March isn’t quite over, but I’m not going anywhere. If North Dakota drives into my driveway tonight I’ll stop the presses. If it doesn’t, well — here’s March.
February was such a rush that March was bound to be a letdown, but still — South Carolina and Colorado? Not bad.
Word arrived earlier today that Anthony Lewis died this morning. In the proliferating obituaries, appreciations, and commentaries, you can read all about his major contributions to journalism, the law, and the intersection of the two, including his influential (and still in print) Gideon’s Trumpet, about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, and his two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting.
What you won’t read in any of those places is that if not for Anthony Lewis, I might never have set foot on Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s the story.
Tony and my father, Bob Sturgis, were both Harvard guys. My father was five years older, Harvard class of 1944, but thanks to World War II he and Tony were undergrads at the same time. More, they were colleagues on the Harvard Crimson — Dad told me that he was one of the few Crimson alumni of the time who didn’t go on to a career in journalism. (He became an architect instead.)
Fast forward a couple of decades. In the mid-1960s the New York Times made Tony its London bureau chief, so the Lewis family relocated to the other side of the big pond. They wouldn’t be using the summer camp they owned by the side of a much smaller pond. Somehow or other (Harvard guys of this generation seem to have been connected by a psychic internet whereby each one was aware of what all the others were up to), my father rented it. In late June of 1965 the Sturgis family, two parents, four kids, two dogs, and two cats, settled in on Deep Bottom Cove of Tisbury Great Pond. I had just turned 14.
For the record, I was not happy. My 4-H project, a grade chestnut mare, was due to foal in mid-July. I wanted to stay home with her. My father and I struck a deal: I’d accompany the family, my grandmother (an avid horsewoman herself) would keep an eye on the mare, and in two weeks I could return to Weston and spend the rest of the summer at my grandmother’s. And so it was. I missed the foaling by eight hours. For years I held a grudge against Martha’s Vineyard.
I didn’t warm to the Vineyard till after I started college in Washington, D.C. By then, after several years renting from the Lewises, my father had bought four acres and built a modest, unelectrified camp with Deep Bottom Cove on one side and Thumb Cove on the other. Finally I got to know the Lewises: Tony; his first wife, Linda; and their three kids, Liza, David, and Mia, who were fairly close in age to my younger siblings. Along with other pond-connected families, we sailed and swam and beach-picnicked together, and made frequent excursions to the Movie Museum at the old Ag Hall. (Tony knew all the dialogue from all the old movies, and his kids sometimes had to tell him to shut up.)
This was, you’ll remember, the Nixon era. When Tony made President Nixon’s enemies list, we were all so proud. In 1973, the Senate Watergate hearings dominated summer conversations; by the following summer, impeachment was under way, and finally the word went out: the president was going to resign. There was no electricity and no telephone on the east side of Deep Bottom Cove in those days. Tony rented a battery-powered TV: it was red and considerably smaller than a boombox. Around it we gathered, Lewises, Sturgises, and friends, and watched the whole thing, praying all the while that the battery’s charge would last till the end. It did. It’s still one of my favorite memories ever.
In between the sailing, gathering seaweed for the garden, going to movies, and other vacation activities, Tony worked. I’d never seen anyone type so fast with only two fingers, and on a manual typewriter at that. When he finished a column, he’d hoist the sail on his Sunfish and sail down the cove to call it in from Everett and Ginny Jones’ house — their side of the cove had both phone service and electricity.
Throughout his career Tony did so much to make the law both comprehensible and fascinating, to journalists, to laypeople, and even to lawyers. I will always associate him with this famous exchange from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, which he quoted in his columns more than once. Sir Thomas More is speaking with Roper, his hot-headed son-in-law:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
It’s the most eloquent argument for the rule of law that I’ve ever heard.
After I moved to the Vineyard year-round, in 1985, Tony and I would cross paths at the West Tisbury post office at least once a summer. In recent years I heard he had Parkinson’s and figured that was why I didn’t see him around anymore.
