Trudging up the dune path leading to the beach on Tuesday evening, Sisyphus came to mind. I was midway through finally building a swim raft to moor out front in the bay and, in several trips, had carried my tools, number-two cedar deck boards, and dock foam from the house along the rising serpentine path, then down the steps, which I had built to the beach.

My labors were not quite as useless as Sisyphus being condemned by the gods to rolling a stone up a mountain only to have it fall back under its own weight and have to do it again. And yet, there was something similar going on, more similar perhaps than Hercules mucking out the dank Augean stables. Albert Camus argued that there was joy in Sisyphus’s endless toil; the rock was his thing.

My thing is building stuff. Maybe more accurately, thinking about building stuff. I had picked up the chunks of blue dock foam that will provide buoyancy for the swim raft on beaches here and there for more than a decade, storing them in an Augean heap near the woodpile. On a college visit trip in Maine last week, I picked up a mooring anchor; the framing planks came from a friend renovating a house in Springs. I bought some galvanized chain made in the U.S.A. and a shackle made in China at the boatyard. The cedar came from the lumberyard in town.

As I nailed down the last of the deck boards this week, the sun was setting. Soon, the Devon Yacht Club cannon fired, and I sat down to contemplate my work. The raft was large, far more of a thing than I might move by myself. Come fall, I will have to figure out how to get it on higher ground, lest storm tides take it away. Then, come spring, I will have to take it back down the mountain, unaided even by the gravity that to this day pulls down Sisyphus’s rock. But it will be of no matter; such is my thing.

If only, if only. If only I had known that Blossom Dearie was performing in New York into the early 2000s, when I was living there, a hungry musician who had somehow conned enough people to become the pro audio editor and then a senior writer at Billboard. 

If only, if only I had really gotten to know Aretha Franklin’s catalog, and not just the hits that every wedding band from here to Siberia plays ad nauseam, and been thusly motivated to con my way into every concert within a 500-mile radius. 

But there was that snowy, happy Sunday, late in the winter of 1996, on the Upper East Side. Was it her birthday? I don’t know, but a New York radio station was playing Aretha’s music all afternoon, and, armed with an ancient stereo packing a cheap cassette recorder, I filled every cassette tape I could find. 

And then I was hooked. Like a drug administered by Dr. Feelgood, “Call Me,” “Ain’t No Way,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Angel,” “People Get Ready,” “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby),” “Tracks of My Tears,” and “Dark End of the Street” were the ones I could no longer live without. Most days, I would not leave the little apartment on East 91st Street for the long, early-morning trek to my crappy job as a Wall Street drone, in those unhappy pre-writing days, without listening to at least a few of them. 

How to describe the joy and sorrow simultaneously conveyed in that voice, and in her own, just-right piano accompaniment? These were the very essence of the blues: within the anguish, the uplift; in the deepest despair, the eternal, perfect soul bared. 

It’s in the desperate grieving of “Share Your Love With Me,” the soaring, piercing wails of “Ain’t No Way,” the galloping piano of “Since You’ve Been Gone,” the gentle introduction of “Baby, Baby, Baby” and its climactic middle 8: 

Those that we love, we foolishly make cry

Then sometimes feel it’s best to say goodbye 

But what’s inside can’t be denied

The power of love is my only guide

Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, this is just to say

Just how much I’m really gonna miss you.

And it’s in a thousand others, and the Soul Town station on SiriusXM Radio has been given over to the Queen of Soul in the aftermath of her liberation, last Thursday morning. It’s hard to drive with tears in your eyes, baby, baby, baby. 

In his wonderful autobiography “Rhythm and the Blues,” the late Atlantic Records producer and executive Jerry Wexler wrote that “Aretha was continuing what Ray Charles had begun — the secularization of gospel, turning church rhythms, church patterns, and especially church feelings into personalized love songs. Like Ray, Aretha was a hands-on performer, a two-fisted pianist plugged into the main circuit of Holy Ghost power.”

I had one occasion to speak with Wexler, who later in life lived in East Hampton, and with whom I shared something beyond our love of rhythm and blues. As a music journalist at Billboard, he coined that term, rhythm and blues, in 1949, for what the trade previously called “race records” and, before that, the “Harlem Hit Parade.” 

