Nearly twenty years ago a group of parents began formulating a plan to create a new school on Martha’s Vineyard. The idea was to provide another public school option on the Island, one that was still free and taught the same state-mandated framework as other schools, but that was more project-based and gave students the freedom to pursue their own education plan, whether it be mathematics or becoming a better skateboarder.

Workers in downtown Vineyard Haven never needed a watch to know when it was lunchtime. They had their reminder every day when the noon whistle blew from the fire station on Beach street. The sound made dogs howl and, according to an old account from the Gazette, one day a horse died of fright following the whistle blast.

If I had the opportunity to provide a family with all its financial needs for a year, I would stick with the basics, but include things that would carry this family for years to come. My idea is kind of like the old saying: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.

In January 1851, according to the diary of Jeremiah Pease, a British boat “castaway” off Muskeget with 256 Irish on board. Four froze to death. Who were those nameless people? From the date it is clear they were fleeing from a country that had become a graveyard to seek opportunity and salvation in America. Turning their backs forever on families and communities decimated by famine and oppression, these uninvited and undocumented immigrants hoped to find work and food.

You used to be my favorite without a wink of doubt. “May, the unsurpassable Vineyard May,” I would effuse to mere mainlanders, “riding ashore on perfect waves, your velvet breezes and widening warmth soaking into our bones, your light awakening across greening pastures, emerging leaves holding the softest hues, the pitch and sway of the land still visible through the trees, each day spectacularly tuned to early birds laying their claims and rebuilding their lives.”

Amazing May, month of easy metaphors, making each of us a poet.

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?

Annie and I spent a lot of time at the beach through the years. I stayed at the tide line. She took off for the dune grass looking for small mammals. There were plenty. If she caught a scent of something underground, she would crouch, her big plume of a tail wagging furiously, and leap straight up into the air like an Arctic fox. She was a border collie mix, big at 55 pounds, and the thrill of the chase was what engaged her.

One day at the beach I saw her in the distance trotting toward me and there was something in her mouth.

The other day I was looking at a photo taken from Pam Clark’s old house of Shenandoah, at anchor in back of the Black Dog, and waxing nostalgic. Then today I read about Shenandoah’s namesake, and the original Alabama. I had thought they had been Confederate blockade runners, sort of romantic vessels.

Tea Party member Peter Robb (letter, May 17) complains that “Barack Hussein Obama has done precious little to bring liberals and conservatives together.” Without suggesting any useful measures, Mr. Robb instead goes on to assert that the administration has done a whole list of bad things, and lied about them.

I’m always amused to see how information given to someone working for a newspaper can get turned around, and I normally just enjoy it. But when Skip Finley’s Oak Bluffs piece from the May 17 Gazette was pointed out to me, I knew it was time to correct some misinformation. I think my mother, Elizabeth Hilliard Stacy, would be very surprised to hear that she was the founder of Hilliard’s Kitch-in-vue Candies and that Marguerite Cook was one of her five daughters.