Letter from the Vineyard

It’s indisputably August on the Vineyard; the calendar does not lie. We are in the thick of it, knowing in about 15 minutes it’ll all be over, September will be here, businesses chalking up their successes – or losses.

A friend dropped by the bookstore. We sat in rocking chairs on our porch, watched Edgartown happen in front of our eyes.

Folks, she said, have told her July was soft. Edgartown has seemed to me as busy as ever it’s been. June a riot, with the 50th Anniversary of the release of JAWS, which made June, to me, at least, seem like August on steroids.

I’ve heard whispers of soft business; in casual conversations, noted concern this will not be the year folks had hoped it’d be.

Thank the bookstore gods, we’re a bit above last year, clawing our way up after a flat last year. I’m better at book mongering, having done this for five years, an unexpected feast in my old age. A friend wrote me to tell me I had the best retirement project of anyone she knew. She’s right.

There has been a stretch of perfect Vineyard days, sunny, warm, soft breezes ruffling hair while walking streets, beaches.

My friend Lionel came for a few days to sort out what’s next; his job at Yahoo has been eliminated. We talked strategies, tactics though mostly reveled in our friendship.

Invited by Jeffrey and Joyce for an afternoon sail with a clutch of friends, we rejoiced in one of those perfect Vineyard days, sipping a dry white Gavi, nibbling appetizers, their amazing 92’ schooner photographed by others as we swooned past, a perfect Vineyard day, followed by clams at their house.

Once in a moment, I get what it’s like to vacation here, for this to be your “happy place,” when I swing in somewhere while doing an errand, see people climbing onto their boats for sails, or dancing on the “Jaws” bridge before jumping into the water.

Being the book monger of Edgartown is something I love. It came to me recently, when my obituary is written, it will focus on this part of my life, not all the other things I’ve done. It is for this I will be remembered, not for opening the west coast office of A&E, not for helping launch Discovery in Australia and India, but for this, this absolutely unexpected chapter.

While I sail through this unexpected blessing of a time in my life, I wake to pictures of starving children in Gaza, perplexed concern over their plight is considered by some to be antisemitism.

We live in a world, right now, I do not understand. I look at children who come into the bookstore, worrying about the world in which they will live. Will it be as good as the one in which I lived?

A local newspaper article featured a scientist, wondering where were all the insects? They seem to have disappeared this year; we’re not plagued by mosquitoes, and where are the moths fluttering at my door in the nighttime?

If you’re old like me, you remember windshields caked with dead insects. But no more.

While fearful and anxious, I am hopeful. We may despair at the shadows on the land; I pick up Jill LaPorte’s “These Truths We Hold,” open it to any page, see we’ve lived through other dark times, emerged. Let us not forget the black shadows of McCarthy. There was a moment he seemed unstoppable.

Even with crime down, Trump has wrested control of DC’s law enforcement, bringing in the FBI and the National Guard to protect the streets. He’s wanted to do this for a long time, been looking for an excuse. A horrible carjacking gave him his moment.

He’s looking for his moments to erode our rights.

Mr. Trump is assaulting our norms, swaggering on the stage, his meeting with Putin just completed with no sense of what was accomplished.

There have been other ugly chapters. Andrew Jackson’s presidency one of those so not surprising the current president seems charmed by him.

With luck, Mr. Trump’s presidency will slip into the history books like those other bad moments, lessons for another time.




Photo courtesy of Paul Doherty

Praying for us to keep lurching forward…

Photo courtesy of Paul Doherty

Friday was sunny and chill, a day for cozying, a day I played hooky from the bookstore, wanting a moment to recharge, shake off the dust, clear cobwebs from my brain, all those things we use weekends for though whatever “weekends” I get are usually weekdays, when things are quieter.

And it is quieter now, as we have seen the summer crowds evaporate.  There are a few intrepid souls who vacation here, when it’s quieter, when they can walk the beach and be alone, enjoy the silence and the lack of crowds.

For twenty years, once a quarter, I have had lunch with my friend David, who lives in New York.  Now I’m on the Vineyard, we do it by zoom, a practice that grew organically until now it seems a tradition.  We catch up, talk of cabbages and kings, of presidents past and present, his children, our work, life, and the wars that rack our world.  I am always more when we finish our conversation.

We hurtle toward the holidays, Thanksgiving is soon upon us, then the gifting holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, suddenly the year is rushing to a close.  I’ll blink and 2023 will have come and gone.  I am staggered.