I interviewed Wexler, in 2002, because I was writing Billboard’s obituary for Tom Dowd, a longtime Atlantic Records producer and engineer. “By 1967,” I wrote, “Dowd was recording and mixing one hit after another at Atlantic Studios. Paired with the recently signed Franklin, Dowd and Atlantic producers [Ahmet] Ertegun, Wexler, and Arif Mardin formed a team that seemingly couldn’t miss. . . . Between Feb. 8 and Dec. 17, 1967, Dowd recorded and mixed Franklin’s ‘Respect,’ ‘Chain of Fools,’ ‘Baby, I Love You,’ and ‘Since You’ve Been Gone,’ all of which topped the Billboard R&B chart. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ and ‘Ain’t No Way,’ also recorded in 1967, reached Nos. 2 and 9, respectively.” 

If only I had seen Aretha in concert. The closest I came wasn’t very close. In February 2003 I spent an afternoon at Madison Square Garden, one day before the Grammy Awards were to be held, interviewing the remote recording and broadcast crews as they prepared to broadcast the event in 5.1-channel surround sound for the first time. “The raw excitement in Effanel Music’s remote recording truck, known as L7, was every bit as palpable as the awareness that new ground was bring broken,” I wrote in Billboard (hey, I’m no Aretha Franklin). 

But Aretha was going to read the nominees for Best Something-or-Other and, standing in the cheap seats a hundred feet away, I watched the Queen, clearly bored, run through her lines from a teleprompter during the rehearsal. She did not sing, but at least I heard, from her lips to my ears, that voice. 

I like to think that musicians have no use for racism, that petty differences like the color of one’s skin are forgotten as quickly as they are observed, dissolving in the communal act of soulful expression, and in one player’s reverence for another’s playful, sublime, or just downright funky creation. 

Amagansett’s own Paul McCartney, whose songs “Let It Be” and “The Fool on the Hill” Franklin chose to record, provided solid evidence last week. While the president, whose administration resembles a monster truck rally a little more every day, remembered of Aretha that “She worked for me on numerous occasions,” Mr. McCartney took to the president’s preferred medium, Twitter. 

“Let’s all take a moment to give thanks for the beautiful life of Aretha Franklin, the Queen of our souls, who inspired us all for many many years,” he wrote. “She will be missed but the memory of her greatness as a musician and a fine human being will live with us forever.”

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

“The woods‚” hereabouts, used to mean quiet expanses where one could wander alone among stands of white pines, find a path to a hidden pond, and hunt for trailing arbutus, an evergreen groundcover with small pink blooms in early spring. (The internet tells me they also are called mayflowers, which makes sense, but what my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, called them was woodpinks.)

Today, however, what we see in Northwest Woods in East Hampton, as well as in the woods of Southampton, to the extent that I have poked around in them, are man-made neighborhoods peppered with examples of excess. 

“Excrescences” would be too harsh a description, I suppose, for the largest of the stuccoed or stone-sided mansions that have cropped up down the long and winding driveways that until recently were dirt roads or footpaths. These grand houses apparently are filled with Stanford White-style staircases and dining-room tables big enough for two dozen or more.

I’ve been thinking about dirt paths in the woods these days because I have had to find my way in recent weeks to a yoga class in a studio off Millstone Road, in the woody region between Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, which is led by an excellent yogini (although she would hate that coinage). 

Finding Millstone Road was a problem the first time I tried; I got to Scuttlehole, then turned in the wrong direction, and then, after driving around for a while, gave up. After that, someone hung a red balloon on a tree to mark the driveway for outlanders like me, although, with balloons now rightfully considered unacceptable environmentally (especially by the sorts of people who practice yoga), we have been warned they will soon be removed. Instead, we were told all we had to do was drive to the fourth dirt path on Millstone Road, regardless of whether we came from east or west. 

The dirt path to the studio is definitely in the woods. Eventually, it circles a long, low building, where the property owner, a master printmaker and inventor, has set up shop and also constructed a small building with a second-story space full of light, perfect for yoga and contemplation, although he apparently intended to use it initially as an art gallery. 

