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?

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.

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.

“You have to write the piece that goes with this rap: ‘No Conca, no movie theater, no diner, no Black Buoy. (Variety Store? You’re right, it’s still there.)’ ” This from a book editor quoting back to me my lament for the wreckage of Sag Harbor.

I’d emailed her in the fall, I forget why, maybe because she’s a parent too, and so seemed to agree that the emotional crater left behind by the disappeared Conca D’Oro pizza parlor was going to be particularly difficult to crawl out of — the kid hangout, the antithesis of Hamptons pretension, the throwback, if not exactly to a time of a gas station on every corner, at least to those days when from downtown you could make out the distant whine of engines up in the woods at the Bridgehampton Racetrack, a siren call to something, anything, happening out here.

The vacant Conca storefront may have been in the back of my mind as I crammed in the next best dinner I could think of on a Monday night, a couple of Pierson High booster club frankfurters in sweet white-bread buns, one French’s-only as a starter, another as the main course squirted with two different colorful streams of condiment for variety, the meal finished off with the butt end of my fourth-grade daughter’s leftover mess, all ingested in mere seconds as the Whalers and Bees warmed up in preparation for their recent tête-à-tête, and all three dogs for 4 bucks, the nice booster lady had informed me, math I’m still trying to figure out. 

About the game, for you parental units out there skeptical of teens these days, let me put it this way: Effort was not an issue, was in fact in ferocious evidence, particularly on Pierson’s part, the boys hammering the boards and raining threes without the help of their thousand-point man, Will Martin. He was missed more in the bleachers, as he’s fun to watch, this baby-faced assassin who’ll smoke your ass flat-footed as he slashes to the hoop, then calmly floats back up the floor, blond head cocked to one side like he’s negotiating the inclined deck of Captain Havens’s whaling vessel in a heavy swell. 

As for the Bees, they looked like a team not used to playing together, as my wife put it, incisively, I thought. Maybe next year.

Yet for all the shouting and high spirits, what ghost was that haunting the Sag Harbor gym? For the visitors too. I mean, Bridgehampton: What’s to become of you? How many more regular folks can you stand to lose to the saner economies of the Carolinas? How many more 19th-century houses have to come down? 

And those kids sacrificing their bodies for the sake of a loose ball deserve a magical place of their own come summer, like the old drive-in movie theater. Is that maudlin to say? Or merely pointless. I’ll go ahead and add to the grievance list those two six-foot-tall fiberglass soft-serve cones Carvel wanted atop the shop but Southampton Town ordered mothballed decades ago. The supports are still there, if it’s not too late. God forbid there be a glimpse of joy intruding on that dreary suburban stretch of Montauk Highway. 

It was noise complaints that did in the racetrack — the worst loss the South Fork has suffered, more than a few of us believe. And now the same judgment is being visited upon another large tract where interesting things happen, the East Hampton Airport. So here’s a modest proposal: Rather than silence surrounded by mostly empty second homes and an unchecked army of deer, how about doubling down and putting a luncheonette in the terminal? The kind of place you could get a tuna melt, fries on the side, chocolate malted with a coffee back. Sit under a lacquered wooden propeller mounted on the wall and watch the planes come and go. The occasional refueling. See who deplanes and treads across the tarmac to points unknown. Good for old people with nothing to do, good for kids. 

I know, I know, don’t hold your breath. But we’ll always have the hardwood.

Baylis Greene, Bridgehampton High class of 1985, is an associate editor at The Star.

The other night on the “NewsHour,” our source for horror on weeknights, they showed the light that could not until recently be seen in what was heretofore thought to be vast outer blackness.

It was comforting. “We’re looking at heaven,” I said, “all the light that can now be seen.”

Well, I didn’t mean by that to imply I’d been convinced, though, as I say, it was comforting inasmuch as the revelation did nothing to disabuse me of a feeling that has persisted, to wit, that despite the suffering that attends us, all will be well. Or, as my French stepmother used to say, “Tout s’arrange.”

“It’s nothing,” my father reported his mother-in-law as having said to Lucette and him on her deathbed. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I do wonder sometimes if the life to which we cling so isn’t a dream from which we’ll awake. Sometimes it almost seems as if it’s a sideshow. Nay, most often it seems like a freak show, so confounding at times that I’m prompted to seek refuge from the madhouse in Mud House.

And refuge in “The Book of Joy,” a compendium of conversations in which the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu engaged not long ago, two leaders who know well what suffering is, but who, despite that, are joyous, their joy being linked to suffering. Theirs is a state, I presume, beyond happiness and beyond mere optimism. 

There is a large photo of the Dalai Lama laughing in our daughter and son-in-law’s house, and sometimes I wonder why he is. I can only conclude that it is because he is supremely accepting, that he’s never trying to force the issue. Still, inasmuch as I’m a citizen in an exhortatory nation, I would like to have a bumper sticker made that says, “Strive for Beauty.” For me that sums it up.

“We are same human beings,” the Dalai Lama says at one point, and, at another, Archbishop Tutu says, “We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another . . . human beings are basically good. . . . Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”

Theirs too is a light you can see, and much closer, and yes, it too is comforting. Jack Graves

It would be great publicity for all involved, if anyone reads it. That was part of my thinking this week on a story about a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whose ownership is disputed in a federal lawsuit.

