Commentary
FAIR METHODS
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
Christmas 2010
A small gale lashed the Island early this week, bitterly cold and driven in from the ocean with steady light snow that frosted woods and farm fields and stone walls, turning the Vineyard into a Currier and Ives print overnight, just in time for the winter solstice on Tuesday. Soft, mournful blasts from the Nobska foghorn blew across the Middle Ground, echoing faintly up and down the north shore, somehow more reminiscent of June than December.
I am disturbed, and I am old — almost three quarters of a century. What’s disturbing is not my oldness — I don’t feel that most days. It’s our U.S. Congress that disturbs and disappoints, especially those senators who voted on Dec. 4 against better lives for the lower economic classes of our citizens — middle class and the poor — by holding out for tax cuts for the rich, ironically, the ones who could afford to pay more towards our deficit without disturbing the comfort of their lives.
FISHERMEN’S FIGHT
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
First, I would like to clarify that I am not a lawyer; though my education is in insurance law, there was no way I was going to sit behind a desk. Ever.
Second, thank you for your story about the event that we held at the P.A. Club last weekend. I am sure that the excellently written article brought many of the attending crowd to the event.
L ongevity is in Rose Treat’s genes. Her Polish grand mother lived to be 104.
On Dec. 7, 2010, Rose Treat celebrated her 102nd birthday surrounded by her friends at her home on Sengekontacket, which she shares with two part-time caregivers: Debbie Jewfry and Denise Walsh.
Dick Jennings works for The Trustees of Reservations on Chappaquiddick. He is their natural history guide there and he seasonally leads tours that introduce people to the extraordinary stretch of coastline that connects Wasque Point at the southeast corner of the Vineyard to the tidal gut that defines the end of the long peninsula arching around Cape Pogue Bay. He has been observing this habitat for years and he is clearly in touch with what goes on there in the natural realm.