Doormats. They are something that serve two purposes — to clean off the bottoms of shoes before they step into the house and to dress up your entryway and give visitors a sense of your style. That all sounds great, but I’ve yet to find one that is long-lasting and worth the pretty penny they cost. 

We bought our house a few years back and I’ve gone through my fair share of doormats. One made of rubber, ones made of coco fiber, ones made of cloth especially for covered porches. Plain or decorative, it doesn’t seem to matter. They break down. They flake. They fade. Always in a matter of months, it seems.   

I’ve bought cheap and I’ve bought the not-so-cheap. I wouldn’t say I’ve bought the ultra expensive . . . yet. I’m not afraid to buy high end if it’s high quality and worth it. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who gives a glowing review of any doormat and so I’ve wavered on making the purchase. 

I’ve shopped in our local hardware stores and online. There are quite literally thousands available online. Google whatever your heart’s desire is and you will find something. But will it be worth the buck you spend on it? That’s the question. 

It dawned on me recently that perhaps my expectations are too high. Perhaps they are not supposed to last long at all. I don’t know what gave me the idea that something that costs $50 to $100 should last longer than a few months. Silly me. Surely there are many other things that I could throw money at in my house. 

Perhaps I should be rotating them out each season. Lord knows they make ones for winter, spring, summer, and fall. I discovered there are even specialty mats for snow and ice melting. 

I know there are more important things to worry about than this, but if anyone has a recommendation out there, please, by all means, drop me a line. I just want a simple doormat to greet guests at they enter my home, one that doesn’t break the bank and lasts longer than the blink of an eye. 

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s deputy managing editor.

Does anyone know how many undocumented immigrants live in East Hampton? Southampton? The East End? Has anyone estimated whether, or to what extent, unskilled workers who find low-wage work among the wealthy here reduces the economic prospects of local, native-born residents?

Immigration policy is a conundrum that Congress has been unable to face. It became an incendiary topic with the rise of Donald Trump. There are millions of Americans who say his nationalistic credo speaks for them, that they seek to restore America to the country they knew in elementary school, and that they have not shared enough of the American dream. That’s not surprising since Mr. Trump’s popularity is said to be strongest among those who are economically and culturally threatened.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, an estimated 11.4 million unauthorized immigrants were in the United States as of January 2012. This fall, however, a study by Yale and M.I.T. estimated that there are more likely to be 22 million undocumented immigrants in the country. 

President Trump, who has debased the national debate about immigration, taking it to the lowest possible common denominator, rose to power at a time when more Mexican immigrants were leaving this country rather than arriving. No matter. Using invectives, he made it a campaign issue.

The term nativism goes back to the mid-19th century, when the Know Nothing party represented native-born Protestant Americans who were threatened by the arrival of German and Irish Catholic immigrants. The ethnic majority of the time feared their decline. Was the “melting pot” a figment of do gooders’ imaginations or was it just some propaganda with which the populace comforted itself? 

 (This week, as a “caravan” of Central American refugees from violent and poverty-stricken El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala continued to walk toward the United States, determined to stake a claim for a better life, it is possible that the Trump administration will take military action against them. But even if they are allowed to seek asylum, profound questions remain about their prospects and about what their children could look forward to once they make it here.)

One of the studies I Googled this week reports that only 6.2 percent of children of immigrants with less than a high school degree will graduate from college. This statistic is sobering. Not everyone needs a college degree to live well in this country, but it helps. The Department of Labor reports that the unemployment rate is highest among adults with less than a high school diploma and their weekly income is $520 in comparison to $712 for those with a diploma. Earning a bachelor’s degree brought in $1,173.

There is good news on the East End, however. The Organizacion Latino-Americana, which was founded in 2002 to help immigrants deal with issues of health, employment, and justice, is alive and well. It is under the direction of a vigorous executive director, Minerva Perez, but needs all the support it can get. You might give OLA a call if you are interested.

With apology to Daniel Webster, it is a small thing but there are those who hate it. And, as another saying goes, all politics are local. So, with that in mind, I believe it is time to address what is for me one of the most local of all matters: the Route 114 roundabout.

Roughly three months since its completion, reviews are mixed. I, for one, enjoy the baffling complexity of five streets that do not precisely come together at the same point. From above, think of a broken wagon wheel; on paper it’s like a child’s drawing of the sun with rays scattering every which way, with a duck’s head at the center or perhaps a human figure being tortured on the rack. Yeah, something like that. At least that’s what I came up with when I tried to sketch it from memory.