Deep Bottom Cove has drifted to the peripheries of my psychic map. It’s a summer place, and I’ve been a year-rounder for almost 28 years. But the Deep Bottom Cove of the 1970s remains vivid in my memory. I can still see Tony sitting by the window, unruly hair catching the sunlight, the cove rippling below as he speed-types with his two forefingers, and I see a yellow-and-white sail run up the mast, tacking between the sandbars, and beating upwind, all to meet a deadline in New York.
Online some people have been threatening to do nasty things to the poor groundhog, all because snow fell after the spring equinox. Get a grip, people. Any critter who didn’t see her shadow in my town on February 2 should see her optometrist posthaste, and besides, this is New England. Snow is unusual in May (but it does happen). It’s not unusual in March.
Yes indeed, it snowed last night, four or five inches of fluffy white stuff. Beautiful. I pulled boots on over my bare feet and went out in my bathrobe to take a couple of pictures. The snow was deep enough that the front door had to be pushed open, but the snow was light and easy to push.
Down there somewhere is Trav’s outside water bowl, the mold for my dog dish ice art. True, we’ve had some chilly nights and days when the temperature hasn’t got much above freezing, but most of March’s ice disks have been both fragile and ephemeral. February’s were much sturdier — but not as sturdy as January’s.
I don’t need any rodent to tell me that spring’s on the way. Trav’s water dish tells me everything I need to know.
The purple chair that messed up my back is still out on the deck, waiting to take its last ride to the dump. At first I tried to protect it from the elements, but the wind kept blowing the tarp off. Finally I gave up.
So is the humble outdoor chair gloating at the formerly privileged indoor chair that’s been left on the deck to fend for itself?
I don’t know. I’m not privy to the secret life of chairs, if indeed chairs have a secret life.
I am, however, privy to the not-so-secret thoughts of certain dogs. This dog is thinking “Will you get your butt in gear so we can go for a walk?”
Off we went. Trav dashed back and forth in the snow. I took a picture of my neighbors’ roof. If I could ski up the roof, I’d fly into the wild blue yonder.
If you’ve seen one snowy bike path picture, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
Here’s a new one, though: one of the signposts that marks intersections on the state forest’s grid.
For the rest, feel free to revisit a walk Trav and I took in mid-February.
I never get tired of Travvy pics, though. To judge from the comments I get, most of you don’t either.
Trav has got a new buddy. This is a woman who runs regularly on the bike path. Lately our schedule has synced with hers, so we’ve run into her often. She makes a fuss about Trav. Trav makes a fuss about her.
This morning Trav spotted her coming when all I saw was a dark speck that could have been a tree way down by Misty Meadows. The closer she came, the more excited Trav got. He trotted toward her. When I didn’t trot fast enough, he started gyrating in the kind of airs above the ground that he usually reserves for the UPS man. When they finally met in mid-path, it was all wiggle wriggle and let me lick your face.
What makes this really remarkable is that (unlike the UPS man) this woman doesn’t carry cookies and has never given Travvy one. Trav, it seems, is less mercenary than I thought.
Cottonball tree
The tree below went down some time ago — Hurricane Sandy? Travvy and I have been using it ever since for “send over jump” practice. Trav likes to jump. Usually he jumps over, then back, then over again before we move on.
Button bowls, dusted and sorted, Vineyard buttons on the right, everything else on the left
On my recent, and still ongoing, cleaning/rearranging/excavation jag, I rediscovered my buttons. I hadn’t lost my buttons, exactly, but two bowls of them were hidden behind my old chair. I’d forgotten them. I dumped them out, thinking to dust them off, and almost immediately I was
. . . disappearing down the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves . . .
Take this one. It’s from, I’m pretty sure, the very early 1990s. The wording seemed odd then. It seems odd now: Why not just “Another Vineyarder for Choice”?
Odd wording be damned; I wore it with pride.
At this time the annual M.V. Agricultural Society Livestock Show and Fair was still being held at its original home in the center of town. The pro-choice group wanted to have an information table among the other community groups. The Ag Society said no. All political groups, it seemed, were now non grata. The Ag Society said it was a question of space. Of course we didn’t believe it. (In retrospect, they were probably right, if somewhat disingenuous: the old fairgrounds were already bursting at the seams. Stroll through the fair at its current Panhandle location, to which it moved in the mid-1990s, and you wonder how it ever squeezed into the old place.)
