Opinion
Last Monday the schooner Valora was lost after she broke from her mooring outside Vineyard Haven and went up on the breakwater.
Late Summer Days
The northeaster that blew through the Island this week was right on schedule in this summer of early things: early spring, early dog days of heat and humidity and now an early storm more characteristic of September than August. Slickers and rain boots were pulled out of hiding in coat closets and donned for sloshing through wind-driven rain that fell from the sky in great sheets. It felt good, actually, to wash away the summer dust and spiderwebs that have woven themselves artfully around downspouts and on screened porches.
I can’t wait for Edgartown Hardware to move out of downtown. For three generations my family and I have shopped there. You can’t beat the service and friendly attitude. But in the last 10 years or so we’ve taken our business elsewhere. The traffic. All those people from away shopping for T-shirts and baubles. Who can find a parking place?
For the past week, President Obama has been my neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard. He’s not what you call a cheek-by-jowl neighbor. Although we are both living in the same area of the Vineyard — Chilmark — we are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, Chilmark Pond, Tisbury Great Pont, South Road and legions of Secret Service.
In early August I accepted a freelance proofreading job at a rate that could generously be called less than desirable. The job comes with flexible hours, and I am expected to put in 35 to 40 of them in a given week. If you have never worked as a proofreader, this amounts to 35 to 40 hours a week of mind-numbing (though not mindless), slow-moving, eye-blurring work. Best-case-scenario? Hardly. But I finished graduate school in May, and have now spent three months among the ranks of those looking for full-time employment.
A Half Century Ago
From Gazette editions of August, 1960: