Text Box: Poole’s, Menemsha 1978   We managed to find a cottage in Menemsha on our first visit to Martha’s Vineyard. Even though it was tucked away in the woods it was really close to town. It was only available for one week so Gerry found us a place out at the Western end of the island in Gay Head. Gay Head is called that because of the colors of the rock formations on the cliffs there. There was an attempt to change the name to Aquinnah in 1991 but it was voted down. I saw so many possible drawings in Menemsha that I wound up driving back there almost every day to work. This is a drawing of a harbor scene that I like a lot because it focuses in a couple of different places. Sometimes my eye is drawn to the shacks on the right, sometimes it’s drawn to the fishing boats tied up outside Poole’s fish store, but my favorite focal point is the skiff in the foreground. The store is no longer Poole’s but I’ll bet the scene is basically the same. In those days we had a little Fiat 124 Spyder convertible which I had bought with 86,000 miles already on it. Amy was too big for a car seat so I had seat belts installed in the back. Once we fixed the terrible grinding noise we heard every time we went over a bump and some initial electrical problems the car was great. They had used a bolt that was too long when the central part of the seat belts were installed and the extra part of the bolt was slamming against the muffler. I forget what the electrical problem was but I do remember a lot of overheating in the early days. One day Amy and I drove to Edgartown to do some shopping while Gerry stayed back and wrote. On the way out of Edgartown when two women in their early twenties in bikinis flagged us down and asked if I knew how they could get to the beach in Menemsha. I told them we could drop them off and asked Amy to get in the back with one of them while the other sat up front. Amy kept giving me odd looks. After we had dropped the hitchhikers off in Menemsha Amy got in the passenger seat, looked very seriously over at me and said, “Should we tell Mom about this?” I don’t know what rules she thought I had broken but all she wanted to know was if I was going to fess up.

 Close Ups
Text Box: Email neil@borrellcompany.com

All material copyright 2016 Neil Borrell

www.borrellcompany.com