As a young architecture student, Craig Whitaker took some time off from study one day to go see a movie, a western. A spaghetti western, as it turned out, directed by the Italian Sergio Leone in Spain and starring Clint Eastwood.

Mr. Whitaker didn’t know that when he went in, but as soon as he saw Clint Eastwood ride into town, he knew the movie had not been shot in America, for Eastwood was riding into a plaza.

“In America,” he said, “We don’t have plazas. We have Main street.”

Up-Island, they don’t do Main street. Post offices and general stores are not a given either. In fact, go up far enough and town center — or even proof of life — can be difficult to locate.

Earlier this week, on a sunny, warm May afternoon, Main street in Edgartown resembled a ghost town.

Although year-round places like Edgartown Hardware were doing a moderate business, well over half of all businesses were closed while several storefronts were empty.

Go back a few decades, though, and the scene was quite different.

At the center of Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs is a square with ample room to sit this time of year.

The weather is not quite warm enough for ice cream, and the benches that face the main drag are empty. The summer tourists have yet to arrive, so no weary bottoms rest on the edges of the raised flower beds. Front stoops of storefronts are clear.

Despite the empty benches, a recent sunny afternoon found one elderly lady sitting in her own bright pink lawn chair, watching the world go by.

Vineyard Haven is a place where people use benches as year-round communication centers. The curved wooden bench in front of Leslie’s Drug Store is one such center, and useful for gathering local intelligence.

“Art Buchwald once wrote in his national column that Leslie’s Drug Store was the place to learn what’s going on,” said Leslie Leland, proprietor and only the third owner of the drug store in well over 100 years.

The history of the Island’s main streets is written on the facades of the older buildings. The three down-Island main streets all have their stories — and their storytellers.

Main street is memory lane for those who share in the fellowship of growing up, playing and working on the pavement and along the side streets.

Richard Clark of Vineyard Haven, Dennis daRosa of Oak Bluffs and Edward (Peter) W. Vincent Jr. of Edgartown all have spent most of their lives stepping, smelling and breathing the life on the down-Island sidewalks and streets.

Mother’s Day arrives each year with an odd dichotomy: It is universally held to be a marketing gimmick, and yet it’s widely observed by even the most cynical among us. If mothers approach the holiday with any attempt at mindfulness, then adoptive moms may have an edge in that department.

The hit television series Lost tracks the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious island, winks Heather Capece in a sly marketing maneuver. The family play she is directing, Pirate Island, premiering this weekend at the Vineyard Playhouse, toys with the same theme, only with shipwreck survivors washed up on a deserted island.

Two years ago, documentary filmmakers Len and Georgia Morris arrived in Kenya, Africa, with a schedule, a cameraman and a translator. There to finish shooting an exposé on street children, they flew home to Martha’s Vineyard six weeks later with 600 hours of footage and a project thrown off the tracks by a conniving and obnoxious, but brilliant, street boy named Emmanuel.

Let’s Talk About Race

Moving Beyond Race: The Dialogue Continues is the program on Wednesday, May 14, from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Centre street in Vineyard Haven.

The Island Diversity Council, Martha’s Vineyard NAACP, and the Social Action Committee of the Hebrew Center will show the video Eye of the Storm: Sharing Powerful Lessons About Racism, followed by a community discussion. All are welcome.