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.

I almost got run over

Did you — too?

Then there’s a pair of us?

Don’t tell! They’d really take aim — you know

How dreary — 

to be — Pedestrian!

How exposed — like a Dog —

To risk one’s life — 

the livelong July —

I think we’ll move to Quogue!

Every year it seems to get worse. Last night, O’en and I were almost clipped by a wide-turning tank dropping people off at the house across the street. With O’en on the leash, I unleashed obscenities. I had been waving my flashlight energetically to ward them off, but to little avail it seemed. 

As we headed home I thought I heard a woman say she was sorry, but I could have been mistaken.

This morning, a guy sped through the walkway between the cleaners and Mary’s Marvelous after others had stopped, a foot or two away from my receding chin. I yelled, as is my wont, and he clapped a hand to his forehead, realizing his mistake, I thought, though I could have been mistaken.

Then lately I have seen a toddler toddling near the end of our driveway in the morning as her mother walks a dog nearby, on a leash. The toddler too should be on a leash. This morning, I told the mother that cars sometimes drive quickly on our street, and then I thought about how, in backing out of our driveway, which we’re used to doing, we wouldn’t be able to see a toddler in our rearview mirrors. So, I turned and headed out frontways over the lawn.

I wasn’t surprised to read a letter this week fleshing out the serious injuries a 63-year-old pedestrian had suffered as the result of being hit by a Jeep in a crosswalk near the post office on June 23. Driver said she didn’t see her, if I’m not mistaken. Not that long ago, and not that far away, a 14-year-old girl was killed as she was riding a bicycle. 

I’d be mistaken if I didn’t include myself as one of the potentially heedless. You never know. 

One thing I do know is that I can’t remain in a gloomy state overlong, and so it was refreshing on Friday to see Isabel in the reeking dump. She too thinks the traffic is the worst ever. It had taken her I don’t know how long to get to East Hampton from Southampton, she said. I told her that when Mary was about to set out from Springs earlier that day to do some shopping in Amagansett I’d said, “You can’t get there from here.”

Happily, I was mistaken.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent voter, it’s easy to simply assume that Representative Lee Zeldin, our congressman here in the First District, is a reliable, reasonable, traditional member of the mainstream Republican Party. However, given his decision to invite Sebastian Gorka to headline a re-election fund-raiser in Smithtown on June 28, that easy assessment needs to be tossed out the window. Our congressman has become extraordinarily buddy-buddy with radicals and extremists of the ultra-right, bigoted wing of his party.

Mr. Gorka has been in the public spotlight not just for his stridently anti-Muslim opinions, but for his associations with a nationalist group in Hungary that openly expresses nostalgia for the days when their twisted segment of the Hungarian population marched arm in arm with the Nazis. That Mr. Zeldin, who is Jewish, should embrace a bombastic buffoon like Mr. Gorka beggars belief.

Mr. Gorka prefers to be referred to as Dr. Gorka — although there are serious questions about the legitimacy of that honorific, and about his qualifications to claim to be an expert on immigration or anything else. Despite that, he has served for a time at Fox News as a national security analyst, and worked for the Trump campaign in 2015. Along with Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, he held a short-lived post in the Trump White House, but resigned about a year ago, criticizing the administration’s foreign policy for being — get this — inadequately anti-Muslim.

 Mr. Gorka, who was born in Britain to Hungarian-immigrant parents and who immigrated to the United States after marrying an American, continues to argue that Muslims should be summarily banned from immigrating to this country. As does a racist provocateur of a similar ilk, Milo Yiannopoulos, he gets a lift from making offensive remarks. He greeted the election of Donald Trump to the presidency with an inanity: “The alpha males are back.”

 Mr. Gorka likes to peacock around at public events with a medal on his chest that was given to his father as a member of a Hungarian group, Vitezi Rend, that was notorious for enthusiastically collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. His father’s beliefs can be consigned to history but in continuing to wear this emblem of an acknowledged pro-Nazi organization, Mr. Gorka is clearly trying to tell us something. We should hear him. In 2017, he vigorously denied having been a member of Vitezi Rend during his years in Hungary, but his fellow members, when contacted by reporters, said that of course he’d been a member, and that everyone in the western Hungarian branch of the organization knew it.

According to Recoil, which is a “firearms lifestyle publication,” Mr. Gorka, on a daily basis, likes to walk about armed with two pistols, two flashlights, a knife, a tourniquet, and the U.S. Constitution. Given his beliefs, which are completely antithetical to many of the ideas of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, it seems unlikely that he has read very far beyond the Second Amendment. The rest of his Boy Scout kit is laughable, is it not?

Nevertheless, Mr. Zeldin chose Mr. Gorka to be the big attraction at his fund-raiser. That Mr. Gorka is seen as a drawing card in the First District is a sad sign for all of our Republican friends and neighbors, most of whom are, of course, respectable, reasonable, and moderate citizens. I would like to think that, given a chance to reflect on the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations of Mr. Gorka, they would share my disgust that he was put on a pedestal by our own congressman. 

What did the Greatest Generation fight for? Not for this.