I may not like the disappearance of the uninhabited white pine forest, but I’m not so much of a curmudgeon that I would deny the positive side of a modern world in which we lucky few get to go to yoga classes in lovely settings (beach, woods, even the middle of the bay on a paddleboard) on any random weekday.

 I don’t think I can give you, or your GPS, good driving directions to my yoga class, but I would be happy to tell you how to join us, provided, of course, you like going into the woods.

Hats off to Sylvia Overby, who told me at the Little League ceremony at Maidstone Park the other day that Adderol was used to treat ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as I was later to learn) and thus helped me finish a crossword puzzle that had been causing me to fidget. I excused myself for a moment so I could run back to the car, which was parked nearby, to fill in the missing letters.

Usually, on finishing a crossword puzzle I toss it, as a cat would a dead mouse, at Mary’s feet, or in her general direction, saying in so doing, and with no little pride, “Now, I can begin my day,” though sometimes it’s, “Now I can begin yesterday, or the day before yesterday.”

And now that I’ve looked up ADHD on the Internet, I find that, crosswords aside, I tend to manifest certain of its symptoms. 

“Often fails to give close attention to details” is listed as one. Bingo. 

“Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities.” Ditto.

“Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish chores.” Oh, boy. 

“Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.” What?

“Often talks excessively, interrupts, and blurts out answers before questions have been completed.” Moi?

It all reminds me of the new doorknob I bought recently at the hardware store to replace one that had become so sticky that no amount of WD-40 could bring it around. 

Part two of that chore, of course, was to affix it, which I tried to do a few days later, with much cursing, of course, only to find once the little bolts were screwed in all the way — it took forever to align them — that you couldn’t pull it to, nor could you, moreover, lock it, even from the inside. 

“What shall we do now?” Mary, who was as nonplused as I, asked.

“There are no problems, only solutions — the juice of five limes, half a lemon, and an orange mixed in with three cups of ice, a cup of Triple Sec, and a cup of tequila being the solution in our case.”

The next day, it may have taken Dave, our neighbor, all of two seconds to diagnose the problem, which was that the latch had been inserted upside down and therefore the desired coupling of the latch with the strike plate could not be achieved. He flipped the latch assembly around and voilà. Dave pays close attention to details. He finishes chores. I doubt that in his youth he was ever called “a mechanical moron,” as was I, by my late stepfather. Generally, I’ll embrace a critique like that. Say that my prose is as dry as a mudflat after a heavy rain, or that what I write about is beside the point, and I’ll preen. But to have been labeled a mechanical moron at an impressionable age — 22, I think it was — has taken such a toll emotionally that I become hyperinattentive, even to the extent of vanishing, when anything requiring assembly and accompanied by detailed instructions arrives. 

But now the psychic weight has been lifted! It’s not that I’m inattentive, phlegmatic, unorganized, excessively talkative, or downright annoying. I’ve got ADHD!

I’m sure Mary will be relieved to hear it.

The landscape here is lovelier than ever this spring . . . even as our nation wallows in the muck. 

I can’t help but be reminded of something Voltaire wrote about a “best of all possible worlds” mind-set: “Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden,” Voltaire has Pangloss, one of literature’s most indelible optimists, say in Candide.

Nice weather seems to have conspired to bring an incomparable lushness to bushes, trees, and flowers this month, and even the air this week seems to me unusually scented with early summer. If you are anything like me, you find solace in being surrounded by all this natural and human-cultivated beauty. All seems right with the world.

But, oh, the contrast between our well-tended gardens and the plight of children at our southern border. Have not most of us always considered the rights of children — the right to the nurturing care of parents and other loving adults — to be a basic human right and a core value in these United States? The “zero tolerance” dictum promulgated by our White House administration and announced by our attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is enough to undermine any faith that the public at large may still have in the goodness we like to say is at the heart of America.

What do parents here “in the best of all possible worlds” tell their children these days about how other children are being separated from their mothers or fathers? Are they explaining just how our nation came to allow tent cities to be constructed to house children who have been ripped, crying, from their parents’ arms?

