The Vineyard Gazette - Martha's Vineyard News

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As the New Year rolls in, may it contain in that motion a wave of possibility. And may this possibility continue to crest and roll long after you have been tossed aside like yesterday’s lunch. Let’s face it, a year’s worth of days will also leave you face down in the shallows or riding a riptide to nowhere. But never fear and don’t fight it. Simply paddle to the side until a day more your size appears.

But if pond metaphors are more your thing, let’s turn to the snapping turtle, a shy fellow or lady who would just as soon avoid you in the water as it goes about its mysterious routine. Pity the person who tries to shake one’s hand on dry land, however. All that slow going makes them very snappy; a bit of road rage from ground level you could say.

And so, like the snapping turtle or the long rolling wave, may you be allowed to stick to your environmental strength while you go about your mysterious routines. But do know that your weaknesses will miss you and drag you to dry land or to a bed of rocks at its earliest convenience. No resolution will alter this fact, and so perhaps the best resolution of all is to be kind to yourself this year, kinder than necessary even.

And when that fails, because of course it will, paddle to the side once again until better days appear.

Two college women on break head to the Island for a January getaway, the first time they have visited outside of summer. It is a much different time. The sun sets in late afternoon, people are scarce, stores are closed and the beaches no longer the center of attention.

Looking for something to do they find the community supper at the West Tisbury Congregational Church. The eat and chat and by dinner’s end feel like regulars, reveling in the atmosphere of the Island at rest and reaching out to those who may be hungry, lonely or both.

And yet the night is still young. They wonder of they should go to The Ritz, a place they have never been in their sheltered summer lives.

Of course, the minister tells them. It is essential.

At night a little girl lies in her bed, covers up to her chin, eyes wide and teary. Her puppy rests at her feet munching on his favorite purple stuffed animal.

“Why are you sad?” asks her father as he tucks her in.

“Because dogs don’t live as long as humans,” she answers. “And it’s not fair that he will die and I will have to watch.”

This is heavy stuff at bedtime the father thinks as he stands back for a moment to collect his thoughts. He begins to tell his daughter that there is no point in thinking about this now as it is a long time in the future. But as he talks it occurs to him that she could say the same thing about daughters and fathers, their future timetables also very unequal.

The weight of this thought drives him to his knees and then to the floor where he starts doing pushups, his talisman to ward off Father Time. When his daughter asks what he is doing he is quiet, but when the puppy climbs on his back he tells her to climb aboard too and soon they are all laughing and ready for a night of sweet dreams and nothing more, he hopes.

Because it was January and the sky gray, not a pushy gray, rather something to mix with your coffee, he decided to go for a walk. A few snowflakes fell, and a seagull plotted a lazy course as if she had seen it all before, which she had.

He wandered down to the ocean’s edge, to the place where long ago in a flotilla of kayaks they had scattered the ashes of his grandfather. He sat on a rock, out of the wind, and watched an unending series of white caps wave at him. Before leaving he waved back but by then a calm stillness had taken over.

Later on, while seated by the fire, he closed his eyes to visit with the waves again. The seagull was there too, still soaring as if she had seen it all before, which of course she had.

While cruising the Island, a side trip down Snake Hollow Road did not reveal anything untoward, no pythons, cobras or even garter snakes. A chipmunk ran by unimpeded.

Further afield there were no bears on Holly Bear Lane, but a perfect cup of porridge was enjoyed. Mud Puddle Road might have had mud puddles had the weather not turned freezing. A small boy tested the puddle ice and submitted a petition to change the name to Skating Street.

Breakdown Lane was happily free of breakdowns, not even a sputtering or slight stall. And down by Goa Way, the folks actually seemed quite welcoming, more proof that you can’t believe every Vineyard road sign you see.

The Notebook often takes walks, down to the ocean to find meaning in the sea spray or marvel at the gulls as they gather for a hard earned meal of mollusks. It travels to the woods, down winding paths to swap stories with passing squirrels. It sits quietly on a bench listening to raindrops while waving softly at its past lives.

This journey, like so many others, is the product of teachers. The work of Mary Oliver stood large among these mentors and so her passing yesterday is noted with sorrow. Thankfully, her words remain and the spirit with which she wrote them. Here she is in her poem Breakage.

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It’s like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

On a cold and frosty evening a family walked outside to take in the night sky. The weather did not play spoiler and clear skies provided a window to the lunar eclipse.

Down below on Earth, everything was a part of the shadow falling across the moon. The family looking upward, the trees surrounding them, the grass beneath them, everything they could see and everything they could not see, extending outward to the oceans, the mountains, the cities, the glaciers, the deserts. All that and more blended together out there in space to blanket the moon for a few hours, until the moon returned and bedtimes were restored.

After everyone was asleep, a man returned to the outdoors to look upward and experience again how small he was in this grand picture, marveling at how this always made his heart feel so much bigger.d

He had been away and was feeling out of sorts so he went to walk his usual haunts. He stopped first at the cemetery and tipped his cap to Capt. Benjamin Worth and also to Samuel Stuart, born in 1824, the only son of Zalman and Nancy.

It began to rain, first a light mist and then harder as he watched a large ant make its way along the bark of a bare oak tree.

He walked to the harbor. The waves were still there as were the gulls and a ghostly group of fishermen who waved and then went back to work.

His feet felt heavier then, the roots of the place working their way through him, until he felt at home with himself again.

It’s late January and the pace of life on the Island has just about slowed to a crawl. There is time for everything now. Time for a second cup of strong black coffee in the early morning while the sun makes its winter climb over the eastern treetops. Time to drive the long way into work, along the ribbon of road that hugs the north-facing seaside in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs.

A lone shellfisherman is out on the Oak Bluffs harbor bullraking for quahaugs. An honest way to earn a living and put food on the table if ever there was one.

There’s time to think about that.

At daybreak Thursday it was seven degrees in West Tisbury. That’s balmy compared to the temperatures in the upper Midwest that were making national headlines at minus 20 or more.

Still, seven is about as cold as it gets on the Vineyard. The usual fleece layers aren’t enough, even for a quick sprint to the coffee shop. Suddenly dog walking is an endurance test. Dreams of weekend quahaugging are dashed. Better to tackle the woodpile, split some more logs for the fire. Maybe read some Hal Borland.

But it turns out that even the great nature essayist had little good to say about the early days of February:

“The bitter cold that marked January’s end has not abated. We still shiver and I am grateful for a furnace. And for a roof and four walls.”

He spent some time wandering around in his past, marveling how it felt as if time had compressed and decades had not walked between visits. The faces he saw now were the same ones he remembered. More importantly, their hearts were just as open, and the laughter still flowed with ease.

Later, while talking to someone from the present, she said she had spent the month writing gratitude letters, one each day, to those who had meant something to her at various intervals.

He realized then he had just done an in-person version of this — giving thanks for a moment in time when the clay was still soft but already being molded forever by those who walked beside him.

While standing in the grocery line he gets to chatting with the cashier. It is early morning and he is buying items to make breakfast for his kids before they head off to school.

The cashier left home long before her child woke up, taking the ferry over from the other side to get to work. She shows him her phone, with a video app of her daughter’s room, where the young child is just waking up. Her husband is in the screen too, kneeling by the bedside, looking tired.

They are not morning people, the mom says with a laugh. Sometimes I have to call and tell them to hurry up, school is starting.

The husband and child face the screen and wave to the mother who waves back. But it is not a two way video and they can’t see her, nor can they see the man in the background, waving vigorously as he buys groceries on a gray and rainy morning that moments before felt like a burden.

A young girl wins her class spelling bee. Not known for her competitive fire she is all in for words. Training for the school-wide bee begins. There are many contestants, one for each grade, but her nemesis and last year’s champ is a young boy of seemingly limitless talents. He can fish, play baseball, skateboard and surf, wear cool necklace with ease and spell like a cool breeze on a hot August day.

At first she is so scared she can’t even study. She has heard the young boy doesn’t even need to practice, that words and letters gather round him like old friends, visiting him in his dreams to whisper multisyllabic poems of encouragement. Even her friends have counted her out, not even acknowledging she is in the running at all.

But then a curious things happens. She sees the young boy studying at school, carrying his lists of words everywhere he goes, sounding out letters while walking the playground at recess. He sees her on one of these walks, smiles tentatively and tells her in a whisper he is worried about her spelling skills. He speaks openly and honestly.

And with that she is reborn, knowing now that her competition is human. She doubles down on her practice rounds, making friends with all the lists of words, even the foreign ones like jefe and auf Wiedersehen.

But in the end it was not to be. She falls and the young boy wins. It was as if the story had already been written, she says. Except for that moment on the playground. She will remember that fondly, she says, unlike the word extricate, which she writes on a piece of paper and buries in the backyard beside the chicken coop, its fate to be fertilized forever.  

A quick survey of the newsroom revealed many who as children placed Valentine’s in a large shoebox at school to be distributed at the end of day. Hearts were drawn, puppies or other cute animals too, and declarations to Be Mine or I’m Over the Moon For You echoed through school hallways.

One man spent years delivering Orange Crushes to his crushes as per school tradition. Another remembered repeatedly throwing a large gumball into the air to the Valentine spirits in thanks for his love prayers being answered. The gumball kept crashing back down to earth, evidence that Cupid’s sweet tooth had already been sated that year.

Another recalled a little girl who sat caddy-corner to him. Each day she would gather her pencil shavings into a neat pile, and then after the school bell had rung and everyone was set free, she would set the shavings aloft, blowing on them like dandelion seeds, powered by the wind and the wildly beating heart of a young boy standing nearby.

On a wet gray day when it seemed like nothing happened, when the slush spent hours dripping from the roof and nearby trees, when a small rabbit sat pensively at the edge of the woods for nearly the entire afternoon, when the chickens looked outside their coop but did not venture outside themselves, when even the wind had trouble getting out of bed for reasons of its own, an exuberant crow flew overhead calling out loudly as if mocking the silence of everything else.

It was just a moment, but perhaps not unexpected. After all, crows are always robust, it just seems to be in their nature, no matter the gray and the wet and the hushed whispers of an otherwise ordinary day.

Two girls are discussing summer jobs, although both are still too young to get an official job. One reminisces about her successful lemonade stand from last summer, with thoughts of recreating it again this year.

“One time a really famous person came by,” she says, her voice charged with wonder.

“Who was it?” the other girl asks. A nearby eavesdropper leans in too, wondering who it was that made the girl so excited. Summer on the Vineyard is a smorgasbord of celebrities. Taylor Swift, perhaps, or Lady Gaga or Cardi B?

“It was that guy on the furniture store commercials,” she reveals.

“No way,” the other girls says. “The one with ponytail? From Jordan’s. I love that guy.”

“Me too,” she says. “And he was a good tipper.”

