C.B. Stark Jewelers is a place that’s so well known you probably take it for granted. If you’ve ever needed a new charm, or cuff links or had to have the battery changed in your wristwatch, chances are you went to C.B. Stark, which has stores on Main street in Vineyard Haven and North Water street in Edgartown.

The jewelry store turns 45 this year, which is a lot of years to be in business on the Vineyard.

Most painters cannot tell you at precisely what moment, or how, they knew they wanted to become an artist. Usually they attempt to articulate some ineffable urge that has been with them for as long as they can remember, or perhaps an epiphany triggered by their first contact with an inspiring masterpiece or art teacher. Chris Pendergast, in marked contrast, sat down at the age of 20 to think about his life, and having mused upon everything that mattered to him, decided that “painting is what I should do” — even though he’d never painted.

This sunny Saturday in West Tisbury, Allen Whiting is out at his easel, working at his latest landscape and simultaneously working at his answers to questions about his art.

His approach to both tasks is similar: He goes at it enthusiastically for awhile, then pauses to reconsider things, then goes back and adds another layer.

Ask, for example, why an artist who seldom shows outside his own gallery has decided to put on a retrospective of his work at Featherstone Center for the Arts, and he gives a succession of answers.

First up, he is glib.

It’s summertime and Martha’s Vineyard looks like one big landscape oil painting. Simply perfect and bursting with both subtle shades and vibrant colors. Shame the Island is too big to pop in the trunk of the car and take home to remember such perfection all winter long. We have tried, but no go, even with one of those clamshells on the roof-rack. Chappy keeps blowing off midway home and ending up in the tall weeds somewhere off 95.

Home Port Cookbook: > Beloved Recipes from Martha’s Vineyard. By Will Holtham with A. D. Minnick, Photography by Mike Buytas, Illustrations by Susan Tobey White, Lyons Press, $19.95

Three years ago, Rose Abrahamson told a Vineyard Gazette reporter her art show then at the Shaw Cramer Gallery was her last. Now this summer, at 89 years of age, she is saying this show at the same gallery will be her last.

As talented and respected as she is, whenever Mrs. Abrahamson produces new paintings it calls for an exhibit. And just as well she is having another, because this show includes what she calls the best piece she ever has made.

Cue the music, can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

For more than 40 years the popular children’s television show has played a central role in the life of preschoolers, teaching many important life lessons — how to spell the word cookie, how to count to 10.

Now in a new documentary to be aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), young children will be able to learn about the tougher issues in life such as hunger. And a Vineyard single dad and his children will play a leading role.

Have truck, will travel — or better yet, follow your nose.

That’s the idea behind the growing food truck obsession across the country — in a culture where people are constantly on the go, so is our food.

The Vineyard is the latest place to pick up on the trend. While it may seem like a natural fit for a food-loving Island to get on the bandwagon, when it comes to the rules and regulations it’s not as easy as it looks.

On Thursday morning all was right with the Lagoon Pond. The water was clear, blue-green crystal, by all appearances the very picture of estuarine health. Just a day before, the water was clouded by an unsightly yellowish-brown fog from the head to the mouth of the Lagoon. It was an explosion of prorocentrum, an algae, and the largest one that Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group director Rick Karney has ever seen.

A quick glance at the program for this year’s Hebrew Center Summer Institute speaker series is enough to show that change has happened at the institute.

It is suddenly more diverse in both subject matter and guests.

Chalk it up to the new chairman of the summer institute committee, Geraldine Alpert, and her desire to see the series broaden its appeal.

“I thought I would try to get a more diverse program that attracts people from all over the Vineyard, not just the Jewish population,” she said.