That this country’s former first ladies, of both major political parties, have spoken out about its cruelty and called it by its name — child abuse — gives the lie to any lingering belief that we are at heart a caring and charitable country. Is it time to sing a requiem for the American dream?

There is no doubt that the forceful separation of children from their lifelong caregivers is a trauma from which they may never fully recover. Just this week, the American Psychiatric Association warned that children treated as the detainees are being treated are at high risk of developing depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. One of my friends points out that this policy is an incubator for anger and antisocial lashing out, once these children are older. The Trump administration (ignoring statistical proofs that crime rates among immigrants are lower than those among natural-born citizens) claims its policy is motivated by the desire to deter crime, but just think of that! 

Further undermining all decent Americans’ struggle to awaken the nationwide consciousness of the harm being done to these innocents is the assault on truth through which the president and his supporters have attempted to deflect and defend their “zero tolerance” policy. The president wants to be a big tough guy, the toughest and strongest on immigration-law enforcement; on the other hand, he doesn’t want to take responsibility for the harm he is doing, and has, absurdly, blamed Democrats for his own “zero tolerance” policy, which only went into effect a few weeks ago. 

I’m told that the private security corporations that have been contracted to run the detention centers for children are advertising job openings in Florida and Texas. I’m also told that a march across the nation in protest has been announced for June 30. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Independence Day and our traditions of liberty than to take our American sons and daughters to Washington, D.C., or to Main Street to exercise their right to free expression on this despicable assault on their fellow children.

It was a missed opportunity. On Sunday night my friends and I spent our time waiting for a table at Salivar’s in Montauk and watching a crowd at an outdoor reggae show. Would that I had had the sense to take a photo with my phone. It might have made the front cover.

The band was at one end of a deck with its members’ backs to Salivar’s dock. Maybe 200 young people were jammed together in front of them, some dancing, others shouting to one another over the music. The lead singer, a wiry guy in a green T-shirt, climbed onto a railing and leaped toward the crowd. When the set ended, a woman in a flouncy black dress made a beeline to talk to him.

Nearer to us, four women in their 20s played corn hole. My dear friend Michael, a man of great decorum, said that he found it difficult to separate the name of the game from another connotation of the phrase. Play consists of two or more people tossing beanbags at a, uh, hole in a piece of plywood. John, the other friend with us that night, explained that the game was popular with millennials. I felt as if we had been sent on a mission from another planet. Then the buzzer we were given went off, and we were seated. I ordered sushi.

Back in the old days, before its current incarnation as the successor to the Westlake Clam and Chowder House, Salivar’s was a more down-home kind of place. Tap water was served in chunky, brown-glass glasses, and there was shrimp, but no sushi. Breakfast used to be served at some crazy-early hour to cater to fishermen headed out for the day; now, by the cut of their jibs, the crowd are renters and hotel guests.

On weekends at the old Salivar’s during the lunch rush, a female clown made rounds of the tables, alternately entertaining or frightening the children. Now there are three bars, including one on the roof, where from time to time yoga classes, of all things, take place.

Yeah, Montauk sure has changed. About a week ago, a photo taken in the hamlet’s 7-Eleven circulated online showing a man from behind browsing in one of the aisles naked but for a pair of boat shoes. No explanation was provided. Speculation was aplenty.

The naked boater was not among the crowd on Sunday, but had he been, I don’t think anyone would have been the least bit surprised.

Driving past an osprey feeding on a utility pole on my way to Lazy Point the other morning, I noticed something that had not caught my eye before. Grasped in a talon was a flatfish of some sort, which the bird was tearing apart with its beak. This was not a fresh sight for me; I had often watched hungry ospreys atop this pole in the past. What was new was that I noticed a dark stain at the top of the pole, as if it were a blunt pen that had been dipped in a foul ink.

Over time, blood, fish guts, and seawater had drizzled down the wooden sides of the pole, memorializing the birds’ many meals up there as on an abattoir floor. Back for another look several days later, I watched a single fish scale flutter, sparkling in the bright sun like a snowflake, down, down, and then disappear into the spartina.

