HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Only two weeks into January and already Oak Bluffs has suffered two fires. The first was the New Year’s Day conflagration of that nice house on Spruce avenue. I was walking Huxley along the harbor when we saw billows of black smoke and columns of orange flame licking the sky. Actually, I don’t know what Huxley saw — he was busy pressing his nose to rocks, dried shrubs and a patch of grass where perhaps a female poodle had left a trace of her DNA seven years before.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Washington 1963.

From Gazette editions of January, 1962:

The latest addition to the Island’s intertown, fire-fighting brigade is the new maxim pumper, delivered a few days ago to the town of Oak Bluffs. This pumper has a 750 gallons per minute capacity, and carries a reserve water supply of 500 gallons. Voted by the annual town meeting, it replaces an older piece of apparatus of similar style and capacity.

The year is 2008. Georgette drives the van from Montgomery to Selma on U.S. Route 80. As it leaves the city and heads through the country, the landscape surrounding the four lane highway opens up. Fields of cotton with big old trees lie on either side of us as Georgette grips the steering wheel.

“It’s quiet out here,” I say from the passenger seat. I’m used to the hustle and bustle of Montgomery.

“Yeah, it gets a little spooky out here sometimes,“ Georgette replies in her deep southern accent.

There was a time in America when debate mattered. It was a period when declamation was standard fare of a youngster’s education, when people knew about disputation and rhetoric and dialectics, when beyond a mastery of a subject, how one expressed an opinion, whether with wit or humor or insight, was important.

LACKING BALANCE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Edgartown selectman Michael Donaroma has a good suggestion for resolving the endless and potentially costly bickering over the roundabout: put a nonbinding question on annual town ballots Islandwide this spring and find out what the voters really think.

What began as a reasonable debate over the merits of the project has now devolved into a procedural squabble. Will we feel any better if a judge tells us it was — or wasn’t — approved in strict accordance with the law? Not likely.

The moon was an otherworldly blood orange Monday night as it lit a shimmering fuse along the waters off the Oak Bluffs town beach. It was so spectacular that nearly every car and truck pulled off the road so its inhabitants could stare . . . and reflect.

Dean’s List

Ryan Brennan of Vineyard Haven has been named to the Providence College dean’s list for the fall 2011 semester. To qualify for the dean’s list, students must achieve at least a 3.55 grade point average with a minimum of 12 credits.

Subsidized Apartments