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West Tisb'ry the Gem of the IslandMarch 24, 2006 (Muchos apologies for long silence; I've been bizzy, distracted, preoccupied, and other stuff.) My mailing address is in West Tisbury so people think I live there, but this is not true. For nearly all of the last 15 years I've lived in Tisbury, aka Vineyard Haven. When I moved to the island in 1985, I was indeed living in West Tisbury but the waiting list for a p.o. box was 30 years long so I hijacked my family's. No regrets; p.o. boxes don't like to be empty nine months of the year. Plus these days low-number p.o. boxes have the cachet of four-digit license plates, of which I also have one, so how can I lose? Once upon a time each of the six island towns was entire of itself; these days all they have is character. West Tisbury prides itself on being the Athens of the Island, the way Boston is supposed to be the Athens of Amurrica. Music Street, in the heart of the village, is said to have obtained its name from the number of pianos acquired for the daughters of affluent whaling captains -- music wafting out the windows wowed the passersby and yadda yadda yadda. West Tisbury is no longer a village, and Music Street is no longer the heart of it. The heart has moved down-island several miles in the direction of Tisbury (aka Vineyard Haven), and it's there, in the "new" post office, that since the early 1990s I've been getting my mail. For the diehards there's still a post office annex at Alley's General Store, but P.O. Box 39, West Tisbury, is in the new post office in what used to be called (and still is, by some) Middletown. My bank, the M.V. Co-op, has a branch across the street. Rhodry gets his biscuits via the canister or the drive-up window. Fine with him; fine with me. Anyhow, West Tisbury, in keeping with its self-polished reputation as the Athens of the Island, plans to choose a poet laureate at its annual town meeting (ATM, which also means automatic teller machine, of which the West Tisbury branch of my bank has one but we don't use it because it doesn't dispense cookies), so the Martha's Vineyard Times is running an unofficial poet laureate contest. They've solicited poems that refer in some way to West Tisbury or one of its hangouts, and naturally I've submitted one of mine, "Picture Postcards," which doesn't invoke the name of the town but does take place at Alley's, back in the days when I got my mail there. The first-prize winner gets a $100 gift certificate to an expensive restaurant in Oak Bluffs; the second prize is a $50 gift certificate to a bookstore in Tisbury aka Vineyard Haven. The Times editors pick the winners -- a task I don't envy them because about half the entrants so far have been or are currently affiliated with the M.V. Times (including moi) and about half of the rest have some connection with the Vineyard Gazette. You can vote for your favorite on the M.V. Times website: http://www.mvtimes.com/poetry_contest.php. So far no prize has been promised for the winner of the popularity contest. Go; read -- you'll get a feel for what West Tisbury is about. You don't have to vote for my poem. If you vote in West Tisbury -- well, as far as I'm concerned, Dan Waters is the only serious contender for poet laureate of West Tisbury. If I voted in West Tisbury, I'd vote for him. I don't vote in Tisbury either, but that's where I live.
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