So pro-choice activist Hasty Runner and her mother, Faith, volunteered the use of their field, which is just up State Road from what was then the fairgrounds, as a pro-choice parking lot. For a five-buck donation — I think it was five bucks; the going rate for fair parking has been five bucks for quite a while now, but it might have been less then — you could park your car for as long as you wanted and go to the fair; all the money went to a statewide pro-choice organization.
Runners’ Field, sans cars
Volunteers were organized in shifts for all three days to park cars and collect money. We had a blast. As I remember, the weather was mostly good, and the mood was festive. One challenge was to make sure the vehicles parked in reasonably straight lines — not easy when they were coming and going all day and into the night, and when some were bigger than others. The humongous Suburbans and other SUVs, we quickly figured out, had to park at the far end of the field by themselves; otherwise they’d wind up taking two rows and throwing our lines out of whack. Luckily there weren’t many of them. In the years to come, they and their monster pickup cousins became ubiquitous.
We raked in much more money parking cars, maybe hundreds of times more money, than we could ever have collected at an information table. The pro-choice parking lot ran for three years, I think — if anyone’s memory is better than mine, please correct me! — until the fair moved to its current home.
Now it’s just another field by the side of the road. I pass it several times a week. I hadn’t thought about the pro-choice parking lot in years. Did it happen in another life? As I usually tell the story, feminism pretty much passed Martha’s Vineyard by. But it didn’t really. I have the button to prove it.
I spent the last two weekends training to be a mediator. Career change? Not quite.
As the instructors and coaches, led by veteran mediator and retired law professor Ed Greenebaum, pointed out several times, we’ve all been mediating all our lives, trying to resolve conflicts between siblings or friends or co-workers or neighbors.
As an editor, I mediate conflicts and confusions between writers and their manuscripts, which leads to improved communication between writer and reader. Working for publishers, however, I deal mostly with words on my computer screen. I take care to edit and phrase my queries in a way that writers will find useful, but since I often have no direct contact with the writers, I don’t get much feedback. When I signed up for mediation training, I was looking for ways to translate my verbal skills into a face-to-face setting.
So no, I’m not contemplating a change of career. Editing and mediating are complementary skills. I am looking for a way to be more useful in the community, and you don’t have to live on Martha’s Vineyard very long before you see how miscommunication and noncommunication can mutate into longtime hard feelings, grudges, and outright hostility. The Martha’s Vineyard Mediation Program, also known as the M.V. Center for Dispute Resolution, is a volunteer gig, however, so I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon.
On the first Saturday morning, 15 of us trainees gathered around long tables set up horseshoe-style at the Tisbury Senior Center. We included longtime Vineyard residents and recent arrivals, retirees and full-time workers, a couple of lawyers, several with social services experience, a police officer, a theater director, and a TV journalist. We were an articulate bunch: our backgrounds were varied, but all stressed communication, through both the spoken and the written word.
From the beginning we were introduced to the basic principles of mediation. Over the four all-day sessions, through lecture, discussion, and role play, our understanding of those principles deepened and even started to become second nature.
Our new bible
For the role plays, we’d break into small groups of three or four; over the four days, each of us had multiple opportunities to play both client and mediator. Explaining the ground rules was relatively easy. From the basic info supplied to the mediators, some of the cases looked like no-brainers. Tammy and Roger were splitting up, they’d worked out most of the details, but they couldn’t agree on who should take the TV or the DVD player? How hard could that be?
Hah. Harder than you think. Once the parties started talking, it became clear that Roger hadn’t really accepted that the relationship was over, while Tammy had another boyfriend and was already moving on. The dispute, in other words, wasn’t just about stuff.
Subsequent role plays and discussion underscored the same point: the mediators’ task is encourage each party to describe the situation as s/he sees it and to identify his or her interests and concerns, then to encourage both parties to agree on what problems need to be solved and what a good outcome would look like. “Mediation,” according to one working definition, “is an intervention to improve the quality of a negotiation.”