By now it’s a well established fact: this is Quiet Week on Martha’s Vineyard. School vacation week. The week when every Islander who can high-tails it for the mountains, the tropics or at least the French bakery in Falmouth.

At Ghost Island Farm on Sunday it was a different kind of quiet. Outside a steady rain fell. Inside the ramshackle building, jazz blasted from a CD player near immaculate arrangements of organic vegetables. There was talk of soup and what spices were good and the fact that this was Quiet Week. Farmer Rusty had a new drum kit that he had set up in the corner. Said he had just gotten it, was going to get it in tune.

And in the imagination, you could hear the sound of one farmer drumming.

Snow fell softly Wednesday evening and the Island felt like Christmas — hushed and quiet with the farm fields slowly turning white. Come to think of it, Christmas this year felt a little like Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving felt a little like February.

Of course there’s only one cure for all this and it’s March, when winter vacations give way to spring flowers, muddy baseball practices and town politics anew.

A little like a lamb, a little like a lion.

Over in America Monday, they dealt with a massive March snowstorm. Here on the Vineyard, we escaped with a dusting. Again.

Fifty miles away from us, a hair’s breadth in meteorological terms, they handled a houseful of kids home from canceled school, a foot or more of snow on the sidewalk, and television reports of the near-panic variety.

Many of us were returning from school vacation, perhaps from some sunny clime, relieved to be able to get in the driveway.

It is a little disconcerting to mention (okay, gloat) about good luck from the weather deities. For all we know, we are only a wayward polar vortex or a rogue bombogenesis away from our own late winter messiness.

Probably too, it is also a little dangerous to divide people into “us” and “them,” in any category, including weather. We like to think of ourselves as different out here, separated by water as we are from the mainland. It is mostly a myth. We are more alike than not, and separating us often does more harm than good.

But there is no denying that mostly, our snow shovels are still in the garage.

On a gray and rainy afternoon his son says how much he likes days like these, how they make him feel sort of sad, which he enjoys while sitting on the couch wrapped in a warm blanket.

He looks at his son, now taller than he is. Some moments he sees himself in his son’s face. Other times it feels unrecognizable to him, a stranger wandering about the house with new muscles and confidence.

He wants to tell his son how he too enjoys drifting toward the melancholy because it puts him back in touch with what matters to his heart. He wants to tell him that when he is happy and distracted he can’t see as clearly, but when he is sad, when the outside world nibbles at his soul, he sees his son’s face everywhere, while driving or at work, while taking a walk or sitting for a moment beneath a large Sycamore tree.

He wants to tell his son that in those moments he can see nothing else because nothing else will ever matter nearly as much.

He wants to tell his son all of this and so he does.

Two elderly women are seated and enjoying their conversation as only two old friends practiced in the sacred art of afternoon banter can. They are talking about hats and compliment each other on their choices of headwear today, not to ward off the chill but for style.

Women don’t wear hats anymore, one says. Ain’t that the truth, the other remarks.

But there was a time. We didn’t think about leaving the house without our hat.

Amen to that.

But I’ve got a secret, one woman says leaning in closer. I missed my hair appointment this week. This hat isn’t style, it’s necessity.

Be proud because it’s both, the other woman assures her.

Oh, I’m always proud, the other says with a laugh. It’s the first thing I put on every morning and the last thing I take off every night.

Ain’t that the truth.

In the pre-dawn dark he pondered the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, not the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, but rather the magical vanishing of an hour. From where would it nibble away at his life, he wondered.

Would it just be an hour of sleep lost or would it be his dream life that suffered, the long running series where he took the form of a deranged snapping turtle who stalked bathtubs and outdoor showers? He would miss that for sure.

Or would his waking hours make a visit to the minus column? Would his time staring at the shadows of things — of crows overhead, a passing cloud, his daughter launching herself across the lawn in a series of handsprings or his own ever more stooped image — be compromised?

Maybe it would arrive while reading, although he hoped that hour would be preserved as it now had a heightened pleasure as he read a story a day from a dear friend’s debut collection. It was as if they were together again but on a different level, one not limited to handshakes and conversation. Reading his words it was as if a new relationship was emerging, one he could not explain but that he treasured deeply.

Or maybe he wouldn’t notice the missing hour at all as it vanished like so many other moments during any other ordinary day. He hoped this wouldn’t be the case, but then again how would he know.

This story comes to the Notebook from a Vineyard snowbird, warming her feathers in Florida. Evidently, she was walking her two dogs one morning when they stopped for a bit to nose about in the grass of a home a few blocks away. The owner did not appreciate this and yelled his displeasure from his balcony.

The women scooted home but couldn’t shake her bad feeling from the encounter. The next day she returned to the scene, without her dogs. She knocked on the door and told the owner she was sorry. He, in turn, apologized to her, saying he was surprised she came back to say sorry after how he had treated her. It had bothered him all night, too.

A pattern was then set up, with the woman walking her dogs by the man’s house each morning, both parties now waving hello and exchanging pleasantries. One day the woman mentioned her children and grandchildren were coming to visit and they were headed to a Red Sox spring training game.

The man replied that he goes to many games himself, as his son is on the team.

Oh, what’s his name, the woman asked.

David Price, the man replied. And if you ever want tickets back in Boston be sure to let me know.

A man waits in the car for his daughter. The school bell will ring soon but the usual last minute backpack packing and clothes adjusting continues.

Eventually, she joins him. But instead of getting in the backseat, she jumps in the front. His early morning funk quickly dissolves as she smiles at him.

She is close to living a front seat life, what with another birthday recently notched, but not quite. He looks at her again, now in profile rather than the usual voice from the backseat. The sight stills his heart. Soon she will be old enough to ride shotgun and then, in a few more years, she will move to the driver’s seat and ease away into her own independent life.

Such a journey to take, he thinks, before school and work have even begun for the day. He turns the key, and just this once allows her to ride beside him, holding her hand the entire way.

They were barely teenagers when they met, thrown together by chance as roommates at a summer training camp. It was only for two weeks, then they parted ways and didn’t keep in touch. But it was during a pivotal time in life, when everything is still so new and details seemingly never fade.

Over 30 years later they meet again by chance. It is as if time had not passed, and that they had somehow spent more time together in this life than only two weeks. They share their stories since then, of families and work. But mostly they remain teenagers, training in the hot summer sun, the cacophony of nostalgia holding center stage.

As the talk continues one admits to a measure of guilt, a slight he felt he had performed. The other says he has no memory of that. Instead, he recalls a moment when he was preparing for a big match and the coaches and everyone else were busy with someone more important.

“And then I looked up,” he says. “And there you were, alone in my corner saying ‘you got this, you got this one.’ I have never forgotten that sight.”

Later they part ways again, each with a new understanding of who they once were.

Spring is here and the birds are chirping. This is not always a good thing. Consider this story recently told to the Notebook.

A man walked out his door one spring at the exact moment mother and father blue-jay returned to their nest to find their children deceased. The man had nothing to do with this but the birds wouldn’t listen. They attacked. And attacked. And attacked. All summer long.

The man took to leaving his house in disguise, he wore helmets, he carried a cane to ward them off, he tried exiting the back door. Nothing worked. Mother and father blue-jay were always waiting for revenge, swooping down on him for several blocks. Only by ducking into a store or friend’s house could he shake them.

Months later, seasonal migration finally freed the man to walk out his door again without fear. But each spring, he retrieves the helmet and cape from the closet, holds tightly onto a cane and readies himself for whatever may come.

The Notebook likes to eavesdrop or, as one young friend calls it “ears drop.” The other day it dropped its ears into a conversation between two eight-year-old girls. They were playing “yes or no.” Is your brother annoying? Yes. Do you like ketchup on your ice cream. No. Do you think sleeping is kind of gross. Yes.

Then they switched to “would you rather.” Would you rather have a playdate with a mermaid or unicorn? Unicorn. Mermaid. I mean unicorn. I mean mermaid. That one’s too hard. Okay, would you rather eat a person’s foot or a dog’s foot. That’s easy, a person’s foot.

And the final question: Would you rather be a boy or a girl? That depends. If I had a time machine I’d rather be a boy. That way I could go back in time and fight in wars instead of sitting at home and taking care of the kids.

The girls parted ways then, but the Notebook remained anchored in place, amazed at the journey it had just taken.

He was wondering about the chickens, especially the one whose color looked off, with a dingy gray mottling around her face. Then he turned and wondered about the rhododendron bush, its tender leaves hovering as if in agony during the freezing spring mornings.

He continued on this way, wondering about a pair of perfect pine cones sitting together at the end of a thin branch. He wondered what they whispered to each other during the night. He wondered about the gull overhead and the chipmunk who disappeared beneath the shed.

He wondered about his young daughter, who sat yesterday in a pensive profile he did not recognize. He wondered about his teenage son, who still seemed eager at the end of the day to share the news of his life. He wondered for how much longer.

He wondered about his wife, who when she danced in the kitchen made the decades together seem like minutes.

He wondered about his journey, the headwinds, tailwinds, sidewinds and bumps from below. But most of all he wondered why he so often forgot to wonder at all.

This is a familiar story with a surprise ending.

A college student hired to be a summer intern for the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish group needed housing and took out a classified ad in the Gazette under Wanted to Rent, with the headline, Nonprofit Intern Needs Room/Apartment. “Super responsible and wants to change the world through marine biology,” the ad read in part.

A couple of weeks later, another classified ad appeared in the Gazette, under the headline Nonprofit Intern Found A Home. “Thank you to the individual who stepped up to provide free housing for the summer for the Marine Biology Interns at Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group. You know who you are and we appreciate the support.”

That spurred an idea for another classified ad, under the headline Wanted on Martha’s Vineyard: “More homeowners who want to change the world through generosity.”

In the midst of town meeting season, we turn to history to gain a little perspective.

Here is the Gazette’s esteemed former editor, Henry Beetle Hough, recalling one of his first Edgartown town meetings, in 1921.

“The finance committee had pared down the appropriation for the police department to $720, providing for one man, who would serve as policeman in summer and as night watch in winter.

Henry Tyler declared that an officer was needed at the bank corner to regulate traffic.

“’The most I saw the officers doing there last summer was entertaining chickens,’ said Ben Collins.

He was voted down all the same.”

May democracy endure and chickens be ever entertained.

On Monday morning the rain poured down and umbrellas were up as mourners hurried into the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown to pay final tribute to Ted Morgan. More than one person commented on the significance of the day — Patriot’s Day — for such a funeral. Because Ted Morgan was after all a patriot, a hero of World War II and among the last of the Islanders from the greatest generation.

Baskets of flowers lined the stage of the majestic old church. The tributes were heartfelt, genuine and never over the top. Ted would have wanted it that way.

Later he was laid to rest in the cemetery in the town where he was born.

Soon after the sun came out, flooding a greening April landscape with warmth and light.

