So you think your operation was bizarre? Let me tell you about mine.

In the middle of an otherwise uneventful yearly checkup, with that little hammer thingy in his hand that doctors use to test your knee-jerk reflexes, mine frowned. “I’m going to push down on your thigh,” he said. “Try to push it up against me.”

I couldn’t. Half an inch, maybe. 

“Have you felt tired lately? Fatigued?” 

Well, I said, it was taking a lot longer to climb up the two steps onto the bus, but I’d just turned 50, so that was to be expected. Wasn’t it?

It turned out that I had Graves disease — hyperthyroidism, an overactive thyroid gland. It isn’t fatal — Barbara Bush, wife of George, mother of George W., was diagnosed with it in 1989 and died five months ago at 92 — but it’s certainly not one of life’s pleasures. 

Swallowing radioactive iodine is the most common treatment, but for more people who go that route than not, the pendulum will swing 180 degrees and they’ll become hypothyroid and have to keep taking pills for the rest of their lives to stave off lethargy, weight gain, mood swings, exhaustion, and more. Or, there are two kinds of pills you can take. “Side effects of both include rash, joint pain, liver failure, or a decrease in disease-fighting white blood cells,” says the Mayo Clinic website. No thank you.

The doctor advised surgery. I agreed. It seemed to have the least scary after effects. 

The hospital where the operation was performed was under renovation at the time, and some of the operating rooms had been moved temporarily to the basement. After a very long ride on a gurney, down one elevator, through murky passages where dementors could have been right at home, down another elevator, we emerged into a very long, very cold, subterranean room where all of the hospital’s infrastructure appeared to be housed. The ceiling of this cavern was lined with water pipes, which kept up a steady drip as we passed beneath. The sheet covering me got wet; so did my face.

They’d given me something upstairs that was making me drowsy, but what with the cold and the damp, I was still half-conscious when we stopped, which, as you shall see, was providential. 

People were talking above me but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Eventually the gurney started moving again, and as it did somebody in one of those shower caps they wear in operating rooms leaned over and said, quite clearly, “Welcome, Mrs. Barnett. Everything is going to be just fine.”

I could feel myself about to give in to whatever I’d been given and slip under, like an exhausted swimmer who’s fought a riptide for too long, but somehow I found my voice. Well, my mumble.

“Not — not — Barnett.”   

A different voice: “What’d she say?”

“Not sure. Now don’t you worry, Mrs. Barnett, everything is fine.”

“Not — Barnett.” The gurney was still moving. Inspiration, born of desperation, struck. I eased my left wrist, with the hospital bracelet on it, out of the sheet and flapped it at them weakly. Somebody took hold of my hand. The gurney stopped.

People began talking in hushed voices on both sides of the stretcher. Now I really was losing consciousness, but I felt it being turned around and then starting to roll again. The last thing I heard as I drifted away was, “You’re very lucky, Mrs., uh, Silverman. This is neurosurgery.”

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

For reasons that I think require explanation, I have never registered as a member of a political party. To put it simply, I was the editor of this paper for more than 20 years and thought it quite enough to have an opportunity to express opinions large and small in print, including who should be elected or re-elected to local or national office. 

Not being on a political roster also was an attempt to appear nonpartisan, to set The Star apart as well as keep it away from the internecine warfare that sometimes occurs within majority parties. Over the years, however, I have been criticized for obfuscation: The Star’s reputation has almost always been described as liberal, so who did I think I was fooling?

David Rattray, The Star’s editor for the last 15 years, writes its editorials, and has honored me by giving me a look before they are published. We’ve a collegial relationship; I respect what he has to say, and if there is an occasion when I disagree strongly with his point of view, we talk it out. 

This sounds enlightened, I suppose, but when heated controversies come along, I often wish I had a direct voice. Let’s face it; it has been a long time since the East Hampton Town Board was politically divided. If the heart of the debate is taking place within a majority party, it’s pulling punches to stay out of the ring, right?

It turns out that a number of friends who used to vote in New York City have taken my advice (and my husband’s) and registered to vote here. It was easy to convince them their votes would count more here than in thoroughly Democratic Manhattan. I also would argue that if they were aghast that the Trumpist Lee Zeldin was entrenched as the First Congressional District’s representative, voting here was imperative.

There also are two strong factions among Democrats vying for control of East Hampton Town government facing off in a Democratic primary next week. David Gruber, a longtime mover and shaker here, is considered the Reform Democrats candidate, while David Lys, who is new to political candidacy, is pegged as the Establishment Democrat. 

The Star’s letters to the editor prove this is a hot-button issue. There were 14 letters about Gruber and Lys among the 37 in the Aug. 30 edition, with another 28 among the 52 (yes, 52) letters this week. My guess is that more will come in even though there will be no opportunity for them to be published before the primary, Sept. 13. 

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, recently explained political philosophy this way: When a group used to controversy has sole control it invariably finds an adversary.

Perhaps it is just as well that I remain unregistered.

Among the pleasures of a late summer day here is being at the beach and watching small shorebirds race to pick food from the wet sand as each wave recedes. As the next wave advances, they dance up the beach, returning in a seeming instant to probe again with their beaks.

Plovers and sandpipers live at top speed, as befits birds that follow migration routes twice a year that can reach many thousands of miles. In miniature, their bursts of flight from one place to the next along the water line, like confetti shot from a cannon, give a hint of their lives on a hemispheric and global scale.

World Shorebirds Day, as declared by a group of British birders, is today, with bird counts by individuals and organizations accepted through Tuesday. Here, Frank Quevedo, the director of the South Fork Natural History Museum, is leading a count beginning this morning, the third SoFo has done.

The idea is that annual tallies by volunteers and professionals around the world can provide details about the birds’ distribution and population trends, and pinpoint species in need of greater conservation effort. As this is a digital age, checklists can be submitted by a smartphone app, ebird, available for IOS and Android.

On a still, muggy morning this week, I was disappointed not to see a single shorebird on the Gardiner’s Bay beach. Five or six cormorants lingered on the wooden swim raft floating out front; maybe 25 more had staked out the nearby pound trap and were arrayed at wings’ length along the lines and stakes. On the beach itself, immature gulls of differing size stood impassively.

On most September days there are at least a few sandpipers around. That morning, with only the high-pitched love songs of insects on the air, nothing seemed to move, not even the water. Given the threats to shorebirds from all sides — habitat loss, climate change, competition from other species — it is difficult not to worry when none cuts through the stillness with a shrill call or the soft beat of its wings.

I know I’m repeating myself, but it was a while ago — in the mid-’70s, I think — when I last rhapsodized about keeping your eye on the ball.  

Tennis was my subject, as it is today, though Steve Bromley Sr., my doubles partner at the time, thought I’d gone a bit overboard in arguing that it — keeping your eye on the ball — was the key to bliss in general.

So let’s just stick to tennis. There are good days and there are bad, I’ve been told by my partners, who add that I should simply accept the fact. Far fewer good days, I’ll warrant, than bad in our cases.  

For pretty much the entire summer, I’ve been playing indifferently,  though cursing creatively — full-throated cris de coeur that resonate even more wonderfully when we are indoors.

This morning, being the last of the summer insofar as the Friday morning men’s doubles league goes, I resolved to see the ball as best I could, on both the forehand and backhand sides — for once. And I could tell, from the moment we began warming up, that my swing would be true, and that that would be all I needed to know.

That we won was beside the point — a lesson that’s taken me years to learn. Willing it won’t necessarily get you there. In fact overweening exertion can be a hindrance. Simply letting it flow may better guarantee victory, but, in the end, winning is beside the point: Knowing you’ve done your best is all you need to know.

“You were in the zone,” said Mary.

“Yes, I was seeing the ball come off the racket, on both sides, and — win or lose — that was all that mattered, all that matters.”

“That’s it!” she said.

“I think it’s the first time I’ve felt like this on a tennis court in some 40 years. Why are these moments so rare?”

“You’ve got to get out of your own way, and when you do it’s beautiful.”

“And that’s the truth,” I said.

I lived in Montauk as a child, and spent several summers there as a young adult, but it wasn’t until years later that I finally visited the Montauket.

It was approaching sunset on Sept. 15, 2001, and I was dazed and out of focus, detached as if observing myself from a thousand yards, lost in a strange new world. 

I’d arrived in Springs, from Brooklyn, on the evening of the 13th, collapsing under the unbearable heaviness of the attack, good friends graciously taking me in for three nights. 

There was no plan but to be far away from New York City, and I was happy to do anything, to go anywhere, to turn off the damn television and pretend all was well, and going out to Montauk for drinks at sunset sounded pretty good, under the circumstances. 

Standing on the lawn with a hundred or more others, we clutched our drinks as the late-summer sun cast its warmth across everything and all of us, gathered under the blue sky on Fort Pond Bay. 

I’m not much for jingoism, but damn, the seemingly spontaneous swell of a disparate choir, friends and strangers alike singing in unison and with complete abandon, brought the first, microscopic sense of comfort, even strength. “From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam, God bless America, my home sweet home.” 

