Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

It is difficult now to empathize with my teenage self, who, along with a lot of other year-rounders, fantasized constantly about keeping city folk from getting here. High tolls were one notion. Getting rid of the canal bridge altogether was another. Ours, like the president’s, was an arbitrary distinction: Our friends from the city and their parents were cool; everyone else was not cool.

Okay, so this is not to say that we were exactly like Mr. Trump. He arrived by helicopter on his one memorable visit to the neighborhood, during which he attended a beach volleyball match played by a bunch of models. Still, in the same way he demonizes Latin Americans, we blamed the summer influx of “outsiders” for all our ills. What we did not realize then was that we had met the enemy and he was us.

East Hampton has had a love-hate relationship with people from away for more than 100 years. We like the money, but resent the changes and think we can have it both ways. As kids in the 1970s, for us, it played out in whom we hung out with at Indian Wells. 

In my own adolescent group of friends, the city girls provided the opportunity for a date. Or maybe it was that, wisely, the local girls knew enough to want nothing to do with us. But, at the same time, we would whine about the city people messing everything up while the grown-ups allowed the farm fields to be carved into house lots and the woods trails to be blocked off by tennis courts. Sure, the folks from the big city might be buying, but we were the ones selling.

When we were a little older, a friend put an ad in the paper with a drawing of a Jeep with a laser mounted where the rear seats would have been. His business — entirely a fantasy, mind you — was called the McMansion Eliminator or some such foolishness. We all thought it was hilarious.

Fact is that East Hampton was and is inextricably tied to the city and suburbs to the west as Mexico and Latin America are to the United States. My friends and I eventually wised up. It is a pity that the Build the Wall! crowd never did.

Presidents Day was celebrated earlier this week, and, of course, we at The Star were working rather than reflecting on how far the country has come, or regressed, since George Washington and Abraham Lincoln led it. 

Washington, as I learned in Joseph J. Ellis’s new book, “American Dialogue,” had earnestly wanted to have Native Americans settled in enclaves throughout the country, and had even signed a treaty with the Creeks toward this end, but “manifest destiny,” the great westward push, put the kibosh to those plans, to which he’d devoted much of his first term, and, consequently, “slow-motion genocide” ensued.

Ellis’s book was an eye-opener for me. Jefferson stood alone, for 

instance, when it came to envisioning an agrarian egalitarian paradise with incidental governing. Other founders, such as John Adams, James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, and who, with Gouverneur Morris, largely provided us with our Constitution, and Alexander Hamilton were for a strong central government. Washington too, I believe. 

(I had always thought of Adams in more or less pejorative terms, as an implementer of the Sedition Act, which struck home here with the libel conviction in 1799 of David Frothingham, who, in 1791, began editing Long Island’s first newspaper, The Long-Island Herald, in Sag Harbor. The alleged libel, of Hamilton, the then-Secretary of the Treasury, wasn’t published in The Herald, but in The New York Argus, in Brooklyn, in 1799, resulting in Frothingham’s arrest, trial, and conviction. Freedom of speech and of the press were to be enshrined later. Presumably to satisfy the $2,500 bond, Frothingham set to sea, never to be heard from again.)

Anyway, Ellis makes note that it was Adams who predicted our present state of vast inequality, telling Jefferson, who thought we were done with such Old World oligarchical stuff, that “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. . . . I repeat, so long as the Idea and existence of property is admitted and established in Society, accumulations of it will be made, the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”

Therefore, “the invisible hand of the marketplace,” according to Adams’s lights, and Ellis’s account, “required the visible hand of government to regulate its inevitable excesses,” an insight that was to become embodied in the New Deal.             

Ellis says that Franklin Roosevelt, in underlining the need for New Deal legislation, argued that “only enhanced government power at the federal level could offset the economic imbalances fostered by large corporations, manage a huge industrial economy, and redistribute wealth in order to ensure that ordinary workers shared in the bounty.” As Ellis describes it, “This positive profile of government as ‘us’ rather than ‘them’ became received wisdom in mainstream American politics for the next 50 years.”

