Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week? It is a cliché to rhetorically ask where the time has gone, but this autumn, with the dramatic news cycle unfolding at such a breathless pace, it is flying by faster than ever. Don’t you agree?

For me, Thanksgiving is the year’s biggest holiday. Christmas just isn’t as important to me, despite the fun I share with grandchildren. I didn’t celebrate it when I was young and had to catch up as an adult. (The first Christmas presents I ever wrapped, in East Hampton before I was married, were elaborate constructions of paper and ribbons and cards and decorative detailing. Back then, there was plenty of time.)

Over the years, the number of people at our Thanksgiving feast has fluctuated wildly, from the Novembers when we regularly welcomed upward of 30 friends and relations (and the occasional stranger) to eat turkey and ham off plates balanced on laps, down to gatherings of eight or 10 around a dining room table set with our good, old Copeland Spode. 

Nostalgia works in funny ways. I just looked at a small scar on my left thumb; it dates to the first Thanksgiving I spent as a Rattray. Ev and I were living then, in the early 1960s, in the house on Gardiner’s Bay that our son David lives in now, and my mother-in-law, Nettie Rattray, for whom my granddaughter is named, was the only guest. We thought a goose would be festive but apparently were not experienced enough to know how to cope with the quantity of boiling-hot rendered fat that a domestic goose releases when roasted. Hence the scar.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Thanksgiving was a real bacchanal. We would put on some early Sinatra and Dorsey records (“Polkadots and Moonbeams,” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”) as the guests began to stream in the door. After dinner, we played charades or sang a bit drunkenly around the piano. Our regulars could be relied on to bring a favorite dish that became traditional, like my friend Joanne Grant’s unforgettable pumpkin mousse, which sometimes came cleanly out of the mold and sometimes didn’t, as we all stopped in the kitchen to watch breathlessly. Or my daughter’s take on her great-grandmother’s Chocolate Sundae Pie, an airy custard dessert so impossible to perfect it was only attempted twice a year. Or our must-have appetizer, Oysters Rattray, remembered with watering mouths by all who tasted it. 

Oysters Rattray is a cousin of Oysters Rockefeller, only better, at least in my opinion. Instead of spinach, we use sorrel, which at one time grew in our garden. (Later, we used to reliably find it at the Green Thumb in Water Mill, but — oddly, considering the self-consciously “gourmet” world we live in today, sorrel is harder to find these days.) The recipe also calls for shallots, dill, parsley, and celery, garlic, butter, breadcrumbs, and Pernod. Don’t forget the Pernod.

This year, with the dust not yet settled in a round-robin of house-selling and house-moving — boxes and brooms flying all over our old family house on Edwards Lane — Thanksgiving will be different. Two of my children, and their kids, are heading to points north (Vermont) and west (San Francisco), and we will have a smaller crowd than ever before. My third child is coming with his two kids. He is focusing on a recipe for Indian pudding. I hope to find sorrel for the oysters. Everyone promises that in 2019 we will revive the boisterous party of Thanksgivings past. Next year, on Edwards Lane . . .

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.

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. 

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.

There was a time when no one spoke of closing the East Hampton Town Airport. At a minimum, I believed that and would tell pilots so when they said the elimination of the airfield was the ultimate goal of the anti-noise faction. Whether or not I was wrong about my observation then, they are talking about it now.

In the 1990s, the struggle was over jets and what size could land there. The measure of pavement strength was a, if not the, big issue. This would determine how heavy an aircraft could be to safely use the airport, and, as a consequence, how loud operations would be. Joanne Pilgrim, who had the KHTO beat for many years, kept a chunk of Runway 4-22 on her desk, the best reportorial souvenir ever of anyone on the Star staff, in my opinion.

Also in the air in those days was a fear that allowing large jets would lead inevitably to scheduled commercial service. There was a credible allegation of a doctored airport layout plan, lawsuits, and endless hours of hearings. Then came the helicopters. 

They started arriving slowly at first. A few of the ultrawealthy would charter helicopters to get from the city to their houses in the Hamptons. At first they were almost a novelty not worth worrying about. But as Manhattan got richer, helicopter travel became more frequent, and companies sprang up to offer semi-scheduled flights from there to here and back again.

I believe Patricia Currie was the first person I know of who publicly suggested that East Hampton Airport should be closed if nothing else was successful in quieting the helicopters. She was, and is, among the most faithful airport critics, which, as a Noyac resident, really says something about how widespread the noise is.

In more recent years, callers from the pilots side would complain to me about something they had read, and I would tell them that they might not actually want to align themselves with the helicopter companies. It would take only three members of the town board to agree to close the airport, and while that did not seem immediately likely, it had become a possibility. Local aircraft owners would in a sense be the ultimate victims of the helicopter problem if it got too great and there were no other answer.

On Tuesday, I filled in for Chris Walsh covering a town board meeting at the Montauk Firehouse. When I got there, it already had been underway for a few minutes, and Pat Trunzo was at the podium. Mr. Trunzo, a builder and former town board member, has for a long time struggled with airport issues. He was a leader in the anti-expansion fight and has continued to press for safety improvements and reductions in noise, which seem nearly impossible as long as the town remains under the heavy thumb of the Federal Aviation Administration.

And so there he was, representing the Quiet Skies Coalition, denouncing the F.A.A.’s idea that shuffling helicopter routes around would spread the noise more equitably. If Washington would not give the three East End airports the right to impose curfews and ban loud aircraft, shutting down the bane of so many summer days on the South Fork was the only choice.

Members of the town board, while not outwardly agreeing, did not blanch at the mention of taking the land and using it for new, valuable purposes. What was once unthinkable has now become a real possibility, whether the pilots and helicopter companies want to believe it or not.