Mediation, I quickly figured out, has a few things in common with editing. You learn the rules and guidelines and basic principles, but the job involves a lot of improvisation.
It can also involve time constraints. In recent years, most of the MVMP’s cases have come through Small Claims Court. When the court meets, several experienced mediators are on hand, and the clerk magistrate offers all disputants the mediation option. If they agree, they meet with mediators right at the courthouse. If they reach an agreement, it goes to the court for approval. If they don’t, their case will be heard in court the same day. The time allowed is generally no more than an hour.
On the second Saturday afternoon of the course, clerk magistrate Liza Williamson of Edgartown District Court explained how this works. The following morning, Margot Parrot, lawyer and law professor, gave a presentation on ethics. Massachusetts requires that an ethics unit be included in mediator training programs. On Martha’s Vineyard, hardly anyone is more than two degrees of separation from everybody else, so ethics are of more than academic importance.
As Ed Greenebaum passed out our certificates late Sunday afternoon, I was acutely aware of how much I didn’t know, but I had to admit that I knew a lot more than I had when I walked into the room the weekend before. Enough to know that I’m on a new journey, and curious to see where it takes me.
I found this in my old Bloggery while looking for something else. Posted on November 3, 2005. I’ve passed a few milestones since then but the place I’m in now looks a lot the same, even though I’m living in a different town. Figure there was a reason I came across it just now.
You know the feeling — you’re walking round the neighborhood on a brisk sunny day and the umpteenth house being shoehorned into a postage-stamp-size lot looks worse than a toxic-waste dump, and driving up State Road from Vineyard Haven is one long string of useta’s: That’s useta be Portside, best burgers on the island even if the service took forever and it was only open in summer; Wintertide Coffeehouse useta be there, the grass-roots arts community pretty much fell apart when it died; Spinnaker Lanes useta be over there, remember the year the M.V. Times fielded a team?; that’s where the Art Workers’ Guild useta be, remember Helios, the little sorta Greek restaurant?; that’s where I useta live, before it was bought by this adrenaline junkie from New York . . .
New York and Martha’s Vineyard make up one bipolar whole, New York permanently manic, the Vineyard permanently depressed. What could Martha’s Vineyard be if we weren’t the decompression receptacle for all these city-crazed people? Hypothetical question #286. It’s a koan: intuit the answer and presto! imperialism and tourism will vanish from the planet. (Note to Susanna: Maybe it’s time to reread Orientalism? How about The Wretched of the Earth and Pedagogy of the Oppressed?)
Long time ago . . . Notice how slippery time gets on Martha’s Vineyard? I try hard to focus on the few buoys bobbing in my wake: the year I got here (1985), Hurricane Bob (1991), the year Rhodry was born (1994), the year I worked at Webb’s campground (1996), the year Allie arrived (1999), the year my retina detached (2004) . . . Most of the rest is slippery: when did I start working for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, when did I finish my novel, when did I start? Anyway, at some point in the past, there hung on my wall a Pretty Picture Calendar by a Celebrity Photographer, and on one of its twelve months, damned if I remember which one, was a quote from a locally famous/notorious writer. The gist was that at some point he realized that he had married the Vineyard and that any compromises that had to be made were going to have to come from him.
I had a deep and sinking suspicion as I read those words that I — I who had resisted marriage in any form, who thought of all entangling alliances as giving hostages to fortune — had done the same, and the terrifying thing was that I didn’t know what it meant.
I’m singing the “Whaddym’I Doin’ Here Blues” partly because the universe has not given me a clear sign — never mind a clear sign; it won’t even give me a murky runic hint — where I’m supposed to go next, and barring a sign I’m way too lazy and way too scared to start again somewhere else, but partly, mostly because of that marriage thing. If this were an abusive relationship, if Martha’s Vineyard were getting drunk and knocking me around, I’d walk out the door. But it’s more like Martha has Alzheimer’s, combined with a slow-moving but almost certainly fatal cancer, and what kind of shit would I be if I deserted her now?