Mr. Zeldin is, by all accounts, a perfectly charming and easygoing man who, in person, is easy to like. By his association with a radical nincompoop like Mr. Gorka, however, he has crossed a line. It is time for Republicans in our district to reassert the decency and common sense of their party.

It may be that Mr. Zeldin thinks it is preferable, on the political stage, not to worry about his or anyone else’s Jewishness, not to make too big a deal out of it. But anti-Semitism is on the rise, not just in Hungary, but here, and our congressman just took a giant step onto the wrong side of history.

One hundred years ago this week, The Star reported, East Hampton observed Independence Day with the biggest and grandest celebration ever held.  More than 600 members of the New York State Guard marched in the July 4 parade, and the context made it page-one, above-the-fold news:

“To Americans the day came with a new significance and impressiveness and to our allies in the Great War it brought a new understanding of the principles which have now become theirs.”

At 10:30 that morning, the Sixth Separate Battalion, under the command of Major L.D. Dyer, assembled on the Harriet F. Herrick Playground on Newtown Lane. Seven of the eight Long Island companies taking part motored to East Hampton, the reporter observed, with the exception of Greenport’s, which came by boat.

Unlike today’s Main Street parades, this one began at Hook Mill and headed toward the Village Green. A reviewing stand was set up at the Osborne house near Dayton Lane, from which Supervisor N.N. Tiffany, Brig. Gen. James Robb of the State Guard, and other officials watched.

At the Village Green, the Sixth Battalion formed an open square around a raised platform; those who wanted to listen to the speeches filled in the empty space at center. The actor John Drew, for whom Guild Hall’s theater would be named, made the introductions. Speakers extolled East Hampton’s beauty and described the devastation in France and Belgium by the Germans. 

One of the speakers, Gen. Howard Duffield of the 9th Coast Artillery, warned of enemy agents here on the home front “playing the German game,” while pretending to be loyal citizens. John V. Bouvier Jr., the grandfather of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, spoke of a son, then at war in France, and told the women in the crowd to save their clothes so they would not have to spend money on new ones. The war could not be won without women, he said.

All this was followed by a baseball game pitting a team from Fort Jay on Governor’s Island against a squad from Camp Upton. Fort Jay took it 8 to 3. That evening, a military ball was held at Clinton Hall, with nearly 150 couples on the dance floor. Troops from the Montauk Army camp, who had not been able to take part earlier in the day, made up for it at the ball.

Twenty years later, as the war in Europe was over and the next one was only then getting underway for America, East Hampton marked the Fourth of July with fireworks at Main Beach, a concert by the town band, and John Bouvier, by then 72, was back at the speaker’s podium to extoll the day’s praises.

It was asked last week of some people in the street how they were going to celebrate Independence Day. Most said they’d see the fireworks, which is evocative, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t before night falls (this was written before night fell) take 10 minutes, at the most, to reread the Declaration of Independence, one of whose “self-evident truths” is, surprise, that “all men are created equal,” an assertion that seems to have been more honored in the breach than in the observance over the years, especially these days. 

The Declaration goes on to say that governments are instituted among Men . . . to secure their unalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. And, further, that when a government “becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. . . .”

And, of course, following the whys and wherefores, the Declaration severs ties with England, whose tyrannical king has, among other things, “endeavored to prevent the population of these States . . . refusing to encourage migrations hither.”

Written almost 250 years ago, it has a familiar ring now, now that our present president seems as if he would readily wrap himself in a tyrant’s mantle if he could, and, frankly, who will stand in his way — a tergiversating Congress, an apathetic electorate?

We should look to it, as did Mary, who with fidelity and passion knocked on doors for Perry Gershon, winner of the First Congressional District’s Democratic primary, as did legions of other volunteers here and abroad, i.e., Brookhaven.

Though she didn’t use Jefferson’s exact words, she urged one and all to vote as if, in effect, their Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness depended on it. 

And, in keeping with the tenor of Gershon’s and the four other candidates’ campaigns, she urged all with whom she spoke to get behind the winner in the general election, as if — I’ll be so bold as to interpolate here — our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness depended on it.

The conventional wisdom has been that even a landslide in East Hampton is nugatory when votes come to be tallied in Brookhaven, which was probably why some voters here backed Kate Browning, a county legislator who lives in Shirley. 

Again, Mary, who worked hard for Tim Bishop when he first ran for Congress, backed a winner.

And it’s a truth self-evident to me that she’s a winner herself.

A couple weeks ago, the New York City L.G.B.T. Pride march left Lower Manhattan all but paralyzed. I grew up on Christopher Street, less than a block from the historical Stonewall Inn, and the parade passes in front of my mother’s house every year. 

My mother lives there with her boyfriend, dog, and two cats. Occasionally she stays to enjoy the show, but usually she comes here for the weekend out of sympathy for the animals, who don’t appreciate the constant noise and massive crowd outside. So, like any good son whose parents are away for the weekend, I usually invite a few friends over to watch the parade from the fire escape. This year was no different.

