About a week ago, a small parcel, postmarked San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrived at the office. Inside, cushioned against breaking, was an old glass bottle of the sort that might have once contained a soft drink.

    The legend, “J. D’Amico Quality Bottler,” in raised letters, appeared on one side, and “Amagansett, N.Y.” on the other. Vertical ribs made it reflect light in a colorful way. In the hand, its tapered midsection was vaguely reminiscent of the classic Mae West Coca-Cola bottle. The raised letters at bottom said it once contained seven fluid ounces.

    Rolled and tucked into its narrow neck was the following note, dated Jan. 2:

    “Hey Man!”

    “Found this bottle wedged in between two rocks on a beach in Belize. I’m traveling the Caribbean, photographing hotels and wealthy families on vacation. I am in P.R. now, on my way to Anguilla. Running out of paper so I’ll drop you a line when I return to N.Y.C. All my best! Chris. P.S.: Happy new year.”

    Chris, who sent me the bottle, is Chris Manis, a friend who is singularly the most adept finder of things I have ever known. Back in the 1990s, when I lived in the city, he was continually picking up loose cash from the sidewalk, a dropped earring, some interesting tool, or piece of furniture left in the trash. I asked him what his secret was. “I never look up,” he said.

    According to Carleton Kelsey’s “Amagansett: A Pictorial History, 1680-1940,” Joseph D’Amico ran a barbershop and ice cream parlor on the north side of Amagansett Main Street in the early part of the 20th century. An advertisement in a 1910 issue of this newspaper for the J. D’Amico Tonsorial Parlor noted that he stocked cigars, and canary birds and cages.

    Later, in 1932, an immigrant from Sicily, Salvatore LaCarrubba, bought the building, which had once been occupied by the Life-Saving Service, and opened a shoemaking and repair business. A few months later, LaCarrubba’s began selling clothes. From my cursory reading, I did not find out what became of Mr. D’Amico.

    It is difficult to imagine by what circumstances a bottle that may well have first been sold in an Amagansett shop ended up on a beach in Belize, some 1,800 miles away in a straight line. In those days, there was still a vigorous coastal trade, so it is possible that, after being carried to New England, it accompanied a shipment of salt cod or some other commodity on a long voyage south. Doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

   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.

   “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.

   Sharp criticism greeted the New York Post editors’ decision this week to put a photograph of a man about to be struck and killed by a subway train on the cover of the Tuesday edition. The image presented the Post with a dilemma its editors are likely to face a lot more than we do at The Star: when to run or not run photographs that could cross a moral or ethical line. I’m not saying the Post made the right choice, but the question is more nuanced than the critics make out.

    People quickly took to Twitter and other online forums to denounce the choice. Taken by an occasional Post contributor, the image was of Ki-Suk Han, 58, just after he was pushed from the platform and as he was scrambling to climb to safety.

    R. Umar Abbas, who took the photograph, told the Post that he had been on the same platform and had begun running toward the train firing his camera, hoping the train’s driver would see its flash and stop in time. Others on the platform were similarly unable to help.

    The controversy over the photo, of course, has assured its distribution. Other media outlets, such as The New York Times, piled on. The journalistic thinking in reprinting or airing the troubling image of Mr. Han’s last moment was that because the Post was widely faulted for running it, the photograph itself had become news.

    To me, the criticism seems disingenuous. So many front pages of the nation’s newspapers in recent years have had photographs of the dead, often children, killed in wars, in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. How is it somehow different and across a line to show one of our own people, a New Yorker, about to be killed?

    If it was wrong of the Post to publish it — and for The Times and many others to reproduce the Post’s Tuesday cover — it is also unacceptable for The Times and others to run images of those killed by United States drone strikes, terrorists’ attacks, and Israel’s retaliatory bombings in Gaza.

    Our contemporary culture is soaked in images of death. To be outraged at the Post but ignore all the rest seems hollow. It can be an unpredictable, and brutal, world, and the news media by and for adults must reflect that unfortunate truth.

   I was more than confident, I was cocky.     

   It was the first week of October. I was sitting at the weekly East Hampton Star editorial meeting. I had already talked about what I anticipated the next few days would bring me on my beat, which is cops and robbers, plus the town’s zoning and planning boards. (Sometimes the last two are confused for the first two, but they are different, I swear.)

    I was finishing up, and, almost as an aside, I said, “I have jury duty on Tuesday.”

    I know how the system works. Hell, I’m part of the system. I’d be put through voir dire for one or two trials and then dismissed. It would only be a day or two at most. There was no way I’d be chosen.

    “There’s as much chance of me being picked for a jury as there is of me being elected president of the United States next month,” I joked. Everyone laughed. Who’d want a juror who covered cops and robbers on their jury?