Suddenly green. That’s the best way to describe the Island these days. Yesterday farm fields were brown and muddy beneath the gray skies and cold rain that have been the hallmark of winter. Today the landscape is cast shades of emerald and yellow, with greening fields framed by forsythia and daffodils. Tomorrow there will be lilacs, the day after that bridal wreath. The herring are running, stripers not far behind.

Spring sneaked up when we weren’t looking.

At first it made us felt older that we hadn’t seen it coming.

And then we threw our arms around spring, and didn’t mind at all.

Post school break week, two dads stand on a corner talking about their respective journeys, heading off-Island, one-on-one with their pre-teen daughters.

One mentions the facial he received with his daughter, a mask of hibiscus and lavender, while they watched a tale of Australian mermaids.

I can top that the other one says. One night, after dinner at a Provincetown restaurant, my daughter joined a trivia game. There was a music round and the next thing I know I found myself dancing in a Lesbian conga line, swaying to Donna Summer’s Last Dance.

The dads linger for a moment longer, reflecting on how, led by their outgoing daughters, they interact with the world in ways they never could have imagined. It becomes bigger, one says, and more fun. The other agrees—and my face has never felt softer.

A woman brings her therapy dog to Windemere each week for the residents to enjoy. With dog in tow she knocks on the residents’ doors and asks if they would like some canine company. Usually, the answer is, of course, come on in. But last week a 99-year old woman wondered if she could come back in a few minutes. “I’m reading the Gazette’s want ads,” she said.

True enough, the woman had her arms stretched out wide, embracing the size of the broadsheet as if it were a form of exercise to keep the deltoids, pectorals and trapezius in tune. On the page several possibilities were circled in red including a dock worker in Oak Bluffs and a Back Door Donuts barista. But only one was starred: a Red Bull merchandiser.

The parents huddle together on the sidelines, in thick coats and blankets, wearing winter hats and mittens while watching for hours their children play sports. This could be soccer or lacrosse, football or field hockey, track or tennis, any season or any year. But today it is of Babe Ruth baseball we speak, on a cold spring day in late April.

It is a scene repeated each year, the parents and children rotating in and out, depending on schedules and team assignments. To pass the time between innings, the parents swap stories about work and home, the guilty pleasure of the new Mötley Crüe movie, the recent rock and roll hall of fame inductee performances — Robert Smith’s makeup had not traveled well but his voice had, Brian Ferry would always be sexy no matter his age.

The players on the field, most of them into their teenage years now, cannot hear the chatter of their parents, except for the first baseman who shakes his head and laughs.

The players have been together since T-ball, weaving through the years as teammates or competitors, their parents switching benches too over the years but never their allegiance to the group as a whole. They are talking now of the early days when all the players were uniformly sized, before puberty swallowed some whole, leaving others waiting for another day.

And when the players leave the field after the final out of this early game in the season, led by their smiles and whoops of joy, the parents talk about how they will always remember this moment, when they could still see so clearly the young boys and girls their children once were and the men and women they would become.

We sang him home last night when the Gazette gathered to say good luck to Steve Myrick. The big man with the even bigger heart has hung up his notepad after a journalistic journey of many decades that traveled from television to local newspapers. He was Gazette family for five years and over 800 stories, his dry wit, quiet authority and talent anchoring the paper each week.

As fitting for a man who will now look to the wind to decide his sailing course for the day we turned to a sea chanty to carry him forward with fair winds always at his side.

"Rolling home, rolling home, rolling home across the sea. Happy times we’ve spent together. Happy times we’ve spent with thee."

The chickens are wondering when the leaves will pop so they will have more cover to hide from the hawks. Winter with its bare branches is a dangerous season for free-range chickens.

The little girl is wondering when the leaves will pop so she can climb her tree fort and watch caterpillars nibble their new terrain, aphids hang like tiny green bats from beneath the stems and shadows dance across her fort in the wind.

The man is wondering when the leaves will pop making his throat and eyes itchy and his nose run marathons of mucus.

The puppy is not wondering when the leaves will pop because he does not know what spring is, not yet, or summer or the delight of lapping up the sticky sweetness of an ice cream cone spilled on the sidewalk by a small, sad child who a few months earlier wondered when the leaves would pop, the ice cream shops would open and whether he would be big enough this year to grab the brass ring.

Up early he noticed a large hawk perched on a tree limb. Nearby a crow stood sentry too, both quiet in the gray of dawn. He found this odd, having watched crows harass hawks in the skies. Perhaps each was enjoying a slow build to the day, their equivalent of a morning coffee not yet taking hold.

He walked closer, continuing to look up at the hawk. Eventually, it let go of its perch, dropping forward toward him for a moment before veering off to the right, effortlessly navigating a thicket of branches without ever flapping its wings. The hawk appeared again on a taller tree deeper in the woods. The wind ruffled its feathers and it readjusted its hold on the branch.

And that was all for this walk on the cusp of dawn. And yet later that night, as he walked again, now beneath the stars and a sliver of moon, he wondered how his day would have been different had he not spent those early hours in the company of two quiet birds and a soft spring wind.

The Vineyard Gazette turns 173 years old today, which seems a perfect opportunity to look back in time, to see what its first publisher Edgar Marchant had on his mind for No. 1, Vol. 1, printed May 14, 1846. The paper has never missed a run since, although in 1991 Hurricane Bob did its best to stop the presses. With electricity out on the Vineyard, the newsroom and production crew flew over to Nantucket that year to get the paper out and save the streak that continues today.

Back in 1846 the paper cost $2 per year, and on day one consisted of four pages. Amidst the articles on married life, a poem on a sister’s death, the status of war with Mexico, a letter from Europe, and the New Bedford whale oil market which “remains dull” there was an introduction from Mr. Marchant to his readers.

“We present to our readers this morning, the first number of “The Vineyard Gazette,” and are happy to state that our subscription list is well filled, our advertising patronage respectable, and that we have every hope of being enabled, by industry and perseverance, to put forth a paper which shall meet the expectations of the community... Of its form and dress, the present number of the Gazette is offered as a specimen. We solicit patronage, — it shall be our study to merit it.”

Thanks to all the Gazette readers for making the journey with us.

The Notebook was thinking about beginnings, how it once walked to the library each day during summers. The one-story building was located a few doors away from the Notebook’s life as a child. Inside, it held the whole world, and an ability to escape from or burrow deeper into the enormity of life. Passage could be booked to the city or the country, the swamps of Florida or the tundra of Alaska and everywhere in between. Most often the guides were animals, dogs of all kinds, mountain lions, a fawn, a wolf, a falcon, a spider, a mouse.

The other night, now disguised as an adult, the Notebook ran into a woman who said how much she appreciated these morning journeys of the mind. They talked for a bit, the circle of connection quickly growing smaller until it placed them together in that library so long ago, a small child and the librarian who opened the door each morning to give him the key to the rest of his life. They thanked each other, both marveling at this rare discovery, a half century later.

Without you, the Notebook said in parting, there would be no Notebook.

As the busy Memorial Day weekend approaches, a recent Guinea pig dad takes time out for a cup of coffee. He’s new at this sort of thing, he says, but was moved by the plight of the cute rodents. Evidently, someone had set 17 Guinea pigs loose in the woods around Edgartown. There were generations at stake when a Guinea pig samaritan found them and called animal control.

From there it was off to the animal shelter and then finding numerous permanent homes. The young man took in two, both now approaching adolescence, he said. Part of that growth process is fighting for alpha status, something he was told not to interfere with, no matter how hard it was to watch. He said they are skittish too, most likely from their time in the woods running from snakes, skunks, cats, birds of prey — so many enemies on the prowl.

The young man sips his coffee, hears his name called when his sandwich is ready, and then heads off for his day, preparing like everyone else for the coming season, while also worrying about two more mouths to feed at home.

A married couple greets each other at the end of their individual workdays. They exchange brief hellos then become occupied thinking about dinner for the children, discussing schedules, focusing on the needs at hand. It is the way of things, the business of parenting leading the charge and taking center stage.

But into this mix, out on the front lawn, a young puppy emerges. He greets the man and woman with flagrant exuberance — tail wagging, tongue flapping, mouth squeaking — and the couple returns the favor, petting him and showering him with words of love and affection.

Then, in an instant, the man and woman look at each other. Time not only stops it travels back in time, to when they first met and then continues to flow through the journey they have taken together. They move closer, erasing the distance, and sink into each other’s arms, holding each other tightly while a small dog dances at their feet.

On Friday morning four chickens were let out of their coop to roam for the day. In the evening only three returned. The man searched the surrounding woods but found nothing. He kept the news quiet from his young daughter.

The Memorial Day weekend continued, busy with soccer tournaments, baseball games, the honoring of veterans, picnics, a family matriarch’s birthday celebration, the return of a much loved and much missed prodigal son, a celebration of life and the shock of a life cut too short.

The man continued to keep the news of the fourth chicken quiet from his young daughter.

And then, as dusk fell on Monday evening, the lost chicken returned to the flock. She was not broken or injured in any way. She sipped some water, munched some grain and settled on her accustomed perch in the coop as if no time had passed.

The man walked into the house, his shoulders heavy with recent news, but for the moment relieved he had a story to tell his young daughter that had a happy ending.

The leaves are green and full, the rhododendrons in blazing bloom and the birdsong operatic each morning as May exits stage left. Amid this sprint of nature a young girl contemplates the jumping bridge. Her brother jumps, the adult house-guests jump, her father jumps, but she stays by the jetty. The water is still quite cold so there is ample excuse.

Her father shakes himself dry and begins to encourage her. It is invigorating, good for the soul, good for growth, for fearlessness, for independence, he extols. This last adjective stops him, though. He looks at his daughter, still little but not so much anymore. In front of his eyes she begins to grow up, to sprout wings as she heads off to high school, then drives away to college and out of his day-to-day life.

He shudders, more so than when he took his icy plunge and backtracks on his eagerness for independence. He moves to his daughter with words of consolation, but before he can reach her, she runs to the bridge, climbs the railing and jumps into the air, lifting off with her new wings out into the deep blue sea.

A man stands at Gio’s pizza counter waiting his turn to order. It is Saturday night and crowded. His young daughter is in the fried food line.

When his turn comes he orders a slice. Then another man appears by his side. The man is rough looking, deeply muscled with a shaved head and a hard scowl. And he is standing close and staring.

The first man wonders if he has done something wrong, perhaps inadvertently cutting the line. He nods and looks away but the other man keeps staring. It is so uncomfortable the first man begins to worry, about himself and his daughter. He steadies himself as the man keeps up the hard stare, preparing for what he does not know.

He doesn’t want to provoke anything so when his slice arrives he quickly moves away from the counter, still watching his back. The other man follows and the first man sets his stance. He was once a wrestler, he hopes the moves return.

The other man leans in: “Hey did anyone ever tell you, you look just like Jimmy McNulty from The Wire. It’s uncanny. I thought you were him at first and didn’t know what to say.”