In October, I started a Letter from the Vineyard and was stopped cold when Hamas swooped into Israel, bringing death, destruction, horror with them, retreating back to Gaza with hostages. Israel has attacked back, instinctively, understandably outraged at what has been called Israel’s 9/11.

There were no words to flow from my fingertips onto the page, left speechless, much as I was in the first days after 9/11 when I wandered New York, unsure about anything.

It was an awful attack, possibly triggered by the movement of some Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel, an effort now gone off the rails.

And there seems no good way to talk about this.  The attack was horrific, the response has been ferocious.  Feelings both for and against Israel have exploded, wracking conversations nearly as much as our own fraught politics, reaching a level of polarization I’m not sure we’ve seen since the Civil War.

Antisemitism is climbing both in this country and Europe, probably all over the world. It frightens me.  In Europe, in particular, it is anguishing as there was once, still in living memory for a few, a concerted effort to eradicate Jews. Anti-Muslim feelings have risen as they have against any Arabs.

After Kevin McCarthy was ousted as Speaker of the House, something which is in itself historic, we lived for three weeks without a Speaker, which paralyzed the House of Representatives at a time the world was in crisis.

Now there is a Speaker, Mike Johnson, who no one seemed to know much about, which helped him get elected. Now we know things about him and, well, I am just a little terrified by the man. 

He is very…fundamental…

He’s been painted in some reports as a “Christian Nationalist,” which I suspect he just might be, believing this country is meant to be a “Christian” country, with “Christian” being defined in a way that is not, to me, very Christ like.

He is very anti-LGBTQ+, is a strong Trump supporter, a key player in efforts to keep the former president in office, rails against the prosecution of the former president, supports Israel, wants to quit helping Ukraine, is anti-abortion, doubts climate change, is in a “covenant marriage,” which makes divorce more difficult though I’m not sure I actually understand all the ramifications [though it sounds to me something out of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”].

These are the times when I pick up Jill Lepore’s “These Truths: A History of the United States,” as I can open it to almost any page and discover we’ve always been pretty crazy and while all of us think this is the craziest time ever, we’ve had other crazy times and somehow managed to lurch forward.

I pray we continue to lurch forward.

Letter from the Vineyard 14 April 2023

The ones who will save us…

Photo courtesy of Paul Doherty

A sadness has been wrapped around the island, people hunkered down, prepared for even more grey, while waiting, with muted hope, for the liberating forces of spring, which erupted Wednesday, when the temp scratched 75 degrees, the sun shining kisses all day upon the island.

Easter is, unbelievably, in the rear-view mirror. Christus resurrexit!

Preparations for “the season” are all around, much scurrying and hurrying as businesses prepare for “the season,” which will be here before we know it.  The courtyard behind the bookstore, home to “Behind the Bookstore Café,” is aswirl with painters painting, saws whining, workhorses piled.  Next door, Past & Presents, is hurrying the interior rebuild done over the winter to ensure open doors when the ferries begin to disgorge their thousands.

At the bookstore, we are struggling to sort through orders done for the summer, to count them, store them, be prepared for when they are needed.  It is dawning on people, as it does every year in April, that it is, OMG, APRIL!  May is next, finishing with Memorial Day, the beginning of it all. 

We are sorting staff for the summer, settling those orders, painting, new items displayed, preparing for the next Elin Hilderbrand summer bestseller [she says this is her last?].

At least through the summer, I will be writing an occasional column for the MV Times, one of our local papers, called “Around the bookstore…,” observations from the bookselling life.  Find it here: https://www.mvtimes.com/?s=Around+the+bookstore.

While the pace is quickening, with winter beginning its retreat, while an island dusts itself off, spruces itself up, girds its loins to face the make it or break it time, “the season,” the world outside has been barreling along, though some might say careening.

In what seems an affront to the senses, Russia has taken up its rotational position as president of the UN Security Council. Ukraine screams, everyone protests; there is not much to be done.  Soon, thank god, it will be done though Russia is milking its moment.

There have been more mass shootings in our country than there have been days to the year. In a discouraging trend, red lawmakers are expanding gun rights as bodies pile up.  The US is an outlier, to say the least, in this when it comes to other developed countries.

For the time being, at least, Disney has outfoxed Ron DeSantis in his efforts to exercise control over Disney World.  While I confess much is obtuse to me, it seems Florida can’t do anything until 21 years after the last descendant of King Charles III is dead.  Now why Charles and his descendants have a role in this is a bit beyond my legal ken though I have to say: good on you Team Disney.

