What did I do with my life?

Vera MacDonald at the Dinner Bell.

This profile is another in an ongoing series, New Faces at the Dinner Bell, the Nutrition Program’s Monday and Friday congregate luncheon at the Shelter Island Presbyterian Church.
For too long, Vera MacDonald was hostage to a serious misconception about the Dinner Bell — that it was a kind of soup kitchen for seniors in need of a hot meal twice a week. She now admits how wrong she was and has became a faithful luncheoneer.
Angela Corbett is a wonderfully creative chef, she says. She thinks that Robert Strugats, the Dinner Bell’s joke-meister, is hilarious, and she’s very much at home with her table mates — Gloria Roth, Dorothy Zabriskie, Concetta Spinosa, Rose and Phil O’Neil, Ruth Staehle and Easy Clark. Their table, table number 3, has the dubious distinction of being known as the rowdy table.
Vera has a long history of community involvement on Shelter Island. For many years, she was a columnist for the Suffolk Times, reporting on the social life here on the Rock; she was active in both SCAC and SISCA, and she will be honored by the League of Women Voters for her leadership in the formative years of the league at its annual brunch on June 19.
We were sitting on her back deck in the rain last Sunday, enjoying a heart-to-heart. What did I do with my life? she mused. I paid my taxes, I loved my husband and we raised four children.
What more could any woman want, dear Vera.