Please Adopt Us

Sadly, the holidays are not the happiest time for all the beautiful cats at the Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard who need new homes. This is especially true for our featured cat his week. Nomar was surrendered to the shelter by a wonderful, caring owner who had to give him up because she must to return to Chile and can’t take him with her. He is beautiful, a Himalayan with lovely blue eyes and a soft coat who has won over the hearts of all at the shelter. Won’t you please come see him?

Paul Sullivan’s last day in the Coast Guard and last day at Menemsha Coast Guard Station coincided on Wednesday. Mr. Sullivan, who had spent 22 years in the Coast Guard, and two years in Menemsha, departed with subdued fanfare at about 9 a.m. He took his car and headed home to his family, south of Boston.

After years of what seemed an encouraging recovery for the once-storied New England cod fishery, federal regulators recently announced that an important stock is failing.

A 2008 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study of the Gulf of Maine cod stock revealed a fishery rebounding after decades of overfishing, and on pace to be rebuilt by a 2014 deadline set by federal regulators. But just three years later NOAA now says that the fishery is near collapse and may require a fishery-wide shutdown to recover.

Matt Cancellare stands in front of you holding up a pair of padded boxing mitts. “Come on, give me more. I know you got it,” he says.

You throw combinations of punches until your shoulders ache and you can barely raise your gloves. You feel like giving up, yet something in his voice compels you to dig a little deeper and keep punching until the round is over. An alarm chimes.

“Time,” he calls. “Relax.”

Alarming Contradictions

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Late Summer Luncheon

Editor’s Note: Last fall Marlee Fox, a senior in high school, was mulling over her creative writing assignment. It was a cold, blustery day in Annapolis, Md. where she lives and her thoughts turned to Martha’s Vineyard. For several years now her family has been visiting the Island for two weeks each summer.

She wanted to capture, “that feeling you get in your stomach when it’s summer for the first time,” she said.

The year 2012 will mark the 35th anniversary of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group. Traditionally such a milestone is reason to reflect on the past and ponder the future. So please permit me to indulge in some memories.

In 1967 and 1968, here on the Vineyard, I began to prepare myself to meet the epic sea change that is the Occupy Wall Street Movement today. Those years began a 43-year course in what is possible in this life we live together on earth.

It has been an uninterrupted series of lessons on the power of beauty, on right and wrong, on the limitlessness of love, on the authority of compassion, and on the depth of the grief we must embrace for all that we have destroyed and lost over the last 150 years.

CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

I have been walking at Lambert’s Cove Beach with my dogs for many years. I am seasonal so my dates of walking are typically from June 20 to Sept. 10. I usually arrive there around 8:30 in the morning and stay until we must be off at 10:00. I have never gone off-season or in the evenings. I write for the times I go every morning. Usually during a summer season I see a total of two or occasionally three dog feces on the path that have not been picked up.

From Gazette editions of December 1936:

Winter came to the Vineyard in earnest form early this week, and the youth of the Island enjoyed the earliest skating in many years.