    It had been many years since I’d last done jury duty. Many years. Twelve deferrals ago. Sometimes I would get a summons and ignore it. A second summons would follow the first, this time much sterner. I’d go down to Centre Street and tell them I was going to be away on business, or I’d just started a new job, or yada yada yada. The stories I told the clerks over the years were always true, but I knew that I was ducking an obligation.

    “Okay, well, your new date is Oct. 9,” the clerk told me the last time I was there in June.

    I was being summoned for jury duty in Manhattan because, while I’ve worked for The Star since the beginning of the year, I haven’t given up our Manhattan residence. Some people are bi-coastal, I’m bi-island.

    On Oct. 9 I was due to appear in New York State Supreme Court as a potential juror in a criminal trial. Might as well finally get it over with — I was untouchable. And I wouldn’t receive any more of those pesky summonses for six years.

    At 9 a.m. that morning I stood in line with several hundred other potential jurors outside 100 Centre Street, waiting to pass through security. I was reminded of what a quiet town East Hampton really is when I got near the door and looked at the arraignment schedule posted there.

    Under the Constitution, after being arrested, arrestees must be arraigned — that is, told judicially what the state is charging them with — within 24 hours of the arrest. In East Hampton, it is an impromptu process. Last night’s drunken driver, after sleeping it off in a holding cell at police headquarters, will be brought to East Hampton Town Court after the judge sitting that day has had an opportunity to review paperwork from the police, usually around 10 in the morning.

    Not so in Manhattan. In the city, courts dedicated to arraignments operate throughout the day, 24/7. The jail, known as the Tombs, is attached to the courthouse via an enclosed bridge, so arrestees can be brought right over.

    I went to the jurors’ waiting room on the 15th floor. It was the size of a gymnasium, filled with chairs. No worries. I’d soon be a free man.

    I had a heavy load that week from The Star. I found a little corner and set up my laptop on a box. I heard my name called. Shoot. I packed up my laptop and headed to the 13th floor.

    Thirteen. Hmmm.

    There were 50 of us sitting in the courtroom. The judge, Justice Lewis Bart Stone, explained that the trial would probably last until about Nov. 8. Jeez, I thought. I’m glad I’m not going to be on this one.

    My name was called again, this time to sit in the jury box with 17 other prospective jurors. This was a process that would be repeated as many times as necessary until the attorneys and the judge agreed on the 12 jurors plus three alternates needed to proceed to trial. We were handed laminated cards, on which were a series of questions. The last question was, in essence: Do you have any friends or relatives who are either attorneys, members of a police force, or either accused or convicted felons?

    When I got to that one, I paused for a moment, then said, “I have friends who are attorneys, I have friends who are cops, and I have friends who are alleged criminals. That’s my job.”

    The courtroom broke out in laughter. Yes! I would be on my way to East Hampton in just a few more minutes.

    We were all sent to wait in the hallway outside while the attorneys and judge negotiated over who would be kept and who would be sent home. I talked with two prospective jurors who’d been in the pool of 18 while we waited. He was a doctor and she was a corrections officer.

    “You’re overeducated, and there is no way they’re keeping a corrections officer,” I said to them. “We’ll all be dismissed.”

    They called us back into the courtroom and called three names. The doctor, the corrections officer, and, of course, me.

    Six weeks later, on Nov. 21, 2012, the jury in the case of the People of the State of New York vs. Marte, Marte-Tejada, Meran, and Osuna rendered its verdict. In the interim, the doctor and the corrections officer were released from the jury for personal reasons.

    Me, I was still there. The 12 remaining jurors rendered justice as best we could, given the information presented to us. I came away from the experience with a profound sense of gratitude for being able to live in a country where the people are in charge of rendering justice.

    Still, thinking back to that early-October editorial meeting, I guess I should have run for president after all.

    When he is not on jury duty, T.E. McMorrow covers police and government news for The Star.

   BookHampton has a daily quiz now, and so I thought why oughtn’t I to have one too.

    Which Shakespearean characters said:

    1. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

    2. “For in a minute there are many days.”

    3. “It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

    4. “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t is I know how to curse.”

    5. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

    6. “Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an eseam-ed bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty!”

    7. “Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

    8. “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye. . . . Talkers are no good doers.”

    9. “My library was dukedom large enough.”

    10. “A plague o’ both your houses!”

    11. “Who hath it [honor]? He that died a Wednesday.”

    12. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more: Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

    13. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

    14. “Naught’s had, all’s spent where our desire is got without content.”

    15. “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls, doing more murder in this loathsome world than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.”

    16. “And yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.”

    17. “O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”

    18. “What light is light if Sylvia be not seen — what joy is joy if Sylvia be not by.”

    19. “There is no world without Verona walls but purgatory, torture, hell itself.”

    20. “Care is no cure, but rather corrosive for things that are not to be remedied.”