It is not that my eyes have gotten better as I have put on the years. It is instead that there are far more ospreys around than there used to be and their habits have become much easier to discern. Or maybe, like an interest in the Roman Empire, birding takes on more significance in middle age.

Lately, I have puzzled over the fascination for the winged inhabitants of my neighborhood. Unlike deer, which only sleep, eat, defecate, and get hit by cars, birds are always up to something, eking subsistence from the last hard berries of winter or gorging themselves at dawn on summery invertebrates at the shore’s edge. Deers’ idea of a good time is lining up at a hedgerow as do pigs at the trough. A lawn? Hot damn, the deer think. Let’s bring the kids!

Osprey migrate thousands of miles in a year. Action in deer town is when deer that had been sterilized and ear-tagged in East Hampton Village go rogue and make it all the way to Bluff Road in Amagansett. 

An osprey pair at Promised Land have their own guts-soaked feeding pole, maybe 200 feet away from their tilting top hat of a nest alongside Cranberry Hole Road. Passing by recently, I noticed one of the pair there, eating a shad or bluefish while its mate glared from across the street. Sharing among adult fish hawks, as the old-timers called them, may not be that much of a thing.

Yet these big forked-winged birds soar together. On sunny mornings I hear them high above the scrub oak and pine and low bearberry, screeching or whistling or what we earthbound folks might hear as the sound of joy on the wind. And the milquetoast deer, they just snuffle about in the brush below.

It was distressing to read that the traffic snarl exacerbated by the U.S. Open had eased during the weekend, which means, I guess, that they really are going to have it again, in 2026.

I’ll be 86, perhaps having by then taken up the sport, though, frankly, I wonder why old people ever do. They’re creaky, their suppleness, if they ever had any, has left them, and it’s a maddening game, hardly what you want to be playing when you’re about to evanesce.

Actually, golf is the last game you want to take up when you’re old. It is, as we saw this past week, a young man’s game. Tiger Woods, though he is to be praised for playing at such a high level again following spinal fusion surgery of a year ago, missed the cut, and while Phil Mickelson didn’t, he finished at 16-over, tied for 48, his age.

Speaking of the latter, I had thought, when I first heard of it, that he had executed what in polo would be a nearside backhand shot — with the right hand having swung the mallet over the mane of the player’s pony before reversing the course of the ball — on the 13th green on the third day.

Mark Herrmann, I believe, likened it to a polo shot, and I was very proud to have put a name to it, but when I saw the video it was clear that I’d been wrong. He chased it, pivoted, and, having taken up his accustomed stance, sent it back again toward the hole — a disappointment, to my mind. Still, it was bizarre, as everyone agreed, and, because of that, I was inclined to let him off the hook, for I can’t stand the slavish obeisance paid to the rules of the game. That Mickelson was unruly, even for a moment, was worth the price of admission, which, I’m happy to say, was in my case waived, being a member, however vestigial, of the, ugh, “media.”

I had barely been able to get through the credentials process, digitally illiterate as I am. I submitted my photographer friend Craig Macnaughton’s application twice, hinting at the level of esteem I have for him. And also because he, in contradistinction to me, really wanted to go.

And so he went, and I, who’d been as apprehensive as he had been eager, didn’t. 

And it all ended well. Craig’s photos were terrific, better than any I’d seen in the daily papers — which is all the more remarkable given the fact that, despite the glad-handing, the U.S.G.A. has stiffed us when it comes to getting inside-the-ropes access since 1995.

Those — the 1986 and ’95 tournaments at Shinnecock Hills — were the days. Things were more humane then, less regimented. You could run into, and shoot the breeze with, Jack Nicklaus on a quiet Sunday afternoon before everything began, you could listen to and learn from Pete Smith, the then-superintendent, a member of the Shinnecock Tribe, which had owned the land and had built, with the receding glacier’s help, the singular course, and Alex White, the septuagenarian caddiemaster. 

You could read Larry Penny’s poetic description of Shinnecock’s flora and fauna: “When the colors fade and the light pales, look up and listen again. The woodcock is on the wing, fluttering in the semi-light, dancing on high to impress his mate . . . whippoorwills fly by at shoulder height with mouths agape, hawking insects. . . .”

