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.

A 160-yard-long black plastic pipe washed out of the ocean at Georgica last week. When I finally got around to looking for it on Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed that it had already been cut into shorter lengths and dragged away. 

We had been first alerted to it by my friend Tim Garneau, who sent a few smartphone photographs and was the source of the 160-yard estimate. Paul Vogel, another friend, who is the de facto early-morning mayor of Georgica Beach, emailed a report at about the same time.  From Tim’s photos, it was obvious that the pipe had come from a dredging operation, but how and from where remained unknown.

Georgica Beach is a good place to seek surprises cast up by the sea. The stone jetty there, which has produced a subtle rise in the onshore sand, traps floating objects on an easterly swell. Among the items I have picked up at Georgica are money, sunglasses, a gold-and-jade bracelet, and two insulin pumps, one of which was still beeping in the sea-grass wrack line. The beachcomber’s glory days are long since passed, however. My paltry finds are but trifles when matched against those that used to appear in the age of sail. 

Long Island shores, north and south, had for centuries taken their toll on ships. A miscalculation at night or during bad weather could put a vessel on the bar, where it might as soon break to pieces as be refloated. A ship’s pilot unlucky enough to steer onto the Montauk rocks would have no hope of rescue.

Places along the coast carry names memorializing such wrecks: Cullo den Point in honor of the British warship that sank there during the American Revolution, Amsterdam Beach for a British steamer by that name that went aground in 1867 carrying a load of fruit, raisins, lead, and wine to New York.

Perhaps the most intriguing East End wreck came in 1816 when a mysteriously empty ship struck the bar at Shinnecock. As the wreck master prepared it for auction, a bystander found a Spanish silver coin in a piece of rigging; visitors to the hulk discovered more coins here and there. Then, two young men, determined to do a thorough search, crept aboard with candles and a tin lantern. 

Making their way from fore to aft, they at last spotted the shiny edge of a coin in the cabin ceiling. Prying the boards apart, one of the men was showered with silver dollars, but his companion dropped the lantern and much of the trove rolled into the sea.

On subsequent trips, the men found other coins, but kept quiet until much later. When the ship broke up that winter, people began to find money in the sand. Farmers took ploughs to search; one came away with a princely haul worth $60. Now and then for years afterward, bits of Spanish silver could be found. It is hard not to believe that some of that loot might still be out there.

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. 

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.

A New Year’s resolution may be an indulgence in wish?ful thinking, but I’m determined to fulfill a modest resolution I’ve made for 2019. It’s simple: I am going to sort through my T-shirts and give away most of them. Exactly when I took to buying T-shirts in large numbers is clouded in history. Suffice it to say they come from only two or three retailers and can no longer fit in a bureau drawer, so they clog my closets.

Giving away clothes makes us feel good; we like to spin it as an earth-friendly effort at recycling. (Although, if you have ever seen a good documentary called “T-Shirt Travels” you know how not-so-wonderful the used-clothing trade actually is for local industries in the countries where our castoffs end up, though I guess it might still be better than the landfill.)

Many residents here donate their nicest unwanted clothes to the Bargain Box, the secondhand shop run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, which — despite having become quite tony in recent years and not always as big a bargain — is still chockablock with fortuitous fashion finds. Young men of my acquaintance have found perfect tuxedos at the Bargain Box, and there always seems to be a plethora of secondhand designer shoes and outfits.

My daughter tells me she and a close childhood friend had an argument in the Bargain Box’s dress?ing rooms, over Christmas, about a beautiful Carolina Herrera poppy-colored skirt suit with cutout lace trim that was on sale for $10 and probably was originally priced at 200 times that; it didn’t fit either of them, but was too tempting to leave on the rack. (The Herrera suit, I’m told, is currently on a jet plane on its way to Seattle with the victorious childhood friend.)

I am afraid that the staff who manage the Bargain Box would laugh me right out of the building if I showed up with my T-shirts. They would likely suggest I take them to the row of donation bins at the dump, but I am not enthusiastic about that.

Everything that goes into those bins is bundled into bales and resold in less-affluent communities and countries, from the Canadian Maritimes to Zanzibar. No doubt you have seen men, women, and children in faraway places wearing clothes with all kinds of American logos? The reason people on the other side of the world are photographed in Bonac football jerseys and “I’m With Stupid!” T-shirts is because the clothing-bale industry has knocked local fabric and clothing manufacturers right out of business.

I will never forget a jammed, warehouse-like store called Frenchie’s in the small town in Nova Scotia where my daughter used to live; it was stocked entirely with items from these secondhand bales. It was amusing to realize while browsing that all of the clothing, recognizably, had originated from donation bins in the Boston area: In among the woman’s cashmere pullovers from J. Crew and the used lacrosse uniforms, we found a green T-shirt with the logo of Concord Academy, the boarding school in Massachusetts that my daughter attended.