    Answers: 1. Dick to Jack Cade, “Henry VI, Part 2”; 2. Juliet; 3. Lady Macbeth; 4. Caliban, “The Tempest”; 5. Trinculo, “The Tempest”; 6. Hamlet; 7. The Banished Duke, “As You Like It”; 8. Richard III; 9. Prospero, “The Tempest”; 10. Mercutio, “Romeo and Juliet”; 11. Falstaff, “Henry IV, Part 1”; 12. Henry V; 13. Malcolm, “Macbeth”; 14. Lady Macbeth; 15. Romeo; 16. Nerissa, “The Merchant of Venice”; 17. Antony; 18. Valentine, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”; 19. Romeo; 20. Pucelle (Joan of Arc), “Henry VI, Part 1.”

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

    There is so much more than is dreamt of in my philosophy that all I can say, sitting in this Jacuzzi in a desert, with mountains behind it, and above them the vastness of the universe, listening to Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and Jim Hall playing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” is, “I may not be very smart, but I know what heaven is.”

    We have some time on this vacation to take delight in each other, and to remember why we were magnetized from the start. The feeling is always there, but the distractions that are in the aggregate largely known as life often get in the way.

    This week in Palm Springs is, in our 28th year of marriage, our honeymoon. She reads to me from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, I read to her from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and though I overdo the steaks and underdo the pork chops on the grill, it’s all right. The margaritas I’ve got down pat, thanks to Alex Silvio.

    It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind.

    Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

    So, as I sat down at the computer on a quiet morning the day after Christmas, I came up blank. There was little noise in the house other than the breathing of our ancient pug, who was resting in the dog bed she reluctantly shares with our pet house-pig. The north wind of the night before had stopped; looking through the kitchen windows, even the smallest of winter’s bare branches were still. Our children were still asleep, tired from a long run the day before. Starting early with presents, then a brunch here, then a round of visiting that ended at nearly 11 p.m., it had been a good day.

   So I sat, thinking that I welcomed the near-total silence in the house. The year, and especially the month or two leading up to the day after Christmas, had been demanding. Summer had come and gone with its frenetic pace. And then, when I thought things were about to wind down, Hurricane Sandy upended normal routines. Against the tense backdrop of the presidential race, the war in Afghanistan and drone strikes in Pakistan continued to add to the lists of the dead, though Americans seemed increasingly immune to the news. Then came the Newtown, Conn., killings.

    This has been a year for reflection necessitated by events, but events that are difficult to process. The great annual reset that is the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day, could not come soon enough, as far as 2012 is concerned.

   I love winter here: The office phones ring less in January and February. The great and unrelenting river of e-mail narrows a bit. There is time for a walk on the beach, time to plan. There is time to be with our thoughts between distractions, and this I look forward to most of all.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

    A similar feeling of joy in the outdoors occurred on Christmas Day when we went to spend time with my son David and his family in the house on Gardiner’s Bay where he and my other children grew up. Being out in the wild landscape — and the blustering wind — of Napeague lifts my spirits and, this week, reinforced the daydream I indulge in that someday much of the sandy and exotic land that surrounds the house will become a park.

    Perhaps we all were meant to live in the outdoors. Or maybe it’s just that being outdoors reminds me, personally, of the well-being I felt as a child on my grandparents’ 108-acre farm in the Catskills or as a college student during the summers I was a counselor at a summer camp, where we slept in lean-tos or teepees or under the shelter of a covered wagon. In any case, when our house on Napeague was finished in 1963, I embraced the rare landscape that surrounded it. The house was not just isolated, it was, in fact, one of the only houses in sight and the only one on our empty road that was lived in year-round.

    These days there are plenty of houses along Cranberry Hole Road, but, as far as I am concerned, it is still one of eastern Long Island’s last great places.

    I have saved part of a column that Larry Penny, The Star’s nature columnist, wrote in these pages some time ago about why Napeague is to be treasured. I am not sure that those who make decisions about how the Town of East Hampton uses its community preservation fund think often about Napeague, or the part of it called Promised Land, but here is some of what Mr. Penny had to say:

    “The water table is only a few feet below, and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dune plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe in all of America.”

    Edible wild mushrooms and prickly pear cactus grow on Napeague. There are other rare plants, including lady slippers; cranberry bogs can be found off the road to the south, and wildlife, from toads to snakes to foxes. We have found huge old whale bones, over the years, in the dune craters between Cranberry Hole and Montauk Highway; it is easy to dig up arrowheads, too (although I won’t tell you where).

    If I could, I would gather botanists and zoologists, birders and expert environmentalists and ask them to draw a heavy line around the part of the landscape that remains, in Larry’s words, “very much intact” and, as Larry suggested, preserve it “for future centuries.”