Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Last Friday after buying bird seed at SBS I went to my car and it wouldn’t start. Assuming the battery was dead, I returned inside and asked if I could use the phone to call AAA. Katrina Nevin, who works at SBS, asked what the problem was and offered her jumper cables to charge the battery. When I went out to the car a customer parked his truck next to my car and offered to jump it with his battery charger. He hooked it up and nothing happened so he suggested trying the jumper cables. Katrina brought her car around and hooked up the cables. Nothing happened. A man who had been doing a grill demo in front of the store came over and re-hooked the cables and again, nothing happened. I thanked them and waited for the AAA truck.

Soon a friend drove into the SBS parking lot and asked what was wrong. He looked at the battery and seeing nothing obviously wrong, sat in the driver’s seat and tried to disengage the gear shift lever. It was locked in park. He rocked the car a bit and tried moving the lever again. It disengaged and he shifted it to reverse and neutral. Back in park, the car started when he turned the key.

One of the best things about living on the Vineyard is that people like Katrina, my friend and the other two men stopped what they were doing to help. Thank you all. I hope I can return the favor some day.

Martha Moore, West Tisbury