As for the Bargain Box, it has been a year or more, but I remain sorry that the L.V.I.S. decided to stop offering children’s clothes there. Apparently, it just didn’t make economic sense to give over valuable selling-floor space to a kids’ clothing section that didn’t turn much of a profit. Also, I’m told, it was difficult to find reliable volunteers to take on the unglamorous, week-in-week-out task of sorting and pricing things for this particular department.

Still, the fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

It seems to me that a thrift shop is, in this regard, a moral venture. Not only do thrift shops almost invariably benefit charitable causes, and not only do they enable recycling, but they lend a needed hand to those who cannot afford boutique shopping. “Waste not, want not” is indeed a noble dictum. Perhaps someone who reads this — someone with experience in the clothing trade, or a pair of friends — will be inspired to offer their volunteer services to our beloved Bargain Box.

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”

I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street. I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

Jane Bimson, who works in The Star’s front office and who I like to talk with about all things cooking, chided me gently on Monday when I raved about how easy it was. “You’re 55, and you are just now finding out!” she said, as she made a note to bake some biscotti for herself very soon.

Jane is a master in the kitchen. Her sweet pickles brighten our Decembers every year, when she hands out a jar for each person at The Star. I am told Baylis Greene quietly consumes every last slice before the day is out. At birthdays, she always makes carrot cake muffins with cream cheese frosting, leaving them on the office kitchen table to honor the person whose lucky day it is. Because I can’t have dairy products, Jane places a single topping-free muffin on my desk before I get in.

We are an office filled with foodies. Russell Bennett’s wife, Fiona, is a test chef and often sends him in with the most remarkable of treats. Matt Charron’s eats are consistently healthy, and we often talk about that. Jennifer Landes knows all about the restaurants. Laura Donnelly (who does not come into the office often enough) and I could talk for hours about scallops and beach plums. My sister, Bess, who works downstairs on East magazine, is a whiz with desserts and has a massive stash of antique cookbooks.

Kathy Kovach, who used to work here, and Carissa Katz, the manag ing editor, worked in catering on the side for years. I spent several summers selling fish at Claws on Wheels in East Hampton, getting to know the regular customers and making up names for some of them, my favorite the “Pounda Flounda Guy.” Leigh Goodstein, a former reporter, manages the Clam Bar on Napeague. I could go on.

There is a thing, I think, about food and the news business, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Years ago at a wedding, I met a woman who worked in human resources at The Times who told me they put internship résumés in two piles: those with food service experience and those without. They called in the food service people for interviews. I can see why.

“We’re going to be in for some snow, O’en,” Mary said as we were driving along last Wednesday, before realizing she’d mistaken me for the dog, a good sign.

That she would think to compare me, a Mr. Burns look-alike (in fact, I can rub my hands, and, with a protruding fang, say, “Excellent, excellent” just as he), with such a dignified, snowy-coated beast was comforting, especially in weather that is becoming anything but.

I still worry every now and then, as does she, that we are a bit boring as masters, too old to trot along with him, at least in my case, and too eager to pull the sliding glass door shut when he’s still wanting to chase tennis balls in the frigid gloaming. 

As a ball-chaser he is mercurial. He’ll do it for a while, if he’s pretty sure there’s a treat waiting, in which case he’ll follow the commands — “Bring it . . . Front . . . Sit.” But eventually he’ll get distracted, by a stick, the scent of a mole, or some such, affording us the chance to duck back inside to warm our hands.

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen. Of course, to be fair, there should be lotion Trumpians could apply, too, lest they be irradiated by World Federalists. That having been said, as they say, I found that people were quite friendly when we were in Naples a few years ago, probably because most of the other vacationers we met were from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Canada, where from time to time we say we should move to, if it weren’t so cold, which serves to underline the point I made above. Cold place, warm hearts. Warm place, old farts.

Temperate place, warm hearts and old farts, I guess, which is why we’re still here, engaged in the eternal round of despair and hope, small town contention and amiability. Come to think of it, despair and hope pretty much dominated the conversation at the media forum in Sag Harbor that we went to today. There were challenges to be sure, not the least of which was posed by the perplexing half-done crossword puzzle I’d taken with me, but there was hope too that local news, offered in varying formats, through print, websites, podcasts, and local access television, would remain germane, a future that seemed assured when I arose from the American Hotel table an hour or so later with the puzzle finished in its entirety, usually a sign of good things to come, even if it looked as if we were going to be in for some snow.