A few years ago on Gustavia’s main street, beside the yacht-laden harbor, outside the Cartier shop, a pedestal stood. On the pedestal was a stainless, bejeweled watch sitting on a smaller pedestal of its own. No glass, no cage, just sitting there out in the open. When you reached for it, your hand was spotted by some kind of electric eye and the watch disappeared through a trap door.

    Funny, of course, but the intensity of laughter generated by the slight of electronic hand was proportional to one’s ability to own such a timepiece. If the person reaching for it was wearing one just like it, very funny. If, on the other hand, the watch represented what one might expect to earn, in Euros, over the next 10 years, less funny. St. Barthelemy, the celebrated French West Indian island, is a place of wild contrasts.

    The island is home to wild goats, cacti both tall and squat, and feisty blue-green lizards whose ubiquitous scurrying accounts for its original Carib Indian name, Ouanaloa (Lizard Island). Barthelemy was the much beloved brother of Christopher Columbus who made a cautious landing on the island in 1493, cautious because of the Caribs’ cannibalistic reputation.

    For centuries, England and France played out a protracted tug of war over the West Indies, but because St. Barts was and is a mountainous, desert island with few natural resources other than salt — no sugar cane, no tobacco — it remained on the the fringe of colonial activity and relatively unpopulated but for a tough community of settlers from Normandy and Brittany. They are still there.

    St. Barts belongs to an “overseas collectivity” of France along with the islands Guadeloupe, Martinique, and half of St. Martin-St. Maarten, very French, which is to say the islanders are proud, hard-working, with that French bearing that seems equal parts solipsism and indomitable joie de vivre.

    Because it remained a place outside established trade routes as well as established law, St. Barts became home to the lawless. The pirates Laurent Graff, Jean-Baptiste Nau, the Dutchman Van Horn, Morgan, and piratical women, Anne Dieuleveut and Jacotte Delahaye hung out there. In the late 1960s and ’70s, the island became a hangout for drug-smuggling pirates. Depending on one’s definition of pirate, things haven’t changed much in some respects.

    In the late-18th century, the pirate Montbars the exterminator (not a pleasant man, apparently) was said to have buried treasure at l’Anse du Gouverneur where the Russian oil oligarch Roman Abramovich now has a 70-acre retreat. The island’s reputation as a haven for the wealthy began after David Rockefeller purchased property there in the late 1950s. The transformation from old pirate haven to new pirate haven took time.

    Perhaps I’m being cynical, but personal wealth on the level one confronts in Gustavia (the island turned Swedish for a time in the Napoleonic era) awakens the Jacobin within. Not all billionaires are pirates, of course. Many earned their fortunes legitimately and improved the world in one way or another, but the conspicuousness of their consumption is so over the top on St. Barth that you question the system of values from which the baubles spring.

    Yachts the size of naval destroyers, $5,000 bottles of rum, villas that rent for 250,000 Euros per week, hotel rooms for $10,000 per night rented for the season — spending on a scale that would make the robber barons turn green with envy. Vast amounts of money that could be much better spent, if the celebrities and oligarchs asked me, but they didn’t.

    So there we were again last month at a restaurant called Hideaway, a popular, less-tony eatery in St. Jean that features imaginative pizza toppings and meat cooked at the table on mini-grills. My wife, Kyle, speaks French, which makes a huge difference at the local boulangerie and the Marche U, a grocery store where delicious French foods can be purchased at a reasonable price to feed the island’s proletariat as well as its relatively impoverished visitors.

    The table beside us was set for 20 or 30 people who began to wander in when we were halfway through dinner. Their clothes were of the special-occasion type. They looked familiar, Kyle said, and although we knew not a one, there was indeed something recognizable in them.

    Kyle was eavesdropping, translating. It was someone’s birthday, she said. In walked the man of the hour greeted with warm taunts. He took his place at the head of the table. Toasts followed, kids had their cheeks pinched, women their cheeks bussed. Wine flowed along with a growing crescendo of conversation without a wisp of airs.

