Preparing Oneself for Dying

Compulsively,

I strive to find a method

for a confrontation with what must be done

to save my children from the task of doing it when I die.

Make lists.

Make lists.

I sharpen pencils with an out-damn-spot intensity.

In shaded rooms,

on yellow pads,

I hide myself from sun

to settle my affairs:

For 21 years — from the late summers of 1874 through 1895 — a passenger train chuffed along a route that looks inconceivably imposing to us today: from what’s now the Oak Bluffs Steamship Authority wharf, over the very sands of State Beach, through the fairways and greens of the Edgartown Golf Club, perpendicularly across Upper Main street, along the border of not one but two cemeteries and into what are now the subdivisions and farmlands of Katama before terminating at two dead ends: the dunes of South Beach and a hotel at Mattakessett whose ugliness was rivaled only by its windswept isolation and self-evident vulnerability to fire.

Six years ago, West Tisbury resident Paul Karasik traveled to Oxford, Md., to meet the son of Fletcher Hanks, a great undiscovered comic book cartoonist who first caught his attention 20 years earlier when he printed portions of Mr. Hanks’s work as the associate editor of Raw magazine, the international comics and graphics review. Mr. Hanks had spent three years in this quiet fishing town on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, during the advent of the comic book industry, from 1939 to 1941, scripting, drawing and inking 51 bizarre, edgy and masterful comic stories.

By Tuesday, August 25, Susan and Pierre Guérin, owners of the Sweet LifeCafé, had pretty much given up hope that the President would make a return visit to their Oak Bluffs eatery. President and Mrs. Obama had come for a meal in 2007 during the presidential campaign, sharing a quiet dinner on the breezy restaurant sunporch. The then-sena tor and his wife posed for a photo with theGuérins, which is now framed along with a note of gratitude scrawled on Sweet Life stationary by Mr. Obama.