I always think of that moment on the few occasions I’ve been back at the Montauket. Maybe I’ll get out there next week, for a cold beer and quiet reflection.

A most gorgeous streak of perfect late-summer days had blessed the Eastern Seaboard that week, the furnace of New York’s wretched summer finally yielding to cool nights, low humidity, skies a clear and beautiful blue. The morning of Sept. 11, like those before and after it, heralded another perfect day. 

I was getting ready for the commute from Brooklyn to my office at Ninth and Broadway when the crackling voice on WCBS NewsRadio 880 said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. In the first minutes, eyewitnesses said that it looked like a twin-engine aircraft. This was going to be a long day, I thought. 

Then, incredibly, another plane crashed into the other tower. America is under attack, said the voice on WCBS. 

We were all staggered that day, slow to process the surreal scenes on the television and before our eyes. For a long time that morning, I still intended to go to the office. Only later did it occur to me that the subway may not be running, and later still did I grasp the enormity of what was happening.

On the television, the south tower collapsed, but surely everyone had gotten out, I thought, and how strange the skyline looked now, and the sight of just one tower would take getting used to. 

I walked out of my apartment, still bound for the office. But as the door closed, another opened, this one at the top of the staircase leading to the roof. A neighbor across the hall, a beautiful young woman from Ukraine, stood at the top of the stairs. 

The building was a few blocks from the East River, and across it was Manhattan. The roof offered a close, clear view, and it was there that my neighbor, her roommate, the superintendent, and I watched the north tower burn for several long minutes, until it too collapsed, disappearing into an eruption of smoke and dust and flames. 

We all stared, silent, for a long time. Someone had a portable radio, and we listened to reports of a plane crashing into the Pentagon, and another in a field in Pennsylvania, and in the fog the truth was obscured: Now there were eight planes unaccounted for, now there was a fire on the Mall in Washington. Or not. 

Guy, an Englishman who lived three floors below me, was a friend. We had been in a band together a few years earlier. He did web design for Deutsche Bank, at 4 World Trade Center. 

I went downstairs and knocked. He answered, very shaken. He had been a little late for work, he said, and had just emerged from the subway when the second plane hit, the explosion and fireball directly overhead, people jumping from the highest floors to their death. 

He’s dead now, too. Eighteen months after Sept. 11, he got some very rare cancer. There were tumors growing all over his organs, on his spine, eventually on his brain. He went back to England, and he died. I was too broke and callous to fly over for the funeral. 

Smoke poured into the sky for many days, and the enormous empty space where the World Trade Center had stood seemed illusory, the notion that the towers could simply be gone ludicrous, impossible. 

In the twilights to follow, what remained of Manhattan’s skyline was majestic, that unique profile that everyone knows from pictures, from movies, from standing on a roof in Brooklyn. That night and the next, I went back and stared long into nightfall. But for the huge, billowing black smoke emanating from the site, it had never been so beautiful. What an unlikely juxtaposition, I thought, remembering the thousands dead and, looming over the horizon, the wars and death to come. 

I walked past “missing” posters affixed to every inch of every wall, each a plea for information painstakingly handwritten around an image of happy people at some spirited celebration — a birth, an anniversary, a graduation, or just a perfect summer day. Every last one of them was dead, buried beneath thousands of tons of steel and glass. 

I walked past firehouses where a dozen men were lost, and the evening news told of 25-year-old widows and fatherless infants and those who would soon be born into this terrible new world. 

And that was the worst thing, that unbearable heaviness, and it filled me with a sadness for everyone, but mostly for the children who might never know the innocence of awakening to the world, a welcoming, endless summer awaiting.

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.

Labor Day weekend is going to hit me like a ton of bricks. I can’t help feeling I let summer go by without taking enough advantage of its possibilities. Did I get to the ocean when it was calm enough for the likes of me? Did I meet up with the best of friends who are rarely here in fall or winter? Did I attend some humdinger social or political offerings? It would have been an absolutely crazy summer if I had tried to get out and about to every enticing event; the Guild Hall calendar alone was mind-boggling.

When I ran into Andrea Grover, Guild Hall’s executive director, in the lobby one evening in August, she suggested with a laugh that it might be time to put a cot in the basement for me because I was there so often. That seemed close to true at the time, although to be fair I live only a hop away across Main Street, and, furthermore, a quick glance at Guild Hall’s stuffed summer 2018 book gives proof that my forays were quite humble.

