I’ve been carrying Gerry around for years. Trust me when I say he’s not heavy, not any more, he’s gone from 200 pounds to less than a pound at this point.
My friend and former coworker Gerry Kelly, a jovial, melancholy Irishman, died and was cremated in 1996. He had no known immediate family and although we were not all that close, we shared a love of cooking, the theatre and art.
Karen Coffey is tiny, but she packs a huge wallop psychically. Her clear eyes do not look away when she speaks to you. When I encountered her in her shop, Pyewacket in Vineyard Haven, I immediately felt the connection of a person who spoke from somewhere outside of her own ego.
There aren’t too many men who go into home health care, but Hank Sjostrom (pronounced Sherstrom) has been in it since the 1960s, helping people and in turn helping himself.
For 30 years it has been the Island’s best-kept secret.
And today Island Elderly Housing (IEH) also remains one of the Island’s best success stories, thanks in part to the original founders, Margaret Love, Marguerite Bergstrom and Carol Lashnits, who had a strong and far-sighted vision of what was needed for not only the elder citizens of the Vineyard, but for its disabled population as well.
“My dad has a barn,” chirped a wide-eyed, hyperactive Mickey Rooney. “And my mom can sew the costumes,” the pigtailed, pinafore-bedecked Judy Garland replied. And off they went, hand in hand, singing and dancing their way across the barnyard.
Well, it was something like that and they didn’t even live on the Vineyard where the performing arts culture has grown and grown. No more drafty barns here and mom can now sit in the audience and not have to sew costumes.
What if your muse becomes your shrink? Margot Datz didn’t really take her paintings of mermaids seriously until they began to speak to her like a Ouija Board, predicting divorce, life changes and pointing out a woman’s place in the landlocked world.
