Just the other night, with nothing better to do, and nothing to interest me at the office, I thought I would drive around a little and see the Christmas lights of the town. I took my leave from friends who I had been visiting on Gould Street, and headed off for a turn around the pond, where a brightly lit tree blazed in the center.

Not all that long ago, East Hampton was greatly riled when an electrician overseeing the illumination of Main Street and Newtown Lane trees unilaterally chose to change the lights from multicolored to blue. A ferocious debate ensued, and the guilty electrician went to ground. Within a few Christmases, once the blue ones had been used up, the trees were set back to rights, at least in the majority view then.

New technology, cheap Chinese LEDs, and changing tastes would make a controversy such as the one concerning the blue lights of the late 1980s unlikely. Depending on one’s taste, almost any color scheme is possible. 

During my recent tour, I was particularly impressed with a tree at the Maidstone Hotel: white strings wound in the branches near the trunk of the tree but with dazzling fuchsia lights around the outer boughs. At the Whitmore’s garden shop in Amagansett, an otherwise bright red tree somehow sparkled white here and there.

Almost anything can be hung. Minimalist green strands rise to the top of a flagpole outside the Huntting Inn on Main Street like a signal to passing alien explorers. Swooping white lights converge on a gazebo at Groundworks Landscaping, druid-like.

The display drawing the most attention around here this Christmas can be seen at the Toilsome Road, Route 114 roundabout. In a small field sits a red tractor, attended by three Santa-hat-wearing half-size plastic human skeletons bedazzled with festive garlands. That no one to my knowledge has complained shows how far we have come since the stringing of blue lights on the official trees set East Hampton into fits.

Can you believe, 10 percent of high school students, when questioned, think Judge Judy is a member of the Supreme Court, when, as everyone knows, she’s on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals? (Just kidding!)

Actually, we know a judge on that court, a high school classmate of mine who, when asked by the Reagan administration to interview for the job of F.B.I. director, declined, referring them instead to a man he thought highly of, Robert Mueller.

Yes, Virginia, there are principled people who happen to be Republicans. One such was recently laid to rest with heartfelt eulogies that made you yearn — liberals are always yearning, when they’re not hand-wringing — for decency again.

“He was a good guy,” Maureen Dowd said of the late President George H.W. Bush when asked by Judy Woodruff during a Channel 13 “NewsHour” round-table discussion for her final thoughts. High praise indeed from a columnist whose words can flay you alive at 20 paces. Dana Carvey, his chief lampooner, whom the president later befriended, was also of that mind.

My brother-in-law, who had been rendered nostalgic as well, did have one cavil, having distinctly remembered the late 41st president saying we could win a nuclear exchange. Oh well. We’re rid of that fantasy now . . . aren’t we? And there was Willie Horton, and the turkey shoot in the desert, the first shots fired in what became, with his son at the helm, a tragic mission in the Mideast, a “mission” that has, after all these years, yet to be defined.

Taken all in all, though, the late president was an honorable, accomplished man, a Yalie, who, while the most competitive person Jim Baker ever met, had the common touch, and who, while born to privilege, felt the need to serve his fellow citizens, to serve his country. He had a generous spirit, Carvey said, was gracious too. And what’s not to like about a guy who, confined to a wheelchair, celebrates his 90th birthday by jumping out of a plane? 

You do yearn, especially in these self-serving days, for honest public servants like the late president. Was he the last president to raise taxes? Perhaps the last Republican president to do so; anathema to those in his party clinging to the tenet — to the long-discredited fantasy, but no matter — that tax cut tides raise all boats. Tell that to the middle class, whatever’s left of it. And doing the right thing, of course, cost him.

So, we go about, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man, a man of principle, a man of decency, a man of generous spirit, a gracious man. My classmate is one, and by his account, which is good enough for me, so is Robert Mueller. We await his findings with bated breath. 

The East Hampton Star staff has been making more frequent trips to the library next door ever since Starbucks installed a coffee machine on the front desk. This I know, not because we have a sophisticated indoor surveillance system, but because my second-floor window on the south side of the Star building looks onto the sidewalk that runs between our driveway and the library’s Main Street entryway.

