One can be exceedingly buoyed by the aura of good will that exists here, but, for the most part, in order to revel in it you’ve got to arise at first light, which I have been doing for a number of weeks now. 

It’s something of a trade-off: While early-morning ocean swims, triathlons, and road races are energizing, especially, as I said, when it comes to their bonhomie and all-for-one spirit — qualities so evident here that you wish the core of every community in the world could be like this — the leisure beat can be exhausting.

A nap usually does the trick, but I do find myself wondering sometimes whatever has become of summer — summer in the traditional sense, not as we know it here, with its lazy days and pickup baseball games and caressing nights you think will never end. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Not all this jostling, elbowing, and rushing about. Where are the summers of yesteryear? Not here, Bub.

“Honk If You Love Peace and Quiet” still ranks as the best bumper sticker I’ve ever seen. (In southern Vermont, as a matter of fact.)

Well, enough complaining. Getting up early, even for one so inclined to sleep his life away, is worth it, for the reasons mentioned above. I come back from these forays so impressed by what I’ve seen that I’m speaking in tongues, and feel as if my cup is overflowing. Surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives. . . .

Competitive yet full of fellow-feeling, these events are, indeed, to borrow a word from one of them, I-Tri’s youth triathlon, “transforming,” their example serving as a template for a more enlightened society, one in which all are encouraged to do their best, for themselves first and foremost, but also for others.

A good education for all, good health care for all. That is our best defense.

While I was neglecting to properly maintain my yard this summer, a colony of wasps built a nest on one of the outer walls of the outdoor shower. 

The nest was situated far enough below eye level that I hadn’t noticed it on those rare mornings when shame had motivated me to mow the grass, take a clipper to overgrown vegetation, and pick up fallen tree branches. 

For a long while, the wasps and I lived in harmony. They permitted me the carefree use of the outdoor shower — even though a vigorous swinging open of the door could have smashed their domicile — and I, their unwitting host, provided them with a landscape unruly enough to satisfy even the most prodigious pollinator. 

Our relationship began to change a few weeks ago when, after emerging from the outdoor shower and shimmying an outstretched towel to and fro against my back, I experienced two simultaneous stings, one on my shoulder blade and one on my scalp. 

I blamed bees. Sure, it seemed a bit odd that two bees would have launched a coordinated strike against me, but who was I to question nature? 

Days later, as I was entering the outdoor shower, I was stung in the face, and that’s when I realized, while in the midst of screaming profanities at the sky, that a trip to the hardware store’s pest control aisle might be in the offing. 

When I finally eyed the nest, I was amazed at its size. I later learned that wasps construct their nests, which resemble papier-mâché sculptures, by layering chewed pieces of wood and plants. The matte-gray orb that hung from my outdoor shower looked like the ghost of a disco ball. Months of mastication must have taken place to create this structure. 

The more I learned about wasps the less eager I was to eradicate them. Colonies of social wasps are started each spring by a queen who was fertilized the year before and had the fortitude to survive the winter. She begins building a nest and then rears a brood of female worker wasps, who take over the construction duties. 

Only females have the ability to sting, but wasps of each gender, when they sense danger, emit a pheromone that sends colony members into, as a National Geographic article put it, “a defensive, stinging frenzy.” 

I spent a few days observing the nest from afar. It was a hub of activity with some wasps in a seemingly constant state of alert for potential threats, while others went off in search of food. I admired their commitment to community. They were doing exactly what they were born to do, albeit in a location that was inconvenient to me. 

I would have begrudgingly forgone using the outdoor shower and allowed the nest to remain until the winter’s cold caused the colony’s demise, if it were not for the fact that I have visitors — both human and canine — coming to stay with me at the end of August. At that point, according to National Geographic, more than 5,000 wasps could be in residence. For the sake of my friends, I told myself, the cohabitation needed to end. 

After reading up on some of the safer, more cowardly ways to rid your property of a wasp nest — do it either early in the morning or at night when the creatures are at rest, do it while clothed head to toe in case of attack, and do it with a pesticide spray with a long reach — I chose Sunday at 5:30 a.m. as my D-day. 

I am pleased to report that the attack occurred without incident to me, and saddened to recall how unfair a fight it turned out to be. The pesticide-soaked nest now hangs lifeless, a testament to one man’s refusal to let nature run its course. 

Part of me wishes I had received a few more stings for my actions, but, since that wasn’t the case, I decided to punish myself. Later that day, I mowed the lawn during the peak of the afternoon heat.

Jamie Bufalino is a reporter for The Star.  

I may have been the winner of a spelling bee when I was in second grade, but now that I am above a certain age my spelling prowess is diminishing. It’s hard to stomach the fact that I sometimes have to consult a dictionary these days before committing a word to prose. (I was about to say “to paper,” but thought better of it.) Sometimes I even rely on Microsoft Word’s spell-check to be sure of certain words that used to come automatically. Oh, the indignity!