Nevertheless, it’s true that I was at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on July 29, Aug. 4, Aug. 5, and Aug. 8. The program on July 29 brought together Neil deGrasse Tyson, the well-known astrophysicist and writer, and Questlove, an instrumentalist, D.J., journalist, record producer, and actor, for a rapid back and forth about creativity. Whoever made this match, whether Andrea or another, struck gold.

On Aug. 4, I was pleased to be there when Andrew W. Kahrl, an assistant professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, spoke at a gathering planned by the Eastville Community Historical Society about summer communities founded by American blacks, like the three long-standing communities of Azurest, Ninevah, and Sag Harbor Hills. Residents of these communities filled the hall, enjoying not only what Mr. Kahrl had to say but a 40th-anniversary video.

The next night was a concert by Bela Fleck, who apparently is the most revered banjo instrumentalist ever, and on Aug. 8 The Star’s East magazine took over for “Vengeance,” a program about mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. Whew.

Without these opportunities, the summer might, I am sorry to say, have had a lugubrious effect. The problem is that my husband and I are aging, and so are many of our friends. The good news is that despite a series of physical setbacks, one friend had enough stick-to-it-iveness and stamina to overcome them and is avidly playing chess again. Another, I learned just this morning, is out of the hospital, to which he had been sent after a fall, and “doing quite well.”

There’s only one thing to say: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

On Tuesday morning, I took a shower with a clam rake; it made sense at the time. I had just come up from the bay after a swim and needed to rinse off the salt. So, too, did the rake.

Old-time lore is that you should not eat oysters during months without an “R” in them, that is, May through August. Modern refrigeration and health departments have undercut that advice, but as far as personal shellfish digging, as opposed to commercial, there is something questionable about picking oysters, clams, and such from tepid, olive-brown water.

The East Hampton Town Trustees recently closed Georgica Pond after a toxic algae bloom was noticed there. Most of the time, the pond is open to crabbing, despite pretty regular indications of perhaps more disturbing bacterial contamination. This never stops the crabbers, however. 

Out in the boat the other day, my son, Ellis, who is 8, asked me if there were crabs that could swim. Yes, there are, I told him.

The blue-clawed ones we catch at the dock can do so. Most of the rest of the crabs he knows, especially the monstrous spider crabs feasted upon by black-back gulls on the beach in front of our house, do not swim.

Ellis’s question got me thinking about going crabbing — then not going crabbing until the water cools next month. The problem is that by late September, all the obvious spots are crabbed out. Ellis and I went last year at about that time and all we caught on our submerged chicken necks was a single, enormously fat eel, which quickly wriggled out of the net, accompanied by our shouts. 

I saw a photograph the other day of a massive blue claw whose pincers would span a garbage can lid. Apparently, Callinectes sapidus, or beautiful swimmers, do just fine amid the toilet flushings of the super-rich. As for me, I tend to hold off until September at the earliest: You know, a month with “R” in it.

Our cat taught us how to die, leaping into the vastness, the slugs, taking their own good time, taught us how to love, and Henry Haney may have taught us how to live when he said life was what you made of it — in other words, that we could be the agents of our salvation. 

At least that’s how I understand him. No church to lean on, no secular liturgy, no manual to be consulted for the fashioning of ourselves — which is good because I am not good at following instructions. 

So we make it up as we go along, trial and error, stopping every now and then to take stock, asking ourselves what we want to make of it.

I was confronted with such a question some 34 years ago. What were my intentions, Joe Gordon’s son wanted to know, when it came to the woman with whom I’d come to the Giffords’ party. For, if I was serious, he said, he wouldn’t continue to press his friend’s suit. 

Yes, yes, I was serious, I said, in my diffident way. I liked her, I liked her very much.

 And still do, so much that on leaving the store that has Robin’s painted cards, of birds, often pairs, and flowers, this afternoon, the sadness which I guess is always underneath welled up, and I stopped for a moment, aching and thinking could we have one more insouciant moment, one more tango in Zihuatanejo. 

The birds on the card face each other, a couple, balanced and content, amid red, orange, and yellow leaves. 

Suspended so they seem to see clearly that it’s eternal and momentary. 

There was a time before we had spirits, and bodies, and this time now, the happy occasion of our 33rd anniversary, when we face each other and toast one another, a pair of birds amid red and orange and yellow leaves.

That’s what I make of it.

The Equal Rights Amendment is only 24 words long: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Its point couldn’t be simpler: to provide women with all the rights now guaranteed by the Constitution to men. The only existing guarantee for women in the Constitution, which dates to 1787, is the right to vote, which became an amendment in 1920. 

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, grants equal protection to Americans regardless of race, religion, or national origin but, according to the Supreme Court, not gender. (What Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, thinks about women’s rights is not merely an academic matter.)