Besides, the muses have given me this assignment: I’m supposed to bear witness to the rest of the world, including all those junkies who’ve used the place as their karmic waste dump. I kicked and screamed and threatened to quit, then they said the magic words: “But you’re the only one who can do it.”
The front of the Dumptique
At last December’s groundbreaking for the library expansion, Selectman Cindy Mitchell said that the library was the heart of West Tisbury. If she’s right, West Tisbury has at least two hearts. The other one is the Dumptique — the recycling shed at the West Tisbury dump.
Oh yeah, I forgot. We’re not supposed to call it a dump anymore. It’s not even a landfill. It’s a transfer station. What the hell, we still go to the dump.
The Dumptique was closed during February, during which time super-volunteer Martina Mastromonaco almost singlehandedly renovated the place, cleaning, painting, reorganizing. You remember February, don’t you? Several snowstorms, lots of sub-freezing days, winds whipping round corners and through walls? The Dumptique is not what you’d call air-tight. It’s air-conditioned in winter, heated in summer — ecologically correct to be sure, but short on creature comforts for the stalwart volunteers.
I missed the grand opening last weekend because I’m training to be a mediator and the training ran 8:30 to 5 both Saturday and Sunday. Tuesday is a dump day in West Tisbury, so yesterday afternoon I went down to drop off some stuff and check out the new look.
Wow.
The day was dreary but the Dumptique was bright and busy with townsfolk browsing and volunteers sorting incoming donations. The clothing racks would do credit to a department store, and there’s even a well-stocked little library where bibliophiles can hunt for their next book fix.
The little kids department
Shirts, pants, and shorts
Thinking of hosting a wine & cheese, or a kaffeeklatsch?
As a New Englander born and bred, I grew up with recycling, although we didn’t call it that. When you had to spend money, you bought the best you could afford and you used it till it fell apart. If it outlasted its usefulness, you passed it on.
The sorting table, with Martina in front and Pauline (I think) in back
Martha’s Vineyard is New England squared, and when you factor in the high cost of living and the relatively low median income, you see why recycling isn’t just a virtue; it’s a survival skill. Everything at the Dumptique is free for the taking. If you’ve ever done any taking, as most of us have, you don’t think of donating anything you wouldn’t be willing to wear or use. Some donors aren’t so conscientious: they’ll bring in a bag of clothing with the good stuff on top and the junk on the bottom. The volunteers go through it all and reject the unwearables and unusables.
Once in a while a would-be donor objects: How dare you reject this dirty, ripped, and/or broken thing?
Because this is the Dumptique, not the dump: that’s why. In all six island towns, you pay to dispose of your trash but there’s no charge for recyclables. Some people will try to pass the former off as the latter, to save a few bucks.
The volunteers volunteer more than their time. Sometimes they take clothes home to wash them. Sometimes paint and other supplies aren’t donated and have to be paid for. So if you’re moved to put a bill or two in the box, they’ll probably be able to make good use of it.
Amnesia has its uses. I can’t really remember how awful my back felt when I whined about it almost a month ago. I do remember how long it took to get out of bed or pull my socks on, and how careful I had to be while doing it. Advil, exercises, and time got me through it, and since I really wanted to avoid a recurrence, I went looking for — and found — a new chair.
In the almost two weeks between the buying of the chair in Falmouth and its delivery to Martha’s Vineyard, I overhauled my workspace. I don’t believe that things happen for a reason, but I do believe what when some things happen, it’s up to us to figure out if we can learn anything from them. I learned, first and foremost, that I needed a new chair. I also took a hard look at my workspace and realized that it was out of control.
Note piles of papers here, there, and everywhere, unsorted and often precariously perched. Note junk stuffed under table because there’s nowhere else to put it. Sometimes clutter is just clutter, but sometimes it’s the outward and visible sign of inward, not-so-visible chaos. Between the out-of-control clutter and the screaming back pain, I knew that Something Had to Be Done.
