More than a decade ago, a landscape architect friend from Rhode Island brought us a house-warming gift when we had a cottage in Menemsha.

As with all of us, life is a series of stages and transitions. Years of joy and trepidation. Times of fun and despair. Or just plain time.

Editor’s note: The following speech was delivered at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School graduation Sunday.

When I went to the Menemsha School as a kid, the post office was in the Chilmark Tavern building just a stone’s throw away from the school house. Bette Carroll was the postmistress.

The temperature outside was a frigid 12 degrees with a foot of snow on the ground. At Featherstone Center for the Arts, inside the Pebbles, 20 of us played our ukuleles and other instruments loudly, smiling and carrying on.

In 1972, William A. Caldwell retired to a home on the Katama waterfront with his wife Dorothy after a lifetime working as a writer, editor and columnist for The Record of Bergen County, N.J.