Commentary
My early childhood was spent in a beautiful four-story New York city brownstone that my great-grandparents owned. The floors were wood and always polished; each floor had its own kitchen, bathrooms with large giant claw-foot tubs, and a unique style that reflected its occupants. My parents, siblings and I lived on the upper floor, my great-grandparents lived on the floor directly beneath us, and my grandparents beneath them. But despite the brownstone’s blueprint that gave us the chance to live apart, we never did.
There was almost no one on the first deck of the MV Martha’s Vineyard on the 2:30 p.m. boat out of Woods Hole on Nov. 16. Once the motor vessel had turned around to head out across the Sound, the quiet was deafening— no hum of conversations, no cell phones in use, no shuffling footsteps, no babies’ cries, no children’s running feet, no greetings, no laughter, no one. The vacant seats spooked me a bit. Is this what the end would be like?
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Special Delivery
As off-Island subscribers to this newspaper know only too well, the U.S. Postal Service has been in decline for many years. With subscribers in 47 states and several foreign countries, we often hear horror stories of papers not arriving for days or weeks after they are mailed.
Big Houses, Small Island
They are the guzzlers of the built environment, and like sport utility vehicles, McMansions have become an object of derision in many circles in an age of heightened consciousness about wasteful consumption of finite resources. Much as big cars guzzle gas, oversized houses gulp electricity from an overloaded grid, block scenic vistas and occupy valuable coastal wetlands, sometimes to ruinous effect.
From Gazette editions of December 1986:
The Vineyard may only wonder — perhaps despair is a better word — at the insanity of yet another collision over the future of Georges Bank.