Recent Stories: Opinion

    Daisy, Violet, and Gladiola are flowers, but they’re also people who happen to have charming floral names popular in England when they were born. These three blossoms are known among family and friends as the Three Flowers. Perennials who are getting past their prime, first bloom long gone, but they remain vital, engaged, and reasonably healthy for their 96, 93, and 88 years.

    People who study suicide scientifically, like me, have long recognized how society stigmatizes those who complete suicide and their remaining relatives. Historical records show that during the Middle Ages suicide corpses were regularly mutilated to prevent the unleashing of evil spirits. Suicides were denied burial in church cemeteries. Afterward, the property of their surviving kin was usually confiscated, and families were excommunicated for failing to pay the heavy tithes expected by the church.

    Are you grouchy, grumpy, or gloomy at this time of year? Irritable? Depressed, drowsy, tired? Maybe a headache? Your spirits sag? Or you suffer silently, your mind wanders, ideas elude you?
    If so, you may have a case of spring fever, like Dorothy Parker, who kvetched: “Every year, back comes spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up. . . .”
    Does spring fever really exist, or is it an imaginary ailment? Does your body change its chemistry and rhythms?

    After his triumphant election in November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to wait five months to address the desperate condition of the nation’s banking system, while exiting President Hoover rained down appeals to F.D.R. to endorse a continued gold standard.
    Roosevelt was interested in restoring confidence in the American financial system. To that end, he recruited a non-banker, a pillar of New York City and East Hampton, William H. Woodin.

    We of a certain age and perhaps a certain degree of affluence may not have a huge store of old photographs. Certainly nowhere near as many as are being accumulated in this digital age. But, thank God for the ones we have! They capture past moments of a reality, for the most part, a reality that had a gala edge. One can almost enter an old scene and re-experience the moment. Sometimes that step-in even will allow you to supply your own soundtrack.

    The second connection between me and Whitey Bulger, the star monster of the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list, never came to light until two years ago when, after some 16 years of searching, they found him hiding out as another harmless-looking, white-bearded retiree in sunny Santa Monica, Calif.

    Is it Presidents’ Day or President’s Day, a question that seems to have divided the nation in the great punctuation war being waged last week in the media. I will leave it to grammarians to settle where the apostrophe properly belongs.
    Either way, as a historian, I think it an outrage the way we are now forced to celebrate George Washington’s birthday (so-called President’s or Presidents’ Day).

    Our proposal began like a dream, with two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes over a candlelight dinner, but quickly morphed into a Greek tragedy starring Italian actors.
    Getting married in an Italian family is not only an event between the bride and bridegroom but also an occasion for them to establish relationships with each other’s families. The success of many Italian marriages often depends on whether the family accepts the proposed mate.

   In 1976, Marilynn and I found ourselves together as housemates in a large, run-down Victorian just outside Boston, pursuing our careers, she as a nurse and me, a teacher. That year, she taught me to love snow.
    Marilynn was from a small town in upstate New York where cold and white winters last four to six months of the year. Growing up there, she did what people who live in snow do: play, snowshoe, and ski to get around.

    The students enter the building through a side door, where they promptly submit backpacks and any other personal items to the N.Y.P.D. safety agent who greets them at the steps. There’s a male agent for the boys, a female for the girls. Everyone is scanned for weapons, cellphones, and drugs upon entering the building. Some of the more committed students have already hidden items inside a shoe, their underwear, perhaps the lining of a wig. The rest have scattered belongings in various spots throughout the neighborhood.

   While you don’t have to be a woman to enjoy “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” it certainly helps. The smattering of men in the audience at the Southampton Cultural Center on Thursday night seemed to be enjoying themselves at this frothy pink cocktail of a production, but it was the women who laughed the most and the longest.

   The second week of December I was talking with a boy in Guines, Cuba. Guines is about 60 kilometers southeast of Havana. We were standing just outside the Presbyterian Reformed Church, where I was a guest along with Barbara D’Andrea of Wainscott. The boy, Nathaniel, just now 17, asked me, “What day was Jesus Christ born? The date.”
    I was startled by the question, first that he didn’t­ know the date of Christmas, and second that he asked me. I answered him in an adult way, registering no surprise.