Much as there are many things about Disney I don’t like, this legal maneuver gives me a belly laugh.  Long live Charles and his descendants!

Trump has been indicted in his alleged payoff scheme with Stormy Daniels, a porn star, who allegedly received money to be quiet about her alleged affair with the Donald. 

Whether you think it’s a strong or a weak case, there is something so fitting in an indictment of a man caught on tape saying profoundly demeaning things about women.

He is the first president to be indicted though not the first to be arrested.  That honor belongs to Ulysses Grant, arrested for speeding in his carriage. 

It also opens the floodgates.  Trump is the first president to be indicted. One indictment makes it easier for another indictment.  Georgia is looking at election interference, the Justice Department at those pesky top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

This could become a three-ring circus – New York, Georgia, the Feds.

To my delight, and a bit of a surprise, Wisconsin, by a wide margin, elected a progressive to the State Supreme Court, ending a 15-year stranglehold from the right on that institution.  Born in Minnesota, I have watched my neighboring state produce Paul Ryan and gerrymander itself into a Republican pretzel.

It is widely considered the most gerrymandered state in the union. Wisconsin?

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz won the spot in a race, I suspect, driven by women and young people who were not going to give up their rights lost when Roe v. Wade was overturned, as well as their overall concern for our democratic institutions.

Mark my words, it is the women and the children who will save us.

Photo courtesy of Paul Doherty

The other night the last full moon of the winter lorded over the night sky; I went to the head of the driveway to soak in its beauty for a moment, basking in the white night light of our moon, overwhelmed, just a bit, by the serenity of the moment.

It is March on the Vineyard, seesawing between spring moments and winter wraiths, days clouded, days sun kissed.

For the first time in four years, I went on vacation, a Caribbean cruise, gone for two weeks, sailing from Port Canaveral, eleven days at sea, a buffer couple of days on either side, an undemanding itinerary, which is what I wanted, on a cruise line I’d never heard of, MSC, which, turns out, is the fourth largest cruise line in the world though just beginning to enter the North American market.

One of the things I love about cruises is they can be undemanding. And I ached for undemanding.

My reading was beach read level, THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO, a monstrous bestseller over the last couple of years, so much so last summer you couldn’t get a copy to save your soul.

Also read THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB, best British mystery I have read in a long time, clever, accessible, full of great characters, the first in a four-part series; can’t wait to start the second.

One of the things I like about cruises is it gives you time to think, loving the days at sea, sitting on the balcony, watching the warm waters of the Caribbean slip by while you assess your world.

My world is now the bookstore. As once other things anchored me in life, Edgartown Books now anchors me in this part of my life. Edgartown, a place where I never expected to be a resident.

These are the wonders and wonderful moments of life.

While delighted in my life here, I am aware when I left on my cruise, the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was nearly surrounded, fighting to stay free.  When I returned, it was the same.  Every day I am astounded by the Ukrainians, who are showing so much mettle.

There was an article I stumbled upon while cruising, though attempting to avoid news, indicating we Americans are tiring of the Ukrainians. This is what Putin is counting on, we grow bored, a terrible stain on us if we did.

In the meantime, it’s getting difficult for Putin to hide the cost of his adventure; too many bodies piling up. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Not that I see a regime change happening.  Though Putin becomes a bit more bizarre every day.  The most recent rumors have him sleeping in a pod which infuses oxygen, not unlike the one Michael Jackson used.

If you look at Putin’s face these days, I’m guessing a lot of steroids are in play.

Xi Jinping has taken China in a strange direction, cuddling up to Putin, seeing the two countries as the new balance to the west.  It’s, and I am not a Sinophile, a radical change from the direction China was taking before him.

Even if you’re having a wonderful afternoon, reading good books on the balcony of your cabin, overlooking the Caribbean, these global issues seep into your mind.

As do the bitter issues of our own politics.  President Trump keeps railing about his stolen election. It was a talking point for all of Fox’s lead hosts, except that none of them believed it. But they were worried about ratings and the stock price. Tucker Carlson, really? You worried more about the stock price than the truth. What a surprise!

Fox has been exposed. It is not a news network. It is driven by catering to an audience created under the brilliant, malevolent force of Roger Ailes, driving viewers to the right by spewing untruths, day after day after day.

It’s my hope Dominion prevails in its lawsuits against Fox as it has been unveiled in its exorable reality, a “news” organization not driven by news but by a political agenda, a propaganda machine for the right, a money-making machine for the Murdoch family.  Should I make allusions to the Krupps?