It must have made sense on some engineer’s design pad or it would not have been commissioned. In real-life conditions for motorists, the learning curve has been steep.

Toward the end of the summer, a call came in over the emergency scanner about a car accident on Toilsome Lane. I grabbed my camera and headed out to have a look. No one appeared injured, thank goodness, but I was disappointed that the incident was about a quarter-mile away. A village police officer sitting in his vehicle laughed and said, “That’s what we all hoped, too.”

It is probably too soon to say if the Buell Lane roundabout has made a difference in the number of crashes there. Certainly the old “five corners” intersection could be frustrating to manage at times, but, in my recollection, it was never a hot spot  for car vs. car action. If I had to guess, I would say that the Buell Lane, Main Street, and Dunemere-James Lane labyrinth was more death defying to navigate. From my Star office window I have an excellent view of all the daytime drama.

In a poll sample of one — me — I have had two near misses at the new roundabout, which is two more than I recall ever having when the intersection was its old, confusing self. Both times, my car was nearly T-boned at the same spot, however, when drivers headed north on Toilsome (from the Woods Lane side) rolled past the yield sign with their eyes fixed on mysteries ahead. Now, I don’t know from nothing, but it seems to me that a simple stop sign there would be worth the village’s looking into. A notion kicking around Village Hall lately, to install speed bumps there, would not get this daily user’s vote.

All said, I still consider the roundabout a pleasure. Whether it has been worth all the fuss is another question.

So, is it to be AR-15s for all? One would think so given the shoulder-shrugging by officialdom that greets massacre after massacre. Oh well, there will always be crazies — a few bad eggs in the barrel. Can’t let them spoil it for everyone, this being a God-fearing and gun-loving country.

So, yes, avail everyone of an AR-15 — as tends to be done on a global scale with nuclear weapons. If everyone has one, mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) will act as a deterrent. Just kidding. I’m of a contrary mind, to wit, that the fewer weapons of mass destruction (including AR-15s) there are available to people the less they will be used.

And speaking of mass destruction on a really mass scale — of Armageddon, if you will — isn’t it time to come clean, isn’t it time to count up all the pernicious weapons in each country’s arsenals, and to, under some kind of international scientific oversight, begin to whittle down their number, arriving some day in the distant future at zero. There used to be a lot of talk about nuclear nonproliferation, though not so much, it seems, anymore. The opposite in fact on the home front, where it’s rip up this, tear up that. Frankly, it’s a tossup in my mind as to whether I have more to fear from our president or from Iran.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the media is to be blamed for not embracing her boss’s agenda. Whatever that is. If it’s to sow fear far and wide, in this country and abroad, that’s not an agenda — a reasoned plan aimed at achieving certain salubrious goals — but a tactic. 

What was it Caligula said? Ah, yes, Oderint, dum metuant. “Let them hate me so long as they fear me.”

By now we will know whether we have acquiesced to this kind of governance, one which speaks with a forked tongue, which preens and casts blame, whose sole aim, it seems, is self-promotion and self-aggrandizement rather than working toward the general good. 

The more I see of what’s going on in our homeland, the more inclined I am toward World Federalism.

Paying attention to scientists — at least to those many working to better our lot rather than to those turning out more and more demoniacal weaponry — could in the end save us. 

Will we some day be delivered from the grip of the Know-Nothings? I don’t know.

Many of us who live on the South Fork seem to take pride in thinking we are the tail that wags the dog. You know: We imagine we set the cultural standard for all that occurs in the county. Those who live on the North Fork, and especially in Riverhead, are fully justified in taking umbrage. The heart of Riverhead — and by that I do not mean its nearby shopping centers — has a lot of culture and history going for it.

Because Zach Zunis, who has a day job in advertising at The East Hampton Star, was to perform as part of a “Blues Salute to Etta James” at Riverhead’s Suffolk Theater, a number of our staffers experienced the theater for the first time on a recent Friday night. I was certainly aware that Zach has had quite an illustrious career as a blues musician, but this was my first time seeing him as his real self: on guitar and miked in song. We were all thoroughly wowed by the talent of “one of ours,” which until then had been hidden in plain sight.  

