Around Town – April 18, 2019
Congratulations to Henry and Lyla Bushey of Charlotte who earned recognition through the Good Citizen Challenge and what they accomplished in 2018. Their recognition became public at the Vermont Statehouse on March 27 when more than 70 student competitors for the honor gathered to be recognized. The Challenge invites students from kindergarten through high school to participate in activities related to civics, history, advocacy and media literacy—elements of “being an informed citizen.” They attended city council meetings, picked up litter, read local news articles and wrote letters to elected officials pointing out their responsibility to maintain the “five freedoms specified in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Congratulations to Charlotte resident Sandy Steingard, M.D. who along with her colleagues from the Howard Center of Vermont received the National Council for Behavioral Health’s 2019 Excellence in Addictions Treatment Award in Nashville, Tenn., last month. Howard Center was selected for the honor from 230 nominations across the country. The award recognizes an organization that has provided effective addiction education and prevention programs through an innovative science base and services following that base. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont noted that Howard “has long been a pioneer in providing effective, compassionate care . . . and I know they will continue to work hard to reverse the effects of addiction that have touched every Vermont community.”
Congratulations to three Charlotte students who were recognized for their writing and a photo in the Young Writers Project of The Burlington Free Press.
Appearing in the April 5 Free Press, Annika Gruber’s poem titled “Rainbow at Night” is not set in Charlotte because she writes from her bedroom, many floors above the streets of a city that never sleeps. What she sees is “an explosion of light in the darkness, with shimmering skyscrapers.” The sky and the people on the ground “blend together . . . to make a rainbow at night.”
In the same issue, the Photo of the Week is by Iris Lawson-Ryan. It shows two dogs on leashes, standing still and attentive to something nearby, both with noses and eyes pointing in the same direction.
Courtney McDermott begins her poem, titled “The Inconvenience of Memory”—which appears in the April 12 Young Writers Project – with the words, “Easy to forget the important things, Huh?” That line gives a clue to what follows, a litany of the seemingly important things in life, such as doctor’s appointments, birthdays of friends and relatives, French verb forms, the worst thing her mother ever said to her, etc. What she can’t forget are cherry earrings and the color of her nail polish, “things that don’t matter anymore, things that never mattered, things I’d like to forget.”
Charlotte News bite
Chittenden County Forester Ethan Tapper is a frequent contributor to the News’ section titled “Into the Woods” in which he uses his studies to assess environmental issues facing our region. Last issue, for example, he wrote about maintaining trails and clean water by minimizing soil disturbance and protecting water quality in the course of logging and skidding. What we don’t know from that is his affinity for heavy metal, punk rock music, an environmental issue of a different sort. The April 3 Seven Days section on “Music and Nightlife” helps the reader discover an 11-piece punk band called the Fobs and founded by Ethan in his spare moments in 2015. It says the Fobs “have grown from an oddball computer-based electro-rock solo project to the frenzied mob heard on their new album, Golden Thread.” Eric George of the band Ponyhustle, a fellow Burlington musician, calls the Fobs “profoundly subversive.”
So we at The News say, “OK, Ethan, Keep the forest electrorocking with clean water quenching otherwise dry environmental rhythms.”