Still, I am old school when it comes to the rigors of style and grammar that I’ve hewed to in my career, and I still know my way around a proofreading galley. I’ve been writing, editing, and proofreading for so many years that it’s hard to stop, even when I am trying to relax. Reading someone else’s newspaper, my eyes go directly to the blooper and my hand starts reaching for a proverbial red grease pencil. I cannot imagine many students in journalism school these days are still learning proofreading marks — the shorthand hieroglyphics with which a galley is marked up for correction — though I could be wrong.

Many publications throughout the country use AP (Associated Press) style, which — at least among ink-stained old curmudgeons — is considered snappier and a bit more modern than New York Times style, although we at The Star do prefer more the formal usage set by The Times, while abiding by a few style-rule and spelling quirks unique to us.

There have been bloodbaths recently in the newsrooms of papers around the country, including the horrible news this week of mass firings at The Daily News and the demolition not long ago of the copy desk at The Times. Entire departments have been slashed and streamlined — and, from my perspective, the damage to the language is obvious. It is troublesome to see mistakes and missing words cropping up more and more often as The Times is rushed to print and into digital form. 

Although my spelling isn’t quite what it once was, my memory for numbers is as sharp as ever. When my kids were in school, they counted on me to remember their friends’ phone numbers. The advent of cellphones has complicated that, of course, as has the proliferation of area codes over the last 20 years. Once, 516 and 324 would do, and then 631 and 329, but they were followed by all the cell-specific exchanges, your 917s and 347s. I remember when people even sold old 324 numbers to newcomers, as a way of making cash from that numerical prestige.

How many different phone numbers are your friends and countrymen using these days? I don’t believe kids today bother to memorize phone numbers, do they? All the various numbers are simply stored into their cellphones. My daughter, who still uses old rotary and push-button phones from the 1980s and 1970s (she says it is because the older phones were better built and never break, but I think it’s really more of an aesthetic choice) claims that one of her summer interns last month was unable to operate a push-button landline phone when confronted with it.

I use a cellphone, of course, but have resisted programming my contacts’ numbers into it. This isn’t so much because I don’t love cellphones — although, truth be told, I do not love them, and never want to be one of those people whose head is always down and whose nose is always in the screen. No, the real reason I still rely on my brain for phone-number storage is because it still gives me a second-grade thrill to be able to brag that I remember them all.

The Ladies Village Improvement Society fair is Saturday, an annual event that I have enjoyed since I was small and my grandmother took me to the Mulford Farm grounds to play pint-size games of chance and get my face painted. But it was not the fair that had me thinking about the L.V.I.S. early this week; rather, I had no swim trunks in my truck, and I badly wanted to break up the day with a dip in the ocean. 

At the risk of sounding too much like a fanboy, the L.V.I.S. and I are like this (picture my intertwined index and middle fingers). Not all that long ago I was invited to speak to the club’s members about The Star during a lunch at the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett. I had given my spiel plenty of times before, but this was the best audience I had ever had, bar none. 

But it’s the Bargain Box shops, which dressed me and several generations of somewhat nonconformist East Hampton youth, that really float my boat. Punk rock, preppy, biker look, Deadhead, office grunt — the L.V.I.S. outfits it all. More than once, I am only a little chagrined to say, the Bargain Box put me into an appropriate kit mere hours before I was due at a summer benefit and even a funeral, or two.

On the eve of the fair, with the shops going to close early today, there was a sense of panic among the customers browsing among the books and clothing on Tuesday. A strikingly rugged young man in black boots, sleeveless T, and artfully ripped white overalls emerged from the men’s dressing room to place a very floral swimsuit back on the rack. Others picked up a few beach reads. The women’s section was buzzing with a sound like an oncoming train as people rattled the hangers. 

I found a pair of Hurley surf trunks that would not fall off in the waves for $12 and two dress shirts for those moments when the need might arise. After walking proudly back to the Star office with my loot folded over my arm, I sat for a spell at my desk, then quietly slipped out the back door for a quick run to Georgica and my long longed-for plunge. Bless you, L.V.I.S., for all you do and the catastrophes large and small you have helped me avoid.

See you at the fair.

Well at least the president didn’t claim the enemy of the people misquoted him — he had, in fact, misquoted himself, he said, when it came to Russia’s meddling on his electoral behalf.

It was all very well for Whitman to say he could contradict himself because he contained multitudes, but when it comes to presidents you like them to wheedle the multitudes down a bit before spouting off, before giving aid and comfort to people who don’t wish us well. As I said last week, cleaning out the cranial closet every now and then makes it tidier.

