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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Now that Brett Kavanaugh no longer has to defend himself against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault, he can get on with screwing us. 

It’s been a long time coming, and were it not he it would have been someone else with equally illiberal views. It is supposed to be a liberal country, you know, inasmuch as we pay no fealty to a king (though maybe to movie and TV stars and pro athletes) or slink about whispering under the thumb of a dictator, but rather are supposed to make of ourselves a commonwealth of purposeful individuals, checking the swings the pendulum may make toward anarchy on the one hand or statism on the other. The idea, I take it, was that if power were to reside with the citizenry — with citizens sufficiently aware of the ways power could be abused — it might through the holding of frequent elections be sufficiently diffused. 

We have one such election coming soon, and let’s hope that there will be some redress, some righting of the ship, the minority party now controlling the Supreme Court as well as the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency, the latter office having become pretty much synonymous with the abuse of power. 

To help turn the tide, my wife has been knocking on a lot of doors lately on behalf of Perry Gershon, a voice of reason amidst the turmoil that seems to surround us. I told her she had met more people in the past few weeks than I had in my entire reportorial career. At least it seems that way. Of the two of us, she is more the political animal, as it were, eager to exchange ideas with others, more willing than I to listen, and to reflect, more concerned with the well-being of all, and more sensitive — even to the point of becoming physically affected — to injustices, which, of course, abound. My late mother called her “a great cheerer-upper,” and she is, genuine in her hope that in this society, in this world, we can do better by one another.

She said not to single her out, as I was about to, when her candidate won the Democratic primary here not long ago, that her contributions had been negligible, that she was just one person in a large, and well-organized, effort throughout the district. All right. I am encouraged, then, that there are many like her, that she isn’t the only one who would like to restore checks and balances to a society that has become warped. Judy D’Mello wrote recently that there are encouraging signs too among the 18 to 24-year-olds. Maybe they’ll vote in big numbers this year, availing themselves of absentee ballots.

I hope that this country will eventually live up to its promise, that it will become less stratified, more egalitarian when it comes to wealth, race, and class, and, yes, even more inspiring when it comes to according to everyone the chance to be the best they can be.