You probably know the rest, alas, so that’s all for now.            

When my last column went to press, my husband, Chris, was a patient at the Lahey Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. The good news is he is now in a rehabilitation center in Waltham, Mass., and his treatment is well underway. Although Chris’s doctor has informed us that this four-month course of chemotherapy will be no walk in the park — and that it might be six months or more before Chris regains his full strength — the good news is that his form of lymphoma is a very common one, and this particular treatment has been standard for 45 years. The outlook is excellent.

Leaving the hospital for rehabilitation was anything but simple. We do not have a plethora of “acute rehab” options here on eastern Long Island, so it was evident quite soon after we began our search that Chris would be extending his stay in the greater Boston area, and that I would be clocking a lot of time on the Cross Sound Ferry.

Many rehab centers that, in theory, accept patients on chemo, in practice avoid doing so. The job fell to Chris’s brother Bob, who happens to live in Massachusetts, and me to take a sort of tour to have a look at those that do. We spent a long day visiting and trying to evaluate each thoughtfully.

All of these centers, in Massachusetts as well as here in New York State, rely on Medicare funds, and as the day went on, the idea of health care equality was prominent in our thoughts. 

Even if different centers receive the same amount of money from Medicare for a given patient, the treatment he or she finds from place to place is anything but equal. The facilities we toured were widely diverse. 

The head nurse who showed us around the first was sullen and unsmiling. It was a small, institutional building with neat grounds, but the patient rooms were below ground and had few windows. The main physical-therapy room was small, and the young woman we found working there confided that the place was under new corporate management. It was not up to scratch.

The next center was old but modernized and huge by comparison. We were greeted at the entrance by two men in wheelchairs who looked at us with what I interpreted to be hostile thoughts. Physically, this facility — with its tiled hallways and slanted walkways — was attractive enough, but we saw hardly anyone out and about.

How is one supposed to judge a medical facility as a day visitor? 

I looked for pleasant environments, apparently adequate staff, and, principally, whether staff or patients smiled as we said hello. The breakthrough didn’t occur until the next morning; the last place on the list got high marks. 

Finally, we had found what we were looking for. It was of modest size, with attractive single bedrooms and pullout couches for loved ones to spend the night. A staff member told us she had worked there for 30 years. Everyone smiled. One of the first people we met was the facility manager. He was changing a lightbulb because the maintenance man was out shoveling snow. 

Poking around in these rehab centers came as something of a shock: Some patients, clearly, are getting much more for the government’s dollar than others. One thing was clear, and that is that there is a grave need for more comprehensive oversight of how taxpayers’ money is being spent.

The wind has been out of character this winter here by the beach. Normally, by now we would have had a couple of classic northeasters; instead, there have been just a few easterly blows followed by hard wind from the west or northwest.

This has saved the Gardiner’s Bay shore from Devon to Promised Land, so far, its usual beatings. There are plenty of weeks left to come, and March often brings the hardest weather, but what seems to me a shift from the usual pattern feels odd.

At Ditch Plain on Sunday with my friend Chris, we noticed that the beach was unusually wide and smooth. Sand had filled the area from Poles to the jetty and around to the Trailer Park, something neither of us recalled seeing for years.

My guess was that it was the persistent westerlies, the same ones that choked Amagansett with field dust, that had brought the sand in. Toward downtown Montauk, the bluff hoodoos had sloughed off large blocks of soil in recent rains; these, I suspected, are quickly broken up by the waves and the sand carried to the nearby hook of the beach. In other places, the ground had become near liquid and come down to rest like so many successive lava flows but in miniature. These, too, meant more sand for the beach.

Nearby, Chris and I came on the last remaining wreckage of the Rheinstein house that stood on the bluff from 1928 to 1976. Two stone-and-cement driveway posts rested on the beach, among a scatter of broken pipe and bits of brick. The landward section of the foundation slipped onto the beach in 2003. Poles, as the surfing spot out front is called, got its name from a set of pilings, now gone, too, that once had been part of an attempt to stabilize the bluff.

