In the few weeks since the terrorist shootings in Paris, a number of people have asked about my take on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and whether The Star would have published them.

Whether to reprint these images was a serious question, one that many news organizations around the world asked themselves in the days after 11 people were killed at the office of the satirical magazine. In the United States a great number of editors decided to run them either for their news value or out of a sense of solidarity with those killed, or even for reasons of defiance. Others did not.

Notably, Dean Baquet, the relatively new executive editor of The New York Times, chose not to print them. His reasoning, which The Times made available on its website and which we endorse, included, “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

Running these cartoons was never a real consideration at The Star, since the news did not directly involve our coverage area. However, the general question about when and how to handle certain kinds of material is worth talking about. The Star has no hard-and-fast rule, but the yardstick we use to measure such things is that if we are going to run something that will deeply offend some readers, there had better be an overwhelmingly good reason to do so.

An example that I give the staff is that the uncalled-for use of profanity, an F-bomb perhaps, in most cases is not necessary. But, if a hypothetical town official dropped one during a public meeting, it then would be newsworthy and fit to print.

One cannot always catch everything that is going to offend. Things slip through, such as the description of a Bridgehampton neighborhood as “crack alley” in our pages not that long ago. That does not excuse it, however, and I regret that it happened. But something as obviously insulting as stereotype-heavy drawings of the Prophet Mohammed or a caricature of a black French high official as a monkey did not need to be redistributed as widely as they were in the aftermath of the shootings.

French intellectuals have all sorts of explanations for why the context of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons justifies their publication. But to the people who saw and see their religion maligned or race depicted as something less than human, those subtleties may be less than convincing, especially here in the United States, where equal rights and respect for all is something we strive for.

I’ve been reading about Zen Buddhism lately, and was reminded of the Yogi Berra koans I’d seen at the Artists-Writers Game last August.

    Here are some:

    “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

    “It gets late early out here.”

    “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

    “Baseball is 90 percent mental — the other half is physical.”

    “A nickel isn’t worth a dime anymore.”

    “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

    “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

    “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

                                    * * *

The Zen masters used to rap inquiring students over the head if they didn’t catch the drift of their puzzling koans, and the concussive force of the blow often led to Enlightenment.

I almost achieved it myself the other night during the Super Bowl, giving my forehead an awful whack with the back of my hand when the Seahawks tried that second-and-goal slant pass at the Patriots’ 1-yard line with 20-some seconds left in the game.

In somewhat unenlightened fashion I’ve been hoping to see the Patriots defeated for the longest time, it seems. Once the Steelers went down and I could no longer root for, rooting against — as in our national elections — became my goal. It’s not that I hate my country — I just can’t stand teams arrogating to themselves exceptional, bright, shiny status, even if they are exceptional. I’ve chafed at that self-satisfied our-city-stands-upon-a-hill kind of thing for a long time, ever since “America’s team” was flattened by the one in black and gold that brandished the United Steel Workers’ banner — in the Bicentennial year no less.

So the Patriot fans remain smug, and I’m going back to “Anne of Green Gables,” whose third disc I almost watched instead on Super Bowl night. Actually, I did remain unglued for just about all of the first half, calling out to Mary as I went down the hall to inquire as to the halftime score that I trusted my quest for spiritual peace would not be derailed by a little violence.

“We must look at the big picture,” I said.

“You are — you’re looking at the big TV screen down the hall,” Mary said.

“Well, yes, but I mean by the big picture that we must embrace life in all its mystery and contradictions and through serenity somehow transcend the duality that leads to our problems. That’s the only way to world peace. . . . It’s all one.”

“At least until the hockey playoffs begin.”

This can’t continue much longer, it sucks: I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve struck a co-worker’s truck, and I’ve just told a cold-caller to “take a flying ——.”

You get the idea — one’s nerves begin to fray when beset by the cold, not to mention cold-callers.

I was beginning to think that all the reserves of joy that are to be found in mutual suffering had been spent when a wonderful couple bearing tea came to our aid, but more about them later. 

On the morning of our latest snowstorm, I struck up an acquaintance with a neighbor shoveling his car out at the end of the street, having walked down to see if Copeces were clear.

I told him I was hell-bent on playing tennis that Sabbath morning, and while he advised against driving if it could be helped, relaying the forecast that the wind would pick up and the temperature would drop precipitously as the day wore on, he said that if I did play tennis he hoped I’d play well.

“I’ll play well!” I promised as I inched by soon after.