Although we had come to hear Zach, the concert included an unannounced appearance by Janiva Magness of Bluelan Records, who had never before performed on the East End. A singer and songwriter, she presents American roots music, sometimes described as blues and soul, has produced 14 albums, and been nominated for Grammys and the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year award. Zach has toured all over this country and abroad with her.

The Suffolk Theater itself might be described by those among us who haven’t spent enough time in Riverhead as yet another gem hiding in plain sight. It is worth a visit all on its own. It is an Art Deco building dating to 1933, preserved and refurbished in 2013 as a restaurant as well as concert hall. Nowadays, concertgoers can sit at one of two bars or at tables on the floor and enjoy serious cuisine prepared by Noah’s of Greenport. If you have been to Noah’s you know the food is excellent. 

Good music and good food equals a super evening out, and I would suggest you plan one as soon as a worthy show appears on Suffolk Theater’s schedule. 

When I asked East Hampton friends if they had ever been to the theater, they invariably thought I was referring to another interesting institution in Riverhead, the Vail-Leavitt Theater, which boasts of being the oldest theater on Long Island, having been built in 1881. (The Vail-Leavitt is on the short street as you head from the direction of the Sunrise Highway toward East Main Street, around the corner from the Suffolk Theater.)

Tickets to the Suffolk Theater are not cheap, so I am pretty sure I would not go for the “45 R.P.M. Salute to David Cassidy” on Nov. 11 or Foghat (“Slow ride . . . take it easy”) on Nov. 16. But Art Garfunkel in person on Nov. 23, the day after Thanksgiving? I might be tempted. 

There were two messages on my voice mail when I got to the office last Thursday morning. Both were in response to an editorial on Republican voter suppression in advance of the midterm elections. 

One caller was calm; the other started off angry and ended more than a minute later stutteringly furious. (I shared the audio on several of my social media accounts.) 

Aside from their common rejection of what The Star had published that morning, the callers, women who did not leave their names, were linked in apparently misunderstanding what editorials are. 

The calm woman’s message concerned the absence of a byline (editorials, which reflect the views of a publication’s owners, are rarely signed, whether at The Times, The Wall Street Journal, or the local papers). 

The crescendo of the angry call came when the woman shrieked, “It’s all opinions!” She went on to accuse us of threatening United States sovereignty and being the main cause of East Hampton’s downfall, whatever that may be. 

The two phoned reactions came a day before Cesar Sayoc’s arrest in Florida for allegedly sending 14 pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Trump. And they came two days before a shooting attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 people. 

On Thursday, when I first heard them, the messages were amusing. By Saturday afternoon, they had taken on a far darker note. Particularly in the angry woman’s voice, I could hear the irrational hostility that might have motivated these most recent attackers. 

Hatred is a powerful thing. The president floated on a bilious cloud of it all the way to the White House, and has pinned his survival in the midterms on it. Of all the elections since perhaps the Nixon-McGovern presidential race, this one has most clearly pitted hate against its opposite — love. Voting is essential; it may literally be a matter of life and death.

My father used to say all I did was watch balls go back and forth, and so it has been — volleyballs, basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, baseballs, rugby balls, footballs . . . though, come to think of it, not so many footballs anymore, and, for the first time that I can remember, no rugby balls have been going back and forth at Herrick Park this fall.

So, I suppose if you were to ask me what changes I’d seen here over the years, I would say, “I’m seeing fewer balls go back and forth.”

But, as I said to Susan at Robbie’s the other day, what buoys me really, what keeps me going, is the prospect every day of going to watch children play. How can you not be enlivened by that, how can you not continue to be rendered optimistic, despite an Everest of evidence to the contrary. 

Mark Twain apparently said sanity and happiness were incompatible, or words to that effect — at least “sanity” was given as the correct crossword answer the next day. Mary demurred when I mentioned it, knowing me to be happy, and reluctant, I guess, to think of me as insane. Inane, perhaps, but not insane — a trait that she often ascribes to our leaders when they talk of winning nuclear exchanges or of weaponizing space.  

I remember when my late stepmother, who was French, first heard of “Star Wars.” Ah, she said, America would be protected now. But I wondered. There is, after all, a lot of space in space. . . . 

We can’t even control guns in a reasonable way, how can we even think of controlling nukes, you might ask. Certainly the present administration doesn’t seem much interested. In fact it’s tilting the other way. And so, unhappily, the insanity remains in fashion.