Ditch is fat with sand at the moment. If it stays that way through the summer there will be a lot of pleased beachgoers, unaware of the price in many feet of eroded bluff.         

“Have you noticed we’ve been watching a lot of movies about old people?” Mary said as we were viewing “The Last Laugh” with Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss on TV. She paused a moment. “How did they get so old?!”

It’s true, I don’t look a day over 79, and Mary’s eternal youth is often remarked upon. She’s Irish, my valentine, with those high cheekbones, that’s why, and she’s got that Irish spirit. 

I guess that’s the way it is. One is always taken aback at how much others have aged, but in denial when it comes to oneself. I don’t feel old, mentally that is. I’m younger than springtime that way, though the joints need oiling. If steroids were widely available, with no harmful side effects, such as are rapidly ticked off in miracle drug TV ads, often including among the whispered risks “slight possibilities of coronary infarction and severe liver damage” — I would take them.

You do want to keep on keeping on as long as possible, to go while planting your cabbages or while planting a kiss, oblivious to oblivion. 

But some preparatory steps should be taken, I guess. Along that line, I was asked recently by one of our executors where I’d like my obsequies to be held. Perhaps at The Star itself. I’ve spent much of my life here, after all, and I don’t belong to any church or fraternal order or fire department or veterans organization that has a hall. 

Lewis Thomas said music was, in the end, humanity’s best invention, so I’ll make a playlist, beginning with “Stardust,” of course, and then go on to “Fly Me to the Moon,” a favorite of Mary’s, “By the Sea,” because that’s where we live, and “This Land Is Your Land,” because that’s how we ought to live. . . . Or, it occurs to me, I could get a Bose surround sound system and listen to all of those songs now right in my own house! Lugubriousness can wait.

Meanwhile, it’s Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the lone star tick.

We all know it’s been cold, and we all know how to procrastinate. What do I avoid doing? Paying bills, sorting through the junk drawer(s), going through old papers and magazines. You know the drill. 

But one has to do something when not doing the thing that needs to be done. 

Enter the time wasters. 

There are those little nuggets of time to be found while waiting for disks to burn, a return e-mail, or files to upload. Sitting at my computer with the big screen, while waiting for electronic things, I have been known to play a kind of scrabble against a computer. I tell myself that this is strengthening my brain and vocabulary, and, thus, I am actually not wasting time. Ah, but there are other things that engage me.

Much like the Jimmy Stewart character in “Rear Window” — both of us being photographers and both of us being indoors (he for a broken leg, me hiding out from the cold) — we have found entertainment in “the window.” He watched a murder; I am watching the peaceable kingdom. He watched his neighbors, I watch Africa from my computer window. 

Africam.com, is a website I found years ago when my family had just gotten back from a photo safari to East Africa and I could not get enough of anything Africa. The site features live feeds from remote cameras in the South African wild. I found myself staying late at the office to watch the watering holes in the African daytime. 

Enter the polar vortex and Africa once again seems a really great escape from the chill. I have abandoned the faux Scrabble game and begun to watch Africa, streaming live, in my house. 

The time difference messes up your creature watching big time. When it’s 2 p.m. here, it’s 9 p.m. in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. The watering holes are lit up, but not a creature is stirring. Anyone who watches animals knows you never know what’s going to happen. At Tembe Elephant Park, as I watch, two impalas are illuminated on the screen. Turning up the volume I hear the sounds of the South African watering hole. The animals are doing what I am doing, a continent and an ocean away — we are just hanging out.

I notice that their eyes glow at night, when the transmission looks black-and-white, little spots of glowing impala eyes. The remote camera sometimes zooms in for a close-up, zooms out and then gives a wide angle, and then scans the viewing area. The crickets and other things buzz, and the impalas never seem to blink. They must have spectacular wide-angle eyesight. Their eyes glow when seen from the front, the side, and even when facing away. Like goats, they sit down front legs first. When they get up, they get up fast.