Though with this one you don’t know what to believe. Nor does he, apparently, know what to believe. Because he doesn’t know his own mind. Other than the pre-eminent fact that he is pre-eminent. 

But the All-Star game was fun, wasn’t it? All those home runs. Their boom, boom, boom still resounded this morning as I gazed up from the outdoor shower into the outreaching trees, putting aside for the moment all thoughts of gloom, gloom, gloom, and doom, doom, doom. It’s the papers. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, for you do want to stay up on all the lies and calumny and disasters man or God-made (whose reputation, as a result, has been tarnished too). 

Greed is the big sin, one of my sons-in-law says, and I guess that the urge to aggrandize, especially in the land of the fee [Don’t you change this, editors, or I’ll take my column and go home!], is pretty rampant. There’s no we in me, and our leader is the avatar in that. But doing for oneself is just the half of it. To be balanced, to live up to this nation’s oft-touted ideals, we must also do for others, in whatever ways we can — even to the extent of covering local sports. So, since he’s unbalanced, he must be checked.

This was to have been the City on the Hill, which would inspire, and to which all would aspire . . . the beacon of freedom, go to the light . . . the envy of all. The beacon’s getting dimmer, the cheering more faint. 

The World Cup was fun, wasn’t it? Won by a former ally. Wimbledon too.

Chill out, give thanks, I wrote, from Brooklyn, in a typically mawkish letter to The Star eight years ago.

I remember the afternoon too well. The 100-degree heat in the sixth-floor walkup, the sliced-open palm in a window air-conditioner installation gone wrong, and the south side of Williamsburg’s essential soundtrack to summer: incessant car alarms and stereos 24/7/365. And always, the lamenting of summers gone by.

Entertaining as the melee could be, I wrote to urge the warring parties of The Star’s letters pages to step back from the gaping partisan divide and remember how very fortunate they were, enjoying another summer on the South Fork. 

Twenty months ago, I wrote, from Amagansett, a typically weepy “Relay” about the last day of summer — in my experience of that summer of 2016, if not the calendar’s. A self-pitying account of a day in October, it was all long shadows and falling leaves and an unconscious yearning to hibernate, dolefully played out on a dock and a boat on the harbor in Montauk. 

And on Monday night, I wrote, from East Hampton, this typically soppy “Relay” about the first day of summer, which, like the last day of summer, arrived a month late. 

It had been a long week, what with the usual work I perform as an Enemy of the American People (Sad!), Mother’s five-day visit, and negotiation of a car purchase, and when the East Hampton-to-Lindenhurst-to-Orient Point-to-East Hampton race had been run on Friday, there were just a few hours left until Saturday and early-morning longshoring in Montauk.

It’s dirty work and my clothes are quickly damp if not drenched, but that one-way ticket to somewhere, I keep telling myself, isn’t going to buy itself, so earn and then earn some more.

Damp and dirty but done in the early afternoon, instead of driving back to East Hampton I accepted an invitation to hang out at Ditch Plain Beach with my friend and Y and Y’s friend, Y2. 

Y is renting a room from my friend for the summer, and brought Y2 along when she came out from Brooklyn on the train on Saturday morning. It’s a small world, after all: Y2 used to work at a groovy restaurant-lounge around the corner from my sixth-floor walkup. We knew each other slightly, across the aughts, in Brooklyn, where Y and Y2 are in an all-girl punk band. I am in awe.

But the thing is, Saturday, July 21, was the first time it felt like summer. I’d barely been on a beach before that afternoon, and on Saturday the clouds and windy, unsettled air had dissuaded many from a swim or surf. Mostly alone and close on a couple of beach towels, we all caught up and had a few sips of beer and laughed a lot and looked to the cliffs and the horizon and the heavens, and we felt so fortunate and happy. 

Later, I remembered what I had forgotten: The world is bigger than a wind farm, an airport, an election campaign, and perfluorinated chemicals. People discuss and do other things, like music, and art, and adventure, and that is mostly the province of the cities. That is why Y and Y2 came from far away to live there, and my own thoughts of returning gather anew — once the temperature has dropped below 80, that is — as do thoughts of venturing farther afield, to the field of infinite potentiality.

But on Saturday, it was good just to lie flat and look at the sky and, for a minute, have nothing at all to do. Later still, at the Star Island Yacht Club, we came to know the bliss of a late-afternoon drink by the pool, until it was time for Y2 to take the train back to the city. 

On Flamingo Avenue, windswept and enveloped by David Bowie’s “Soul Love” blaring like a Williamsburg car alarm from the new convertible’s stereo, we hurtled toward the train station, carefree and exhilarant in the moment. “New love, a boy and girl are talking / New words, that only they can share in / New words, a love so strong it tears their hearts / To sleep through the fleeting hours of morning.” 