Night has settled on the Vineyard, we leap forward this evening, an annual ritual leaving most of us cranky, certainly me.  Out there in the night, Ukrainian soldiers are still cling to Bakhmut, ships are sailing, trains are running, planes land and take off, people cook dinner, we go on, because that’s what we do, we go on.  As I grow older, I understand Mother Courage more – and less.

November 8, 2022

Letter from the Vineyard

Election Day Musings 

This past weekend, the sun shone bright, the wind was soft, the temperatures near 70; it seemed as if mid-September had made an island return. Leaves are turning everywhere, it seems. In my yard, green still rules. 

The streets of Edgartown are quiet, many businesses shuttered for the season, signs in windows thanking people for a great season, see you next year. 

At this moment, next year seems faraway though it’s not; it will be here before we have finished resting from this one. 

We still have Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Christmas in Edgartown, Christmas itself, New Year’s, all ahead of us before the sublime quiet of January, when the Vineyard goes to rest, everything seemingly folding into itself, the days short in every sense.  The bookstore is open from 10 to 5, almost not working at all it feels, thinking back on the twelve + hour days worked back in the 80’s, 90’s and the aughts.

I was younger then.

As I write, Chopin plays.  He has become my composer of choice for quiet, contemplative moments, of which there are many these days.

Today, November 8^th, is election day, the dreaded mid-terms – generally, a referendum on whoever is currently sitting in the White House though this is such a mixed year who knows where it will go.  Roe v Wade has been overturned and many, many are unhappy. 

Despite his uncharismatic persona, Joe Biden has actually done a decent job but the collateral damage of the pandemic, with its disruptions of all kinds to the supply chain, which he can’t fix overnight, the war in Ukraine [kudos to Biden and team for pulling the NATO alliance together to back that poor country] has caused a global food crisis as Ukraine supplies a huge amount of grain to the world and as the war is wreaking havoc with energy supplies, weaponized by Putin.  China’s zero covid policy has shuttered plants; the world’s manufacturer has slowed deliveries of everything from computer chips to toys. 

Inflation has resulted. Biden’s being blamed.  The supply chain crisis began under Trump, who takes no responsibility for anything, anytime.

Chopin is playing because I am frightened.  If the Republicans win, we are in for a world of trouble, IMHO [in my humble opinion], as I have no idea what any of these people stand for except more NO.

Unless I have missed it, I don’t hear any constructive Republican plans to tackle inflation – it’s all about how Biden has not succeeded in taming it, which he can’t.  That’s the Federal Reserve’s job and they’re doing what they do, raising interest rates, which may, may not, lead to a recession. 

Most people have forgotten the days when interest rates for mortgages were higher than now.  I do.  The first home I owned had an interest rate of 10.75%; my mortgage broker said it was the lowest she had closed in three weeks. That was 1985.

Lots of folks have been born since then, not remembering those difficult, brittle days in the much-glorified presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose trickledown economics have been slavishly followed by Republicans since then, to no good end. It’s a failed policy. Period.

Today is Election Day and will likely herald in a time of discord – at least a hundred Republicans running for office have not committed to accepting the results of the election.  Half the Republican candidates are election deniers.  

It will take weeks to count some of the mail-in ballots, particularly in states that have prevented them from being counted prior to today.

Republicans are steering themselves away from the center, driving hard to the right, lionizing Viktor Orban of Hungary, dictator in all but name, who calls for “Christian Democracy.” Marjorie Taylor Greene swooned over the election of the rightist Meloni in Italy.  Wisconsin has been gerrymandered to the Republicans.  

Trump will probably announce his re-election campaign any day now, as much, in all likelihood, to make his growing legal issues more difficult to pursue by law officials. Mr. Trump has underscored his feud with Governor “De Sanctimonious.”

We are all but guaranteed a h*ll of a ride between now and 2024.

A crazed man mired in crazy conspiracy theories broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi, using a hammer on her husband’s head while asking where she was, threatening to break her kneecaps. 

Some Republicans, shamelessly, attempted to blame it on a lover’s quarrel, or a male prostitute trick gone bad.

Democrats can’t find a clear message to save their souls and Biden, poor chap, is no Obama or Kennedy in the eloquence category, nor is he a Clinton, who tripped himself up and out of being remembered as well as he should be.

Alas, Babylon. 

We are facing a tough time, folks.  Pray.  Hard.

Photo Courtesy of Paul Doherty

Letter from the Vineyard

September 20, 2022

Of travails, grief and mendacity…

There have been a series of lovely late summer late days; warm enough to wear shorts, warm enough to savor everything about summer, not cool enough to turn one to thoughts of fall, not quite yet.