Last year at this time we were preparing to host Thanksgiving for 37. It was our first Thanksgiving at the Mashomack Preserve and we wanted to make it a holiday to remember. Family, friends, food, and fire, all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark Thanksgiving. 

It was the promise of this gathering that was largely responsible for my agreeing to make the move to a place where the directions might almost be “over the river and through the woods.” We had the historic manor house with a commercial kitchen for the cooking and a table long enough to accommodate everyone. Miles of trails, views of the water, bald eagles. What’s not to love about that? 

But I didn’t love it at first, even though I knew that I should. In selling the holiday weekend to family and friends, enticing them to travel over the sound and through the woods, I was also selling myself on the idea of what lay ahead for our family of four, of the wonders all around that I was still too homesick to appreciate.

We played games and did jigsaw puzzles, cooked and ate together, went hiking and clamming, and at the end of each night, we walked back across the big lawn to our house, all its unpacked boxes reminding us how much work there was to do before it felt like home. 

It took me more than a year to feel settled, and to be honestly thankful for the place I find myself in. There is something about the turning of the calendar, revisiting a holiday for a second time that gives you a chance to see how far you’ve come. 

So I am grateful this Thanksgiving to have finally found my bearings in a new home. I’m thankful for every small gesture of welcome from a new friend, for all the colors of the leaves at the beginning of November and the ones still hanging on this week, for ferry rides on sunny mornings when I get a spot on the east side of the boat, for seeing the water every single day, for foxes and eagles and hummingbirds and red-tailed hawks, for that summer evening we went clamming and then walked home to cook the clams on the grill, for the bat researchers who let us join them one night in the woods, for the veterans who came to Mashomack with the Strongpoint Theinert Foundation and left it with the best damn fire pit you’ve ever seen, for the privilege of living and raising my children in such a special spot, and for the chance to share it with the people I love.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. She lives at the Nature Conservancy’s Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, where her husband, Jeremy Samuelson, is the preserve director. 

The Day of the Dead was lively and bright. The sun streamed through the trees in the early morning, and in the afternoon it was so warm that the tennis lesson to which I’d taken our granddaughter was held outside. I couldn’t recall a First of November being so gentle.

The next day, drizzly and drear, was more fitting for remembering; the treats of the night before having traditionally assured that those who showed up at the door would, in return for “soul cakes,” pray for the donors’ dead.

Filial piety is not such a bad thing in which to engage every now and then in these heedless days. I am partly an amalgam of four parents (make that five if you include Mary’s mother), all of whom did the best they could, and all of whom remain pretty vivid within. 

I can become crowded when all are speaking at once — two fathers conservative, though one more forgiving of human foibles, a mother more tender, though no one’s pushover, one lighthearted, yet steely . . . I hear all their voices. 

And I try not to misrepresent them when I’m writing, though I’ll allow, given my flippant bent, that I have. 

As a group I remember them too: the love they had for one another, beacons to us. It was the second time around in my mother and stepmother’s cases, the first time around in the case of my stepfather, the fifth time around in the case of my father, and all the marriages ended happily. 

Everything, as my stepmother, who was French, used to say, arranged itself. “Tout s’arrange.” 

Those words, I think, are the ones Mary and I most use when we discuss thorny problems. As well as “GOOOOD GOD!” An exclamation my stepfather, whose moral rectitude was practically infamous, would often spit forth. 

“Everyone does the best they can,” my father would often say, to wit, that we are all of us forgiven, and ought to forgive ourselves. 

I still think of my mother when I dry between my toes. And the Bible she gave me has only partly been read. I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. 

She said once we were on different wavelengths, but waves can bend toward one another, can’t they?

It’s drizzly and drear, though the sun is streaming through the trees as I think of them.

I was only joking when I said, “Why not Thanksgiving?” when my first cousin, who’s been after us for years to come down to the Eastern Shore, asked when we’d like to visit. I figured she would laugh it off and say, “Aren’t you the wry one?”

Instead, she welcomed the idea, freeing us from playing host to two score or so, as we usually do. I say “we.” It’s actually Mary upon whom the weight of intensive festive mass gatherings lands. When I said proudly during a Thanksgiving past that I had “helped,” Kitty, Mary’s older sister, almost choked on her torte as she repeated, mockingly, “You HELPED. . . ?”

I was duly chastised at the time, though, as we know, time is a great healer. Soon I’d forgotten all about her rudeness and have been helping myself to more helpings ever since. 

Come to think of it, Kitty didn’t almost choke on her torte, for while she makes all the killer desserts for these occasions, the aforementioned torte, and apple and  pumpkin and pecan pies to boot, she doesn’t eat them. That chore is left largely to me, and I can say with no little pride that I’ve invariably risen to the occasion these many years, with virtually no help at all. None. 

I’m  waiting for the young to step up so that I can, in humble acknowledgment of the cyclic nature of things, pass the baton, but they’ve apparently been programmed to “eat healthy.” It’s amused me that I’ve lived so long despite having eaten in my youth, and in gargantuan portions, liverwurst, Lebanon bologna, pastrami, with extra fat, calves’ liver, scrapple, bacon, French fries, and cheeseburgers, most of it lathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise, not to mention brown cows, rice pudding, floating islands, apple crisp, hard sauce, and vats and vats of Isaly’s ice cream, pistachio being my favorite.

Thanks to Mary, my diet is healthier now. Why, I’ve eaten so much kale in recent years that my father would be hard pressed, I think, to say, as he once did, that I needed more iron in my soul.

I still can’t get over it that Margot wants us to come for Thanksgiving. She’s a Christian martyr. And I know how I can really help. I’ll make Kitty’s torte.

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.