Relief floods the room. “No one has ever said that, but you made my day,” the first man says. Then the two set to eating their slices together, while the young girl asks her father who their new friend is.

There are teachers everywhere, even or especially the towering oak tree in the backyard waving in the early morning breeze. But during this graduation season, a man stands at memory’s gate remembering and paying tribute to those whose led him on a daily basis from the front of the classroom.

To Mrs. S who taught him to read and Miss B who didn’t mind when he ate paste and wiped his mouth kindly with a gentle cloth.

To Miss M because she was beautiful and whose smile cheered him when he was sad. To Mr. I who helped him believe he was tougher than he ever knew.

To Mr. C and his magnificent mustache and Mrs. H for her stern kindness which still reminds him of an owl at home in a Sycamore Tree.

To Mr. P who helped him find his voice and Mrs. J who once assigned the class to track the clouds and create a report on what images they saw. But this was during a time when he always found fault with his imagination and turned in a jumbled mess. Her frown that day he still remembers. But more vividly he recalls her kindness after school when she lay in the grass with him, the two of them cataloging an array of animals and ships, castles and dinosaurs floating lazily above them.

To these and so many more, the Notebook celebrates teachers everywhere.

The rhododendron blooms are on the way out but the peonies are getting ready to burst. A man stops to look at the large round blooms and sees a family of ants crawling across. In a flash he is thrown back in time to when he was a young boy and often watched ants traveling across peonies near bloom.

He was always a friend to ants, letting them go their busy ways. Earwigs were a different matter, though. He remembers climbing a tree beside the porch of his grandmother’s house to wage war with a nest of earwigs in a hollowed out area about halfway to the top. He would bring a book of matches, stolen from his grandmother, and burn them out, week after week, during one particularly long summer stay.

He finds this disturbing now, thinking back on this cold-blooded activity. But then again so much about being a 10-year-old boy can be disturbing.

He takes a drive passed the home his grandparents once owned. Many years ago the home transferred to another family and the tree is longer there. But the porch remains and when he stops to take a closer look he sees his 10-year-old self sitting near where the tree used to stand. They talk for awhile, like old friends who have not seen each other for decades, sharing the details of their lives, catching up, and making plans to get together again soon.

A teacher is set to retire and on the last day of school a group of freshmen boys from his class stop by to visit. They chat, they hang out, they tell stories. The teacher is cleaning up his classroom and begins to distribute some of his personal items that have lived there during the many years he has taught.

One boy gets a floppy straw hat and a Kazoo, another boy gets a DVD of the teacher’s favorite old movie, another receives a denim jacket, not quite a perfect fit but soon.

The bell rings and the teacher and the boys say goodbye. Then he rides away on his motorcycle, heading off into the early afternoon sun, while the boys sit at the bus stop wearing their new items and playing a tune on the Kazoo.

Eventually, the bus arrives and they climb aboard. They find seats and as the door closes one boy remarks to another: “High school. Not so bad after all.”

A man takes his young daughter on a guided tour of the Oak Bluffs cemetery. It is Saturday morning and the other 15 or so participants all have gray hair. They look at the little girl doing cartwheels as the guide begins his talk. The sun is shining, a memorial service is soon, and the tour has to hustle.

He is here to find the grave of an ancestor, to add another piece to the puzzle he is researching. His daughter said she was game to come but now, as they walk the grounds, noting the names and dates of death, he wonders if he has made a mistake, this odd father/daughter outing.

The tour stops at the grave site of Tom Clancy, the master spy novelist, but as the guide discusses Mr. Clancy’s life and death, the daughter points to a neighboring headstone. “Isn’t that who we came to find,” she says. She is correct and they walk closer. While the father is engrossed in the details of the stone his daughter calls out again: “Hey, his wife is still alive.”

Again, she is correct. There is a birth date but no death date on her headstone. After doing the math, they figure she is 95.

A woman from the tour appears by their side. “She’s my neighbor,” she says. “Still lives at home. Here is her address.”

Later that day they pay the woman a visit, the father and daughter, and spend time rocking on the porch of a relative who before that moment was a stranger. They talk about the old days and resurrect some ghosts on an otherwise quiet Saturday. That night the little girl tells her father it was her favorite day in a long time. He nods his head and tells her he feels the same way.

At the Oak Bluffs seawall a trucker parks on a beautiful sunny day. He has dropped off his cargo and his huge empty flatbed now serves as a tanning bed. He sits in a small beach chair catching rays in his boots and wool socks, shorts, but no shirt. The sky is big and blue. On the road cars drive by and in the water a few swimmers take tentative dips.

At a farm nearby a four-year old girl sits at a communal picnic table with a man eating strawberries. She digs into her backpack to get some snacks of her own. The two strangers pass the time discussing the plight of a worm they see under the picnic table, the odd shape of a cloud overhead (it looks like my baby brother, she says), and whether it is Wednesday or Thursday or Sunday. They decide, after some discussion, to anoint it a new name: Wedthursun’s day.

Summer begins today. May it bring moments of sunny repose wherever you may be, and may each day be as magical as a Wedthursun’s day.

A man says goodbye to his wife and children, the dog too, as they leave for a 10-day trip. He waves, then shuffles to the porch, puts up his feet, sips a beer and soaks in the quiet. He is now a man totally alone able to set his own rhythm. He comes and goes on a whim — for a run, to the beach, to the garden to weed the overgrown mess. He makes lists of other household chores he never has time to complete and checks them off one by one, reveling in his productivity.

A man alone goes to work early and leaves late, again reveling in his productivity. He makes glorious sandwiches for dinner that he eats while watching the chickens, whose constant clucking breaks the silence of early evening.

As the days pile up, a man alone notices his contentment shift to unease. He feels unmoored as if he doesn’t know who he is anymore. He anchors himself by traveling back to high school by watching 80s movies, and then to college by flipping through old photo books.

A man alone begins to see the smiles of his wife and daughter everywhere, on telephone poles, behind bushes, in the clouds. He thinks he hears his son up early getting ready for the day, but it is only the murmurings of the house in the wind.

A man alone watches a video of his daughter dancing to their favorite tune, a routine she choreographed in the backyard while he played fetch with the dog. He sits on the porch, his feet up and his eyes wet with tears. The chickens are with him and so is the wind, witnesses to this moment as he drops to his knees, giving thanks for all he has been given.

A young girl puts a title at the top of her new pad: Summer Mystery Journal. Her plan is to write a series of stories with prompts she gathers from around town, on sidewalks, next to garbage receptacles, wherever she can find receipts. She tapes the found receipts to the page — a bank withdrawal, a store, a gas station, a restaurant — and lets her imagination roam. It comes out something like this:

“A girl withdraws her entire savings ($200) and goes out to dinner. The meal costs so much money ($63.25) she starts to cry. Nobody stops to help her so she goes into a clothing store and gets a bargain on a cute T-shirt, a scrunchy and a hair-tie ($22.75) and his happy again. But she is also hungry again. She buys a donut ($1.95) and meets Taylor Swift in line, who is buying the same kind of donut. Taylor likes the girl’s new T-shirt; the girl likes everything Taylor is wearing. They decide to spend the day together. They buy some gas ($45) to fill up Taylor’s jeep, and head up-Island. On the way, they see Ed Sheeran hitchhiking and think about stopping to pick him up. But then Taylor says I want today to be about just the two of us. This makes the girl happy and sad. She really wanted to meet Ed Sheeran. But a girls' day is a girls' day. To be continued...”

A mentor to the Notebook died a few days ago. He was a professor and a writer of nonfiction, and in the wake of a life cut far too short, the sadness is lessened in part with a visit to the gallery of writers he championed in class. At night the Notebook heads to the bookshelves and then to the porch to read again the essays of Montaigne, E.B. White, Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland as the moths gather and unseen creatures scuttle about in the darkness beyond.

His vision is clouded every few paragraphs with a return to that classroom, a circle of students gathered, their faces still distinct, untouched by time. And at the center of the circle but always a part of it, sat a man who led by wonder and joy rather than professorial pronouncements. He too is untouched by time, his exuberance for words, for life, for friendship crossing decades with ease.

The darkness deepens out there on the porch. But no matter. A light continues to shine.

It is just after dawn and the puppy is barking. There is a bug outside on the deck flying about that has his undivided attention. There is no other choice than to step outside, sit down on the stoop and let the dog’s curiosity mellow. After all, the children are still sleeping.

The man settles in to pondering the backyard while the puppy chews a stick. The dew is still heavy on the tomato plants, their lush leaves bowing under the weight. A few ants crawl busily back and forth on a slab of stone, while a slug makes its slow ooze for cover — the sun is climbing and survival inspires.

At the purple catnip bush, bumblebees ply their trade, clocking in for the queen. They move from petal to petal, hovering and diving, hovering and diving.

Overhead, a blue jay cruises by then disappears into the green foliage at the yard’s edge. Nearby, two baby bunnies poke tiny noses out from beneath the rhododendron bush. He remembers the Neighborhood Bunny that died last summer. He imagines these are its grandkids.

The bumblebees move on, a chipmunk scurries by, the puppy whimpers and the man continues to sit quietly, pondering the backyard in the quiet before the storm.

He is new to the dog life and someone brings him to a morning beach dog party. The dogs frolic, the owners chat over coffees and dips in the ocean. He immediately recalls when the children were toddlers and feeling so alone until he found his community of parents at the playground. Everyone bonds quickly and easily, remembering the names of each other’s dogs even if they can’t remember the owners’ names.

Another man tells him a story about how deep the relationships can go. He met a woman years earlier and checked in with her every summer when he returned to the Island and this particular routine. They became friends but didn’t dig deeper into their backgrounds. Then last summer the man’s mother visited and met the woman and the two began talking. It turned out the woman was a midwife off-Island, in the town where he was born, in the year he was born. It turned out he was her first delivery, so many decades earlier.

The dogs continue to play in the sand and ocean, the owners continue to chat as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and a man who was a baby when he first met the woman walking beside him introduces her around to an ever widening circle of friends.

The Notebook finds its way to numerous events around the Island, but none so joyful in recent memory as the 100th birthday party this week for Phronsie Conlin. The P.A. Club was so packed many had to park down the block. A lot of friends can be made in 100 years, but keeping them close is another story.

Among the crowd of friends and relatives were Phronsie’s two doctors, one of whom said she was more like a supervisor, as Phronsie led her own way to good health. Phronsie noted she had left her nitro at home seeing as her doctors were nearby.

Her friend Betty Eddy sat next to her, and at 99 years old easily won the title of oldest friend. A young girl approached Betty and since age was paramount introduced herself by saying, “Hi, I’m 11 years old.” Betty told the girl that when she was 11 she was in love with the boy next door and asked if the same was true of her. The girl shrugged shyly, and then Betty wondered aloud if a fog machine would be brought out soon as she wanted to dance.