Mary’s company and tennis keep me going, as they do the rest of the year, but even more so now with winter having closed in. That said, as they say, I’ve always viewed February with a certain reverence given the fact that it is my natal month. But a birthday — even such a distinguished one as 75 — will only get you so far. Even Mary thought it was over the top when I began to sing “O holy night / The stars are brightly shining” on the eve of it.

She’s been itching (and has the eczema to prove it) to get out of here, if only for a week. One recent night she stayed up until 2 a.m., desperately seeking a rental or a hotel room in Naples, Fla., to no avail. It was like trying to get tickets to a Phish concert.

My mood was beginning to sour as well, but it lightened considerably, as did hers, when the aforementioned couple, who are part-time Neapolitans, had us over for tea and empathy. It was owing to their good offices that we finally landed a room at an inn for a week in early March, a Hamptons Inn, in Bonita Springs, north of Naples — a trolley ride, we’re told, from the beach, and not far from our saviors’ house. In reporting the news, Mary said, with great relief, that she’d found “the last room with a king-size bed in Naples.”

When Kathy heard where we were going, she said, sourly, “Florida is Centereach with palm trees . . . and it’s so corrupt it makes New York look like ‘Romper Room.’ ”

“And you can get sucked into sinkholes there,” I said, “but still we’re going. How much corruption can rub off in a week?”

“Just don’t read the papers.”

“I won’t, I won’t — I’m a journalist, for goodness’ sake.”

I’m sure many of you have heard the newest catchphrase, “No worries,” which is said by many people these days in what I believe is a totally inappropriate use of the phrase. I’ve had a lot of people say it to me lately, and I think they’re just bragging, because I have plenty of worries, especially now in winter, when it’s so cold out our daily lives are limited by snow and ice and our finances are at an all-time low.

I mentioned to a friend that our stripped-down Christmas tree is still snuggled under the privet hedges in our sideyard, and she said, “No worries.” But when your Christmas tree is still hanging around your yard almost two months after the holiday, I find that cause to worry. What’s next, I think. An old car, a rusted refrigerator, a broken washing machine, a boat trailer — oh, wait, there’s one of those already parked right next to the damn tree that brought us such joy two months ago but now is bothering the hell out of me.

I tell a friend that I’m afraid to walk my dog because of the snow and ice. “No worries; just let him run,” she says. Oh, okay, I’ll let him run, and worry the whole time he’s out there in this frozen tundra that he’ll be hit by a car or snatched by a dognapper to be used as a science project.

I’m coming up on another knee surgery, and the last thing I need is to fall, so I worry that if I do attempt to walk the dog and I fall, I’ll break a leg and my bone will protrude and children will make fun of me and laugh as I drag my twisted bone dangling from my leg back into the house. Worry? You bet I do.

Talking to a friend recently I commiserate that my pants are getting tighter. “No worries,” she says, “you’ll lose it in the spring.” But will I? I worry that it won’t be that easy, especially right after a knee surgery that will limit my ability to exercise.

I recently asked a woman in a doctor’s office parking lot if a particular space was legal to park in. “No worries,” she said. And I thought, oh, not another one. I wondered if she’d hang around and tell the cop who pulls out his ticket pad that she told me it was okay to park there. “But officer,” I’d say, “that lady said not to worry, so I just assumed it was a proper parking spot.” I imagine he’d say, “No worries,” as he proceeded to write out the ticket.

I have to use the restroom, I tell a friend while out on a road trip. “No worries,” she says. No worries for you, maybe, but it’s been hours since I last went, so it’s certainly worrying me, and I need to find a restroom soon or my worry will be all over your car seat.

I first heard the expression “no worries” when my daughter (who is now, much to my dismay, a Hawaii resident) brought home her very agreeable boyfriend for the first time several years ago. No matter what task I asked him to help me with, he would say, “No worries,” and get on with it. Although not Hawaiian, he grew up there, and like most Hawaiians I’ve met, he’s unencumbered by all the baggage we New Yorkers carry around with us. I liked his easy manner, but when I started hearing “No worries” from others, regarding everything from my being slightly late for an appointment to my car being frozen shut, it really started to piss me off. I am worried about many things that I won’t bore you with, but please don’t assume everyone has no worries.

When I mentioned to my husband last week that I’d really like the sideyard cleaned up, he said, “No problem.” Meaning he’ll get to it in a couple of months. When our yard begins to look like one of those backwoods houses off I-95 down south, I see that as a problem. And that really worries me.