If there is a universal routine shared above all others it is that coffee drinkers organize their days around the next cup. For many years, I had my second coffee of the day at Java Nation in Bridgehampton after dropping one of my kids off at school; I was nearly at a loss about what to do when that was no longer the case. I miss the morning crew, Dave and Don and that New Zealand guy and those whose names I never caught.

Coffee time is like that; you rarely introduce yourself to other regulars, even though the caffeine-fueled conversation might be the longest of the day. I see this happening at the library, too. Sheila Dunlop, who is often behind the front desk, and I are on a first-name basis, but I know the others only well enough to quickly nod and wish them a good morning.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that the library has become a more convivial place since the advent of Starbucks. At least those of us at The Star are beating a path to its door.

Many are the early mornings when I arrive at work before the library is open, however, and I count the minutes until I can shuffle over for a cup and a bit of conversation. Or not, silence being fine, too.

How do you tolerate the cold? I don’t seem capable of tolerating winter at all these days. When the temperature drops down below freezing, I find myself unwilling to do much of anything except go to bed and read a book. And, for some reason, a really cold and blustery winter day always makes me start thinking about delicious recipes and hearty meals. 

I’m told that when your core temperature drops, the body signals a need for more calories, and I guess that’s what happened to me when the thermometer plummeted earlier this week. Before today’s paper went to bed I had filled the pantry shelves as well as the refrigerator and freezer with more than we could possibly expect to need anytime soon. I asked my husband to have a look at all the groceries I’d brought home and estimate how long he thought it would take us to eat every morsel in the larder — for example, if we found ourselves entirely isolated by a snowstorm — but he just looked at me as if I’d gone a bit loco. We have enough on hand for a couple of hurricanes at least, and a power outage or two.

We’ve got both frozen homemade chili and store-bought chili. Because potatoes and warm winter suppers are synonymous, we’ve got three kinds: Yukon gold, big red, and sweet. We’ve got three kinds of squash, too: acorn, spaghetti, and butternut. We’ve got parsnips and some puréed celery root, and I nabbed an eggplant at the store just because it looked handsome. As for carrots, we’ve got a package of those tiny ones that dry out before you eat them and a couple of healthy bunches. Carrots are necessary in a December soup, but I guess I’d better start cooking. Minestrone, perhaps? Or a Greek avgolemono?

Sweet Pea, our Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons “ARFan,” is well taken care of, too. The veterinarian has told us she has gained too much weight — gee, I wonder how that happened? —and she is on what he calls a “metabolic diet” for the winter. Sweet Pea has a large case of special canned food and double bags of dry pellets in the pantry, as well, and won’t need anything else until Valentine’s Day at the soonest.

Obviously, this impulse to overstock is not just an uncontrollable urge to prepare for weather emergencies but also to prepare for holiday company. Whatever the weather, visitors will be arriving in the coming weeks. I know just who to invite.

You’d think that a country wanting to be great again would return to what made it great by welcoming those who, having seen the worst of things, are resolved to better their lives. What more worthy goal? 

And yet the pilgrims, who would a century ago have been met in New York Harbor by the Statue of Liberty, are confronted at our southern border by barbed wire and tear gas.

If you want to make America great again, let them in. (In an orderly fashion, of course.) So the parents can work hard and the children can learn. And, perhaps, in their striving they can teach us, who may have forgot why America has for so long been hope incarnate. 

I hope — sense — that, absent disaster, better things will come, despite the divisiveness so evident now. 

It’s the younger generation I’m pinning my hopes on, a generation less in thrall than its elders to ideology, more amenable to working things out. They, I think, will afford genuine opportunity to all, but will insist that our collective health be as paramount as the achievements of each one of us. In other words, I think that we could become a more equitable society, without going to hell in a handbag.

It’s not either the individual or the group — it’s all of us, together. We’ve got to get back to that. To shaking hands rather than turning our backs — or being shot in the back.

It’s not Communism or Socialism that I’m promoting, but amity, Amityism. Can we not think of the welfare of everyone even as we celebrate an individual’s success? Even as we celebrate, even as we delight in, our own voices? 

