My parents’ best friend, the artist William Blakesley, has a birthday tradition of hosting his friends for a restaurant dinner. This year he has been planning the seating for some months and asked my father six months beforehand to make the toast, although forbidding him from starting with the words, Dearly Beloved.

Bill Blakesley has been a working artist on the Vineyard for almost 60 years. His subject is almost exclusively the Vineyard, particularly its characters, from David Crohan at the piano to young equestrians at the Fair. For me he was the friend of the family who always makes the children feel special, even when one of those children is now 50 years old.

The Blakesleys introduced my parents to the Vineyard, inviting them to share house-parent duties at the youth hostel back in 1961, while he was a professor at Ohio’s Muskingum University. For years the Blakesley Gallery was in the building at the upper end of Circuit avenue proper, almost kitty-corner to what was Nick’s Lighthouse. Bill himself had been introduced by a potter, and on sabbatical years his wife, Ginny, taught art in the schools. I have never known a day that Bill wasn’t working as an artist, for the last 30 years mostly in his studio in the Camp Ground just off Circuit avenue.

As a child my sister and I loved helping at the old gallery, straightening the Rose Treat stationery and being paid in Hilliard’s chocolate pops. Before the Children’s Art Show at the Tabernacle, Bill hosted one along the picket fence just across from Union Chapel. When his children were “too old,” he’d buy tickets for me and my sister to ride the Flying Horses while he sketched, claiming that we provided him an entry.

Even their car seemed glamorous as children, a long, winged 1960s station wagon with Ohio plates that we called The Dreamboat. In Bill’s presence, my parents were more interesting, off to the Lampost or the Ritz with later tales of “chainsaw Johnny.” Never without a sketchbook, Bill offered waitresses their choice of tip or a sketch. The smart ones took the sketch.

Tall enough to be in danger throughout our cottage, Bill made sure that we weren’t using coloring books and asked us questions about our reading and artwork. Confronted by assigned towel racks in the bathroom he added one on a Band-Aid, claiming a towel for Nixon during the summer of Watergate.

Long ago there were more bicycle rides and cocktail parties, trespass days up-Island and gallery openings — we were a family raised partly in West Tisbury. After he sold the gallery, Bill bought the old store building at Montgomery Square just off Circuit avenue in the Camp Ground. His works fill the storefront windows when the shades are up; a sign in his distinctive hand reads, “Studio open, by appt. or chance.”

We always park our bicycles there on the way to the post office or Reliable, popping in to say hello. More often than not, Bill will be at the worktable, back increasingly stooped as he applies color on a sketch. Surrounded by his collection of books, stacks of paintings and unfinished works, Bill warned me over a decade ago not to wait too long to return to story drafts, my equivalent of sketches, “There won’t be enough time,” he told me.

Yet he always makes time for any visitor in his studio, the daily discussion of Red Sox and aging with my father, projects with his second wife, Elizabeth Cornell. The Lampost days are long over, but sometimes I get invited along with my parents to the daily ritual of cocktails, a bowl of nuts always on the table.

Two years ago Bill asked me and my fiancé when we were going to get married, knowing it would be in Seattle. “Better make it soon,” he said. “It will be my last trip.”

We took heed and planned a wedding, giving suitable berth to Bill’s birthday dinner in June. He didn’t make the trip after all, but his push got us married. This year, on the longest day, on June 21, it will be Bill Blakesley’s 90th birthday. Saying that he will be 90 makes him sound like a stranger. Bill is still Bill, the working artist, still wearing the same long-sleeved shirts and khakis, just more stooped, more fragile, but the still-worldly friend of my parents. Bill is the tether of my Vineyard experience, from childhood memories of the Nobska’s steam whistle to the middle-aged present.

Bill is taking particular care planning his upcoming birthday dinner on the “fine dining” side of Lattanzi’s, but has taken to referring to my father’s pending toast as a eulogy. His body is working against his carefully-laid seating plans. He needs surgery on his aortic valve but refuses to consider it until after his birthday. Some days he is dizzy, but he hasn’t stopped working. “Not enough time,” Bill tried to warn me, but I didn’t want to listen then. I don’t want to listen now.

Peggy (Wass) Sturdivant has been summering with her family in Oak Bluffs since 1962. She also lives in Seattle and is co-author of Out of Nowhere with Robin Abel.