Okay, my wife and I have been living here full-time for more than three years. I know we can never lose the label of washashore, but is it conceivable we might be at least recognized with a label that advances our status?
It’s not that I’m risk averse — I prefer predictability. I appreciate a pleasant sameness in my daily routine. Blissful in the calm, I can get things done.
It was a dark but not stormy night. Just a merry crispness in the air. It was Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, around the dinner hour. We were all snug in our post-tryptophan haze in Vineyard Haven when suddenly all hell broke loose outside. Here’s the play-by-play.
I lied. How best to make a clean start for part three of my trilogy on the boxes in our basement? Honestly, I totally miscalculated the number. I thought we had two dozen, but neglected to open another door down there to reveal another roomful of boxes.
After I wrote about the nasty accumulation of boxes in my basement, several readers stopped me on the street, not to chastise me for having so many but to inquire why I had so few. “You only have two dozen boxes? Is your house big enough to absorb everything you moved there?” one said.
Back in the day, as they say, when a lot was two words and a newspaper lede (which this is right here – the opening paragraph) was a lead, and when a woman was called Jaymie it was spelled Jamie and not Jaime, which should be pronounced Hymay as it is in Spanish, back then when all was right with the world (but not nearly as right as it is today), I read books. Real books with bindings and pages, both hard and soft cover. I still do.
A few weeks ago, the Gazette’s front page story on the aging of the Vineyard population hit home. From the story we learned that the number of Vineyard residents 60 and older is growing at a faster rate than the rest of the state, and that some estimates show that the number of Islanders between the ages of 60 and 70 will triple by 2020.
In public seminars this month, the Vineyard Conservation Society, using colorful and frightful maps, showed how we were on our way to becoming the next Atlantis. My wife and I just bought here and now they’re telling me “here” may not be here for long? Here I was enjoying my status as a washashore and now they have the audacity to inform me that life’s odyssey is destined to make me an out-at-sea? Why worry about securing my next appointment with the electrician or the plumber if my future is among flotsam and jetsam?
Once upon a time on this Island that has managed to achieve peaceful coexistence without traffic lights, we had a little hoedown at the four-way stop on the Vineyard Haven-Edgartown Road. Cars would come down Barnes Road from the airport. Cars would come up Barnes Road from Featherstone. Cars would come from the high school. Cars would come from Cash & Carry. To cross the four-way intersection, it was a fairly basic doh-see-doh — first come, first served.
