Not long ago, during an idyll in Palm Desert, Calif., I was doing the crossword puzzle and the first clue I came across was: “ ‘Serial’ podcast host Sarah.”

No problem. I knew that that would be Sarah Koenig, who used to work here at The Star.

Usually, I’m out of it when it comes to topical questions in the puzzles, preferring the gossamer past to the lurid present.

“Do you know who Odysseus’ rescuer was?” I asked.

“How would I know,” said Georgie, who had been reunited with her twin, Johnna, following a long separation.

“. . . You’re right, Ino!” I said, looking up after some moments of reflection.

As it turned out, Georgie and Johnna were my saviors that day because they are of a younger generation, which, at long last, I’ve begun to listen to, and could therefore fill in the gaping gaps of my knowledge of current events. 

“Who wrote ‘Hamilton’?” I asked out loud. “Lin . . .”

“Lin Manuel Miranda,” Johnna replied.

“What’s the backdrop to AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’?” I asked, at a loss.

“Zombie apocalypse,” Georgie said, laughing.

Done.

And so, back to reality, though I’d rather not. 

From wit to shit. Our other daughter, Emily, a veteran teacher, was, I learned on our return, up in arms concerning the move to arm teachers in the wake of the massacre of 17 students at the high school in Parkland, Fla. 

“Now they’re telling us we have to be police officers and security guards too?” she said when I phoned her. “We can carry a gun, but we’re not allowed to turn up the thermostat? Where were the bonuses for all the supplies we’ve been paying for out of pocket all these years — for books, markers, pencils, crayons, copy paper? I could go on and on and on. ‘There’s no money,’ that’s what the answer’s always been. But now, all of a sudden there is money! Not more money for social workers and psychologists, but for guns. We had one social worker at a school of 960 kids in an impoverished community in crisis where I taught in Chicago. One. We’re always telling the children to pick the best possible answer from among several possible ones. Well, this is the worst possible answer.”

“Everything’s always been put on the teachers,” Emily continued. “Turn out sterling scholars, lifelong learners, outstanding citizens, fix poverty . . . and now we’re to solve gun violence?! I can’t go to a math conference because there’s no money. There’s no money for education, but there’s money for guns. It’s so sick. I can’t believe people are voting for this. It’s like a wildfire. I want a bonus for the other stuff I, and all the other teachers, do.”

“Frankly, it terrifies me. I don’t want my sons going to a school where there are guns. I’ve never allowed guns in our house. It was all I could do to say yes to a lightsaber.”

“Can you imagine a teacher shooting a former student? Are teachers going to wear holsters? If a gun is locked away, might not a student find a way to get at it? What about teachers and students being shot in crossfires? Have they really thought all this out? Maybe some teachers might be good at this, but the school would not be a safer place if I had a gun. I didn’t sign up to be a security guard. I don’t want to shoot anyone. I’m not wired that way. I just want to do what I love to do, which is teach.”

Copies of The Star’s 100th anniversary edition were dug out recently for the edification of several new staff members, and we found ourselves reminiscing about people who worked here over the years. 

Our centennial issue was published on Dec. 26, 1985 — the actual anniversary date, to the very day. Some of the memories the centennial issue brought to mind were wistful, some humorous. 

One indelible memory was of a man named Chester Browne, a former U.S. Marine who had been wounded in France in World War I and who worked as a Linotype operator and proofreader at The Star from 1923 until the late 1960s. When he died in 1977, he was remembered in his Star obituary as a real American archetype, a character you might read about in Dos Passos: 

“As a printer of the old school, he deplored the appearance of vulgarisms in type, and on one occasion fought long and hard, without success, to prevent the use of the colloquial verb ‘skunked,’ in the sense of having been held scoreless, in a sports story. He was equally affronted by improper hyphenation, and perhaps fortunately had left the business before the advent of electronic typesetting, in which word breakage is sometimes left to an illiterate computer.”

In a photo from 1930 reprinted in the anniversary edition of 1985, Brownie, as we all called him, is seen in the building at 78 Main Street where the paper used to be composed.

One of our favorite stories, back in the old days, was of Brownie. One day, he arrived at work before every one else and was surprised to see folks gathering across Main Street at Guild Hall. He couldn’t figure out what they might be doing at Guild Hall at that hour, but as time passed and no one else showed up to work, it slowly dawned on him: He had fallen asleep after dinner that night and, waking up to glance at the clock, saw that it was 7:30, and rushed off to work. It took a while for him to realize that it was 7:30 p.m., not a.m., and that he still had a long night of sleep ahead. 