    Yes, of course. They were St. Barts locals, the Third Estate, the shopkeepers, the men who build the island’s roadside walls out of coral and volcanic rock, the fishermen, the gendarmes. The scene was French Bonac and comforting.

    Galleons and their treasures will continue to come and go on St. Barts, but the beautiful Caribbean island will always be theirs. Let them eat cake.

    Russell Drumm, a senior writer for The Star, is an author of several books, including most recently “A Rogue’s Yarn,” which is set partially on St. Barts.

   Cramer, they called him around the documentary film company where I worked in the early 1990s, and although I doubt Richard Ben Cramer would have remembered me from those days, the news of his death on Monday of lung cancer at only 62 was a shock and a disappointment.

    By the time I met him, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he had written, “What It Takes,” an astonishingly detailed, 1,000-word portrait of the 1988 presidential race. I was working for Thomas Lennon, a documentary television producer, and Cramer was what might be called Tom’s secret weapon, brought in to make a script really sing.

    In those days, I was a lowly associate producer, which meant I did things like line up archival footage and organize car rentals. Cramer came in to help write a film we were doing about the rise of tabloid journalism, centered on the Michael Jackson sexual-abuse allegations, and he stuck around to do the narration in what I remember as a tone of authority with just the lightest hint of condescension.

    That he regarded dimly what journalism was becoming by the mid-1990s when the Jackson story would headline nightly news broadcasts was obvious. “What It Takes” set a high bar for understanding the primaries and presidential contests through probing descriptions of the individual candidates as people. This was in stark contrast to the superficiality of the tabloid-style “news” that was fast becoming the norm.

    Paraphrasing here, I recall that Cramer once said voting for president was the least-rational vote an American would ever cast, given the position’s power. This has stuck with me and influenced how I have viewed politics ever since, even on the local level.

    Something else Cramer said that I have never been able to forget was, “The best journalists steal their best material.” As I understood it, this was not a defense of plagiarism. Rather, it was to say that once a reporter learned something, the idea was his or hers to explore, to verify, and to expand. It was, in effect, a directive to take what was heard in the course of doing our jobs and run with it. It was also a reminder that the business of news is not about the reporters who write it, but the people they report on.

    Cramer was as unimpeachable a source as they come. He is gone far too soon. I, and a whole generation of scribblers, owe him a debt we can never fully repay.

   There’s no doubt that the story was highly exaggerated, but when I was a child I heard it said my grandmother was so strong that she had once carried a claw-foot bathtub in her arms. I tend to believe that statement was metaphorical, perhaps derived from an old Yiddish folk tale or saying, but as a child I believed it as fact.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. I suppose it’s because I’m a grandmother and have the good fortune to see at least some of my grandchildren all the time. And, in the last two months, I’ve been able to spend time with all of them.

    I am sure my grandmother was strong, though, especially in stamina and courage. She was said to have walked, perhaps occasionally hitching hay-wagon rides, across several countries from Moldova to Hamburg with three little children, one of whom was still in arms. She must have had enough money for their passage to America, but the trek sounds almost impossible to me. She carried a pair of candlesticks — thin silver plate — with her, too.

    What I’ve really been thinking about, though, is what my grandchildren will remember of me. That may sound a bit morbid, but the fact is that although I loved my grandmother, I know so little about her.        

   My father’s mother died before I was born. The only legacy I have from her is my middle name, and I’ve been known to offer $5 to anyone who can guess what it is. No one ever does, although it is not all that unusual.

    So I’m thinking about my maternal grandmother, for whom my daughter is named. Her maiden name was Bessie Rothman, which was fitting because she had red hair until it turned yellow-gray. I’ve always hoped red hair would emerge in one of her great-grandchildren, but it hasn’t.

