What would Milton Mazer say? The late Dr. Mazer, the Vineyard’s first psychiatrist whose pioneering work in the field of rural mental health led to establishment of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services more than fifty years ago, would no doubt be proud of the institution that he helped to found and that still stands today as the Island’s oldest umbrella social services agency.

Daylight Saving Time begins this Saturday at two in the morning. On Sunday the sun will rise at 7:02 a.m. and set at 6:42 p.m.

It seems but a short hop backwards to when the clocks were reversed an hour plunging the Island into early darkness; the covers pulled over the sun at a little past four o’clock on the shortest day of the year. And it is true the interval of Daylight Saving Time has grown shorter, adding fuel to the chorus that it is an anachronism and no longer pertinent.

The ferries can sometimes can be the best indicator of life on the Vineyard, and certainly this was true last Friday when outgoing boats were jammed to the gunwales with children and adults of every description. Standby lines resembled an August day minus the tourists. A visitor from another country might well have concluded that some strange plague had descended and Islanders were fleeing for their lives.

They come for the sun, sea and rich plankton that occurs in the ocean waters around the Island. This is the season when North Atlantic right whales migrate north to Cape Cod from their wintering grounds off Florida and Georgia. Last month eight of the endangered marine mammals were spotted near the Vineyard and Nantucket. Six were seen from the air swimming between the two Islands; the other two were seen south of Nantucket. Then early this week, twenty whales were seen swimming in the Atlantic Ocean off South Beach in Edgartown.

Pick us, pick us Mr. Reality TV producer. We can be happy, sad, single or very open (if you get the drift). Straight, gay, angry and poor, angry and rich, happy and rich, happy and poor (well, that would be a stretch and would cost extra).

How about the hermit crab who comes out of his shell this summer or the girl who trades in her bikini and beach volleyball for muck boots and milking cows? It’s up to you.

Few people will remember his plucky, colorful and completely hopeless campaigns for state senator and sheriff. The first one was in 1978. He designed great T-shirts for the campaign with a hand-silk-screened map of the Cape and Islands. We all wore them; we were youthful then and had a sense of fun and we knew John Miles McSweeney had little chance of being elected. But it didn’t matter. We loved John for his spirit and we were friends. And friends stuck together when we were all coming of age on the Vineyard some thirty-five years ago.