Commentary
Like the Wizard of Oz
She’s the Ferry Godmother
Magically making
Boats to appear
Reserving and serving
All of the Island
Healing and dealing
With standby line fears
Like the Queen of the Celts
She’s a powerful presence
Not that she towers
She’s rather quite short
But like her namesake
She swings a long broadsword
Cleaving the channels
Between the two ports
I’d like to toast
Our Bridget Tobin
Mistress of magic
What do you do? This is the question we have been asked by family, friends and strangers alike for the past year ever since we became full-time Islanders or, rather, washashores.
I got a call last week from a friend who has been successfully battling cancer. She told me: “Marijuana tea and candy are the only things that helped my appetite. My weight had gone down to 98 pounds. I am now 112 pounds. And it let me sleep. I don’t think that I would be alive today without it.”
I have lived on Lake Street in Vineyard Haven for 25 years.
On Saturdays when I was nine my mother would get home at five, exhausted and hungry from her job as receptionist at Schultzes Beauty Salon. My job was to have a snack ready for her for our Brookside Boulevard (the ritzy street) ritual.
Robbie Tibbets came to the Island from the small town in Maine where he grew up. He had been sitting on his favorite bar stool drinking Heineken some years ago, which is what he did all summer until harvest time when a news program flashed pictures of a state police helicopter landing in a five-acre field of pot not too far away.