“And now the same dreamy, heavy-lidded ivory tower scientists at work on their marvelously accurate missiles are also at work on nuclear defense,” Lewis Thomas said in one of his “Fragile Species” essays. About a quarter-century ago. 

“We need a freeze, all right, a mutual freeze on this kind of [so-called] science. . . . Its only possible outcome will be the destruction of nature itself.”

Not a happy prospect, you’ll agree. Sanity still offers the only alternative outcome, and, yes, undoubtedly a happy one — pace Mark Twain — should it ever be achieved.

I think I have just escaped being victimized by a new scam, which popped down the chimney, so to speak, right in time for the flue season.

The call came in Friday on the landline, in itself a red flag — the plumber is almost the only one who still uses that number — but it had a 631 area code and I took it. “Hello?”

“Hello again!” (Chirpy young-male voice.) “It’s Jackson with Priority Cleaning, calling to remind you that it’s time to have your chimney cleaned!”

“Thanks, but we don’t use our fireplace.” (We used to, years ago, but the living room would get smoky and you’d have to open the windows in the middle of November and then someone needed to stay up late to make sure nothing was left burning, and after a while we got older and the logs got heavier and the game didn’t seem worth the candle.) 

As if I hadn’t spoken, he went on. “It’s been four years since we cleaned your chimney.”

“We haven’t used our fireplace in 30 years. We don’t make fires,” I repeated. 

“It says here that we cleaned your boiler in 2014.” The voice on the phone was polite.

“I don’t remember that. It must be a mistake.” (Could I have forgotten? Nah. I may not know what I had for dinner last night but I remember stuff like when the freezer was last de-iced. Besides, our fuel company, Miller-McCoy, cleans the boiler.) “Where are you calling from?”

Westhampton, he answered promptly. We went back and forth some more for a minute or two. Jackson not only sounded absolutely sure of what he was saying, but also — oh, dear — increasingly solicitous, as if wondering whether he was dealing with an Alzheimer’s case at the other end of the line.

“We will bring a copy of your 2014 receipt when we come,” he said finally. “And the charge will be the same, $59.99.”

I wavered. This guy seemed so certain of himself, and evidently so concerned that we might decide one ditzy night to make a fire after all and set the house ablaze, that I was about ready to cave in, when he again mentioned the boiler.   

“I don’t understand. Are you coming for the boiler or the chimney?”

Both, he said.

“The boiler has its own chimney?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

That’s funny, I thought, I never knew that.

Then it occurred to me to ask if they’d have to come inside the house.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What for?”

“To get to the foot of the chimney, by the boiler,” he explained patiently, as if he were talking to a 7-year-old.

“But, but, the boiler’s in the basement, not in the house. There’s a Bilco door — it’s outside!”

Even that hurdle he smoothly leaped over. “Oh, yes, now I see it written here!”

Befuddled, I heard myself agreeing to have them come the next Monday morning, and hung up. We’d had a story in The Star about a man in Northwest whose roof burned down because he hadn’t had the chimney cleaned, and the fire chief took the occasion to remind everyone it was Fire Prevention Week. Maybe if we didn’t have to think about the flue, we’d make a fire sometime after all. Who knows?

Then reason, a.k.a. Google, kicked in. “Priority Cleaning,” I typed. “Westhampton, NY.” 

Nothing. There were four chimney cleaners in Westhampton Beach, none of them by that name, and one home-cleaning service advertising that “Your trust and security are our PRIORITY.” I tried again, this time with just “Priority Cleaners,” and got a whole slew of companies from North Carolina to California, but nothing within 100 miles of the South Fork.

Finally, I called the number he’d given me. The call didn’t go through the first time; then it was forwarded to another number, which announced that its mailbox was full. 

When I tried again later, though, it took my message: “I’m calling to cancel an appointment. . . . If someone shows up here on Monday I will call the police.”

And no one did.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, my friend Mike moved into a house set back a good way from Main Street, behind what is now the Ladies Village Improvement Society headquarters. I had never paid much attention to the old place until Mike and his mom were there and it became kind of a home away from home for me, but on nights when we happened to be walking by after dark, coming back from some mischief or other, it gave me the shivers. Little did I know.

This is not a ghost story, per se, but let’s say if I believed in ghosts, I would most certainly think the big house was haunted. 

