For some it began with Go Dog Go, Busy, Busy Town or Green Eggs and Ham. The tears may have started with the dogs, Old Yeller, Sounder and Where the Red Fern Grows.

On Wednesday for her last day of
preschool, my daughter Pickle and I discuss what music to play on the drive from West Tisbury to Chilmark. The drive takes about 15 minutes and over the last two years we have enjoyed a long musical journey together. It is just the two of us and so I have had no censors or suggestions of what is appropriate or even good.

Pickle fell in step with my groove early on, leaning heavily toward men of the late 1970s. In our hermetically-sealed musical education chamber, a Honda Fit, one could say she had no choice.

John Clift has been the sommelier and beverage director at Atria in Edgartown for nine years. For six months of the year he works every single day at the restaurant, and now at Hooked, too. For the rest of the year he travels for both business and pleasure, which in his case amounts to the same activity. He visits wineries all over the world. This past winter he visited California, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Italy, Egypt and Abu Dhabi.

This description of Mr. Clift’s off-season lifestyle is not intended to generate envy, although it certainly could.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was established in 1898. There are 250 members in the organization, never more or less. To be inducted into the Academy, one of its members must die. In other words, it is very selective. It is also rather mind-boggling to think of the backlog of talent to choose from when an opening does arise.

When artist Margot Datz begins a new project she finds it hard to stop. “Until someone rips me off the wall I’m there,” she said on Wednesday morning at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. Although no one is coming to rip Ms. Datz off the wall, her brother Stephen Datz is on hand to “help her out the door,” he said. Good thing, too, as this weekend there will be a wedding held at the church. Scaffolding and bridal gowns do not really mix. But magnificently-restored murals serving as a backdrop for wedded bliss definitely do.

Ron (Puppy) Cavallo is one of Jane Leaf’s best customers. Puppy, as everyone calls him, has been getting his hair cut by Jane for nearly 30 years, long before she opened Wavelengths Hair Salon in 1989.

And yet he’s also one of her worst customers. In the last 12 years he’s been to the salon only three times.

In the middle of the night my son Hardy yells for me. He is eight, and usually at least one of his parents immediately appears by his bedside if he whimpers in the dark. But tonight I move slowly. After all I am weighed down under three blankets and wearing a sweatshirt, sweatpants, hat and mittens. And yet I am still shivering. Cathlin is already occupied with Pickle, age four. Cathlin doesn’t have the bone-rattling chills like I do. Her symptoms are exhaustion and an overt phlegminess that makes lying down to sleep futile.

The curly-headed cherub strumming away on a harp is a time-honored icon. Try and consider Valentine’s Day without the sight of Cupid, his bow and arrows at rest for the moment, offering up a musical interlude. But what if Cupid had been allowed to grow up, pack on layers of muscle and play lacrosse and football, grinding out yards on the gridiron in front of cheering spectators. Would he still play the harp? And if so, what would he look like?

He would look like Nathaniel Horwitz, a 16-year-old junior at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.

For my wife Cathlin’s last day of radiation treatment for breast cancer, the kids and I head into Boston to be with her. Eirene, aka Pickle (age four), decides to dress as the hobbit Frodo Baggins. Her costume includes a pair of blue jeans, a white mesh shirt she says is the elven material mithrail, and a long turquoise cape. She also insists that her face be rubbed with mud, as during Frodo’s travels to Mordor he was often dirty.

Hardy (age seven) wears the same pants and shirt he has worn nearly every day for the past few months.

A week ago more than 100 people from around the world beganarriving on the Vineyard. Most looked like regular folks, bearded or not, wearing jeans or skirts, sneakers and shoes. They could have been leaf peepers who took a wrong turn on their way to the Berkshires. But some wore flowing crimson robes, a visible sign that this group was up to something different.

More telling, though, was that they appeared more relaxed than most people. They didn’t pack as much stuff either.