And then, a deer bolted from the brush and across the two lanes, and I stomped on the brake, and Y and Y2 screamed and threw their arms high, and we all laughed and marveled at the nearness of the unknown. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star. “Re: Person I Knew” is an album by Bill Evans recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1974.

Call it an addiction, but I’ve been bereft this week without The New York Times. I have had a copy delivered to my door pretty much every day of my adult life, but suddenly it has ceased to appear. My husband has called every day, even managing to reach a real, live human being, and has consistently been reassured that not only will the next day’s paper arrive, but all the back copies, too. It hasn’t happened, and we are a week into this saga. Crisis!

I am only being half facetious. While it is true that we have other means of accessing The Times — the laptop, on which I receive my “Daily Briefing,” the cellphone, on which my husband relies — these digital versions provide only so much of what is in the print edition, and for a news junkie like me it just isn’t enough. 

Sinking into a newspaper in print is my morning ritual. With my morning Times in hand, I settle on the sun porch. I begin by flipping through the pages and reading headlines. Usually, after finishing the first story that catches my eye, I go back and start on the front page again. I always have a nagging feeling that I might miss something of importance.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Young people, even members of my family and The Star’s staff, don’t seem to need the daily Times. They apparently pick up headlines here and there via email or social media and know everything about everything crucial in the day’s news without sitting down and focusing on it. I have the nagging feeling that maybe they are the ones missing something.

We’re still trying to solve the mystery of the missing Times. Is some early morning dog walker purloining our copy? Is there a new delivery person who doesn’t know how to find Edwards Lane, the street we live on? (We are rather off the map, as a private road.) Should I draw up a sign with a huge arrow pointing up the driveway? 

To be honest, The Times isn’t the only news source I’m addicted to. Come evening, I must have the “PBS NewsHour,” and then I like to go to MSNBC to see what it is focusing on, and then I switch to Fox News for a while to get the other side of the story, and then go back to MSNBC to catch Rachel Maddow. 

My husband doesn’t join me in all this. He is more a digital-screen junkie than a news junkie. Even though he sits in the same room as I flip through my evening television news cycle, he concentrates on his computer the whole time (these days, doing research and writing on one of his great-grandfathers, a noted architect of the Gilded Age). And therein lies the difference between us: He is younger than me, turning 78 in August. Does that make him young enough to be a member of the digital generation?

High tide came late on Friday, late enough that no one was awake or on the beach when my old, red kayak floated away. It was my fault, really. 

The kids had dragged it up a way after paddling around in the bay the previous evening. I had been sleepily watching from a hammock and said that I would take it the rest of the way to the safety of dry sand. Hungry for dinner or addlebrained from a long, hard week, I simply forgot.

Ellis, who is 8, and I were on the beach the following morning messing around with a metal detector when I noticed the kayak was gone. Sentimental and possessive about such things, I made my son walk up and down with me, looking for a clue. Then, we hiked in on a new trail at Promised Land to scour the beach there. Nothing.

High tide had come around 10 p.m. on Friday. The  wind was variable and light then, from the south-southeast. Guessing where the kayak traveled was just that, guesswork, and, frankly, whoever happened upon it over the weekend most likely would have considered it a gift from the gods. At any rate, no one has yet phoned the town police, to whom I reported the loss as soon as I noticed it.

Then, on Sunday morning, an East Hampton police officer got in touch with me to say that his girlfriend’s father, who is a commercial fisherman, had picked up a red kayak floating in the bay and that I could stop by the house. It was in the driveway, he said. Heading over, I was excited, but it wasn’t to be. The thing was red all right, but it was not mine. 

Looking into replacements later that day, I was disappointed. The manufacturer, Hobie, has followed the trend of adding bells and whistles to everything and anything, all knurled surfaces and military action hero fantasies. Even flashlights are sold as “tactical” these days. Gone are the sleek and effective lines of my old boat, blown from a plastic rotomold before my eldest child was born.

Most of Sunday was spent circumnavigating Gardiner’s Island with Geoff Morris, a sharp-eyed friend since childhood. From the boat we scanned the shoreline through binoculars, arriving from Three Mile Harbor first at Cherry Hill Point, near where Captain Kidd buried treasure. Then, we went north around Bostwick Point, east to Whale Hill with a pause to land a couple of keeper porgies, then to Eastern Plains Point, into Tobaccolot Bay, south around Cartwright Shoal, then beating slowly against a hard chop into Cherry Harbor, and out over Crow Shoal and back to Three Mile. No kayak.

Studying the island so closely was a reward in and of itself, however. And, back on land, the sting of my relatively trivial loss dimmed. A man in New Jersey whose kids had all grown up and moved away from home had one to sell of the same model, albeit blue. I might go get it; I might not. I just hope that my red kayak’s new owner loves it as much as I did.

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.

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.