The Gardiner Brown house, as it was known before the L.V.I.S. set up shop there, stood much closer to the street until 1924. It was called brown because it was brown in color in its later years. The Gardiner White House, occupied as a summer home briefly by President John Tyler and his wife, the former Julia Gardiner, was up the street. It lost its roof in the 1938 Hurricane and was demolished.

When the brown house was built for David Gardiner, the fourth proprietor of Gardiner’s Island, in 1740, its front door was about where a white pole-and-picket fence stands today. At some point, a sidewalk was laid along the street, which stopped abruptly at the Gardiners’ stone steps, then resumed on the other side — on the other hand, perhaps one of the family, vexed about the intrusion, had the steps built over the sidewalk. 

During the Revolutionary War, when the British occupied East Hampton, Redcoat officers billeted in the house. Tradition has it that their revelries offended the natives. Much later, another David Gardiner raised half-cow, half-bison hybrids there much to the amusement of the local children who would peep at them through a rear fence. The history of the house was presented recently by Chip Rae as part of a program at the East Hampton Library on the Gardiner properties at the East Hampton Library, which will shortly be available on-demand at the LTV website.

For Mike and me, things got creepy when we were roughly in the eighth grade and the house caught fire, killing an older man who lived there alone. The story we heard somehow, whether accurate or not, was that while his torso was recovered from the debris, his head was not.

For what seemed like months to us, a Dumpster remained in the driveway at the side of the house’s gutted east wing. At night, wading through the damp smell of burned wood we imagined the man’s missing skull hidden deep inside and quickened our step. To our young minds, it seemed reasonable that there had been a murder and that the perpetrator had set the fire to hide the evidence.

We never found out anything more, but to this day it is difficult for me not to think about the old man’s head even when browsing among the books in the L.V.I.S. shop inside — never mind passing by, late at night, on foot.

Happy Halloween.

This week, we learned it was likely that Jamal Khashoggi, a 59-year-old journalist for The Washington Post and a Saudi dissident who lived in the United States, was not only murdered by the Saudi government, but, according to Turkish authorities, tortured first, his fingers cut off while he was alive, his body dismembered entirely — with a bone saw — once he was dead. A bone saw. Dismembered.

The history of Western civilization speaks of beheadings — execution by guillotine or sword as a swift and efficient method. Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England, was among the most famous monarchs to be beheaded. You would think that the guillotine would suffice among today’s despots, but apparently not. 

My daughter reports that one of my grandchildren heard the headlines somewhere and asked what her mom did for a living: “Are you a journalist? Are they chopping up journalists?” Her mother, making light at first, replied, “They don’t chop up journalists like me, who write for fashion magazines.” Later, however, it was time for a discussion, on an 11-year-old level, of the role of news reporters in defending liberty by being the watchdogs of democracy. 

No one is drawing and quartering news reporters in this country — yet — although our president, the very week Mr. Khashoggi went missing, seemed to find it mighty funny to joke about beating them up. The audience at the rally at which he spoke joined in the comedy and chuckled along. That the president, if he could get away with it, would be happy to jail journalists who point out his failings seems patently obvious at this point. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days when our worst parenting worry was that our kids might be influenced negatively by the violence in video games and rock-music lyrics.

The current big man in the White House has already demonstrated a breathtaking capacity for cruelty, seeming to glory in separating children from parents at borders, and cheering when refugees fleeing from persecution and violence are sent home to face prison or death. Here in the First Congressional District, our own zealous congressman, Representative Lee Zeldin, gets into the spirit in a television commercial currently in rotation in which he promises with relish not just to stop but to crush and destroy MS-13, the dangerous street gang.

I have never believed the average American has a taste for blood, or would enjoy physically punishing political enemies — dissidents, dissenters, investigative journalists, and other “enemies of the people” — but unless and until the majority of citizens in this country stands up to firmly and finally put a stop to all this, the jury is apparently still out.

We have to keep listening. We cannot just plug our ears and wish it would go away. Listen for red flags. It is a red flag when you hear a leader speak of those he doesn’t like in terms that dehumanize them: It isn’t just ugly talk when a leader calls immigrants “bad hombres” with “dangerous criminals among them,” or calls some women “dogs” and “fat pigs.” Such words are rhetorical devices for degrading human beings and making them seem less deserving of fair or decent treatment.