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

This winter has been hell on man and beast alike, and it has been hard on houses as well, with frozen pipes, ice dams leaking under soffets, and over-taxed furnaces. Our house has taken a blow or two, including a never-before freeze-up on a kitchen drain, and, one morning this week, a door that came apart in my hands.

I think it was Monday morning, after a rainy Sunday and a cold dawn. The wooden front door, already looking a little ragged from the pet pig’s depredations, had swelled then frozen stuck. Annoyed by the swirling mass of dogs (we have three) and swine at my feet, I shoved and shoved again, and suddenly it all gave way. Part of the door remained on its hinges and swung wide, but the portion along the side with the entry lever remained in my hand.

Whether the animals went outside at that moment or not, I can’t remember. My guess is that they scattered amid the thunderous outbreak of profanity that ensured.

The sun had not yet emerged over the scrub oaks when I found myself stapling up some metal-coated insulating plastic sheeting over the screen doors to keep the wind off the porch. After getting the kids off to school, I was able to find a similarly sized door leaning up against the family barn in East Hampton and get it installed before lunch. It was a heck of a way to start the week.

To be honest, my wife, Lisa, and I had long been thinking about getting new doors. The one that came apart was drafty and, as it turned out, beyond repair due to rot behind a veneer of paint. The animals, for all their annoying early morning impatience, probably did us a favor.

“You’re one of the youngest old people I know,” my dentist said to me the other day as he excavated around a post in the hopes a filling would prevent the need for a crown. Before I could remonstrate with him — “One of the youngest? Please” — he was drilling away.

Still, that was music to my years, though lest I get cocky, he said, quoting from his grandmother, that I could not expect to get any respect in Florida, where we’re going this week, until I reached my 90s. Well, I thought, that would be something to strive for.

I think the youthful spirit he senses beneath the eroding gums has to do with the fact that I’ve covered local sports all these years and still like what I’m doing.

“I’ve never worked a day in my life,” an interviewee, who does work hard, said to me the other day. I knew what he meant — when you’re doing what you like to do it isn’t work, it’s fun.

The big downside so far lies in the realm of short-term memory. “They’re going to have to open a Lost and Found just for you,” Mary said the other day in holding up boots left behind at East Hampton Indoor Tennis. “But those aren’t mine,” I said, “mine had laces . . . I think.” We help each other: She can hear, I can smell . . . often we can pick up the threads of each other’s trains of thought, and we can at times be found lost in each other’s arms. It’s almost as if we’ve become one, though in case you’re having trouble making us out as we make out, I’m the bald one with the pointy nose.

I do hope I can keep my legs under me as I near the finish line. Then it can truly be written, as in the old days, “Death overtook him in his __-ieth year. . . .”

The answer, as the late Andy Neid­nig, who was finally outleaned, as it were, at the tape, said, is to keep moving. Still, I doubt that we’ll be moving to Florida. Kathy says it’s “Centereach with palm trees,” and that corruption (corruption of the flesh perhaps above all) is rife to such a degree that “it makes New York look like ‘Romper Room.’ ” Could it have something to do with latitude? The less corruption the farther north you get? But that leaves out Wall Street. Maybe it has to do with longitude then. At any rate, “Nunca falta un pelo en la sopa.” There’s always a worm in the apple.

While I wish I’d been somewhat older when young, being thought of as somewhat younger when old will do. John Wyche was actually rendered speechless for a moment when I told him the other day that I’d turned 75. “I know — it’s the haircut,” I said.

I’ve been in the presence of Phil Spector twice, so I can say with a measure of confidence that I am very lucky to be alive.

A long time ago — 1991 — I was in a restaurant in New York, where the legendary (and legendarily volatile) record producer was seated with the late Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, and two female companions. One foolish and at least a little tipsy member of my group mistook him for the late actor Dudley Moore, and as the music industry giants passed our table on their way out, he made a spectacularly ill-advised comment about the movie “Arthur.” Mr. Spector, who is serving a 19-years-to-life sentence for the 2003 murder of the actress Lana Clarkson, did not shoot us.

I remembered this chance encounter last Thursday morning when the Phil Spector-produced version of “The Long and Winding Road” played on the radio. That memory spurred another, of a second encounter with the man, on June 25, 2002, at the Russian Tea Room, where ABKCO Records was holding a launch party for “The Rolling Stones Remastered” series of CDs. Well into the evening, a skeletal Mr. Spector, sporting sunglasses and a wig befitting a heavy-metal musician, stopped all conversation with his wordless entrance, again accompanied by two female companions. All eyes were on the reclusive genius, who uttered not a word but did make the sound of one hand clapping — against his thigh — upon hearing an example of the Stones’ remastered catalog. Once again, I had unknowingly cheated death.

