Before the fall football season started Lou Paciello was a bit worried about numbers. Mr. Paciello had joined with several other parents to help re-establish a youth football program on the Island, but he didn’t know how many players to expect at practice.

It’s barely a month into the new season, but youth football has already exceeded expectations, Mr. Paciello said. At a recent Wednesday practice, third and fourth graders worked in small groups with their coaches. Some wore white jerseys; the program had run out of the purple jerseys ordered before the season.

Chris Patnaude’s socks are pink. The laces of his football cleats are pink, the band on his left elbow is pink, and the Under Armor sleeve on his right arm also is pink.

If you examined his white blood cells beneath a microscope, you would also see a fair amount of pink. It’s the color that eosiniphils, the rarest type of white blood cell, turn when stained with laboratory dye. In most people’s bodies, eosiniphils makes up no more than four per cent of all white blood cells, and helps fight infections. But for Chris, 14, who is in eighth grade at the Edgartown School, the eosiniphils are rampant and, as his mother Tanya explained: “They fight against him.”

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About 37 years ago my dad took my son to fish in the junior derby. In a photograph of my son standing on the pier fishing, there’s another boy standing on a piling fishing. These two Camp Ground boys met that day and became forever friends.

I remember a saying: Don’t eat oysters in months without an “r” in them.

And the Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide/Medical Encyclopedia, copyright 1970, says, “Mussels, clams, and certain other shellfish are dangerous during some seasons of the year.

This letter is to thank my many amazing friends and the Martha’s Vineyard community for their ongoing help and support before and after my beloved husband of 56 years, Sheldon Hackney died on Sept. 12 after a long struggle with ALS.

Editor’s Note: Donald Mitchell, a lifelong Vineyarder, died last week at the age of 87. The following letter from him arrived at the Gazette office this week, more than one month after it was mailed, due to a post office error.

In the aftermath of the Navy yard shootings, we see and hear the same accusations where innocent law-abiding people are made the problem, and, in typical knee-jerk fashion, must be dealt with by punitive legislation as the immediate solution.

The top striped bass keep getting bigger and with two weeks to go in the 68th annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby so does the field. More than 2,600 fishermen are registered in the contest and more and more keep showing up.

“I’d be really pleased if we got over 3,000,” said derby chairman John Custer.

The contest ends on Saturday, Oct. 19.

Overall nearly 12,000 pounds of fish have been weighed in as of Thursday morning. Striped bass total 5,300.26 pounds and bluefish total 4,288.88 pounds.

As Martha’s Vineyard residents for over 30 years and now living here half of the year, we had to respond to Danielle Pergament’s recent myopic article in The New York Times. She paints a rather clubby and selective picture of the Island and misses a bunch of noteworthy locals.