It’s not all about the money. And the immigrants, who value family above all, know that. It’s about doing one’s best and in doing so contributing to the whole. That’s what made this country great. There is no better society, no better place. Yes, they’re doing great in China, but at the expense of their souls, I think. There is more joy, more potential joy, anyway, in a country where not only initiative but also the freedom to speak one’s mind is equally valued. I don’t envy the Chinese, though to read of that country’s alchemy of coercion and economic uplift is fascinating. 

In the end, though, it is the free and united spirit that will triumph, or ought to triumph. 

So, don’t tear-gas them, let them in. 

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Outside of that tiny section of Central Park, people went about their business, that business apparently the holiday-season orgy of materialism or the enthusiastic annihilation of livers and brain cells, Saturday being the annual SantaCon, an event that the late, great Village Voice once described as “a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” 

Around that mosaic, though, those hundreds, several of them wielding guitars and a handful of other instruments, were remembering Lennon on the 38th anniversary of his murder. The songs flowed, one after the other, one guitarist or another strumming or singing an introduction in an informal, festive sing-along and celebration of Lennon and the Beatles. 

It’s always so nice to see people of all ages and ethnicities come together, forming a sort of microcosmic New York City within the city, a microcosm of humanity itself, in its collective impulses to gather together and express itself. Better still when the expression is uplifting and positive. All you need is love, love is all you need, was Lennon’s message to the world in 1967. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, he intuited, later that year, with a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide. 

And yet, despite the merry chorus of New Yorkers and visitors to the Capital of the World, where Lennon had persevered, over the strenuous and paranoid protestation of Richard Nixon and his ilk, to become a permanent resident of the city he loved, an overwhelming sadness would not, could not fade away. 

George Harrison, said his widow, Olivia, “was really angry that John didn’t have a chance to leave his body in a better way, because George put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.” 

Lennon was not afforded the luxury of calmly going into the blinding, burning light, mindful that his and the universal mind are one. How could he, with a fan/fanatic squeezing a trigger over and over, shooting holes in his body? 

Nineteen years after Lennon’s murder, the nation was shocked by a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado, two students murdering 12 schoolmates and a teacher. And then, the trickle became a deluge, among the carnage 20 first graders and six adults in Connecticut; 49 killed and 53 wounded inside a nightclub in Orlando, and 58 killed and 851 injured — you read that right — from gunfire and the resulting panic when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. 

This year has been a predictably bloody one in the gun-crazy United States of America. Seventeen more students and teachers were killed, on Valentine’s Day, at a high school in Parkland, Fla. It was the year’s deadliest mass shooting — as of Monday, anyway — but far from the only one. On the 311th day of the year, the 307th mass shooting took place, this time inside a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Twelve were killed — 13 if you count the shooter, who turned the weapon on himself in the end. 

In a sad but sadly foreseeable irony, some of the patrons enjoying country music at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks had survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas one year before. There are now Americans who have personally experienced two mass shootings. 

According to the John Lennon Official account on Instagram, more than 1.4 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Will we passively bury the bodies, offer our eminently useless thoughts and prayers, and await the next shooting, surely knowing by now that nowhere is safe?

Saturday was so very cold in the park, and I left, after an hour, with Lennon’s words rising from the crowd and into the wintry air. “A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

A Star headline on Oct. 11 warned, “The Tiny Springs Library Is In Peril.” The report said that the library and the Springs Historical Society, which operates it, were in all sorts of trouble, both organizational and financial. Word spread that the books on the second floor — some 6,000 of them — had had to be thrown away, rather than sold as intended. 

That was all the people of Springs needed to hear to be spurred to action: More than 100 residents rallied at an Oct. 14 meeting at the Presbyterian Church to set things to rights. 

Legal issues are being sorted out pro bono by a resident lawyer. It was announced that an electronic database would be established to document new books as well as the art and children’s books that had been saved, and that new board members, officers, and a secretary had been put in place. 

Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that Springs would not lose its library and that, indeed, the library would be joining the 21st century.

Have you ever been inside the Springs Library? It is the plainly handsome, modest shingled house opposite Ashawagh Hall that once belonged to Ambrose Parsons. It was willed to East Hampton Town by Elizabeth Parker Anderson in 1975, and it is on the state and national registers of historic places. 