July 24^th, I left the store, developed a stomachache, woke the next morning, exhausted, thinking Covid had felled me, moved by Tuesday to fevers and chills, phoned my brother, the doctor, who advised: emergency room.

An inflamed gallbladder, gallstones and pancreatitis is what ailed me.

I was bundled onto a helicopter, flown to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where a swarm oversaw the beginning of a four day stay, the Friday removal of my gallbladder, days with three intravenous tubes in my arms, potassium, antibiotics, saline solution, the constant beep of machines, electronic insects surrounding me with their noise, the Friday removal of my gallbladder.

Here I am, six weeks later, mending, some post-op bloodwork wonky, so more tests though I am, I hope, on the final upswing out of this.

The world has continued while I wrestled my health.

One day, Elizabeth II was greeting another Prime Minister, her fifteenth, then doctors were concerned; then she was gone, the diminutive woman who threw a huge shadow over the globe, a result of the history she carried into her reign and the personhood she projected into the world, a character of devotion to her role, one she inherited but to which she had not been born.  She became heir to the throne when her uncle Edward abdicated for Wallis Simpson, and her father came to wear the crown.

She held an amazing grip on us, all of us, in so many parts of the world.  The American flag flies at half mast, for 12 days, longer than for any other foreign leader.  We mourn her.

My dear friend Nick, an Englishman, has lived here for 13 years, went home for the Queen’s funeral, wanting to share in the common grief of his nation.  Elizabeth had been on the throne all his life.

The line to walk past her casket was five miles long, five miles of humanity, waiting as much as 20 hours for a glimpse of the casket.  Soccer superstar David Beckham waited 13 hours to pay his respects. The queen’s children have stood vigil, as have her grandchildren.

There was a live feed available from the BBC to see the throngs passing her coffin, some crying, many bowing their heads, some doing a curtsy, often a slightly dazed look on their faces, disbelieving the Queen is no more.

All seemed a fitting send off for a woman who, regardless of our nationality, was an individual to whom we all seemed to feel some sense of fealty. On our shelves rests a book, “Queen of Our Time,” about Elizabeth.  When one heard “the queen” one knew it was Elizabeth.

She was sent off with all the pomp and ceremony Britain could muster, things of which they are masters.  She now rests next to Philip, at Windsor. 

As the queen moves into history, history is being made on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, with Ukraine’s counteroffensive having broken the Russian lines, sending demoralized Russian soldiers scrambling, some back into Russia, some stealing civilian clothes in which to disguise themselves while fleeing.

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, deposited 55 Venezuelan refugees here, which resulted in the island quickly assembling the resources to accommodate them while more permanent places could be found.  My church, St. Andrew’s, became their home, the Fire Department brought cots, clothes were gathered, food was prepared, the island found itself with an emergency, handled it.

Our efforts were met, of course, with trolls.  A plane circled the Vineyard Monday, trailing a sign: Vineyard Hypocrites.  The bookstore, along with other businesses, received phone calls berating the Vineyard, its efforts, the fact the refugees have been transferred to Joint Base Cape Cod where there are better facilities, housing organized for soldiers and their families, used also for refugees from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The number of people working to get to United States, or striving to get to the EU, or into Britain, reflects a global crisis.  The Venezuelans who arrived here were fleeing the desperate conditions in their country, walking for months to get somewhere safe. 20% of Venezuela’s population is on the move, refugees from the Maduro regime and the crushing conditions in that country.

And the numbers will grow as climate change continues to exact its toll on countries like Pakistan, much of which has been a lake these last weeks because of flooding.

Trump’s mendacity continues, spiraling some days toward a kind of Shakespearean madness, though some days the sound is only whining self-delusion, a narcissist denied. He is never, ever truthful.  At a recent rally in Ohio, he appeared to be playing to the QAnon crowd, which is frightening. 

The MAGA sycophants cause me to curdle. Some Republican candidates will not commit to accepting the results of the election if they are declared losers.  Thank you, Mr. Trump, for helping upend our democracy.  If not for you…

Alas, Babylon.

Alas, the decline of the Republican Party into this hot mess of mendacity.

I like that word, lying mixed with hypocrisy, which is now the defining quality of the Grand Old Party.  A registered Republican, I voted for a centrist in the primary, who lost to a MAGA man.

Lincoln would weep.  Eisenhower would weep.  Hell, even Nixon would weep.