Recent Stories: Columnists

   Nostalgia, Platonic love, and a church-like experience would hardly be on the average man’s mind when contemplating a routine excursion to the East Hampton Town dump. Now the dump is referred to as the East Hampton Town recycling center. But Sunday arrived, time presented itself, the dump beckoned.
    Cardboard boxes, a damaged plastic storage container, a toy lightsaber, a carved wooden handle, a child’s club with a note of the aboriginal: These artifacts would make their final departure to the unknown.

   The pace is supposed to slow after Memorial Day, but I don’t see it happening. Could it be a portent of the busiest summer ever?
    June has usually been a respite between the weekend that traditionally marks the beginning of the season and the madness of July and August. Although second-home owners have long since stretched “the season” into fall and spring (and for some the winter holidays, too), it seems that this year June is being swept into the maelstrom.

   The perils of being a fair-skinned beachgoer are legion, particularly at the beginning of the summer when no manner of sunscreen seems to protect one from the inevitable beach nap burn.
    It takes place every year on the first day at the beach when sunscreen is seemingly carefully applied to face and body and an umbrella adds extra protection. This time of year, unless you have a wetsuit, swimming is not the object of visiting the beach. The ocean’s calming sound and pretty majesty are the primary sources of its appeal now.

   Let us now praise all things good about Memorial Day weekend. It goes without saying that those who live here year round usually stagger away from the first onslaught of the season complaining: “Oh my God,” or, “Help us! It’s begun,” or, yes, “It’s never, ever been worse!”
    So what good things, you ask?

Dear significant-others of the comb over guys,
    I know you are suffering, and I am here to help. Trim this part off and leave the rest of this article around the house for the gents to see in the sanctity of the room where they do the comb-over.

The Comb-Over
    Do the gentlemen with seven hairs 11 inches long that stretch from left ear to right ear really think that that looks like a healthy head of hair? Really?

   “Whose Garden Was This,”  an evocative song by Tom Paxton, who lived in East Hampton for many years, came into my head this week after I drove through the railroad underpass on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton and was suddenly startled, not by an approaching vehicle (although that is a real concern), but by a stand of some two dozen wild lupines. I had forgotten how stunning their blue-purple flag-like flowers are.

   Ah, Memorial Day, how did you come upon us so quickly? I don’t know about my fellow locals, but I’m just not ready for you.
    I’m already missing winter’s empty stores, quiet checkout lines, and roads that were not yet filled with pedestrians and bike riders who don’t seem to get that there are vehicles in their midst, people rushing to their jobs, people in a hurry. The bumper sticker that says, “We’re not all on vacation,” says it all.

   The provocative story of what happened when an Associated Press reporter broke the news that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, ending World War II, came across my desk this week — by random coincidence, at the same time controversy was breaking out over the recent revelation that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained records of 20 A.P. phone lines.

   “It feels like years since it’s been here,” sang George Harrison in the Beatles’ soul-soothing song “Here Comes the Sun.” Yes, “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter” but “smiles [are] returning to the faces.” The 60-degree weather and returning greenery and blossoms are visible in every direction I turn, and I caught myself smiling ear to ear when my iPhone camera turned its lens on me instead of the cherry blossom tree I was aiming to capture during a recent walk.

   Two of my gal pals and I have been doing yoga together now for 10 years. Ani, our teacher, insists we’ve only just begun — that it takes years and years —  and years — to get good at it.

   The one thing my children know is not to buy me perfume for Mother’s Day on Sunday. And even though the perfume makers purport to use all types of natural ingredients, such as sandalwood, rose, patchouli, white lilies, and ambergris, they also use chemicals that are not listed on the label that include benzoin resin, deer musk, acetoin, bisabolol, and perillaldehyde, whatever that is. No wonder I’m allergic to it.