We laughed about this for years. The deadlines of newspapering do make a person anxious.

Looking at our special edition also made me nostalgic for the processes and equipment that went into putting The Star together many years ago. Even the 1985 anniversary edition itself seems like a relic at this point. When we said “cut and paste” in those days, we actually cut and pasted! 

“When we think of small-town newspapering as it was,” the 1977 Star obituary for Chester Browne continued, “Brownie will be there, wearing a clean white shirt, a brown apron, and a small smile, and bearing a galley-proof.” Those of you who, like me, enjoy a good trip down memory lane might appreciate knowing that the East Hampton Library has already scanned and digitized every copy of The Star from its inception through 1968, which is as far as they got before the grant that made the project possible ran out. (Perhaps new sources of funding will be found sometime soon to complete this expensive project; I have my fingers crossed.) 

If you go online to nyshistoricnewspapers.org, and click on The East Hampton Star, at right, you will see how easy it is to look up old friends, old football games, old birth announcements, with a simple key-word search. You not only see the text, but can zoom in on high-resolution images of the page. Try it, you’ll like it.

Not since Hurricane Sandy had I seen tides that flooded and then stayed high for days. The winter storm that arrived on Friday did this, and I am worried.

I am old enough and have lived in the same spot long enough to have a sense of how things should and should not be. The bay has been at odds with what should be, but scientists tell us this is the new normal.

Down South, coastal communities have seawater in the streets even on blue-sky days. A raging East River for more than 24 hours after last week’s storm closed two lanes of Manhattan’s F.D.R. Drive. Scituate and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts were flooded through Sunday.

Here, Gardiner’s Bay rose and never really went down again. Storm waves tore at the dunes and toward the foundations of several houses near the old Promised Land fishmeal factory. With the tides remaining so high, groundwater that normally would have seeped through the dunes into the bay had no place to go. The swamps alongside Cranberry Hole Road filled, turned into ponds, and then rose more, joining into one long wetland even as the rain became a memory.

Even on the ocean and with a hard north wind, it was the same. Each time I checked the beach at Georgica and Main, my eyes suggested that the tide was near peak, even if the charts insisted otherwise. Same thing in Montauk, where I stood on one of the expensive staircases the Army Corps of Engineers built over its sandbag earthworks. White water surged under my feet as I descended to take a picture of the Atlantic Terrace hotel.

There is no beach to speak of left at downtown Montauk now. Taxpayers will have to pay to truck sand in before the summer season. At ordinary high tide on Gardiner’s Bay, you cannot walk around one corner of one neighbor’s house anymore. At Lazy Point, two houses are already in the water and two more look about to join them. Gerard Drive was again overtopped by waves, leaving stones on the pavement. 

We had better get used to it, the sea is only going to rise a whole lot more before it’s done.

“It’s sooo nice,” the young woman behind the counter at Trish Franey’s liquor store said last Wednesday evening.

“Yes, I think any day the sun shines here is nice — whatever the temperature,” I said. “We were in Palm Desert not long ago and it was hot, but there are so many people, there’s so much traffic, and everyone lives behind walls. . . . There are always worms in the apples.” 

“Maybe a nice day is even more nice because we’ve suffered a bit, not that I’m a great advocate of it,” I said on my way out.

That night the gibbous moon was so bright that I didn’t really need a flashlight when O’en and I went out on our evening constitutional. We could see and be seen amid the branches’ shadows on the penumbral streets.

We tend to drift along dreamily on these night walks. He’s calmer at night, much less inclined than he is during the day to yank, and I’m calmer too, under the moon and stars, just walking long, reminded that we’re earth-bound only in those moments when he takes a dump, the evidence of which, thanks to an inverted blue plastic New York Times wrapper, I deftly erase.

It was not always so. I used blithely to walk on by in the days I walked Henry, O’en’s predecessor, along Main Street, imagining, with a frisson of delight, summer people stepping in it as they alighted at night from the Jitney. Yes, yes, I confess it . . . a wretch, I am a wretch. 

Finally, a librarian who walks back and forth along Main Street every day, as I do, set me straight. And Mary said she was right to do so even as I complained that, boy, did she have some nerve. It was the hygienic thing to do, Mary said. And so I began to pick up after my pets, and have ever since been so attentive in this regard — and thankful for Debbie’s intervention, by the way — that I risk ecstatic sanctimony, to borrow Philip Roth’s pejorative term. 

I must remind myself — a reformed worm in this apple — that I am only human. Walking with O’en under a gibbous moon and the stars inclines me to this conclusion.

And stepping in it at the edge of our lawn drives the point home. 

