Commentary
A s the bills of mortality overtake American writers of my generation, it is of John Updike I speak. In my retrospective mind’s-eye, I see him using a glacial boulder at Squibby as a backrest, concentrating over a manuscript. The time, the early 1970s. I see him and his Mary on the tennis courts of the Chilmark Community Center, their names and reserved time listed on the sign-up pad affixed to the perimeter wire fencing.
Guns and Suffrage
From the Gazette editions of February, 1909:
I felt a little left out when I saw the pictures in the Gazette a couple of weeks ago of Vineyarders together watching the Presidential inauguration. A world away in Westchester, N.Y., I had spent that morning moving my father into an Alzheimer’s lock-down unit, euphemistically known as an “assisted-living residence for the memory impaired.”
Twenty-five years ago, the striped bass were on the verge of disappearing altogether from our waters. Federal scientists trying to pinpoint a cause listed pollution in the Chesapeake Bay spawning grounds as one probable reason — from residues of the banned pesticide DDT to the new phenomenon of acid rain. The other factor was clearly overfishing, and only this could be addressed immediately.
A Toast to Rabbie
If a Scot be ripe for toastin’,
If a Scot be fit for praise,
If a Scot stands high above the rest
For the way he spent his days,
Let’s raise a cup now, all about,
And celebrate the cheer
That Rabbie Burns has brought to the world
Now for two hundred, fifty years.
Nay, no poet was ’ere as fecund or fine
January Thaw
After weeks on end of snow and ice it was nice to see the grass again this week, if even for a few brief moments when the sunshine followed a rainstorm which followed a snowstorm. So what if it’s not really green — it’s our old friend grass. Hello, we haven’t seen you in awhile.