But I thought a lot more, upon hearing “The Long and Winding Road” and — on the same radio station, later that day — “Thirteen” by the band Big Star, about Timothy White.

Tim was a wonderful guy. I had the honor of working for him at Billboard for just under two years, until his sudden passing, at 50, less than 48 hours after we’d chatted at that party at the Russian Tea Room.

I’m almost as old as he was now, and my interest in what passes for rock ’n’ roll today has faded almost to oblivion. But, like most people seem to, I still dig the stuff I grew up with and probably always will, and I still like to write about it, or try to.

Tim was a master of that realm. The author of definitive biographies of Bob Marley, the Beach Boys, and James Taylor; of many cover stories and interviews in Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, and of a consistently brilliant Billboard column called “Music to My Ears,” he was unfailingly insightful, witty, and, notably, courageous. In one such column, he delivered a harsh rebuke to the insufferable rapper Eminem, and by extension his record label — a major advertiser — in bluntly stating that the “main themes” of his latest album “include drugging, raping, and murdering women.” (The “artist” responded in a subsequent recording called “Bitch Please II,” but I won’t waste more ink with his rhymed retort.)

I didn’t often go to the office on Fridays, but did stop in briefly on the morning of June 27, 2002, before heading uptown to a lunch at Sony Music. I saw Tim from the corner of my eye, but we didn’t speak. At Sony, I met with a group that included Jody Stephens, the drummer of Big Star.

Back at home in the afternoon, I cursed the distant ringing telephone as I changed in the bedroom. It was a publicist from Sony, who had been at the lunch.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“Timothy White is dead?”

“What? Of course not. I just saw him a few hours ago.”

I called the office. “Is everything okay?” I asked. No, everything was not okay.

As I said, rock ’n’ roll doesn’t excite me as it used to, nor should it. It’s a young man’s game, for those with too much energy and too little experience. But that song “Thirteen” really gets me. For all the tentative awkwardness of its teenage narrator, it is perhaps the most achingly articulate telling of a first crush and its attendant vulnerability. “Won’t you let me walk you home from school?/Won’t you let me meet you at the pool?/Maybe Friday I can/Get tickets for the dance/And I’ll take you.”

Tim probably liked that one, too, and I’m sure he would have written beautifully about it. He was one of the good guys.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Ten years ago this June, my eldest granddaughter fell in love with a kitten at the Animal Rescue Fund’s shelter. I can’t imagine what my daughter-in-law, Lisa, was thinking when she took her there on a lark as a fourth birthday treat: Lisa is allergic, and their household has always been something of a dog menagerie to begin with, without much spare room for extra sets of paws.

To be fair, I suspect that other members of the family remember the circumstances of the infamous birthday trip to ARF differently — a case of the Rashomon effect. But as I recall it, anyway, on a June day in 2001, a certain little girl walked away from ARF in a flood of tears, told she could not keep “her cat.” But she was also determined. She called her Aunt Bess and begged her to adopt the kitten. At the time, her aunt was living in a small apartment in Brooklyn, and wasn’t at home in East Hampton too much. Then the birthday girl asked me.

And so it came to pass that my husband and I agreed that Adelia could adopt the kitten, and we would be its surrogate parents. She could visit to take care of or play with it whenever she liked. A white-and-gray striped tabby, he had white boots, and that’s what Adelia named him: White Boots. With the passage of time, naturally, the intensity of the 4-year-old’s interest in White Boots waned to some degree.

White Boots — or, as some of the family called him, Bootsie Baby — was a pleasant fellow. To begin with, anyway; he could be a bit ferocious to small children on occasion. (“Don’t get too close to Bootsie Baby!” mothers warned at family gatherings.) It soon became apparent that Bootsie Baby would be very hard to keep indoors, and, despite qualms about the terrible things cats sometimes do outdoors, we decided to let him go in an out at will. He availed himself, most nights, of three different beds to sleep on. And although there was one desperate incidence when we had to get rid of fleas, we enjoyed a friendly, peaceful relationship. He was a funny fellow, and king of his roost. It may be a matter of selective memory, but I recall only two occasions when he did what cats are known to do to birds. 

I guess I have to admit he was fairly ordinary, in other words, except for one thing: He grew to be the biggest cat I, or anyone else I know, had ever seen.

He was vast. He was gargantuan. 

