Nodding to Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. at his Whaling Church panel discussion Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama last night, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell shook her head and said: ”If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our President, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our President, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying.”
It’s a lazy Sunday evening on Martha’s Vineyard and the kids are loping along a wooded path to a pond, picking blueberries and debating whether “plink, plank, plunk” is really the sound the plump fruits make as they drop into the empty coffee can. The chapter books will be set aside tonight, and Blueberries for Sal will make a comeback at bedtime. It always does in August.
“Will the blueberries still be out when the Obamas come?” asks my daughter.
Vases wrapped with Xeroxed photographs of a muscled, smiling young man sat on the counter of Island Star convenience store in Edgartown yesterday, accepting contributions for the widow of Elton Barbosa, a 26-year-old Oak Bluffs resident who died on Friday of H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.
Mr. Barbosa had no known underlying health conditions, officials said. Most swine flu-related deaths have involved other health factors, such as an existing immune deficiency or other medical ailment.
There is a kinetic movement to the Taste of the Vineyard, the annual feast and fund-raiser for the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust. It’s the giddy energy of hundreds of people who skipped lunch, and maybe breakfast, playing gourmand for the night. Sampling. Sipping. Spying what’s ahead. Suddenly it’s forget the forks; it’s just finger food, faster and faster, with less and less room in the belly, until finally, barely two hours after the tent doors opened, there’s no right move but to dance.
As New England fisheries officials negotiate the finer points of a new groundfish management plan, Massachusetts voters appear firmly behind proposals to change the days-at-sea regulation scheme to one that uses community-based, fishermen-run cooperatives to monitor and limit cod, flounder and haddock fishing.
A woman in her early 40s was hospitalized for two nights last week with a confirmed case of H1N1 influenza, or swine flu, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital chief executive officer Timothy Walsh confirmed late yesterday.
This is the first confirmed incidence of the virus in Dukes County. The case means that every Massachusetts county has now had at least one confirmed case, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported yesterday.