It was strange, walking around Gaysorn Village, an upscale shopping mall adjacent to Bangkok’s new and equally luxurious Gaysorn Tower commercial and residential development, to happen upon the horrifying images captured by Nick Ut. But that is what happened on Friday in the early afternoon as a two-week adventure neared its end.

The mall was one stop in an ultimately fruitless search for a traditional musical instrument, an exploration that stretched across two days and yielded just a purveyor of cheap guitars, keyboards, amplifiers, and the like. But the climate was blissfully controlled inside the mall, and walking around its second floor was a welcome respite from the midday, mid-90s temperatures outside.

As it happened, I’d been thinking of Vietnam lately, having visited Southeast Asia for the first time, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick-directed “The Vietnam War” documentary still somewhat fresh from its fall airing on PBS, and a long piece on “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” in the Feb. 26 New Yorker, which had helped pass the time on a 151/2-hour flight, fresher still. 

“The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes,” Louis Menand writes in The New Yorker. 

“And we watched,” Lt. John Kerry testified to Congress, as depicted in “The Vietnam War,” “while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States’ falsification of body counts; in fact, the glorification of body counts.” 

Yes, it was strange, and inharmonious, to find, tucked among Brooks Brothers and Hugo Boss and Louis Vuitton and Omega and Bally and Tag Heuer and Bang & Olufsen and Davidoff, the Leica Gallery and its current exhibition, “My Story by Nick Ut.”

“It’s an image you cannot forget, and shouldn’t try,” according to the exhibition’s program. “Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack remains — and always will be — the most searing image of the Vietnam War. . . . But while ‘The Terror of War’ has, along with Malcolm Browne’s ‘Burning Monk’ and Eddie Adams’ ‘Saigon Execution,’ taken on a life of its own, become cultural shorthand for war’s collateral damage, it is only one photo among thousands that he took.”

Twenty-five among those thousands are featured in “My Story,” and to gaze at any of them is to experience “a can opener to the heart,” as an East Hampton man once said to me in describing an especially traumatic occurrence in his life.

In “The Terror of War,” Mr. Ut captured 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, her clothes burned off and skin seared, running toward his camera, one of several fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm attack in 1972. The others depicted in “My Story” are no less harrowing, and each of us who had wandered into the gallery, adjacent to the Leica store, where the brand’s sleek, beautiful cameras were displayed as though works of art in their own right, fell silent, as if commanded by the terrorized, agonized subjects of Mr. Ut’s work. 

Ultimately, I could only turn away, so crushingly sad were the images, and I thought of the surreal moment that I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapse, from the roof of my Brooklyn apartment, so many days earlier, an event that had provoked the same, involuntary impulse. 

“Damn you,” I whispered to every architect of this inexpressible, appalling, decades-long butchery of human beings, consciously echoing Col. George Taylor in the climactic scene of the original “Planet of the Apes.” “Damn you all to hell.”

An older Asian man and I had passed each other minutes earlier, subdued as we walked through the makeshift hallways of the small space. Could he be Vietnamese, I wondered. Probably not, but perhaps, or of another country into which the carnage had spilled, Laos or Cambodia. Perhaps. 

I rounded a corner, and he and I were suddenly face to face again, and we looked into each other’s eyes, all of them wet and too full to hold back the sorrow.

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

As far as I recall, our little ARFan is the first dog I’ve ever taken on walks. In the old days, whether we were living in Amagansett or here in the village, we simply opened the door and let our dogs roam free. This was the common practice well into the 1990s. Even when we were at our house down on Gardiner’s Bay — and when the door was opened our dogs had unchaperoned access to a wide and usually desolate beach — they didn’t take off. They knew where hearth and home was; it was as simple as that. 

In years gone by, the village had a number of Main Street canine celebrities. Min Spear Hefner, our advertising manager, reminds me that a mixed breed called Ruxton was considered the mayor of the village for quite a long time and that there was a famously peripatetic bassett hound who used to be almost a mascot at the East Hampton Middle School on Newtown Lane. 

I’m not sure exactly when modern dogs stopped seeming trustworthy enough to be let loose — niceties of modern-era pooper-scooping aside. We do have more traffic on the roads these days, it’s true, but the speed limit today is actually lower than it was back then. In any case, as the years went on, freelancing canines became a less-common sight, and it became more common for helpful neighbors and bystanders to swing into alarmed action when they came upon one unaccompanied. 

