The poem begins with the routine event of chopping parsley, a serious and yet absurd musing on a nursery rhyme known to all — three blind mice — and quickly spins into a quiet meditation on the sneaking cynicism that prevents us from feeling, and then, in shame, makes us feel all the more.

By HOLLY NADLER

A trademark of the boomer generation is that we never follow a straight line for a career path. It looks more like a privet hedge labyrinth in old English country gardens.

Governor Deval Patrick is coming to the Island but this is not just another baby-kissing tour. On Saturday, July 23, he will be reading from and discussing his new memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.

Mr. Patrick was born in Chicago in 1956 and after junior high school he won a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts. From there it was on to Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school. In 2007 he became the first African American Governor of Massachusetts and was reelected last year.

To launch the publication of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translator Robert Bagg will speak at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, July 27 from 5 to 6 p.m.

Seal Meets Dog

Sarah French, author of the new children’s book Summer Friends, will be appearing in the garden at Dragonfly Gallery on Friday, July 29, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Summer Friends is an exploration, through collage art, of the imagined friendship between a seal and Ms. French’s black Lab Minnie. Dragonfly Gallery is located in the Oak Bluffs’ Arts District. For more details, call 508-693-8877.

Of all the ways to go, who would have thought the grocery store would become one of the prime unravelers of our mortal coil.

Sad but true says Nancy Deville in her book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down and Poisoning of America.

The problems are many. So many foods laden with high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, endocrine disrupting soy, neurologically damaging aspartame, and all the rest of the maddening ingredients now commonplace in factory made food.

Detective Victoria Turnbull is at it once again, sleuthing out the latest Vineyard mystery in The Bee Balm Murders. The fictional character created by writer, activist and innkeeper Cynthia Riggs may be 92 years old, but she isn’t slowing down in the least.

Neither is her creator.

The Zen of Award Winning

The lavish book of photography and essays, Martha’s Vineyard – Now & Zen, has been selected the bronze medal winner of the 2011 Indie Excellence Award in the category of Northeast Regional Publications.

This, the book’s second national award, celebrates the highest achievements in independent press and self-publishing.

Pearl Buck Returns

Once the weather turns warmer and the grey, spring skies blow blue and clear the Vineyard beckons to one and all. Time and the grave cannot even thwart the faithful. Pearl Buck is headed our way.

That’s right, on June 1 at 7 p.m. Ms. Buck will be reading from her short story collection East and West at the Vineyard Haven Public Library. Okay, the legendary author of The Good Earth may bear a resemblance to the actress Diane Quaid, but the words will be her own.

Author Winslow Myers will present Living Beyond War, sharing his beliefs and commitment to end war, on Sunday, May 22, at 5 p.m. at the Unitarian-Universalist Society Chapel at 238 Main street in Vineyard Haven.

The organization called Beyond War has been working for 25 years to change thinking about war. During the Cold War, teams of high level scientists from the then Soviet Union and the U.S. wrote a book together about the dangers of accidental nuclear war.