A very long receiving line formed to give Phronsie well wishes. She stood and welcomed all and eventually the Notebook paid its respects. “This is all my fault,” Phronsie said, waving her hand at the throngs. “At first I wasn’t going to have anything and then I started inviting everyone.”

Then she pulled the Notebook in close. “I read you all the time,” she said. “And you better write a book soon. I don’t know how much longer I will be around. Call me if you need help.”

A duo sang an Irish ballad to Phronsie and then the whole room sang a roaring Happy 100th Birthday. The Notebook joined in as best it could, what with the lump in its throat and the tears in its eyes.

They see each other five days a week in the relationship of work. The years accumulate and the friendship deepens in this Monday to Friday rhythm of their lives. There are deadline moments and quiet ones too, victories large and small along with defeats. They have lives lived away from work, the cyclical joys and concerns of family they share as they go about their respective jobs each week. And yet they do not share with each other how much this relationship means, at least not openly.

But how to tell someone how much they mean to you, how much they mean to everyone? How to tell someone he is the one everyone wants to sit next to at every event, that he is the one whose soul they marvel at for its humor and heart, its wisdom and memory. How to tell someone they sing the song of life with such humble force it is infectious and inspiring.

How to tell someone all this? In the only way he knows how. By writing it down and sending it to him.

For a story on the 50th anniversary of the Chappaquiddick accident, the Gazette’s front page from July 22, 1969 was examined. There, below the many stories about Senator Kennedy, were some advertisements of the day.

Having recently attended the Dock Dance, a weekly outdoor concert on Memorial Wharf, the Notebook’s eye was drawn to some outdoor concerts during the summer of 1969. That James Taylor was playing an outdoor show at what is now Trade Winds Park in Oak Bluffs on July 25, 1969 was not that surprising—after all he is a summer son of the Vineyard. But an advertisement for the Velvet Underground, playing with Dirty John’s Hotdog Stand on August 8, 1969 on what is now a essentially a dog park and intermittent air field, felt so rare as to be impossible—Lou Reed and company performing out there under the pale blue sky.

The rest of the advertisements were all nods to history, with most of the businesses, events or quotes outdated. Except for one, that is: The Community Sing on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. at the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle. That outdoor sing-a-long is entering its 101st year this summer, and not much different, really, than during the summer of 1969.

The other point of connection on the front page was the skyline, again not so different than today. It was excerpted from a poem by Charles Malam: High in the evening elm the robin tries his notes...To sleep, to sleep, while star by star the sky opens, and far and high eternity rides by.

After a morning of camp, four young girls head into town for food and adventure. They are not yet teenagers but soon, and they travel now in an excited group without parents. They go to Behind the Bookstore and for a moment crowd into a table for two, the only one left. Then a woman nearby points out a larger table opening up and they thank her and go to it. But as they circle the table, a man appears and tells them he needs the table, his family is on its way.

The girls think about responding that they were there first, but back down in the face of an angry adult male. They walk inside to order their food, avocado toasts all around and some lemonade. They line up one-by-one to pay, but the first girl is told she does not owe a thing, that the food has been paid for and that she can order anything she wants. The same goes for the second girl, the third and the fourth. They take their food outside, still stunned by what just happened. Then they see the woman who first told them about the larger table and her husband. The couple is smiling; the husband tells the girls that they rock.

The girls all smile and want to scream thank you, but the husband puts a finger to his lips, preferring to keep things quiet. The man who stole their table remains oblivious to this act of goodwill occurring nearby.

“It was like we were in a movie,” one of the girls says later on as she retells the story. “Things like that just don’t happen.”

Thankfully, they do, and the Notebook sends out its gratitude to all those who shine their generosity everywhere, but especially on the younger generation, teaching the art of compassion and grace.

He is contemplating perfect moments. Not the type that are organized—grand events or even small victories. No, these are the minor key moments that catch him off guard, that travel up his spine and tickle him behind the ear.

He is driving along when his young daughter and her friends in the backseat abandon their pop station and sing along to a musician he has been singing to since he was their age. That’s all it takes for a piece of life’s perfection to offer a momentary glimpse.

A wandering cloud can do this too, or a bird flitting about on a cemetery plot. The way the evening light reflects his wife’s smile often catches him mid-breath as does his parents sitting on their front porch waving hello.

He never knows what will trigger these perfect moments, what balance of activity and non-activity is necessary to make his heart tingle. But when they do come, he holds on tightly, knowing how fleeting they are as they travel about, hopefully, he thinks, to visit someone else in need soon.

Looking for inspiration, he takes a walk through the neighborhood. The streets are busy, the sun hot and nearly everyone it seems holds an ice cream cone. He passes a restaurant where a few days before a huge tuna was delivered, the harpoon still intact with a note attached: “Please return to owner when finished.”

He continues on, turning this way and that until he comes upon a house he knows well, now shuttered and unoccupied. A favorite writer of his lived there, one he had admired from afar for many years and then became friends with during walks through this neighborhood.

He recalls sharing a coffee or a beer, depending on the time of day, and listening to stories while classical music played in the background. “Come by anytime,” the older man had told him. “There is no such thing as an interruption for me since I write all day long, constantly, and am always happy for a break.”

He wonders how the man is doing, having moved off due to age and health issues. The house is quiet now but the man’s spirit remains, as wild and vibrant as ever. He lingers for a few moments longer and then heads off in a new direction, not sure where it will take him.

What weighs six tons, travels 48 miles and requires 25 gallons of ink? Today’s Vineyard Gazette.

It is an annual rite of summer, the first weekend of August edition that goes into all Island mailboxes. It is an undertaking of brains, brawn and creativity. Reporters, photographers, editors, advertising executives and graphic designers all work double and triple duty gathering stories and images for the largest print run by far of the year. And on deadline day, the whole staff takes turns helping to stack, sort, fold, tie and organize the miles of newspaper that come off the presses.

The pressmen carry the biggest load, deep into the night, sweating, tinkering, hauling, shouting above the hum of the old Goss workhorse. The whole building shakes as the press rumbles through section after section.

The action stretches late into the night, to after the bars have closed in downtown Edgartown and the patrons are wandering home. Many see the lights on at the Gazette, the garage doors open, and the hum of activity still at a high pitch. They stop to watch, to chat or to get a copy hot off the presses. It is a moment to savor, the Gazette staff standing shoulder to ink-stained shoulder each year beneath a starry summer sky.

The Notebook thanks everyone involved and wishes you all happy reading.

He remembers always knowing one thing he wanted to be in life: a father. And he remembers the day he became one, helping in the delivery room as best he could, his wife squeezing his hand so hard his ring finger mashed into his pinkie. It hurt a lot, but he knew enough to not even flinch.

He remembers his wife being rushed out of the birthing room to the emergency room due to complications, an army of doctors and tubes descending after what was a completely natural birth. He remembers a nurse saying to him, “Here you go, Dad,” as she handed him his son. He remembers the room emptying out and wondering if anyone would come back to tell him what had happened or what he was supposed to do with his newborn son. When they didn’t come back he sat down in a rocking chair, with his son asleep on his chest, as tears rolled down his cheeks.

He remembers all this now because it happened exactly 15 years ago and he is sitting on the couch today watching his wife and son plan a birthday meal, while tears roll down his cheeks.

He went looking for his introvert self, this being August on the Vineyard, the season of activity and extroverts. He looked for him at the beach but could not find him amidst the sea of bodies.

He went looking for him on the bike paths but was edged off the road. He went looking for him at the ice cream shop, the art galleries and cocktail parties but the lines were too long.

Finally, he looked closer to home, to the abandoned tree fort resting listlessly in the backyard above the chicken coop. He climbed the ladder and poked his head through the small hole his children once used but had long ago forgotten.

And there he was, his introvert side, seated happily on a small stool. But he wasn’t alone. Nearby were some beloved friends: a neighborhood bunny who preferred fireside chats to backyard clover, a snapping turtle madly in love with a tadpole name Tina, and a Siamese cat on parole for cat burglary.

He joined the group and was about to speak when they all put finger, paw and claw to their lips. They are still out there now, sitting quietly together, with pencil and paper nearby.

On a wharf in the late afternoon, a couple shares an ice cream, taking turns holding the cone and holding hands. Down the pier a bit, two girls take selfies of each other while a gull bobs in the waves behind them.

A father tends to his two young children, telling stories about the fish that swim beneath them. The kids look on with wide eyes and open mouths, until the dad describes the legendary giraffe fish that sometimes stretches its neck into the nearby pizza parlor for a slice of pepperoni. Then the kids laugh and shake their heads no way, while still keeping their eyes on the water.

Two fisherman sort an end of the day catch while a young girl watches and counts the fish out loud, enjoying the way the numbers sound. She’s going to kindergarten in the fall, her mother says to one of the fishermen, and is getting ready by counting everything. The fisherman nods. I’m glad we brought in enough to give her a challenge, he says.

An older couple sits quietly together, looking out on the horizon. Their faces are similar, in the way that people who spend a lifetime together can sometimes become, and their hands are folded as if in prayer. The gull leaves the water and walks toward the couple, but neither the man nor the woman seems to notice. They just keep looking out to sea in the relative quiet of an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

She remembers going to the fair as a teenager; this moment taking place when she was 18 years old. She approached the Zipper, an aggressive ride to be sure, but she was still young enough to enjoy it then. She stood in line by herself and was ushered into the cage-like contraption. Then the carnival worker brought a young girl into the compartment, maybe ten years old and just this summer tall enough for the ride.

The Zipper started slowly, then picked up speed and torque. At some point the young girl reached out to the older girl and grabbed her hand, holding on tightly for the rest of the ride.

When the ride finally ended and all was calm again the little girl let go of the older girl’s hand. Then she looked up at her new friend and said: “I thought you might be afraid. That’s why I reached out and held your hand.”

Happy fair everyone. May a hand of comfort always be nearby whenever needed, whether you be young, old or in between.

It was weeks before they knew each other’s names. They knew their dogs’ names on day one, after meeting at the beach in the early morning and falling into a daily walking rhythm soon after. They knew each other’s children’s names, what they created for the fair and what grade they were headed into.

They knew their dogs’ peculiarities and traumas, how they greeted each other by scooting on their bellies, and their favorite treats.

The knew about loss in their lives too, because that is what early mornings walks offer up while the dogs frolic and the words flow.

And eventually, on that last day, they learned each other’s names, laughing how they hadn’t shared that bit of information, and how it had never mattered.

And then they said goodbye for the summer, one returning to an off-season life off-Island. The dogs did not seem aware, not at that moment. But the next day, a canine ache was noticed, a tail more droopy than waggy, and a questioning bark that seemed to ask: “Where did my new friend go?”

The family sat together on a recent morning, the first such gathering in a long time, the pace of summer consuming all leisurely morning moments. They talked about their dreams, not aspirations but real dreams, the journeys taken during the previous night’s slumber.