Pretty much everything I know about the Springs Library comes to me via the newsletters I have received for years about the various doings there, courtesy of Heather Anderson, who gathered and compiled the information. Ms. Anderson has stepped down after 40 years as president and librarian of the society; it is unclear whether its new officers will decide it is worth the effort and expense to keep the newsletter going.        

For me, the newsletter has been of invariable interest and has provided unimpeachable evidence that community, and history-keeping, are alive and well in Springs. My fingers are crossed that the newsletter will have a future.

The library is staffed entirely by volunteers, and East Hampton Town maintains the building, which is said to be compromised structurally and to need serious attention.

The community is very lucky that the library is sustained by a $5,000 annual grant from the Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation. The Baldwins’ grant has allowed the library to keep its library-card fee a nominal $15 — with a $25 fee for library and society membership — as well as to offer families all the other things (CDs and DVDs and puzzles) we have come to expect in libraries these days. While the library’s new supporters and officers seeks further donations, they have already done a great service for Springs in keeping the library open. Join me in saying, “Hooray!” And perhaps a check might not go amiss?

Long-ago Bridgehampton was wild. And by wild I don’t mean the wolves, slander lawsuits, and dispossessing the native people that kept the English colonists elsewhere busy. What set Bridgehampton apart from the more staid village centers in East Hampton and Southampton was its remoteness.

Set away from the sharp eye of the magistrates by half a day’s ride on the frontier between the two “plantations,” as they were known, standards of behavior might have been, shall we say, loose.

Exhibit A has to be John Wick, who settled in Bridgehampton by about 1695 and ran the tavern and inn. Wick was said perhaps to be a murderer; peddlers might check in for the night but never check out. He also was among the leading men of the time, which might or might not be related to his homicidal tendencies.

His Bull’s Head Inn had a bar in its front room where rum was dealt out, a “short horn” two fingers deep, a “long horn” four fingers deep, and for a “good stiff horn” they put on the thumb. They used to say there had been rum enough in that room to float a 74-ton sloop. The rum, from Boston, would be landed at Northwest, and carted; Sag Harbor was still a salt meadow, years away from becoming a port.

Sometime later, legend is that Scuttle Hole, a glacial swampy pond, got its name when a peddler reported having to scuttle like a crab off his wagon as its wheel sank in the muck. One thing led to another, and the bog’s person-grabbing nature was memorialized in verse, which I share below.

The Curse of Scuttle Hole

Beware all strangers where you roam

Or leave the tranquil bliss of home;

Ne’er at the peril of your soul,

Plant foot in cursed Scuttle Hole.

May Scuttle Hole not a blessing know,

While water runs or grass shall grow;

But evils fall as fast they can

On ground accursed by God and man.

The judgment day is rolling ’round,

And Scuttle Hole shall hear the sound

Of demons, who shall ring the knell.

And Scuttle Hole go down to Hell.

Soon after the midterms I considered ordering a bumper sticker that would read: “Don’t Blame Me — I’m From East Hampton.”

That variant, of course, derives from the sensationally failed 1972 presidential candidacy of George McGovern, the liberal Democrat who was to carry only one state, Massachusetts, many of whose residents afterward proudly put “Don’t Blame Me — I’m From Massachusetts” bumper stickers on their cars. (The comparison, while admittedly clever, is, I confess, somewhat invidious inasmuch as Perry Gershon gave Lee Zeldin a much better run for his money. Had all 16,000 absentee ballots gone to Gershon, he would have won!)

McGovern’s striking “Getting It All Together” poster, rescued from dusty oblivion at The Star, has hung for years in our bedroom, testimony, I suppose, to the coupling of lofty ideals with dashed hopes. 

“Don’t forget to call on Wednesday,” I said to our eldest daughter, who lives in Ohio, a couple of days before the election. “Mary,” who had knocked on doors for Gershon, “will either be over the moon or under a cloud.”

I’m happy to say my prediction was wrong. While obviously disappointed with the First Congressional District result, her fighting spirit — an inspiration to me, a phlegmatic type — bent but did not break.

