February, 2026
I’m home from a day at the bookstore, now reopened after being closed for four and half weeks while a new floor was installed and we did inventory.
Generally, I spend a few days crafting my “letter.” Not this one. It’s poured out of me; I want to get it out before I hack at it again.
My return from vacation while the floor was installed corresponded with the most snow the Vineyard has seen in a dozen years.
The day the store reopened, walking to my car, I didn’t notice a patch of ice, fell, made a small fracture of my ankle. Now I am in a boot, which makes navigating difficult. This winter is more trying than any other I’ve had on the Vineyard. I am working very hard not to be cranky. It’s not easy.
So much is not easy these days.
There is so much to be angry about, dismayed about, and I effing don’t want this man and his MAGA movement to dominate my head space completely. Trump and his minions do so many things so despicable it is hard not to have one’s jaw constantly dropping.
While all of this is going on, relentlessly, from our president and the cast of despicable people with whom he has surrounded himself, I must seek out things to give me solace because in solace there will be found strength to go on resisting because we are moving into a time when we have to actively resist.
There is joy in my days in the bookstore, in the comings and goings of people, of the joy of watching them pick out books for themselves, often not what I would guess. There are moments of conversation, about the weather [for the island, pretty awful right now], politics [most of our customers are aligned with me, but not all], our Banned Books section, which is forever changing as there are so many banned books.
Hope I feel when young people come into the store and buy thoughtful, serious books that will demand something from them.
Gratitude when I wake in the morning and look out my windows, surrounded by nature, glad I am still walking the earth with a moment to feel grateful. And that’s been harder to do wearing a boot on my left leg, using an umbrella as a cane to help me navigate the sheet of ice my driveway has become.
I am grateful for all of you who take the time to read my letters.
Yes, I am enraged right now. The administration is working to obtain subpoenas to look at social media accounts to see who opposes ICE. Well, yes, I oppose ICE in this manifestation, thuggish as it is, masked as it is. Even the Brown Shirts back in the day didn’t wear masks.
So, if the administration gets its way, I will, perhaps, be targeted for opposing the behavior of ICE. And that astounds me. That in this country this would be happening. Goes way beyond Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. Brings it down to all of us, at every level.
This morning, I was at St. Andrew’s, confirmed as a member of the Vestry, the Episcopal Version of the Parish Council, my second tour of duty as a Vestry member. As I stood on the altar, I thought doing this was an act of hope.
St. Andrew’s is a little church and it’s the church which took in the Venezuelans dropped on Martha’s Vineyard by the Governor of the great state of Florida from the great state of Texas.
In the day to day, we work to do good things. We collect food and clothes to pass on. We helped start the first shelter for homeless on the island, along with two other churches, now grown into its own building.
Mainstream Christianity has been in decline but, unless I am misremembering the reports from Pew, the decline has plateaued, perhaps because of Covid, perhaps because churches are, in their essence, community in a time and world craving community.
To stand for good is an act of hope – and defiance – in a time when hope and defiance are now needed as much as ever.
An immigrant in Minneapolis posted a video on Tik Tok in praise of old white women in Minneapolis, who helped him feel safe. Watch it here. It’s wonderful and some of those old white women are people with whom I went to grade school. Take inspiration from them.
As, God knows, we need inspiration.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 03/02/2017 From Saba to a Trump Speech…
March 3, 2017It has been about ten days since I’ve written; I just went back and looked. Last time, I was on Saba, writing when I wasn’t able to sleep. Tonight, I am back at my dining room table, floodlights on, looking out over the creek, having just returned from Coyote Flaco with Pierre, sharing chicken fajitas.
When I reached the cottage this afternoon, I felt I’d been away for a week, at least. Monday morning, I went down to DC for some meetings for the Miller Center on the Presidency and then to New York last night to have a wonderful dinner with my friends, David and Annette Fox. It’s a quarterly event; we gather at their marvelous UWS apartment, order Indian and catch up on our lives.
It is very hygge. As was the dinner party I gave last Friday night for Fayal Greene, her husband, David, Ginna and Don Moore, Lionel and Pierre. Leek soup, sautéed scallops in a brown butter sauce, and carrots in a lemony oil garlic sauce, with a baked polenta to die for, followed by a flourless chocolate cake provided by Ginna and Don, via David the baker.
It was an extraordinary evening.
And I, at least, need evenings like this to keep me sane in these extraordinary times.
On Tuesday evening, in Washington, after an early dinner with my friends Matthew and Anne, which followed drinks with my ex-partner and his now fiancé, I watched the address to Congress by our President, Donald Trump.
To the great relief of almost the entire world, he did not go off the rails and sounded presidential. It was, Tuesday night, all about the delivery. Wednesday morning people started to parse what he said. Even the conservative writers that I read, and I do read some, found a lot of flaws with the speech.
Short on specifics.
Fact checkers found a lot of fault, pointing out Trump claimed as victories some things which had been in play for a year at some corporations. Ford isn’t keeping production in the US because of Trump; they are pulling back on their Mexican plans because those plants would have built small cars and people aren’t buying them. They’re buying gas guzzlers because gas is cheapish again.
When talking with David and Annette, I said that if Trump had not held it together last night, his presidency would have begun to unravel. He would actually be President but, in reality, his claim to power would have begun collapsing. Lots of people on his side of the aisle are slightly unhinged by his behavior. McCain and Graham are frankly, I think, apoplectic.
And he held it together and while he should have been able to take a victory lap, Wednesday morning brought the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had said in confirmation meetings he had not met with any Russians in the run-up to the election, actually had two meetings with the Russian Ambassador, one in his office on Capitol Hill.
Republicans are excusing while Democrats and some Republicans are accusing.
This is a wild ride and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Sessions has since recused himself from all investigations regarding anything Russian but there are those on both sides of the aisle who smell blood in the water.
While we were having political meltdowns, Amazon’s vaulted cloud computing world went offline yesterday for 4 hours and 17 minutes because of a typo in a command. OOPS.
It’s a little scary. 150,000 websites were affected. Amazon is the king of cloud storage and that’s a big oops for the King. I would not have wanted to be the head of that division yesterday.
And, before Tuesday’s Trump speech, we had the foll der wall of the biggest Oscar mistake in history. First “La La Land” was announced as Best Picture but it really was “Moonlight.” Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were humiliated and PwC, the accountants, were more than humiliated. They handed out a wrong envelope.
OOPS.
When it happened, I was safely in the arms of Morpheus, having strange dreams of Mike Bloomberg dating the pastor of my church, Mother Eileen.
Snap Inc. had a very successful opening on the market today; it was the biggest initial offering since Facebook and they have a rocky road to travel and they are a force to be reckoned with and it will be wonderful to see how it plays out. The next Facebook? Or the next troubled tech company, which is where Twitter is today.
It’s time for me to say goodnight.
By hygge. Regardless of your political persuasion, it will help us all get through.
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