The son said he had been back-to-school shopping and noticed a door at the rear of the dressing room. He opened it and stepped onto the Steamship Ferry, a magical commuting portal he was soon selling tickets to.

The mother dreamed of her mother and her father, alive again and performing Renaissance music in the living room, as they had all through her childhood.

The little girl said she met Barack Obama and family in her dream and invited everyone back to the house to hang out. The girls couldn’t come and Michelle only stopped by for a few minutes, but Barack settled in, lingering at the picnic table and asking everyone to call him by his new name: Unicorn Rainbow-Sprinkles. He enjoyed himself so much he ended up spending the night on the pull-out sofa.

The father, who had had no dreams he could recall, having enjoyed his first deep sleep of the harried summer, decided to join his daughter’s dream. After all, Mr. Unicorn Rainbow-Sprinkles was still in residence that morning, quietly enjoying his coffee in the hammock outside.

As summer wanes and August shifts from teenager to twenty-something, may there be time again for your dreams to sway softly in the early morning breeze.

He lay back on the grass and looked up at the sky. The grass felt cool on his bare feet and the sky appeared endless. Clouds sailed slowly by but he did not try to imagine any shapes like he usually did. Instead, he just lay there, feeling the solid ground against his back and the full weight of the sky on his chest.

Exercise called but he did not answer. His family called but he did not answer. Work called but he did not answer. A dance party called but he did not answer. Old friends and new friends called but he did not answer. Nor did he answer the call for a concert, a sail, or a free meal at the best restaurant at the best table with the best company on the best night ever.

Instead he just lay there, wondering what had kept him away so long from doing this and only this.

On Sunday, a visitor to the Vineyard from North Carolina sat with his brother and sister, pondering the 400th anniversary of the first landing of enslaved Africans at Point Comfort in Hampton, Va. He knew the National Park system had organized a commemoration that day, inviting the public to ring bells simultaneously across the nation for four minutes — one minute for every century. But he didn’t know of anything taking place on the Island.

The man held an empty glass bottle in his hand and planned to gently knock on it for four minutes, quietly honoring the historic moment and the contributions of African Americans. But as he prepared to begin the gesture he heard a bell ringing through the air, the sound coming from a nearby church. He and his brother and sister ran to the church where a small crowd stood in line, taking turns pulling on a rope to ring the church steeple bell for the full four minutes. The visitors joined in, registering their tears and solidarity with the group assembled and those across the nation.

The thing about parenting, he thinks, is the two roads he continuously travels, one going forward into his children’s unknown future, the other heading backward in time to his own past as a child. This thought occurred to him yet again while driving his daughter to her first day of the new school year. Earlier he had dropped off his son at the bus stop.

While driving, his memories conjure up the group of friends he traveled to school with each day, beginning in the first grade, walking the few blocks to the elementary school, and continuing through the longer walk to the middle school, and finally to that last year of high school, when they drove themselves, a carpool now with some new faces added to the group.

He sees all those faces again this morning, sitting in the car with him and his daughter. They wave and smile and also age as the drive continues, their relationships, along with their haircuts, ebbing and flowing through the years. They sit in the same seats they did so long ago, squished next to his daughter who takes no notice of the crowd, nor her father’s silence as he tries to hold all of these memories while also listening to her talk excitedly about the coming year.

And when he parks the car and walks his daughter hand-in-hand into the school, these ghosts from the past walk with him. And when he hugs his daughter goodbye at the threshold of her classroom he is also hugging his old friends hello, all of whom he misses so acutely at this moment, along with his younger self and the mysterious promise of another new school year.

In the flurry of a morning rush while getting his kids ready for school, a man throws together a quick smoothie for the family. He gathers frozen bananas and fruit, yogurt and other ingredients, pulses the blender and declares it a masterpiece, setting out glasses for everyone.

In the moment he feels likes super-dad, able to calm hysterics and create a healthy breakfast, all while doing jumping jacks and pushups to wake his muscles and entertain the dog.

Then the kids turn on him, declaring the smoothie disgusting. The morning mood shifts. He calls them ingrates, makes references to starving children worldwide and considers making them walk to school like in the tough old days when kids drank their smoothies without complaint. Then he takes a huge swallow to show them how it’s done.

Just then Mom enters the kitchen. She looks at the storage bag that had contained what he thought were frozen bananas and asks: “Who ate all the frozen bratwurst?”

There is a collective howl and rush to the backyard to spit everything onto the lawn. Super-dad is deflated, his children are nauseous, but the dog is now deliriously happy.

He was thinking about time, as he often does, and how some days he barely notices it, and on other days it merely scratches him a bit behind the ears.

And yet on other days, like today, it walks on heavier feet, a rhino perhaps with a very sharp horn and a quizzical expression. And it is crowded today, riding atop the rhino of time — a noisy bird of indeterminate species, a glum frog, and his young daughter who when she turns a certain angle begins to grow and age before his eyes.

It is the frog who speaks for the group, silencing the bird with a blink of its large eyes. “You’re missing it,” the frog says.

“What?” he asks. “What am I missing?”

But there is no answer. Instead, the group wanders away, turning down a side street and disappearing from view. He tries to follow but becomes distracted by an itch behind his ear.

At some point, he can’t remember when, hellos became more important than goodbyes. He is thinking of his children and their school days.

When they were young and first starting out, the partings were long affairs, heavy with tears and drawn-out hugs. He can still remember those moments clearly, his children dressed in pirate or mermaid costumes to ward off the separation of the school bell.

Now they run off with ease, no hands held anymore or even a parting glance. He knows this because he watches with hope each morning as they wade out to another day.

The evenings, at least for now, are another matter. The tales of their time away bubble forth at every moment: while walking the dog, preparing dinner or staring at the stars above. He recalls doing this with his own parents, narrating nearly every line of the book he had just read while his mother prepared dinner.

He wonders when he stopped telling his parents about his day in such detail, just as he wonders when his own children’s storytelling will drift away, much like holding his hand on the way into school is but a memory to tell at moments like this.

The Kousa dogwood sheds its berries; they live in mashed clumps on benches, sidewalks and beneath the soles of shoes.

The orange pop of pumpkins emerges like a group of robust party crashers.

The derby shack holds court on the Edgartown harbor, busy during weigh-ins, quiet yet still forceful during the lonely afternoons.

A breeze rolls in, both cool and warm, as September slips into something a little more comfortable.

At first Holly Pretsky was just an image on Skype, a job candidate interviewing from afar. She seemed poised and knowledgeable, a bit serious perhaps. She was given an assignment to write as a tryout and the piece sang. She was hired.

That was nearly two years ago and sadly the Gazette says goodbye to Holly today. It is her last day at the paper before she heads off into the next chapter of her life.

In her time at the Gazette, Holly has written about nearly everything and has done it all with grace — with that same mixture of knowledge, poise and a touch of seriousness. But what makes her unique is how many other attributes she brings to each story, to each encounter, to each moment in a day. Consider a poll of her newsroom colleagues, each asked to name the first word that came to mind when thinking about Holly: Inspiring, thoughtful, joyful, smiley, tough, friendly, funny, compassionate, calming, genuine, effervescent.

The list is long and true. We will miss you

A man in his 80s gets ready for the day. He thinks he has everything he needs and heads out to the car. But then he realizes he forgot something. While back inside the house he passes a mirror and catches a glimpse of himself.

Later, he will tell a group of people that it occurred to him then that at his age he was living on borrowed time. He will say this with a catch in his throat and a tear in his eye. Those in his presence will tell him that he lives on borrowed time better than anyone else they know.

They all go their separate ways that day, each carrying with them this phrase of living on borrowed time. One man, much younger but not young anymore, decides to spend the week holding the phrase very carefully up to the light, tucking it under his pillow, massaging it into his knuckles and letting it float gently in front of his eyes while watching the wind.

He is still out there now. You can’t miss him.

When feeling down and out, slightly cranky or as Melville wrote in the beginning of Moby Dick, “whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet,” a good plan would be to travel the Island at around 8 a.m. or so. This is when grammar school students stand at the edge of the roadside waiting for the morning school bus to arrive.

They wait in groups or solo, seated or running about. They wait in costumes or school clothes, they wait patiently or with ants in their pants. Some make the wait worthwhile by fighting unseen forces of evil. You can see them, these small children with their large imaginations still intact, talking to themselves while throwing kicks and punches at the air. You can almost hear the Pow or Bammo while driving by, and just like that all glum thoughts are banished, like the evil-doers themselves.

Which brings to mind another thought — the very real superhero-ness of our smallest ones, able to vanquish our down in the dumps moments, our heavy-laden shoulders and our sad-sack souls. Here’s to those who know not what they do and yet do it so well.

He is shaking hands with his past, visiting with a former self to see where they stand these days.

He eats food he had once eaten, walks streets foggy but familiar, and marvels anew at the height and thickness of the trees where he once lived.

He visits with the death of a loved one and the birth of another. And through it all he remains quiet, listening for something but not knowing what it is.

But then, when they part ways, his former self leans in close enough to whisper in his ear: “You are so close to becoming the person I always wanted you to be.”

And with that they hug and promise to do better about staying in touch.

A young reader of the Notebook asked for help with her homework. The assignment was to ask someone a series of health related questions.

Question #1 - If someone is healthy how does his or her health impact how he or she feels physically?
Reply - They feel like they could travel to the moon while doing handstands on a very tall ladder that veers precariously to the left.

You know I have to read this in front of the class, the younger reader said.
Good, replied the Notebook.

Question #2 - If a person is unhealthy, how does his or her health impact what he or she can do?
Reply - It is as if they carry a large dictionary on their back filled only with definitions but not the words they define. This leaves them confused, cranky and overly quiet.

I might be graded on this, the younger reader said.
Grades make me feel unhealthy, replied the Notebook.

Question #3 - If a person is unhealthy, how does this affect his or her relationships with friends and family?
Reply - Relationships become like smoothies filled with bratwurst rather than bananas, something no one wants to experience but some do.

I know exactly what you mean, the young reader said. My father made me one of those smoothies by mistake.
He sounds like a good man who does not get enough sleep because he has to stay up late helping his children with their homework, the Notebook replied.

Okay, I have to go to sleep now, the young reader said. Thank you for helping me with my homework.
And thank you for helping me with mine, the Notebook replied.

The car broke, the dog rolled in something smelly, the sky darkened, the child cried, the man did not sleep, the crow mocked, the rain came down, the computer failed, the bulb burned out, the feet hurt, the allergies set in, the mind forgot, the hair was bad—it was that kind of day.

But then, at the end of the day, a group of people gave thanks for each other, one by one. The thank-yous were specific and heartfelt, funny and true, and with each thank you another complaint vanished, its space taken up by a feeling of good will that not even a smelly dog could extinguish.

She gets a call to go fishing late at night. She dresses in the dark, heads to her car and hits the road to journey up-Island.

