Commentary
It’s just after five o’clock on a potholed stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I’m in the slow lane, moving along a concrete wall between the road and a back row of mostly dark apartments. Beyond those apartments are more apartments, a long line of giraffe-shaped cranes, and the very beginnings of a New York city morning.
Almost exactly a decade after my first trip, I’m back on the road to Martha’s Vineyard. Things are the same and things are different.
Camp Jabberwocky, a summer camp for children and adults with disabilities, is enthusiastically looking forward to celebrating its 60th anniversary this summer. The celebration will also give fellow campers and me the opportunity to thank the residents of Martha’s Vineyard for helping make camp possible. For the past six decades, your generous support has succeeded in allowing the camp to grow and flourish.
With great sadness today I learned that my good friend and supporter through all my years as an energy advocate, Randy Udall, has died.
My wife is from Tennessee and before serendipitously landing on the island where we met, to her a boat trip was something you took on two aluminum pontoons, a platform covered with indoor/outdoor carpet, a small outboard engine, frilly canopy and a few cases of beer on a flat, calm pond on Sundays somewhere out in the country, maybe rafting up with a few other families for a party. Once on Cuttyhunk, her assumption was that if anything ever happened to our boat, we would each take two kids in life jackets and swim for shore.
On Wednesday for her last day of
preschool, my daughter Pickle and I discuss what music to play on the drive from West Tisbury to Chilmark. The drive takes about 15 minutes and over the last two years we have enjoyed a long musical journey together. It is just the two of us and so I have had no censors or suggestions of what is appropriate or even good.
Pickle fell in step with my groove early on, leaning heavily toward men of the late 1970s. In our hermetically-sealed musical education chamber, a Honda Fit, one could say she had no choice.
O beautiful for spacious skies
is broken, angry, out of work.
Our alabaster cities clang
with voices split and shrill.
Lobbied, pledged, our leaders strut
they shame the patriots’ dream.
Election more than country love
they poke the public wound.
Where are courage, statesmanship
a majesty worth sacrifice
a reason we should live with less
and strive for something more?
Show us the strength of compromise
that differences can mend.
Relinquish stubborn rhetoric