    As a matter of fact, she allayed my nervousness about introducing her to the man I married in 1960, Ev Rattray, by taking one look and exclaiming with delight that he was a “royter.” (Yes, another redhead.)

    What I remember about her most was that I loved her. I know she liked card games because she taught me to play solitaire and concentration, but I turned her down when she offered to teach me to read and write Yiddish. She made blueberry jam and a kind of blueberry upside-down cake, but I don’t recall if she was known for any other cooking. Nor do I remember what the cheese she made — by allowing sour milk to hang in and drain from a cheesecloth bag during the summer — tasted or looked like.

    In America, my grandmother remained an immigrant. She spoke English with a Yiddish accent, and I was told that she once also spoke Romanian, the language of the country where she was born. She read the Hebrew in the Bible, at least to some extent, too, but I remember her going to the orthodox synagogue my family belonged to only on holidays.

    So, what tall tale will my grandchildren remember of me? That their grandma was so good at numbers she could reel off every telephone number she ever dialed? (There’s a tiny kernel of truth in that, as in most family fables.) Or that I could recite whole chapters from “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White? I can’t lift a bathtub, but I can carry a tune.

   “Not that way!” Jasper said, after I cut his scrambled eggs into fork-size pieces. His small feet began to stamp a protest beat on his chair. A rant of frustration simmered just below the surface. “You moved it!”

    “Which way?” I asked, unclear of the infraction.

    “Turn it around,” he demanded, a whimper now set to the rhythm of his feet.

    I stirred the eggs in the bowl. Not it. I rotated the bowl clockwise. No. Then counterclockwise. No.

    “If you know what you want, you do it,” I suggested. But he’s 21/2. Whatever harmony I had shattered, it was important that I be the one to restore it.

    He persisted.

    “Jasper, I don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I said.

    “Not that way. Like a ladybug,” he explained.

    Like a ladybug?! Really? Thanks for clearing that up.

    Apparently a ladybug, if it were scrambled eggs, would form a semicircle snuggled up to one side of the bottom of the bowl.

    Sometimes translation is a guessing game. I can’t say if anything else will need to be like a ladybug, but if it does, I’ll have a better than 50-percent chance of guessing what that means.

    When we fill a cup or bottle for Jasper, he likes it to be “all the way up to the mountain,” meaning very full. And if it’s juice he’s drinking, he prefers that we “make it warm in the dishwasher,” meaning not straight from the cold fridge but mixed with room-temperature water from the sink.

    Since the onset of cold and flu season and all the talk of sickness, germs, and not sharing food and drinks that have been in other people’s mouths, he is emphatic that we not repeat what he says: “Don’t say that. That have my germs on it.” The more I work to understand this sort of reasoning, the more sense it makes. It’s true, that phrase had been in his mouth, and I guess if I put it in my mouth, maybe I could get his germs.

    I should turn his own logic back on him when I hear him repeat some of the expletives his dad and I have let slip in our moments of frustration. They definitely have our “germs” on them.

    Sometimes when he’s talking a little too quietly to hear, I ask him what he’s said. “I’m talking to myself,” he answers.

    While his 41/2-year-old sister begins every day singing or talking to herself in her room before she calls for me, then engages in conversation as quickly and constantly as possible once we’re in a room together, Jasper is often more reflective in the moments before bed and after waking up. He’ll be still and quiet for a long time so I think he’s sleeping. Then, he’ll turn to me and ask some big question that’s been burning in his mind through his long silence: “Mommy? What cows eat?”

    It’s a much easier question to answer than some of Jade’s early-morning inquiries. “Why when I was a baby I ­wasn’t in a people egg?” she wanted to know a few months ago.

    “Because babies grow inside their mommies’ tummies,” I explained.

    “But how did I get there?”

    Umm . . . like a ladybug?

   Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

   I’m a little tired of this — propping up the economy every year when it comes to Christmastime. I read in the papers where we must keep spending to keep ourselves out of yet another recession, and I’m doing my part, but it’s becoming burdensome. I can’t do it all alone.