It was quite a long time ago, maybe as late as the year 2000, when someone last called the Star office to ask whether the lonely black dog hanging around in front of Guild Hall belonged to the Rattrays. Was it Tanya? Or Goodie? I cannot recall which previous ARFan it was. But can you imagine what would happen today if we were to just open the front door and let our dogs come and go at will? Certainly, the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons would recall the dog, for starters. A good Samaritan might even try to press charges.

One of the reasons Sweet Pea, our current ARFan, has to be taken out for proper walks, rather than just let out into our well-fenced yard for a spell, is that we adopted her in winter. She had come to ARF from Puerto Rico in the wake of one of the hurricanes, and was adamantly opposed to the cold and snow. Even on sunny and snowless days, she was completely unwilling to step through the door, and if we managed to carry or drag her through, she would just turn around, plunk down on the steps, and stare back in at us with a tragic expression. She hated the ice so much that she would try to walk on two paws, instead of four, lifting her limbs into the air like a circus performer.

The upshot is that Sweet Pea and I  regularly take walks around the neighborhood, which have not only added a beneficial 25 or 30 minutes of healthy activity to my morning routine, but a pleasant dimension to daily life. Even though we live only a short stroll from the business district, my longstanding habit has been to jump in the car when running an errand upstreet. Out walking with Sweet Pea, I’ve gotten to know some of my fellow sidewalk regulars — a pair who march purposefully each morning toward Main Beach with Starbucks coffee cups in hand, the cookbook writer out for a constitutional, a couple who call Sweet Pea by name. 

I’ve also begun to feel again that I actually live in a village, a village made up not just of buildings and landscapes but of people. It brings a certain ineffable sense of well-being, and I love being reminded how pleasant village life was and still can be. My word to those suffering from internet-age social isolation: Get a dog.

An Idaho lawmaker uncomfortable with climate change being taught in the state’s schools — or perhaps simply uncomfortable with education itself — said kids ought to be able to determine on their own, for instance, whether the globe upon which we live is flat or spherical. 

We were hoping the reporter would suggest the legislator read up on Eratosthenes, or, in the alternative, that she and he go outside and put two sticks in the ground somewhat apart from each other so they could observe the different shadow lengths they cast, or that they look at a ship coming up over the horizon, or that they sit down with a laptop and Google the many photos that have been taken of Earth from outer space, or photos of lunar eclipses. But she held her tongue as our personal surface temperatures rose, my baseball cap creating a greenhouse effect.

Presumably, when it’s become abundantly evident that coastal flooding because of melting polar ice and the consequent sea rise has displaced legions of people around the world, when the coral reefs have all died off in acidic oceans, and when extreme weather events such as hurricanes, deluges, wildfires, droughts, heightened air pollution, heat waves, and insect-borne diseases have produced incalculable damage, he will acknowledge that it’s time for the subject to be taught in school, provided, of course, that the kids are encouraged not to jump to any conclusions . . . about climate change, or a heliocentric universe, or the laws of motion, or any of that.

It takes a while for things to sink in, a couple of thousand years, say, in Eratosthenes’s case. Of course there were — nay, still are — naysayers when it came to the teaching of evolution in schools too. If we are the pinnacle of an Intelligent Designer’s experiments, beginning with slime mats four billion years ago and moving onward and upward from there, it’s pretty sad.

And since not everyone can be a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, a Newton, or an Einstein, who were able to figure things out for themselves, I’m glad there are teachers there for the rest of us, to acclimate us to the world in which we find ourselves, to pique our natural curiosity, and to nurture in us the ability to reason — the ability, once set on our way, to think things through.

We have a teacher in our family, a very good one, who does all the above, and I hate to think that she might ever be hindered in her work, the most essential in society. 

The right to life, free inquiry, free speech, and the pursuit of happiness trumps the right to bear assault weapons in my book. It’s not even close.

I am old enough to remember going to the cinema to watch the 1945 movie musical “State Fair,” starring Jeanne Crain, whom my mother adored. With music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, how could it be anything less than terrific? 

The film also starred Dick Haymes, who scored a gold record with “It Might as Well Be Spring,” the most unforgettable, if corny, of the songs from “State Fair.” 

The last few days, the lyrics have been going through my head:

“I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud

Or a robin on the wing

But I feel so gay in a melancholy way

That it might as well be spring.

It might as well be spring.”

Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra recorded it, too, and I think I’ll go to YouTube to take a listen before the day is out. The unseasonably springlike weather the last few days has put me in a show-tune mood.

This week is winter break at the public schools here on the East End, and, given that we are often still stuck under a pile of snow at this point in February, it’s no wonder that those who can get away head south. It’s also the time of year when a good number of our more peripatetic (that is, affluent) residents decamp to their second or even third homes — in Key West, or Eleuthera, or Palm Beach. One of the couples at a dinner party we held the other night had just arrived home from the Dominican Republic. Another friend is planning a few weeks in Cuba.

