Opinion
One of the reasons I love living on the Vineyard is that almost every Sunday morning, I get up at dawn and go walk on the beach.
We have such a variety of different beaches on this Island, and I think they are all beautiful.
Last weekend the Charles W. Morgan was relaunched on her 172nd birthday after a major rebuild; much of her remains original including the keelson. The live oak in her massive double sawn frames was salvaged after a southern U.S. hurricane, and she has been rebuilt absolutely true to her original design and methods of construction. She was originally launched from the Hillman Shipyard in New Bedford (the Hillman family came from Chilmark) on July 21, 1841, and sailed on 37 voyages with the last voyage in 1921.
Back in the day, as they say, when a lot was two words and a newspaper lede (which this is right here – the opening paragraph) was a lead, and when a woman was called Jaymie it was spelled Jamie and not Jaime, which should be pronounced Hymay as it is in Spanish, back then when all was right with the world (but not nearly as right as it is today), I read books. Real books with bindings and pages, both hard and soft cover. I still do.
The following essays were the top three winners in the annual Della Hardman Day essay contest for students at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. The theme this year was: “Does entertainment such as video games, TV, movies and social media, have the capacity to ‘ruin’ society, as Neal Gabler suggested in his book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.”
From a 1995 column by Arthur Railton: Nothing good is happening. The sky is falling in. Run for your lives, the dam has burst. Family values have taken flight. We abuse our children, kill our parents, rape our neighbors, murder our ex-wives. Nowhere is the sun shining.
It was just too hot to think last week so I just sat around with a dead brain remembering silly things, which is a lot easier than some of the other stuff I think about.