As a kid I looked at animal books all the time and visited the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History and saw all the Disney movies. I figured I knew my animals, but when you visit a game park on real safari or “window” safari, you realize there are animals you have never heard of: topi, for example, and nyala. Nyala, which visit this watering hole, and are yellow-legged antelope with a long-haired strip down their spines and they have stripes. Their babies are really cute. I learned this yesterday. Educational time waster. 

I can identify the Egyptian geese by their call, and I can tell a young nyala (vertically striped) from a young impala, and I bet you didn’t know a waterbuck has a bull’s-eye on his/her backside.

I can’t control when the camera moves and scans, and it’s a bit frustrating when you hear a splash and wonder what happened and you can’t see it. There are five cameras to check on the Africam site. My favorite location is Tembe Elephant Park in Maputaland, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (I found it on Google Earth). See, I’m also learning geography. This is not a time waster; this is interesting. 

In the past week I have seen a genet being startled by some elephants coming in for a drink. A bunch of impalas carefully avoided what appeared to be either a dead thing or a big bone by the edge of the watering hole. They each stopped, took a look, and gave it a wide swath as they passed by. I felt like I was watching an open casket funeral. Two days later they paid no attention to it at all. I watched a thunder and lightning storm and the animals didn’t care at all, but it was loud in my room and my cats did not enjoy it.

For the truly addicted, the site has an animal alert app for personal devices that lets you pick the animals you want to follow. And for the truly lazy, you can check in to see what was photographed and video-ed by the remote staff while you were otherwise engaged. One of the latest videos showed a small herd of elephants wallowing.

When does a time waster become a hobby? 

Last night I left the site on, with the sound low so the crickets and the crows and such wouldn’t bother me. This morning when I headed to check my email before getting ready for the day, there on my screen were two giraffes mock fighting! They swing their necks and kind of hip/shoulder bump each other — standing hip to shoulder, each facing a different direction — with the goal of moving the opponent sideways. This was going on right outside my “window.”

How cool is it that on my way to the shower I can observe animal behavior, learn a few things, and be totally transported before brushing my teeth. There is even a photo feature, so I can have my own “ safari” memories to share.

Some may say I’m wasting my time, but isn’t real life better than a video game?

While writing this, I have the site open to live feed for all of the watering holes. It’s now 4 our time, 11 in South Africa. The impala have yet to blink, as far as I can tell. There is a loud kind of splashing and I have been trying to reach the camera remote guy to scan the view at Tembe to see what’s making that wet noise, but to no avail. Maybe a goose landed and belly-flopped, but no. The sound gets louder. As I stop typing and go to full-screen mode, an elephant comes in from below the camera. First the head, then shoulders, then the rest of it showed up. The sound I was hearing was chewing and slurping. The impala got up, hind legs first, and got out of the way and the elephant went to a puddle, not the watering hole, and slurped like a kid with an ice cream soda. He slurped up the puddle with his trunk, swung it up and gave himself a drink — in perfect profile to the camera and to me. I took a picture.

I have not yet paid my bills but I did write this.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer to The Star.

To get an idea about what team spirit means, all you have to do is go to the greater Boston area at Super Bowl time. I was there last week because my husband was a patient at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, and everyone seemed to be wearing New England Patriots T-shirts emblazoned with the number 12 all weekend long. It was patriotism in two senses of the word. 

Although I was a twirler (you know, it’s something like a drum majorette) in a maroon-and-white outfit when I was in high school in Bayonne, N.J., marching onto and doing routines on football fields, I never paid much attention to the game; basketball was my sport. 

At the hospital during the Super Bowl, however, it was impossible not to recognize the spirit. Even I knew why the aides and nurses were wearing the red, white, and blue, and that 12 was the superstar Tom Brady’s number.

When I was first married and had become an East Hamptoner, we often went to Dartmouth football games, with or without children but always with great tailgate picnics. An outlier nevertheless, I once distinguished myself, if you can call it that, by jumping up and cheering loudly when a player ran down the whole field to make a touchdown. The trouble was he was on the opposing team. As far as I was concerned it felt good to cheer for a maneuver that was swift, graceful, and wily regardless of whose team he was on, and even if no one else on my side of the bleachers did. For me, it was simple appreciation; I didn’t care which team scored.