    “Never again should we take a vacation early in December,” Mary said on our return recently from a week in Palm Springs. She was talking about walking underdressed into winter, and, initially, I’ll admit, it was a shock to go all of a sudden from the 70s and 80s to the 40s and 30s, but we’re acclimated now. In fact, I’d say it’s almost balmy as of this writing.

    While her thoughts were weather-related during that dawn takeoff — the only time during our stay I’d seen the burnt radiance of the desert sunrise over the backlit mountains, as compelling, by the way, as our sunsets at Three Mile Harbor — mine tended toward the agony of the holiday that awaited. Christmas will be upon us with all the vengeance of Superstorm Sandy, I thought.

    We had for a week somehow sluffed off the weight of obligations, and it had been wonderful. But, on our return, as I said, Christmas in all its enormity loomed.

    The Rubicon has been long crossed, nothing can be done. “Don’t, whatever you do, feel obligated in any way whatsoever,” we say to each other — out of a sense of obligation, before being tossed about once again by the season’s storm surge of social, economic, and psychic imperatives.

    Yet, once it’s all over, boredom and ennui, wonderful boredom and ennui, ensue — at least until Memorial Day, by which time, I hope, our credit card gods — and yours too, I say, with hearty good cheer — are fully appeased.

    Boredom and ennui . . . ah, the true tidings of comfort and joy.

   It was family day at East Hampton Bowl, though I didn’t know it at first on Sunday as I took our 8-year-old daughter there mid-afternoon just to get out of the house.

    Evvy and I had tried and failed to go bowling a week earlier, but had arrived after what apparently was a surprisingly early closing time; maybe it was just dark inside, but the lack of vehicles in the parking lot made it seem uninviting.

    Anyway this time, it was family day, we were told by the nice woman at the desk. We could bowl for an hour, and as many games as we liked within that time, for $35, shoes included. Almost all the lanes were filled, most with what appeared to be parents and young children. We were set up in lane six, next to a couple with a boy and a girl who looked about 6 and 9.

    Evvy and I got on our shoes, squared away the scoring, and started to bowl. Then we noticed the music. Top-40 pop was blasting from the speakers, no surprise there. But then, as we listened, we realized that the playlist was not, shall I say, family-friendly.

    At home, my wife, Lisa, and I have been trying to enforce a no-cursing rule. I was cured of sailor-mouth to some degree by the kids’ imposing a $10-per-bad-word fine, which paid them considerable dividends, I am chagrined to admit. Over time, however, it worked. I cut back, reducing my use of profanity even around the Star office.

    Lisa, who wanted no part of the deal, continued her merry ways. But now that our youngest, Ellis, is about to turn 3 and rapidly expanding his vocabulary, we have renewed our clean-up efforts. A foul word in his presence by anyone will result in that person suffering a 24-hour ban on the use of personal electronic devices, such as iPhones and laptop computers.

    So Evvy and I were shocked and stared at each other silently at the first four-letter word to roll from the bowling alley’s speakers. Then there was another. And another. I wasn’t keeping close count, but heard a couple of F-bombs, several N-words, and one or two S-drops.

    I couldn’t tell if any of the other adults in the place were listening. On family day, I guess, you just have to tune it all out.

   When Aaron Swartz, a technological genius, was found dead last week at the age of 26, an apparent suicide, he joined a phalanx of idealists who died for a cause. Explained simply, he believed that scholarly and scientific information should be shared on the Internet freely, and he did what he could to make that a reality.

    Whether his suicide was directly related to his imminent trial under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is not clear, but under the law he could have been sentenced to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the cybercrime he was accused of: downloading and distributing 4.8 million articles and documents from a subscription-only digital service.

