Center for Living Meeting

The Martha’s Vineyard Center for Living will hold its annual meeting on Thursday, Nov. 10. at 7 p.m. in the Tisbury Senior Center. Following a brief business meeting, the board will discuss the Center for Living’s past accomplishments and plans for the future. Refreshments will be served.

The center provides a variety of programs and services for Island residents ages 55 and older through partnerships with town councils on aging and other organizations.

The Halloween scarecrows> that decorated many business storefronts for the past two weeks have been rounded up and moved to a central location. The handcrafted pieces, created for the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School’s 12th annual Islandwide Scarecrow Festival, will be displayed on the porch of the Mansion House through Tuesday, Nov. 6. Each of this year’s scarecrows bears a literary theme, such as the above Grapes of Wrath design.

The idea for OWS MV (Occupy Wall Street- Martha’s Vineyard) first appeared as an image of a can rolling down a hill. The hill was the enthusiasm I felt all around me as people took to the streets to restore our democracy. The can represented a simple idea — a photograph of people congregating in some visually iconic place to support the Occupy movement in each of the Island‘s six towns. Let’s publish these photographs, I thought, wherever appropriate — on Web sites, on social media like Facebook, in newspapers.

Three weeks ago, my 16-year-old daughter asked me what the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place in Zuccotti Park and all over the country meant. To better answer her, I visited the park and spent time talking to many different protestors. There was a very inviting and spirited energy the night I visited. The group was frantically cleaning the park in hopes of not getting thrown out the next day. At one point I was even handed a mop to help.

A lbert (Ozzie) Fischer Jr. was a man of the land who always had dirt beneath his fingernails, a farmer and arborist with a fondness for practical jokes.

QUESTIONABLE CONDUCT

Editors, Vineyard Gazette

If the Martha’s Vineyard Commission was ever well-served by Mark London, that is no longer the case. His attempted gag order in the matter of the highly controversial roundabout is an insult not only to the commissioners whom he serves, but to the entire Vineyard community as well. In sum, he directs commissioners to freeze time as of the closing of the public hearing, and thereafter, to stick their heads in the sand.

I wake up in the morning to the clucking of chickens. The sun is rising, peeking up above the trees as I stumble down the stairs and out into the yard. The “ladies” rush to the edge of their fenced enclosure and watch me closely. I almost fall on the dew-covered grass as I step into the wooden shower covered by honeysuckle and green twisting vines, 15 pairs of eyes still observing carefully. They flock to the shelf in their coop, where they can see me standing in the shower.

Fall Back

This past weekend on the Weather Channel, with the outdoor snowstorms overtaking much of the Northeast, Jim Cantore, the channel’s most hyperbolic newscaster, stood in the snow outside Harrisburg, Pa. Suddenly, there was a loud noise, thundersnow, as he called it. Mr. Cantore was so taken with this phenomenon, evidently extremely rare, he needed to compose himself.

“I need a moment,” he said live on camera and turned away as seconds of silence ticked by.

Lyme Under Study

More than thirty, less than ten thousand. The precise number of people living on the Vineyard who have contracted Lyme disease is unknown, but it is certain that the number is higher than the thirty cases of Lyme disease here recorded by the Centers for Disease Control last year. Far higher.