The E.R.A. movement has been around a long time. The amendment was actually passed by Congress in 1972 and sent to the states for ratification, but it fell three states short of the 38 required. In March of last year — 45 years after that Congressional high-water mark — Nevada became the 36th state to approve the amendment, and Illinois the 37th. Any significance was legally negligible, however, as the time allowance for ratification expired back in 1982. 

Carol Robles-Roman, co-president and C.E.O. of the ERACoalition, which is working to have the E.R.A. reintroduced in Congress and sent back to the states for ratification, spoke about all this to two dozen men and women at the home of Patti Kenner in East Hampton recently, alongside Gail Sheehy, a writer who has 17 books to her credit and too many top magazine articles to count, and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York City.  

We learned that Representative Maloney held an ad hoc hearing in Congress on the amendment after the Judiciary Committee of the House refused to sanction one. Given widespread and bipartisan support for women’s rights —  this is the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, after all — public consensus would seem to be in favor of the amendment. The Republican majority in the House, however, has turned deaf ears.

“At a time when #MeToo has become a rallying cry across the nation, when there are outcries in every corner of this country — for equal pay, equal opportunity, equal treatment, and an end to the casual culture of harassment and assault in practically every sector of society — we have opportunity as never before to make lasting change,” Ms. Maloney was quoted as saying.

For many readers of a certain age, “E.R.A.” probably sounds like a 1970s flashback. Can equality for women really still be up for debate? In recent polling, 94 percent of respondents said they would indeed support the E.R.A. becoming the law of the land — but 80 percent thought it already was! Many young women who were of voting age when Hillary Clinton ran for president apparently have no idea that they are less than equal in the eyes of the law. 

If you said they were second-class citizens, you wouldn’t be wrong. 

Women are also second class in the workplace. In 2012, female full-time workers made 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gap of 23 percent. The E.R.A. would make that illegal. Fixing the pay gap could have hugely positive effects on the economy as a whole: It has been estimated that the poverty rate for women would be reduced by half if women were paid the same as men for the same work.  

We have had our Constitution for 231 years, but are not yet equal. Can you even believe it?

Say the word “roundabout” round about here and people go nuts. This is true even though these road configurations, also known as traffic circles, tend to work well at what they are supposed to do — route vehicles at complex intersections efficiently without causing backups. 

East Hampton Village is the most recent convert to roundabout ways, with a real doozy nearing completion where Buell Lane, Toilsome Lane, Buell Lane Extension, and the Sag Harbor Road come together. Work has gone on nearly all summer with sweltering workmen laying cobblestone and, this week, new asphalt bringing withering scowls from those who pass by in air-conditioned comfort. 

When the Buell Lane roundabout was approved, I did wonder out loud what its purpose was. Yes, there were a few motor vehicle accidents each year at the intersection as it used to be laid out. But without a doubt there will be accidents in the future as well. Slowing to look closely one morning this week, I realized there was no room in the narrow spaces for the many bicyclists who will pass through and that buses and fire trucks and other large vehicles will find it tricky to maneuver.

All that said, I find myself a fan of the new thing in all its baffling glory. The roundabout itself is more of an oval; the approaches are nearly blind, at least from the Buell Lane and Sag Harbor Road sides. Once inside the sort-of circle, especially in the direction of East Hampton Main Street, right-hand and then quick left-hand turns, which are required, seem like something out of a BMW commercial. Yet I love the roundabout despite all its unintentional perversity.

Up until the railroad reached East Hampton and Amagansett in 1895, travelers to New York City went first via Sag Harbor over a sandy wagon track by horse coach. Along the way was an open-air pit that the locals called the Dead Hoss Cemetery, where beasts of burden would end up once their time was up. Communication in the age of the telegraph went that way, too, on wires leading to Sag Harbor and then on to the outside world.

Jerry Baker operated the route for about 50 years, carrying passengers and mail to or from “the Port,” as Sag Harbor was called, and where there had been train service since 1870. A toll keeper, whose house was opposite where the Jewish cemetery is today, extracted a small sum from 1878 to about 1905, when the town took over the road, but there was a back way, a woods track for which nothing was charged to pass. 

The cost for a single horse and farm cart was 5 cents. Baker paid the toll collectors 20 cents each way. One cent was taken off if you were going to the Buckskill path, as you did not use that much road before the turn-off. The tollhouse burned to the ground in November 1909.

Baker also brought The East Hampton Star over each week from Sag Harbor, already printed, but for a single page on which George Burling, the editor, printed the local news he could gather up.