I do rather wish I were jetting off on a trip to, say, the Yucatan Peninsula, myself, but, if I am to be honest, I’m fairly delighted just to sit on the kitchen porch of a morning and soak up the rays, letting the sun coax my mind into a warm somnolence. Taking note of the birds at the feeders just outside the windows, reading whatever newspapers remain unread, and throwing out those no longer wanted — that’s what I consider a good start to the day.

Call me sappy, but the debut of this year’s crop of snowdrops, which popped up in the yard a few days ago, has really put a spring in my step. Can the crocuses, and the hyacinths — and the lilacs, and the roses — be far behind?

One of the big surprises about the woods on the East End is that they are full of nearly invisible life among the leaf litter despite so much development and other changes. The deer have opened up the understory vegetation, sending certain birds species elsewhere, but the amphibians persist. 

Andy Sabin, who founded the South Fork Natural History Museum, is considered the king of salamander hunters here. He is leading a series of nighttime walks this month for museum guests during which encounters with these secretive creatures are all but certain. I tagged along on one such outing some years back; they are quite something and not to be missed.

Guests assemble at the museum to be led to a location kept on the down low for fear of poachers. Yes, apparently, there are people who want to collect rare and endangered amphibians and might pay to obtain them. On the night I went on the walk, we parked at a cul-de-sac in a hilly section of woods and embarked, headlamps and flashlights lit, into the gloom.

The salamanders specific to the Northeast have evolved a particularly innovative breeding strategy. As snowmelt and winter rains fill low places with water, they emerge from hibernation to lay eggs in so-called vernal pools (a lovely phrase or earthly drag-queen name, perhaps). Once the eggs hatch, young salamanders creep off into the woods to forage on their own, grow, and get ready to return to the pools years later in winter’s ebb to mate.

Andy has chased their seasonal rounds for decades. During the exploration I attended, he pulled on hip boots and, with a dip net, waded into a thigh-deep pond to ladle a few tiger salamanders into a white plastic bucket. They were large, larger than I thought they would be, draping their black and yellow-blotched forms well over Andy’s cupped hands as he showed them to the roughly 15 of us taking part. 

Andy will lead three more salamander searches this year. Information about how to join him is available from the museum.

The animals and birds at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens in Palm Desert were not all that lively the day we went to see them. Aside from the birds, who drew our greatest sympathy, they didn’t appear to be cramped, they had some room, though you wondered if they wouldn’t be happier freed from us.

I tried, without success, to get the laughing kookaburra to laugh, reciting catchy Rodney Dangerfield jokes: “I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother!”

“I’m telling you, ugly, I was ugly. My mother used to feed me with a slingshot.” I was constricted, though he just sat there on his perch, apparently unamused.

I fantasized about Mary freeing the vultures, until I read that sometimes they made away with small children. That gave me pause inasmuch as we were visiting two of them, ages 2 and 1 — the 1-year-old, Lucy, being an Aquarius like me. Mary is not a great believer in astrology, by the way, especially since I told her that we were “givers.” Make that “a giving taker,” then, in my case. 

We celebrated Lucy’s birthday a day early, on Super Bowl Sunday, an occasion made all the more merry by the fact that the Eagles won.

We wanted to free the bald eagle and the golden eagle they had at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens too — all the birds, in fact, though it is worth the visit to see the native desert plants if nothing else.

There is nothing much left of the desert now. Mary said she wished she could have shown it to me in the 1970s, when she lived there, a single mother in Morongo, with infant twins, one of whom is the mother of the aforementioned 1-year-old, who has that dimpled wide-eyed look Johnna herself once had. Instead of tumbleweed, it’s house house house now, and malls, many, many, many of them. 

It seems as if millions live there. Johnna said she wasn’t sure. A million maybe in high season, in all the desert cities ringed by mountains, some with snow on top — Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, and La Quinta among them. 

She and her husband, Wally, and the children live within a gated community in Bermuda Dunes, though it’s not as easy to get into as the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens. 

I’ve railed against gated communities in the past, though I see her point: Its relative isolation and the constantly patrolling security service assures her pretty much that the kids will be safe when they are playing and riding bikes.

Even at that they’re never far from the madding crowd. The traffic’s horrendous, The Times is scarce, and it was hot for this time of year, in the high 80s and low 90s, not auguring well for the summer, when, as we do in the winter, the natives hunker down. But the margaritas they were good.