One night last week, White Boots started howling. His intermittent cries, either of pain or for help, kept us awake and worried. We had noticed that he hadn’t hopped up onto our bed to settle down to sleep that night, and gradually we realized that there was a reason why he had stayed on the floor: His back legs were paralyzed. We watched as he pulled himself around, clawing at rugs and using only his front legs.

In the morning, getting ready to take him to the vet’s, I put an open pet carrier in front of him and he pulled himself in. Did he remember that the carrier had taken him to the vet’s before? Or was he just looking for a dark, comfortable place to curl up? It was a moment of cat heroism, the most astonishing thing White Boots had ever done.

Poor White Boots. A blood clot, we were told, was responsible for the paralysis, and an X-ray showed congestive heart failure and fluid in his lungs. The vet lifted him, limp and listless, onto a scale. His final claim to fame was that even in old age and in a state of failing health he weighed 22 pounds.

Because I am a doubting Thomasina, I went to Google to check out a statement in Tony Prohaska’s “The White Fence,” a memoir that was the subject of last week’s “Connections.” Tony reported that Jackson Pollock had a pet crow. The Internet is wonderful; I not only found references to the crow but also saw images of it taken with the artist in 1947. It was named Caw Caw.

I once had a pet rooster. I’m not sure about the pecking order — ha! — in a lineup of crows and roosters, but my pet liked to do what Caw Caw did: sit on my shoulder and follow me around my grandparents’ farm.

We left the farm that summer to spend a month at a nearby farm that took in boarders. I was 11 or 12, and I cried when I wasn’t allowed to keep my rooster. He was put in a big open field with 50 or 100 other birds, and, though I went there every day, he never showed himself. I didn’t eat chicken for a long time.

I got to thinking about that rooster this week after reading a horrendous account in The New York Times of the disregard for the basic health of pigs, cows, and sheep (as well as cruel experimentation on them) by researchers and administrators at a United States Department of Agriculture center in Nebraska. If you haven’t read the story and both care about animals and eat meat, I recommend that you don’t.

I suppose that children who grow up on picture-book farms come to terms early with the fact that most of the animals they see every day are destined for the table. Wilbur the Pig is saved in “Charlotte’s Web,” but that’s just a nice story. A family I know who raised children here always kept a pig or two; the adults made up stories about where the chops for dinner had come from.

Laura Donnelly, The Star’s food and restaurant writer, devoted a column to the production of chickens about a year ago, and I’ve been careful about what poultry I buy ever since. I’m not sure I am disciplined enough to become a vegan or vegetarian, although I think those who don’t eat animals are admirable. I hope something will come of The Times’s exposé about the Department of Agriculture’s misbegotten effort to help the meat industry develop more and more tender meats at lower cost, and if a petition were available demanding that taxpayer dollars be taken away from the department, I would sign it.

The overriding issue, however, is the humanity, and inhumanity, of homo sapiens. Day after day we learn of brutality and killings in the name of God, that red, white, and blue Americans are fighting and killing in the name of democracy and have subjected suspects to tortures in the war against terror. What hope can there be for animals?

From an upstairs window Tuesday, as snow continued to fall fast, I could see a dozen sea ducks riding it out on the bay in front of our house. Seagulls of some sort flew on the driving wind above the water’s edge as a flood tide pushed and clawed at the dune.

The beach is almost dead flat and rocky at this time of year, and the gulls swoop down and pick up any edible thing dug loose from the bottom by the waves. It is one hard way to make a living, though if the cold does not bother them all that much the easy pickings make good sense. On the other hand, the ducks, surf scoters, I believe, have carved out a niche that I find difficult to understand.

Of all the parts of Gardiner’s Bay where they could hole up, our southeastern reach would have to be about the toughest. Rollers propelled by the strong north wind tumble and break above the shallows here. Even in the warm months, there has never been a boat I owned or had anything to do with that did not break loose or drag anchor over the flats.

Watching with an old pair of Navy binoculars, I wondered why the scoters did not find a gentle lee instead. They are sea ducks, however, and to them, the bay may well be a refuge from the day’s ocean turmoil. These birds’ hardiness is something worthy of marvel, an astonishing shell of feathers covering thick down. Their uncovered feet work constantly to keep their beaks pointed in the direction of the oncoming waves.

It appeared that the scotors were not feeding. Rather, they just swam, nearly in place, disappearing and appearing again as the waves came and went underneath them. That they could be doing this for the duration of this stretch of weather is something to think about.

People who live in Florida or anyplace else warm probably think those of us sitting out this blizzard are the crazy ones. And we, warm in the house, look out at the birds and think the same thing.