“After rains, the gray tree frogs utter their melodic one-note trills and the Fowler’s toads their drawn-out whines from the shadowy waters of the pond on the sixth hole. Cottontails and pine voles sport, and Reynard comes to look for them. In the late summer the slender ladies’ tresses orchids abound.”

You could feel connected then. No more.

I’ve been thinking about a topic very much in the news these days, which has not gained as much attention as it should — understandable, considering all the emergencies, especially emergencies involving children in recent weeks — and that is the Supreme Court decision on June 27 that public employees do not have to pay the costs of collective bargaining by unions that represent them if they have not chosen to be members. In general, the court’s decision has been assessed as a further weakening of the strength of unions at a time when they have been in continuous decline. And this reminds me of how vital a union was for my father.

He was born in 1898 on Clinton Street in New York City to Polish immigrants, and he did not go to school beyond eighth grade. He may have been a proverbial newsboy; after working in various places, including a button factory, he was getting old enough for a real job when a relative helped him become a Prudential Insurance agent. Gregarious and energetic, the job suited him to a T.  

Prudential had instituted a major innovation in life insurance by that time, writing policies for workers, not just for the middle class or wealthy. These policies cost only pennies a week, and insurance agents made the payments easy by visiting customers at home to pick up weekly premiums. My father liked the exercise he got by going up and down the stairs of the lower-class brownstones to which he was assigned, chatting with the housewives of men who were at work, and often offering advice.

Later on, he would talk about similarly collecting payments on annuities, an annuity, in the parlance of the day, being a retirement fund someone created for him or herself that would pay out regular sums beginning at some future date.  

In 1951, having been a Prudential agent for a long time, my father was among those members of the American Federation of Labor Unions who voted to strike. It was newsworthy because it was the first formal job action by a white-collar union in the nation. And that is what I remember most, because my father was pictured on the front page of The Daily News reading while on the picket line none other than James Jones’s debut novel, “From Here to Eternity,” which was published that year. It took three months of negotiations for the agents to win working improvements and recognition of the A.F.L. as their bargaining agent.

I am certainly not going to try to summarize the positive effects unions have had on working conditions over the years, although the good they have done is overwhelming. (Well, okay, just a few things: the minimum wage, the right to sick leave, the creation of Social Security, protections for whistleblowers, maternity leave, overtime pay . . . the list goes on and on.) I am proud of my father’s place in the hard-working world and, given how far we have traveled from the idealism of those days — and given how many union-won worker rights have been chipped away by the modern environment of permanent freelancing, job insecurity, and benefit-free part-timer scheduling at places like Walmart — feeling a bit sentimental. 

This time of day, when the sun can be seen in stripes on the dark grass and on the ferns and there’s a breeze and some of the birds can be heard, is my favorite. Maybe O’en’s too. 

He’s lying on the deck looking out, for movement, any movement, Dave, deer, joggers, though he just lay back, flat out, with a sigh. I say, “O’en,” but he doesn’t respond, happy in the moment, which is all he knows, and which is all we should know. Then our minds would really be open. But, alas, they are filled, nay, stuffed with things, a lot of which we’d probably be better off without.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could clean them out like closets every now and then. But the prejudices and fears — as well, yes, as the fond glimpses — remain, so, when it comes to the bad stuff you have no choice but to acknowledge it, and, if you want to be a human being, which I once confessed was my ambition in life, face it down.

How then can anyone say, as the present Supreme Court justice nominee has, that they have an open mind. 

“What are your prejudices, sir, what are your fears, and can you tell us how you’ve successfully dealt with them in rendering objective judicial decisions?”

You will follow the original intent of the founding fathers? But those fine, stirring words were written in slave-holding days, in days when many women and many children too were chattel, when, aside from the elite, rights were out of reach. People had to fight for them, it was messy, not so neat, not so strictly constructionist.

And so we have evolved — yes, the Constitution is a living document, I’m happy to say. And only when it has been treated as such have we become more human. 

We have been inching toward polity, though it’s been a slog. 

Please don’t set us back.