Last night, while entertaining friends, I received an urgent call labeled code red from an Island-based public agency. The purpose was to inform me of a free flu shot. My first thought was that maybe a major massacre had occurred on the Island when they announced it was a code red emergency.

The first snowdrop to appear on the Vineyard this year was reported last Monday by Tom Hodgson of West Tisbury, who has become the Island’s unofficial chronicler of what is thought to be a harbinger of spring.

It seems like the whole Island came down with the flu overnight. That’s not true, of course, but this week it became clear that the Vineyard had not escaped a nationwide early outbreak of influenza that has prompted a state of emergency in Boston.

Glued to the television during the last quarter of 2012 as events unfolded, the senatorial and presidential debates and triumphs, Hurricane Sandy, the northeaster, and then the tragedy and long mourning in Newtown, Conn., I had a mid-course emotional reaction, a sadness which now seems rather trivial. At the height of Sandy, while watching the boardwalk at Atlantic City break up piece by piece and float out to sea, memories of childhood summers spent there visiting my grandmother floated in on a tide of nostalgia

As I started writing this, I found myself wondering how to make people understand something that they have already made up their minds about. It’s so easy to stereotype a person or a place. America isn’t all fast food and violence and Brazil isn’t just made up of favelas. For those who don’t know, a favela is a city within a city, a separate world. The very name is synonymous with violence and poverty, and yet when I had an opportunity to visit one I found that it wasn’t that simple.