What if I moved that table so that it was short side to the back wall instead of long side? In the nearly six years I’ve lived in this studio apartment, the idea had never once occurred to me. I measured the table and the available space. Then I started moving stuff around — careful, of course, not to antagonize my recovering back.
Travvy really liked this part. He found quite a few tidbits that had fallen behind the shelf, the table, and/or the chair.
True, the other half of the apartment looked pretty scary at this point. My bed, out of sight to the left, was part of the transfer station. I couldn’t stop now, not if I ever wanted another good night’s sleep.
Aha! A cozy little work nook was taking shape. The electrical outlet was no longer blocked by the bookshelf. Neither was the narrow counter space. I could put candles on it and other neat stuff that I like to look at.
At this point I was using the old chair as a desk and my exercise ball as a chair. A week ago, my new chair arrived. It fit right in.
The table on the right, which I bought many years ago at a yard sale, has a new purpose in life. Its predecessor, a VCR caddy I bought from the previous tenant of an apartment I used to live in, was functional but too big for the space. Thanks to MV Stuff 4 Sale, it has a new job — as the art table for a little kid. The big box of fan-fold computer paper that I’ll never use has gone for a couple of other little kids to draw and paint on.
The workspace overhaul isn’t quite done. These two piles still have to be gone through and either filed, put away, or tossed. But we’re getting there.
An under-average January generally gives way to an above-average February, and that was the case for 2013. The typical January tally is over 25. This year’s was 23. The usual February take is 3. This year I spotted 6: Indiana, Virginia, Nevada, Maryland, Utah, and Minnesota. Virginia and Maryland usually show up in January. This year they, or I, was a little late.
Yesterday I went to a bridal shower for my friend the mystery writer Cynthia Riggs. I’m not sure I’d ever been to a bridal shower before, but even if I had, this one would have been unique. Cynthia, who is going on 82, has children and grandchildren from a previous marriage. Her betrothed is 10 years older. They met over six decades ago, when Cynthia, then 18, had a temporary job counting plankton at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Her job ended, she went back to Antioch College, and the two went their separate ways, which included marriage, children, grandchildren, and interesting careers.
Then, about a year ago, Cynthia’s former co-worker, Dr. Howard Attebery — now known even to those who haven’t met him yet as Howie — got back in touch. For an account of how the reunion proceeded, complete with wild coincidences, see Sean Gonsalves’s story in the online Cape Cod Times. The short version is that last September Cynthia went out to visit Howie in San Diego, they promptly got engaged, and next month Howie will be moving to Martha’s Vineyard — even though he’s never in his life been east of Chicago. The church wedding is in May.
So here are some photographs from the shower, all taken by photographer Lynn Christoffers and used here with her permission. She did the photographs for Victoria Trumbull’s Martha’s Vineyard. Victoria Trumbull is the 92-year-old protagonist of Cynthia’s Martha’s Vineyard Mystery Series; Cynthia wrote the text, and yours truly was the copyeditor. See Cynthia’s website for more info. Lynn’s eagerly anticipated book on Vineyard cats is due out before summer.
The shower was hosted by Anita Botti (right) at Cleaveland House, Cynthia’s home, which has been in her family since it was built around 1750. That’s Cynthia on the left.
Guests kept coming back to the table to sample an array of cheeses, cookies, fruit, and a choice of drinkables. From left: MaryLou Piland, Emily (sorry, don’t know her last name), Cynthia, me, and Shirley Craig.
From left, Shirley Mayhew, Nancy Slonim Aronie, and the Rev. Arlene Bodge hang out on the couch. Arlene will be performing the ceremony in May.
Cynthia cuts the cake. She saved the portion that says “Cynthia & Howie” on it and is sending it to Howie in California. Romantic, what?
The shower invitation specified “no gifts,” but of course everyone ignored it. The theme was lavender — a favorite of Howie’s — which meant that we not only got to ooh and aah over the gifts, we got to smell them. Here Ebba Hierta, Chilmark librarian, reads a card while Cynthia opens the gift.
Some of the presents. Note the various shades of lavender. Lavender is also an ingredient in the two jams in the back, and in the delicious cookies that Shirley Craig brought.
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 