Such an attitude made me out of sync with my compatriots, but I was comfortable as an outlier, as much then as now. These days, for example, when I am among my husband’s large and talented family, I tend to stand with his brother-in-law, a man who is very much admired but whose background, like mine, is far afield.

Considering myself an outlier at The Star also has made it possible over the years for me to wear an editor’s hat. We decided it would be inappropriate for me to be a member of local organizations, even one noted for good works like the East Hampton Ladies Village Improvement Society. 

Suppose the society decided to do something outrageous, like, for example, tearing up the perimeter of Town Pond? I wanted to preserve the right to howl. Sure, L.V.I.S. members and the general public might well express opinions of disapproval, but at least no conflict of interest would be involved in what the editorial “we” had to say. I had a bully pulpit and think that was good enough.

Lots of books and other things arrive unannounced at The Star, as they do at newspapers and media outlets. Some are worthwhile. Some are not. Others lead into unexpected territory.

An item I found on a center table in the newsroom this week, a book by a James Carter of Enumclaw, Wash., managed to get my attention, if only for its memorable title, “Why Einstein Was an Ignorant Fool.”

To be sure, I have tried but have not been able to crack the wall between elemental physics and my own understanding to point out the error of the author’s ways. Nor do I want to single him out. However, “Einstein was wrong!” holds a high place among crank ideas in my estimation; one of my great-uncles, Morris Redman Spivack, was known to crackpots in his day.

According to WorldCat, six copies of Uncle Morris’s “G=Mmxc/r2; a New Road to Relativity,” are held in libraries in the United States. Morris was multitalented. He spent seven years in Iceland where he drew and collected 5,000 portraits. Among his greatest skills was getting his stuff into archives around the world. Family legend is that he thought Einstein was a nice enough person, though wrong.

I gave Mr. Carter’s book a shot. I really did, but he lost me when he argued that gravity actually went up, that is, away from the Earth’s core. I don’t think Uncle Morris ever went that far. 

Crackpots are attracted to the big ideas, like how the universe came to be. One of their marks is certainty that everyone else is wrong and that they alone, or at most the people who agree with them, have the answers. These proponents might be masters of word salad, but are generally ignorant about basic physics, math, and experimental methods.

I once worked with a guy who said he believed that mayonnaise would someday power space travel. Earlier in his life, he had been a cook in the United States Coast Guard, so it kind of made sense. Uncle Morris had his moments, though; his no-till agriculture, which he promoted decades ago, now has mainstream applications.

Anti-crankism, if it can be called that, has its own adherents. The web is as full of jabs at crackpot science and armchair theorists as it is of cures for the common cold or promises of bulletproof paint. I side with the anti-cranks. At least these are the people who get jet aircraft into the air and make modern medicine work.

I am to turn 79 on Monday, by which time I expect to be lying on a beach in Zihuatanejo reading a good book, or, given my tendency to interrupt, making Mary look up from hers. 

That, my tendency to interrupt, may be the sole sticking point in our otherwise blissful coupling. Why I do it, I don’t know, though it may have something to do with being an only child for most of my youth, untempered by siblings shouting, “Will you shut up, Jackie, will you just shut up for once?” And so, uninterrupted, I continued interrupting.

In catechism — this was at the East End Lutheran school in Pittsburgh — I was constantly waving my hand when it was sixth-grade Bible passage recitation time. I was a fountain of dogma. Never mind that I hadn’t thought much about what I was saying.

And spelling. I was a whiz at it, and was dismissive when told the ability to spell was not a measure of intelligence. Of course it was. My mother helped me prepare for the Western Pennsylvania Spelling Bee, put on, as I recall, by The Pittsburgh Press. She sat on the same chaise longue that is in our bedroom today, I at the foot of it, and drilled me. I had no idea what most of the words meant, but it made no difference, I could spell them.

And, in the Western Pennsylvania Spelling Bee itself, I spelt with such aplomb that the reporter said the next day that if there had been a prize for the most lackadaisical contestant, I, who stumbled on “insidious,” spelling it with a “c,” and thus finished fifth, would have won it. . . . Lackadaisical. A five-syllable word. I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked it. 

