In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (Call me Becca) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe fears and detests Richard Moby, the chief executive of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe has been obsessed with “taking down” Moby.
Aquinnah
Gay Head Community Baptist Church. The Rev. Roger H. Spinney, pastor. Organist, Mrs. A. Douglas Stewart. Sunday worship services at 9 a.m. Tel. 508-693-1539.
Chilmark
Chilmark Community Church, 9 Menemsha Cross Road. Sunday worship at 9 a.m.
Edgartown
LONDON — The newspaper industry is ailing; but I do not think that newspapers will altogether die.
— Tom Driberg, one of Fleet Street’s premier
journalists, is also a Member of Parliament.
In February, 2006, while traveling from Australia to the United States, one of my children became ill with a chest infection. Upon arrival here, my wife took her to the Martha’s Vineyard hospital.
Some hours and $600 later, they emerged with a prescription for antibiotics.
Worthwhile Cause
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
On April 14, at Tisbury town meeting, you will be asked once again to vote on whether or not to place the issue of allowing full service restaurants containing at least 30 seats to sell beer and wine on the ballot in 2010.
Take This Poem
Take this poem. No. Really
take it. It belongs to you.
Like anything you read.
It belongs. Like Hawaii’s
swaying palms, weighted
coconuts, rungs tying
the trunk of the tree. All.
Yours for free.
What did you think
your first grade teacher
was giving to you? Letters,
words, a dog with spots,
COUNTING TURBINES
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
How many wind turbines for Martha’s Vineyard?
Electricity is measured in kilowatt hours. One kilo equals 1,000. One 50-watt light bulb left on for 20 hours consumes one kilowatt hour of electricity (50 watts x 20 hours = 1,000 watt-hours = 1 kilowatt-hour).
Here’s what I love most about my town: its edges. In three directions, Vineyard Haven ends abruptly, as a town should, surrendering, gracefully and completely, to farms and fields and watery expanses of harbor and salt ponds. Within minutes, you can leave town behind and be lost on a woody trail, eye to eye with a ewe or out on the whitecaps with a seagull. Because of these edges and what lies beyond them, it smells good here. The breezes that blow through my kitchen window mostly carry briny scents, tangy with ocean.
The Most Valuable Things
World and national affairs have moved a little closer to the Island these days. The state of the country is affecting everyone, rich and poor, young and old. And all hopes are now pinned on President Obama as he navigates a minefield of global and domestic problems so enormous, so beyond the grasp of everyday life that ordinary citizens can only sit back and read and watch in awe and wonder — and more than a little trepidation.
But happily the news is not all bad.