    Mr. Swartz is said to have broken into a computer-wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to obtain the material. The service, Jstor, which distributes scientific and literary journals, did not choose to pursue the case, and M.I.T. officials, who expressed dismay over Mr. Swartz’s death, are investigating the university’s role in the matter. But the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts is noted for “particularly aggressive pursuit of cybercrimes,” according to a former investigator of such crimes for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    The disconnect is that technology has galloped far ahead of legal philosophy, that the complex issues raised in cyberspace do not seem to be adequately addressed by accepted concepts of right and wrong.

     In what The New York Times called a manifesto, Mr. Swartz had written, “It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative.” It will be a long time, I fear, before justice is appropriately served, at least by hindsight.

    It doesn’t seem likely that Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of classified government documents, did so to fulfill an idealistic goal like the one that motivated Aaron Swartz. But who knows? Perhaps the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, persuaded Private Manning that exposing federal secrets was in the long-range best interest of an informed, and free, American people. There are parallels between the young men, nevertheless.

    Mr. Swartz is credited with having been, at the age of 14, a co-creator of RSS, a basic online tool that allows content to be distributed. He also was one of the people who created Reddit, a social news site now owned by Condé Nast — and Reddit is apt to come up in Private Manning’s trial, which has been put off till June. It seems that Lauren McNamara, who has been expected to be a witness for Private Manning’s defense, chatted with him on Reddit before his arrest and has subsequently used Reddit to express opinions about the case. Only time will tell whether the court of history will determine that doing so was wrong.

   “Where do wars and internecine strife go?” the New Year asked on arriving at the dump.

    “Here, in nonreconcilables,” came the answer.

    “Thanks, it’s a heavy load.”

    “Wait, I’ll help you,” said the supervisor, sweeping some ancient antipathies into the pit as he made his way to the overstuffed van with the YR-2013 plate.

    “Here I am tossing them out and they’re not even paid for!”

    “Tell me about it, we’re a wasteful country. I’ve got some credit card debt of my own. My hair’s starting to turn gray and I’ve still got student loans to pay. Maybe if enough bright kids were able to receive an education without putting them in hock forever they could help get us back on track. . . . Oh, while I’m at it, deferred dreams go in that bin over there. I imagine you’ve got a few of those.”

    “Yes, I found the path to citizenship littered with them. I picked up as many as I could.”

    “What else you got?”

    “Well, there’s gallons of vitriol and countless vials of vilification, and decanted rants left over from the latest campaign. . . .”

    “They go in with the glass, broken promises, and shattered hopes. No, wait; they’re too flammable. Better put them with the assault and batteries, snake oil, and blown fuses down at the end of the shed.”

    “How about frivolous lawsuits?”

    “In the fear and clothing bin that’s on your way out.”

    “And all these amputated limbs?”

    “Limbs? Limbs go with the leaves and brush out back.”

    “And myriad miscarriages of justice?”

    “That sounds like a medical question. Hold on to them for a bit, I’ll have to ask.”

    “I guess it’s the same with bad blood. . . . Where do I unburden myself of hidebound religious beliefs?”

    “They’re rigid, right?”

    “Exceedingly so.”

    “You needn’t rip them apart, just lay them to rest with the cardboard.

. . . By the way, you don’t have any discarded Bushmasters? We’ve got a special area for disarmed firearms now.”

    “I wish I could say I did . . . I wish I could say I did. . . . “

    “Well, buck up, kid,” the supervisor said as the van with the shiny new bumper sticker began to pull away from the drop-off area. “The new year’s just begun. We’re Americans, we’re programmed to be hopeful. We’ve got no choice!”

   Let’s hear it for the Springs School’s fourth-grade opera, “Cat Tales” — or  “Ton of Fun 61 Opera” —  which was performed four times at Guild Hall this month. Imagine, 61 kids divided into small groups, writing a libretto, composing music, building sets and doing lighting, working on makeup, sewing costumes, and handling promotion. I’ve been to lots of kids’  productions over the years, including some directed by theater professionals, and you can take it from me: This was extraordinary.

