I’m always grateful for my email deliveries of The Working Waterfront. The edition with Island Institute Fellow Katie Liberman’s column was especially poignant (Reflections, “A stark reminder of the need to support our children”).
My husband and I live on Roosevelt Island in New York City and have summered on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island) since 1997. Both of the island communities we live in appear idyllic at first glance, and truly are on many levels. I wouldn’t trade either of them for any other place on Earth!
But neither are they perfect and they have cracks in their surface. Though they are welcoming communities, individual lives can reveal other truths because people can be very private. They hold secrets: substance abuse, depression, and food insecurity as they try to navigate their lives with dignity.
Liberman’s column was a stark reminder of this as she related finding a used needle as she walked along a windy beach on Deer Isle in March. It was a sobering reminder that the opioid epidemic in this country isn’t just in “other people’s” homes. It’s in our own beloved communities and affects our own friends and families.
Liberman also wrote about a message from her school’s superintendent about a threat of violence at the local high school that was being investigated as a hate crime. She contemplated whether her own body would be able to shield her precious students in the event of such violence and it kept her awake that night. This story brought tears to my eyes to think that any teacher would have to even contemplate such a horror!
Before you think this note is going to devolve into a vortex of sorrow, I assure you it is not. The fact that this world is still filled with many smart and compassionate people like Katie Liberman, gives me pause for hope. It helps me to balance out the harsh realities of life.
Her information on The Mariners Soar! After School Program and how it feeds and provides after school activities for kids lightened my heart as well.
Our civic duties as loving citizens never really have an expiration date. I learned that from my mentor and friend, Ashley Bryan, on Little Cranberry Island. He taught me that we can create the life and community we want to live in—it’s a daily practice.
Ashley did it every day through art and song and storytelling. He did it by spreading love and compassion to anyone who had the pleasure of meeting him, and I miss him dearly.
Katie showed that same kind of compassion by sharing the poem she wrote about finding a used needle on a bucolic Maine beach—who still does that, anyway?!
Thank you, Katie Liberman, for taking the time and for being the person who “does that.”
Thom Heyer lives in New York City and Islesford.
