2011

Billy Collins

The poem begins with the routine event of chopping parsley, a serious and yet absurd musing on a nursery rhyme known to all — three blind mice — and quickly spins into a quiet meditation on the sneaking cynicism that prevents us from feeling, and then, in shame, makes us feel all the more.

Mollin

By HOLLY NADLER

A trademark of the boomer generation is that we never follow a straight line for a career path. It looks more like a privet hedge labyrinth in old English country gardens.

Governor Deval Patrick is coming to the Island but this is not just another baby-kissing tour. On Saturday, July 23, he will be reading from and discussing his new memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.

Mr. Patrick was born in Chicago in 1956 and after junior high school he won a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts. From there it was on to Harvard as an undergraduate and for law school. In 2007 he became the first African American Governor of Massachusetts and was reelected last year.

To launch the publication of The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translator Robert Bagg will speak at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, July 27 from 5 to 6 p.m.

Seal Meets Dog

Sarah French, author of the new children’s book Summer Friends, will be appearing in the garden at Dragonfly Gallery on Friday, July 29, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Summer Friends is an exploration, through collage art, of the imagined friendship between a seal and Ms. French’s black Lab Minnie. Dragonfly Gallery is located in the Oak Bluffs’ Arts District. For more details, call 508-693-8877.

Of all the ways to go, who would have thought the grocery store would become one of the prime unravelers of our mortal coil.

Sad but true says Nancy Deville in her book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down and Poisoning of America.

The problems are many. So many foods laden with high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, endocrine disrupting soy, neurologically damaging aspartame, and all the rest of the maddening ingredients now commonplace in factory made food.

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