From Bible passages and spelling bees I moved on in high school to Shakespearean soliloquies, a natural progression for one still more in love with sound than with sense. And, of course, soliloquies were essentially great interruptions, if you will, no matter that you had but a vague idea of what you were saying.  

I still, some 65 or so years on, have no more than a vague idea of what I’m saying. That’s called inspiration, isn’t it? And because of an arthritic shoulder, I no longer wave my hand much. But still there is this urge to interrupt, to blurt out, “Hold on, can I tell you one thing?”

The itch to propound passes I’ve found if you just hold on and sit tight (not all that hard to do when you have a margarita at hand), which I intend to do in Zihuatanejo. 

I thought what made America great was its product supply chain. The distribution system never lets up, the trucks keep rolling, and the shelves are always stocked. 

So why did I have to wait weeks to get a simple washing machine part, a little piece of metal with flanges and threaded plastic connectors, the source of a small but persistent leak puddling the floor, staining the baseboard, making a sponge of the carpet? After all, it’s not like it was coming by slow boat from South Korea.

Because of over-engineering, that’s why. Less is more, we were told by Mies van der Rohe, the architect who gave us the, uh, Barcelona chair. But not unlike the latest version of Microsoft Word, with its clutter and unnecessary extra steps and regular seizures, or your new car that shuts off at every stoplight, leaving you in the lurch, among other quiet thefts of your autonomy, my fancy front-loading washer looks good, with its spaceship array of lights, and sounds cute, with its singsong chirping that signals a completed cycle, and in theory I appreciate the reduced water use and increased efficiency, whatever that means, but does anyone really need a “Pre-Wash / Child Lock” setting or a “Fresh Care” button? 

Hot, warm, cold. Small or large load. That should about cover it.

The thing’s only four years old and this is the second repair to this one crucial juncture where water meets tube. No, for prolonged use and even abuse, you need an old top-loading job, with the rotating spike of an agitator like some medieval torture device and just as effective. 

That or a visit to the Sag Harbor Launderette. 

Putting aside the usual laundry list of complaints (pun unintentional, but I’ll leave it be), for us regular folks and year-rounders the Harbor is just not what it used to be. But in the face of gentrification, bad taste, whatever you want to call it, at least we still have this urban touch on the old main drag, with its long rows of stainless-steel shine — industrial-strength Dexter Laundry machines straight out of the Corn Belt. (You know, Iowa? Where they once made those reliable Maytags?)

The speed of laundry generation by a family of five is daunting, and the piles of clothes at home were taking on the permanence of burial mounds, so the Launderette was a godsend on a recent weekend, even with its corridor of a space filled like the 7 train after a Mets game.

I’d call it sobering, the contrast between the, shall we say, brusqueness of the summer crowds here and the courtesy among the other than rich in that rumbling, thrumming place redolent of fabric softener and sharp with static cling — a helpful tip about a dryer lacking heat here, a heads-up that another was open over there, and nowhere in evidence the petulant practice of removing someone else’s clothes and dumping them because they left them in the machine too long. It was like a Friedrich Engels fantasy in an Ayn Rand world.

Or maybe people just wanted clean socks. 

The appeal of the Launderette is the appeal of being alone in a crowded place. Like riding public transportation. Or lingering over a cup of coffee at a greasy spoon. Features of city life, to be sure, but here as the clothes tumbled and the patrons folded, the limited choices of what to do with myself was a relief — read a book (“The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One”), stare out the window, watch the Premier League on a flat-screen. 

And then the part arrived. It had been more than a month. I figure I’ve got a couple of years until it gives out again and I’m back at the Launderette. If not, there’s always that tune by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, on spin cycle in my head since high school: 

“There go the whites, mmm, getting whiter. / There go the colors, getting brighter. / There go the delicates, through the final rinse. / There goes my Saturday night, I go without a fight. / Watching the clothes go round, watching the clothes go round.”

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.