That Gershon swept all 19 election districts here, Montauk included, was good news, I argued, testimony to her — and to all of the other Bonac door-knockers’ efforts. So, don’t blame us.

I still remain mystified, though, that an incumbent who, while he voted against the “tax reform” bill, which gores our oxen locally by denying state income tax, property tax, and mortgage interest write-offs, but did nothing really to prevent the deficit-ballooning giveaway; who apparently fails to support extensive gun control laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings — and whose party is seemingly bent on denying insurance coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, and on meddling with Social Security and Medicare, would attract support from somewhat more than half of those, most of them aging middle-class homeowners I suspect, who turned out at the polls. 

As for immigration, I don’t know if Lee Zeldin — as the president does — tends to characterize all immigrants as members of the El Salvadoran gang MS-13, or if he is utterly laissez-faire when it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, but here too I would think he’d be out of sync with the district’s sizable Latino population.

So, don’t blame us — we’re from East Hampton.

In “The Hurt Locker,” directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, nine years before social media movements put a bullhorn to just how rare that was, we see a bomb squad specialist played by Jeremy Renner at loose ends back home from Iraq. To top off the boob-tube-and-supermarket boredom, a gray afternoon of clearing leaves from the gutters of his modest house helps put him over the edge. 

He rotates back in.

We see him again at movie’s end, suited up in his padded impact gear, large-limbed and huge-helmeted, resolutely waddling away from the camera like a blocky Minecraft character in search of the next I.E.D. The Baghdad street is dusty and leafless.

Movies aren’t life, but they do tend to drive the important points home. I’ve thought of Jeremy Renner miserably scooping leaves on three occasions recently — each one as I balanced atop a cheap four-foot Home Depot aluminum ladder, my feet covering the words “do not sit or step,” the ground uneven and softened by burrowing rodents, as I blindly reach for the collected detritus, inevitably mushy in this wettest of falls, one handful at a time, time after time, the ladder scooted in three-foot increments down the length of gutter, again and again, back of the house then front, slowly filling one plastic grocery bag after another. 

The pointlessness puts me in mind of the mocking words of a secretary I once worked with: “Next they’ll have you sweeping the sun off the roof.”

And just what kind of fall is this? If it isn’t pouring, it’s around the freezing mark, the damp driving the chill bone-deep. 

I used to like the cold. In my early 30s, near the end of a seven-year experiment in living simply on a maximum of $8 an hour west of the Mississippi, I worked outside every day for two full Fairbanks, Alaska, winters, one of them as a laborer on a construction site where a Schucks Auto Supply store was being built, and for 20 straight days at the beginning of 1999 the temperature didn’t reach as much as 20 below, with a low of about minus 50. (I remember because I record such things in calendars, Brett Kavanaugh-style, only without the artistry.)

That was an exceptional cold snap, and if in the depths of it I once carelessly left my earlobes exposed, frostbite swelling them into two small pieces of reddened fruit, that was just part of the adventure. 

When it comes to appendages, the ear, that odd cup of cartilage hung with a teardrop of flesh, is relatively insensate. Hands are another story. So the other day when I dipped mine repeatedly into gutters holding a quarter-inch of late-November rainwater, I thought it a fine idea to do so wearing nitrile gloves — you know, “the latex-free alternative”? The kind you don’t want to see your doctor pulling over his extended index finger? 

I was soon gasping in pain, having stumbled inside to run my hands under warm tap water for relief. It’s the moisture, I’m telling you, that brings the hurt. Fairbanks may be cold, “but it’s a dry cold,” to invert the old Johnny Carson joke.

Then there’s the matter of all that dead matter. I was get-a-beer friendly with a couple of English professors in college — a couple of a couple — who would say how the sight of bare trees always made them want to die. Or at least contemplate the idea of death, like Snoopy used to do, always with great profundity, from his doghouse as he watched the leaves fall.

At the other end of the spectrum is the opinion, equally an old saw, that the coming of crisp fall brings new life.

Well, which is it? Somehow, the prospect of cramming a half-acre’s worth of leaves into oversized brown paper bags kills the discussion.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star