I Remember Jerry best at work

Two drawknives

A peavey

And an ax

A tractor trailer load

Of spiles

Oak trees

From up north

We’d bark

Me a teenage

Local kid

Him a father

Fresh from San Miguel

He came with Bernadette

And the girls

Work for Manuel Santos

In the cemetery

Yardwork

First published on the Gazette Web site Friday morning.

The wheels on his bike stopped abruptly on Centre street behind Cafe Moxie when the pantry chef saw flames breaking through the roof of the restaurant around 9:40 a.m. on the Fourth of July. “I guess I don’t have work today,” he said sadly, and rode off.

What follows is an edited selection of reader comments from the Gazette Web site responding to the stories on the Independence Day fire.

My heart goes out to the owners of Bunch of Grapes and Cafe Moxie. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I’ve spent countless hours in Bunch of Grapes over the course of many years and it was always one of my first stops on my trips back to the Vineyard.

I remember when Cafe Moxie was a barber shop.

Joan Boyken

Denville N.J.

•

THANK YOU, COMMUNITY

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

From the Ashes

They were ready. Austin Racine and Katrina Yekel, who had bought the Cafe Moxie restaurant on Main street in Vineyard Haven in May, were prepared to work sixty-three straight days — all of July and August — to survive and succeed in their business, to make money during the Vineyard’s all-too short summer season, to help realize the dream that they both held so dearly.