First up is a deer. She brakes just in time.

Next comes a rabbit. Safe all around.

Then a large toad hops by and barely escapes getting squished.

By now she is screaming and wondering what will come next in this animals-on-the-run video game. What comes next does not take long. It is a flock of turkeys somehow encouraged to leave their midnight roost. They are slow enough during daylight. At night they shuffle as if pushing walkers. Then the reason becomes clear. One of the flock is injured, limping badly. The turkeys take their time, making sure their limping friend has crossed the road safely before heading as one into the underbrush.

She drives on to the beach, the road no longer overflowing with rush hour dashes from the underbrush. Just the stars, a bit of moon and the endless sea stretching out before her.

The tree was majestic, tall and thick and well used over the decades. Its wide trunk had become a sort of scroll, a repository of tales of couples coming together, breaking up, of harsh words and hopeful phrases.

BN Loves CS, Raul Was Here, Sue +Tim, Sue - Tim, Class of 1998 Rules!

A man sitting at the base of the tree eating his lunch on a windy day wondered about the stories told in miniature on this outdoor canvas. How had BN and CS fared, did Sue and Tim ever figure it out, where was Raul now if not here, and what had become of the class of 1998, now nearing 40 and presumably not carving their fate into trees anymore.

Two kids ambled by, between their soccer games. They tested the branches and climbed up for a better view. The man moved on to give them their space, this new Raul or Sue, BN or CS. He wished them well, silently, and patted the tree as he did. It had seen so many things from this very spot and stood the test of time and sharp knives.

A few leaves dropped as the man walked away and the higher branches swayed in the wind. But the lower branches stayed firm, holding the young soccer players safely until the whistle blew once again.

The wind was blowing hard in the middle of the night and the dog lay whimpering at the foot of the bed. Next to the dog, his daughter lay whimpering at the foot of the bed.

Both creatures carried talismans to ward off evil wind spirits — the girl held in her hands a blankie and her favorite stuffed monkey, the dog held in his teeth a well chewed stuffed lamb.

His son, the teenager, slept though everything, sometimes even when awake.

The man rose and patted the heads of his daughter and dog, remembering the dog of his youth who was afraid of thunder, and his own younger self afraid of mornings of all kinds. He wanted to carry the fear of these two small creatures but it kept slipping through his fingers, knocked loose by another gust in the dark.

He recalled his grandmother who on hard nights rubbed his face with her long fingers, slowly caressing his eyelids until they closed. He carried his daughter back to her bed, the dog following closely, stuffed sheep still in its jaws. He lay between the two of them and tried his grandmother’s remedy. But in no time at all he was fast asleep.

The next morning he awoke alone, his daughter and the dog having abandoned the bed in search of mom, who was so much better at staying awake through the long night and comforting the two, a fact his daughter reminded him over breakfast, on the ride to school and through various text messages throughout the day, complete with thumbs down emojis and a few other images he did not understand.

The dog, on the other hand, appeared to hold no such grudge. There were no texts or other notes at all from him during the day.

He was thinking about how chasing a story can be like chasing the wind. The twists and turns keep coming along with landings at unexpected places. He thought this while seated at a small kitchen table, meeting for the first time two of his great, great aunts — one 85 years old, the other 94 years old.

They talked of many things while looking out the window, down at the Oak Bluffs harbor. They talked of relatives alive and others long dead. They talked about the Island, now and in the deep past, and they talked about relationships. One aunt had never married. “But I have lovely memories,” she said with a wink. The other had married her high school sweetheart, then divorced, then connected with him again recently. “They are dating now,” one aunt said of the other.

He sat there taking all this in on a Sunday afternoon, knowing he would rather be at that table more than anywhere else in the world. He took notes, examined old photos and looked out the window at his younger self, climbing the hill above Sunset Lake after feeding the ducks, never knowing these two aunts lived just a few houses away.

Later that night he started writing and didn’t stop until morning.

They were having a casual chat while driving to school, a father and his teenage son, when it turned to thoughts about college, nothing specific, but it continued to loom out there like some oversized magnet. Not that the son noticed this pull or his father’s sudden rapid heartbeat, his inability to form words or the slight twitch he carried with him the rest of the day. No, in the moment the father pretended to let the conversation roll along as if they were talking about making sandwiches or the joy of napping during a rainstorm.

But inside, his heart fell loosely to his ankles as he pondered the reality of his son leaving home, of leaving him, of the stories that wouldn’t be laughed at because they would never be told because rides like this one would no longer exist. It was a reality he had never felt so acutely until this very moment.

Upon arriving at school he watched his son get out of the car and walk into the high school. Then he drove to a quiet spot to commiserate with his better self, someone who had never fully presented himself until his son first arrived in his life.

As a young child, he had a recurring nightmare where a villain would swallow a family member and then take the form of that person, residing comfortably in this new host until it chose its next victim. This went on for years, periodic visits to this surreal landscape where the villain would walk among them unchecked because it looked like grandma, pop-pop, father, brother or mother. Only the young boy could tell the difference, but like in so many dreams he had no voice to cry out.

As a young adult, he had a recurring nightmare of finding himself alone in a dark city in a very dangerous part of town. He had turned left or right or sideways — forgetting his usual savvy city knowledge — and now faced an impending mugging or worse. The end result never arrived, he always managed to wake himself just in time, but the fear always returned a few months later when the dream raised its head again.

As a father, he had a recurring nightmare of a determined snapping turtle chasing him under water and then following him home, hiding beneath the bed at night and pouncing when he set foot on the floor to check on his children. The children needed him, he knew that, but could never make it to their rooms with the snapping turtle holding him down like an aggrieved anchor, gnawing away at his Achilles tendon.

Why, you may ask, this dark turn in the Notebook narrative? Well, Halloween approaches, just two days away. For a few years, he would swap nightmares with a dear friend, a true professional of mining and filming the dark dreamscape. He misses those conversations, seated across the table trying to one-up each other with real or imagined horrors of the unconscious. And so he visited the cemetery recently to continue this tradition with his old friend. The snapping turtle nightmare was new, and out there in the cemetery, seemingly alone in the near dark dusk, he was sure he could hear his old friend laughing at this tale before returning with one of his own.

And then November arrived bringing with it more time in the dark at the end of day. He could feel the mocking of the skunks and owls and other nocturnal souls as he switched on the lights and prepared a fire. Needing more wood he went outside and noticed a trio of rabbits wandering about with impunity, their white tales the only sign they were there at all.

He decided to walk further afield into the quiet of the deep dark, remembering as he usually did this time of year Virginia Wolf’s essay Street Haunting, where the search for a lead pencil becomes an excuse to walk in a different set of footsteps: “The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”

He never tires of that line, or rather every line in that essay. Just as he never tires of leaving the house come November to become someone he has never been before, at least for a short time, before returning to his former self. “Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet.”

He woke earlier than usual the morning Daylight Saving Time ended, thanks to the extra hour. There would be bemoaning later on, when dusk descended in the late afternoon, but for now the morning spoke to him.

He recalled how as a child waking up early gave him one-on-one time with his father as they headed out be the first ones on the golf course. As a boy he would set the internal clock in his head by concentrating hard on the time he wanted to wake up. He would say it over and over like a mantra as he drifted off to sleep, and it always worked. Then he would slip out of the room while his brothers slept to be with his father and have him all to himself.

He did this with his grandfather too, who woke up even earlier to go fishing. Again he focused his mind and met him at the breakfast table then joined him on the water, so often just the two of them, quietly casting into the break of another day.

He recalls all of those mornings now as he steps outside in the pre-dawn quiet, unwrapping each one like a gift to be held until the sun sets at 4:34 p.m.

At the breakfast table before school a young girl tells her father about the best late-for-school excuse she heard recently. “My friend and her father stopped to watch a group of ring-necked pheasants. They actually wrote that down on the tardy slip,” she says. “Stopped to watch a group of ring-necked pheasants.”

The father smiles at this, imagining a lovely father/daughter scene at the edge of the woods before school. For a moment he thinks about going in search of pheasants or other woodland creatures with his daughter, a whole series of wildlife watching late-slips unfolding throughout the year. Then he looks at the clock. “Oh no,” he says. “We are running late.”

And just like that the relative calm morning turns into a chaos of arguments over tooth brushing mishaps, misplaced homework, sneakers versus shoes and other wardrobe malfunctions. The argument reaches such a pitch that by the time they get to the car neither are speaking to each other and all thoughts about the magical properties of nature have been abandoned. The entire ride continues in silence, something that has never happened before.

Upon reaching the drop-off spot, the father turns to his daughter and attempts a last-minute reconciliation joke. “Hey, how about I write you a note saying you are late because you had a fight with your father?”

The little girl does not crack a smile. She just shakes her head and closes the car door.

Later, on the drive to work, the man passes a colony of rabbits, some lovely birds and two deer. He gives them all the finger.

Scene: Overheard at a grammar school near you. A young boy approaches a young girl.

Boy: How many letters are in the alphabet.

Girl: Um, 26.

Boy: Really, I thought there were 21 letters.

Girl: No, definitely 26.

Boy: Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot about these five letters: U R A Q T.

Girl listens to the boy say the letters out loud and slowly a smiles spreads as she realizes what he has said.

Boy: Oh, and do you want to go to the school dance with me?

Girl: Yes, I’d like that.

Fade Out to Sade’s Smooth Operator

The leaves are mostly gone, the sky is mostly gray, the air is mostly cold, and the chickens have mostly stopped laying eggs.

The songbirds are mostly gone, the evenings are mostly dark, the past is mostly bittersweet and the future is mostly misty.

The streets are mostly lonely, the muscles are mostly sore, the porches are mostly empty, and the thoughts are mostly foggy.

But all in all, this is mostly okay.

They sat shoulder to shoulder on a sunny Sunday, the man and the young boy, writing away while the world outside continued its steady pace unaware of the scenes and characters being created.

A few months earlier they only knew each other in passing, but now they swapped the creative contents of their minds on a weekly basis. On this day, the boy conjured up a haunted house in the woods, guarded by a shaggy dog whose past was not yet known. The trees all had names like Betwixt, Between, Bartholomew and Last Tuesday. They wore sheepskin vests and charged squirrels a quarter a day for lodging.

The man discovered a young girl on the page who had perfected the art of doing nothing all day. She lived an extremely sedentary life on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie, in the company of her grandmother and a sad looking swan who had done time for a crime of the heart.

They went on this way, stopping every so often to read aloud their progress and then after offering suggestions were back on the trail again.

The man never let on that this was his favorite hour of the week, not to anyone at all, except you.

At an early morning coffee shop the talk wanders among the few patrons. Coffee is served as are eggs, hash browns, toast, juice, the usual. Two older men discuss the toughness of shellfishermen, some hard dogs still going out every day deep into their gray-haired decades.