I issued an invitation on my Instagram so that people could get by the police barricades. This year the changed route made it harder to get to the house, but if you have an invitation with an address on it, they let you through (the same thing is true of New Year’s Eve in Times Square). The changed route was an attempt to speed up the march, which, by my approximation, did not work; there was still marching outside around 8 p.m., when it usually ends around 6 or 7.

The parades started with the Stonewall Riots, initiated by Marsha P. Johnson on June 28, 1969. The bar down the street from my childhood home was one of the only places in New York where L.G.B.T. folks could come and be themselves, and for this reason was subject to constant violent raids by the New York Police Department. A month after the riots ended, the late Brenda Howard, the “Mother of Pride” from the Bronx, organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. A year later she organized the one-year anniversary, and the annual parades became her lifelong passion. Pride month was first officially declared by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and again in 2000, and was again proclaimed by President Barack Obama in every year of his presidency.

In recent years, Pride has become something of a national holiday, with all the marketable trappings of Christmas. When you Google “pride month,” the site morphs into a rainbow-spattered version of itself, even now that July’s heat is upon us. When you order an Uber in June, the slug-trail that shows you the route of the driver is a shimmering rainbow. The Stonewall Inn itself is now something of a tourist trap, and the crowds and perpetual line outside have always kept me out (I much prefer the nearby Duplex). The corporatization is not lost on my friends. Their favorites are the radio station floats, the Ru-Paul’s Drag Race floats, and we all freak out when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of “Broad City” fame point at us from their float, but they pay no mind to the corporate “advertisers.” 

I’m a big podcast fan, and Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, writers for The New York Times Magazine who host the Times podcast “Still Processing,” put it well in their “We Louvre the Carters” episode: “I’m saturated with rainbows, they’re coming out of my tits, they’re everywhere in the city, I just don’t like this corporate slapping a rainbow label on something for a month. Seeing these corporate floats, I just wanna grab a microphone and pull a Janet: Let me know [sings], what have you done for me lately?” (In an intersectional slipup they also praise fans of the Mexican soccer team in Germany who, a Star writer pointed out two weeks ago, chanted homophobic slurs at the opposing team’s goalie.) The corporate veneer of the march used to bother me too. I mean, T-Mobile? T-D Bank? As a kid I couldn’t even figure out why they were there. When I got a little older, I realized it was a marketing scheme. Then I wondered, who are these people, the actual mass of people marching? I started realizing what makes the parade special when I really looked closely at the faces above those pink T-Mobile shirts. They’re not a corporate influence, they’re not heartless capitalists looking to market their company to these potential customers, every other day of the year they’re normal storefront employees. 

My favorite every year is the police section. My generation, raised in the midst of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crash, has an unbelievably low level of confidence in institutions, and I am no different. I went to public school in Lower Manhattan, and most of my friends are non-white. I’ve spoken to police on behalf of friends too terrified to do so months after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by Officer Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland. 

I have what I would call a healthy distrust for police. 

But, every year in late June, you can find me sitting teary-eyed on my fire escape, cheering officers I would otherwise eyeball cautiously. It’s not because I necessarily believe in the institution they represent. It’s because I believe in each of them, because I know that their day-to-day life is not easy, made difficult by toxic masculinity and old norms, and today they each deserve to stand and be recognized.

Alex Lemonides is a reporter at The Star.

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.

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.

Since the East Hampton Library placed a dandy touch-screen coffee machine on its circulation desk last month, some of the Star staff have spent a lot more time next door. That might not be the case with the enigma that is Russell Bennett, who takes regular breaks to sit in one of the comfortable leather chairs and flip through a book. For several of the rest of us, the lure of made-to-order coffee, for $1 if we take our own mug, is irresistible. 

On both Monday and Tuesday this week, I was able to hold out until about 3 p.m. Then, a ceramic cup in hand, I went next door to the library with my dollar bills. Conversation around the Starbucks-brand machine is light and, for me, a nice diversion from the day’s typing. Upon return, coming up with new ways to vex elected officials or write a mouth-watering description of a Saturday church barbecue is a whole lot easier — even after a half-caf, one of the coffee beast’s many options.

Mugs are never a problem around this office, or the library’s break room, as I found out. While there may never be a teaspoon in the upstairs kitchen silverware drawer, mugs we’ve got. We have so many, in fact, that earlier this year when I made a fine Manhattan clam chowder for a friend’s potluck birthday, I boxed up about two-dozen random ceramic mugs in which to serve it. I have not yet dropped by to pick up the box; its absence has made scarcely a dent in our office stash.

Dennis Fabiszak, who runs the library, told me that he applied to Starbucks for the machine after numerous requests from patrons. It dispenses chai, three roasts of coffee, and hot water for tea. Other than in the Long Island Collection area, where irreplaceable hoary town records of great value are kept, we can drink our drinks of choice anywhere in the library.

My East Hampton grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, for whom one wing of the library is named, used to spend long hours there researching her history books. The story goes that my father would sometimes be sent down from the house, which is just up the lane, to tap at the window and remind his mother of mealtimes. One wonders what heights of greatness she might have attained had she had access to a powerful brew as well.