I have cerebral palsy, and when I was very young I could not use a straw. This made it very difficult for me to drink milk and other liquids. I first met Helen Lamb, founder of Camp Jabberwocky, in 1953, at a small clinic in Fall River when I was two and a half years old. Her task as a speech pathologist was to teach me the ability of how to suck. I disliked Mrs. Lamb and constantly cried, not wanting to do the exercises. She finally accomplished her goal — teaching me how to drink though a straw. I thought I would not meet the Englishwoman again for the rest of my life.

Public Safety Alert: Children at Play

In one more sign of the changing season, today is the last day of school for most Island public schools (the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School had its last day yesterday.) The familiar yellow buses that roll on Island roads early in the morning and again in the afternoon throughout the fall, winter and spring, are ready for decommissioning as transportation vehicles for our most precious resource — Vineyard school children. At least until just after Labor Day.

Leaving

How can I bear to leave this place,

take the next boat out into the harbor,

pass the buoy, toss

a penny into the water for a return?

How can I bear leaving after 39 years —

built my own house, planted my garden,

tall-trees design, skylight to watch the evening sky,

see the night flight plane lights

blinking their way across the sea.

The Internet has been around for approx i mately four decades, but a team of Stanford University experts says it’s broken. It’s now in the midst of taking a pull-out-all-the-stops approach to developing a new prototype.

The project is called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. It’s supposed to answer two questions: how to design a new global communications infrastructure from the ground up, and what will the Internet look like in 15 years.

The federal Minerals Management Service has received an unprecedented 40,000-plus public comments on the draft environmental impact statement for the “stalled” Cape Wind project, as it is described by one media outlet. Dozens of key groups and government agencies criticized the draft document which glossed over many of the serious threats the Cape Wind project would pose to public safety, marine wildlife and habitats, tribal and historic resources, commercial fisheries, and the local economy.

PARKING JUSTICE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Last weekend  provided two different aspects of life on the Island: delight — and dismay.

On Saturday and Sunday, a group called the Boston Area Roadsters Club brought a number of shiningly restored vintage cars. Part of the welcome the Island offers this group, apparently, is permission to park on both sides of Lake avenue, which is the road that runs along the base of the Oak Bluffs harbor, for the three days of their annual meeting.