One man admits he can no longer haul lines that often and is taking a break, here among the eternal coffee drinkers.

The talk then shifts to relationships. Another fellow mentions an off-again, on-again girlfriend. “One time we took nine years off,” he says. “What can I say, I need my space.”

The door opens, the morning chill rushes in, along with two more customers. There is a moment of quiet as their presence is digested. Then the talk bubbles up again, for the most part arriving over easy, but now and then spoken with a small side of regret.

He began pondering gratitude on a sleepy drive to work, what with Thanksgiving around the next corner. It started slowly, giving thanks for a yield sign because why not, and a passing truck that announced: We Make the Earth Move.

He revved it up a notch, thanking a gaggle of turkeys for crossing the road so slowly so he could give thanks to a squirrel who mocked him from a nearby tree.

He gave thanks to the sun for being so bold and a tailgater for being so bad. He gave thanks for the hole in his sock and for a roadside pile of rocks. He thanked the wink of an ocean wave and the memory of a snapping turtle who would not behave.

He kept going on like this throughout the day, thanking pencils and erasers, a blue paperclip, the crick in his neck and thoughts of new and old friends he had just met.

And he is still out there now, giving thanks in the gloaming to all that he has known and all that he has yet to discover.

Happy Thanksgiving, in all its forms.

A young girl writes a letter to a senior, living in a nursing home. It is the first note in a pen pal relationship, the initial overture. She writes with pencil on paper, careful to make the letters large and legible. After all, the receiver is in her 90s.

The girl opens with her name, explaining the origin of her nickname. She mentions her grandparents, her parents and their jobs and what she is reading. She draws a few pictures and asks a series of questions, wondering what the woman’s favorite color is, her favorite food, book and animal.

At the end of the letter the young girl says she has a thing for history, loves old photos and the vintage life. It is unclear whether she connects the dots from this hobby to the woman she is writing to. But the older woman does, overjoyed at this turn of events as she prepares to answer the note, dictating her story to a volunteer who writes it down in pencil on paper, taking care to make the letters large and legible, but not cursive as the young girl wrote in a P.S. that she has trouble reading cursive.

All in all, it looks like this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

He was compiling the annual family photo-book, looking through a year’s worth of photos late one windy night while the rest of the house slept. Usually, this was a happy chore but at some point, after seeing so many shots of his children posing or in repose, he wandered down a different path. Instead of marveling with joy, he grew fearful, wanting so desperately to keep them safe but also knowing that no matter how hard he tried there would never be any certainty.

There was no immediate concrete worry, and yet he took this feeling to bed with him, after looking in on his sleeping children, so big now that for a moment he became disoriented.

When he woke in the morning the weight of the evening still sat heavy on his shoulders. He shuffled downstairs with the dog and headed outside for a walk. But at the edge of the yard a fairy house caught his attention. He could not remember how many years ago it had been created; the days when building fairy houses were a near daily occurrence were now part of the distant past. This was the only one that had survived the test of time, but this morning it stood in disarray.

He knelt down in the grass and the dog lay down beside him, watching the man work, replacing pebbles beside the doorway to serve as a walkway, a few leaves to complete the roof and some sticks to shore up the walls.

And when he was done with the house he added a few small twigs in the shape of a dog to complete this fairy reality, where catastrophe could be fixed with just a few more scraps from nature. And then they moved on with their walk, the man and the dog, both carrying their own thoughts as the dawn lifted on another day.

He stands outside in the early morning looking up at the first snowfall of the season. It is still dark and the only sound that of the snow falling upon the trees. He had planned to go for a walk to collect his thoughts which had felt so scattered in recent days. He wanted grounding, out there along the wooded path, but the snow sends him indoors. Not to ward off a chill but rather to the bookshelf.

This time of year, when the first snow falls before the holidays, he returns once again to his tattered copy of Dubliners, to the last story in the collection by James Joyce. He settles in, grounded by this tradition of his that goes back so many years he cannot recall.

This year, just as he approaches the end of the story, his young daughter comes downstairs, still covered in the fogginess of sleep and snuggles up next him. He puts his arm around her and reads out loud the last few sentences of The Dead.

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

And when he finishes and closes the book, his daughter pats him on the shoulder. You’re a strange dad, she says. But that’s okay.

Warning, heartwarming holiday story ahead.

A young girl and her father do their weekly dump run chores. He deals with the heavy garbage containers and she focuses on the recyclables, moving expertly between the paper bin and the plastic and metal one. It is cold and they go about their tasks efficiently, waving at friends but mostly focused on the job at hand.

When they finish and are back in the car strapping on their seat-belts, a woman knocks at the window. She is at the passenger side and addresses the young girl.

“I hear you like to help others,” she says. The little girl smiles and they talk about her money raising capabilities for the annual Crop Walk. Then the woman hands the girl $50. “I want you to think of some places to give this money during the holiday season. I’m sure you will be better at it than I would be.”

The little girl is stunned, as is her father, too. On the way home they begin coming up with a list of places to help: The Red Stocking Fund, a homeless group the high school students are visiting, the Animal Shelter — the list keeps growing as do their smiles.

Which proves, yet again, that you never know what might happen at the town dump.

The chickens are worried, what with the foliage all gone, slippery snow on the ground and hungry hawks circling above. They hover in the coop a bit longer each morning, then scamper to the rhododendron bush, an oasis of green cover in a desert of naked trees.

The crows are cranky, having to wait until the chickens move on to swoop in the coop for a meal of chicken feed.

The dog is sleepy, the cold winds outside making the blankets inside a better bet. So, too, the little girl who burrows deeper in bed no matter what the alarm clock says.

The squirrels are busy, the time of acorn gathering growing short, and the raccoons appear tired, what with so much darkness available to their nocturnal lives.

There is no word, though, from the snapping turtles, Pinkletinks or polliwogs, all snug in the mud beneath the ponds and the bogs, as otters frolic on snow slides above.

But the ocean waves remain untroubled, rolling along as they do, white caps cresting through time, paying no mind to seasonal whims and rhymes, nor anyone else for that matter.

The parents sit in bleachers, on benches, in the wings, backstage, on the sidelines, watching their children perform. The have done this for years — for sports, theatre, dance, skating — all the myriad activities that make up these young lives.

They sit as their parents had once sat and cheered for them, remembering those moments now as they live in both the present and past, as an adult and as a child.

Often the generations sit in a row, cheering together for their daughters, grandsons, great granddaughters and grandsons, like they did at a recent holiday show. On stage the entire spectrum of childhood was on display, from the tiny tykes to seniors in high school. A parent watching could be forgiven for weeping while watching the aging process accelerate before their eyes.

Later, in the lobby, while the parents chat about the performance, one man overhears another talk about his daughter heading off to college next year. He looks at his own little girl, who is not so little any more, and has to excuse himself to get some air. And out there, beneath the starry skies, he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, hoping this will somehow ease the passage of time.

The shortest day of the year arrives tomorrow, which begs the question of what to do — not with the lack of daylight but with all that darkness available to you. Will you simply tuck yourself in by the fire to binge stream more tales you have not lived or will you bid adieu in the dark of night to your vicarious ways?

Maybe it is time to embrace this winter solstice outdoors, with the skunks and owls and skittering rabbits. Or simply howl at the moon with happiness or sorrow like there is no tomorrow.

Out there with those extra dark moments, perhaps you will meet a roving pack of raccoons who will lead you away from all that you know. Or maybe it is ghosts you seek, the ones you have been missing while making all those lists of what to do during each daylight hour. Think of how much more time you will have to talk together on this long night of the soul.

And then, when the day breaks and you are so very tired, rest easy knowing that you made the most of those dark hours, sitting side by side with your unsettled self like a spirit in the night. Yes, that sounds just right.

A man drives along a stretch of road not thinking much of anything as he listens to the radio. On it a singer discusses the origins of a song, how it came out of conversations he had with his son, the ones that take place at the end of the day while tucking a small child in for the night.

The man driving is suddenly overcome, thinking about those moments, especially the ones where he was not rushed or exhausted and lingered for as long as his child needed him. He wishes all the nights were this way, but of course they were not. He winces at so many memories of hasty tuck-ins and of tears.

One child no longer needs tuck-ins, old enough now to still be awake doing homework when the parents drift off. But the younger child is still deep in thrall, stretching out the nighttime routine for as long as she can, and then for longer still.

The man wishes that all interactions could be as quiet and profound as those on the cusp of sleep, where the outside world is firmly outside and dreams of his best self always come true.

As the New Year and new decade approaches, the Notebook sends good wishes, hoping that you find time to smile with abandon merely because it is Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday afternoon. May you be ready for when the wind calls your name, and may you zig when you would normally zag and vice versa, too.

And here’s hoping that you will be hopelessly lost this year, at least 22 per cent of the time, that you will sit back and walk forth in equal measures, and that you will find the time to marvel at a stranger’s shadow at least once a week.

May you laugh with your faults, cry with your successes and muse with your mutterings.

And each morning when you rise, may you become reacquainted with your toddler self, the one who spent so much time pointing at the world in wide-eyed wonder. And then each night, when you turn out the lights, may you take a moment to marvel at who you have become.

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2019

Directory

Sections

Towns

Notebook Archive - 2019

Tuesday, January 1

Friday, January 4

Tuesday, January 8

Friday, January 11

Tuesday, January 15

Friday, January 18

Tuesday, January 22

Friday, January 25

Tuesday, January 29

Friday, February 1

Tuesday, February 5

Friday, February 8

Friday, February 15

Tuesday, February 12

Tuesday, February 19

Friday, February 22

Tuesday, February 26

Friday, March 1

Tuesday, March 5

Friday, March 15

Tuesday, March 12

Friday, March 8

Tuesday, March 19

Friday, March 22

Tuesday, March 26

Friday, March 29

Tuesday, April 2

Friday, April 5

Tuesday, April 9

Friday, April 12

Tuesday, April 16

Friday, April 19

Tuesday, April 23

Friday, April 26

Tuesday, April 30

Friday, May 3

Tuesday, May 7

Friday, May 10

Tuesday, May 14

Friday, May 17

Tuesday, May 21

Friday, May 24

Tuesday, May 28

Friday, May 31

Tuesday, June 4

Friday, June 7

Tuesday, June 11

Friday, June 14

Tuesday, June 18

Friday, June 21

Tuesday, June 25

Friday, June 28

Tuesday, July 2

Friday, July 5

Tuesday, July 9

Friday, July 12

Tuesday, July 16

Friday, July 19

Tuesday, July 23

Friday, July 26

Tuesday, July 30

Friday, August 2

Tuesday, August 6

Friday, August 9

Tuesday, August 13

Friday, August 16

Tuesday, August 20

Friday, August 23

Tuesday, August 27

Friday, August 30

Tuesday, September 3

Friday, September 6

Tuesday, September 10

Friday, September 13

Tuesday, September 17

Friday, September 20