    “Cat Tales” was the 16th annual adventure in opera at the Springs School. The genesis was a Metropolitan Opera Guild program for elementary school teachers. Sue Ellen O’Connor, Springs’s academic enrichment faculty member,  who has been coordinating the productions from the start, said Springs had expanded and refined the program over time. Ms. O’Connor supervises the writing, Margaret Thompson, the school’s music teacher, helps students experiment with sounds and melodies, and Kyril Bromley, a professional musician, puts the music and words together and gives the songs their finishing touches. They have been at it for years.

    The story line this year was familiar. One cat, Max, played by Brody Eggert, wants to play, but the others aren’t interested until . . . well, the opera has a happy ending. Ms. O’Connor said the program generates a lot of interest among students, with some waiting to emulate their older siblings. Third graders fill out preliminary applications for what they might like to do, and the project gets going at the beginning of the next school year with auditions for those interested in being in the cast. 

    Eleven cats had title roles in “Cat Tales,” with another 11 in the chorus. Their costumes were perfect. The kids drew them first and then were helped by parents at the sewing machines. Mr. Bromley said he likes to work with three or four students at a time rather than a batch of  fidgety 9-year-olds.  And, while fourth grade sounds awfully young for what is involved, he finds them less self-conscious than students in higher grades. They come up with “oddball, multiple ideas.”

    Adults assist, but the kids originate everything. To this listener, some of the outstanding songs (and there were 16 of them!) and some of the dialogue would have made adult writers and composers proud. I was particularly impressed by the message and melody of one of the songs, “When Does Later Come?,” and by the patter in “Whisker Twisters,” for twin cats. The cat twins were played by real ones, Caleb and Colin Wright, one of whom wrote the words, the other the music. (Evan Mendelman stood in at the last minute for the last performance when one of the twins took ill.)

    Ms. O’Connor believes that the operas have raised the bar on what students believe they can accomplish, and that therefore they help contribute to academic achievement and even test scores. “It’s empowerment,” she said.

    I am amused by the fact that three operas were on Guild Hall’s schedule this month in as many weeks. “Cat Tales”  was sandwiched between “Les Troyens”  by Berlioz and Donizetti’s  “Maria Stuarda”  in HD performances from the Met.

    Who knows? Perhaps someone who got his or her start as a Springs School performer will make it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera some day.

   In my mother-in-law’s house are two large black-and-white photos prominently displayed, of Secretariat with Ron Turcotte aboard, leaving their four 1973 Belmont Stakes competitors in the dust, 31 lengths behind, and of Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford in the opening game of the 1955 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers.

    She’s had them there ever since I can remember, and they’ve become all the more important to me as I think of her who died at Southampton Hospital early this morning, leaving the four children who had held her hands the last few days, way behind.

    It’s not dying that hurts, it’s living, says Emily Dickinson.

    These children, one of whom is my wife, are the birds that stay. And her mother, who had said, unafraid, “it’s the end of the game” when told the morphine drip she’d wanted was on its way, has, after having danced off third, stolen home.

    Only one thing worried her about me, that I tended to hunch, foreshadowing, I suppose, for her a full-circle return to the fetal position. I’ve been mindful therefore in the past few days that I should keep my chin up and my shoulders back. “Don’t hunch,” I hear her voice saying in my head. “Don’t hunch.”

    And so, trying not to hunch, I walked into the milky lights of Herrick Park the other night, after the morphine came, and stepped out onto the chalked line and ran twice around.

    Though I knew she had been a militant atheist, I told her on heading back to the car that I was accepting her as my personal trainer.

    Emily Dickinson also said that time did not assuage — if you really loved the one behind the door — though I have a hunch that the loving are, indeed, assuaged . . . that Mary Kernell, with all her keen intelligence, wry humor, and abiding love, lives, and will always live, in the birds who (for the moment) stay, until the pitying snows persuade their feathers home.

    In the name of the Bee — And of the Butterfly — And of the Breeze — Amen.