One of the indisputable truths about media in these times is that readership is fractured into innumerable discrete groups. Television news, which once was confined to the big national networks and their local affiliates, matters far less than it once did. Newspapers’ monopolies on the public’s attention ended with the rise of radio. On the internet, social media spoon up news your friends “like” and little else.

The Jackie O painting story was first reported by The New York Post and Daily News on Saturday. Other news outlets picked it up, and by Monday it was everywhere, or so it seemed. The story, I assumed, was interesting enough that, at least locally, it would cross over into general consciousness.

In short, the suit alleges that a small painting of the future first lady was stolen from the Beale house, otherwise known as Grey Gardens, in the 1960s or early ’70s. What is not disputed is that Terry Wallace, who runs a gallery in East Hampton Village, bought the painting from an unnamed antiques dealer in about 1988.

A Beale nephew, who lives in California and who has not been shy about trying to cash in on the family name with a line of fashion accessories, wants the painting for himself and has sued in federal court seeking its handover.

That the suit is with the feds is notable in and of itself. T.E. McMorrow, the reporter who wrote our story, pointed out that there is a $75,000 threshold to bring a property claim before a federal judge. The nephew’s lawyer says the painting is worth at least that much. T.E., or Tom, as we call him, is skeptical; none of the portraitist’s works has gone for more than $850, he said.

But federal court is federal court, and it makes for better headlines and a greater likelihood that, as happened, multiple news outlets pick up a story. Still, at my usual Java Nation stop on Tuesday morning, none of the news-junkie regulars had heard of it. Even Andrew, who runs the place and knows everything, was in the dark.

So the question was what The Star should do. Should we wait for it to appear in print before putting it on our website or just go for it? We put it up, pushing the story out over Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Interest was steady, if modest. A small item we had posted a few days earlier about the New York City restaurant chain Il Mulino held an insurmountable lead, followed closely by our coverage of a seal pup found scooting along a road in Amagansett in January. Everybody had heard about that.

As to the publicity value of the Jackie O painting, the nephew wins either way, by seeing his name go cross-platform from New York to London’s Daily Mail. And Mr. Wallace, who says the portrait is his legally and not for sale anyway, does too.

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.

It’s a cliché of personal-essay writing to complain about how everyday items disappear from the home — socks, for instance, and the bizarre frequency with which they are eaten by washing machines. Well, let me begin by assuring you that I never lose socks in the washing machine. Never! And I’ll tell you why. A woman named Susie gave my husband a helpful tip: All you have to do is safety pin the pairs together. We actually do this.

However, as it turns out, there are other, much more mysterious, ways to lose socks. Not long ago, for instance, I was standing next to my bed taking off a pair of pants while wearing socks but not shoes. As the pants fell to the floor, one sock fell with them. The sock on the other foot, however, just upped and disappeared. I looked inside the pant legs, around the floor, under the bed, and into every crevice of the wood frame of the bed (which is a four-poster), but it wasn’t to be found. I’ve never seen it again. This was toward the end of December. Have we got a gremlin?

My husband and I have a standing joke about the bread knife that flew the coop. I suppose a visiting member of the family, adult or child, could have borrowed it for some purpose or other and not only forgotten to bring it back but forgotten having done so. (We’ve asked everyone, of course. They think we’re going bonkers.) We refer to the bread knife whenever something else we are looking for can’t be found. “Maybe the sock is having a meeting with the bread knife in the attic,” we say. “Maybe the bread knife is vacationing on Tortola.”

And then there are the scissors. In our house, at least, scissors have a way of levitating and night-traveling that I find nearly occult. 

And how about our ballpoint pens? My husband buys black ballpoints in packs of six and replenishes the supply frequently, because he likes to have one at the ready at all times. He even takes one or two with him when he leaves the house. (I’m not sure if he carried them in a pocket-protector during college, but I wouldn’t put it past him.) Now, I will admit to taking one of these ballpoint pens to the office every now and again, but I absolutely refuse to take responsibility for the vast numbers that disappear around here. I’m not kidding. Dozens of them.

Then there is a pair of light blue pillowcases that match my favorite sheets. Where could they possibly be? I’ve looked in every feasible closet and on every possible shelf to no avail. If only one pillowcase was missing I might have more hope, but it is hard to imagine that two pillowcases could have gotten lodged behind, you know, some household appliance or piece of furniture, and the two disappeared at the same time. Did the dog bury them? Did one of my grandchildren make them into a skirt? The imagination runs wild. Maybe they have eloped.

Longtime readers of this column may recall my writing about a couple of large glass pantry jars of the sort popularized some years ago by Martha Stewart. I inherited them from my father, who, more than half a century ago, brought them home one at a time from breakfast meetings of his men’s club after they had been emptied of delicacies like dill pickles. You might say he recycled them. They are basically square, with top openings five or size inches around and lids of green metal. (And here I can’t resist adding that Martha Stewart’s jar lids look like plastic.) Well, you’ve guessed it: Two lids from my favorite old jars have gone off somewhere. They aren’t in the dishwasher, or on any pantry shelf. Did someone throw them away? Why would someone do that? 

You know how this will end, of course. These things will all be found someday . . . but it will only happen after we’ve given up and thrown away the matching sock, the matching sheets, and the glass part of the jars. 

I recently read Neil deGrasse Tyson’s little book on astrophysics, probably the smallest book ever written about such a vast and ever-fascinating subject. 

It’s a pity all of us can’t be astrophysicists, for then we’d never be bored, and thus we’d not spend so much time thinking of ways to kill each other or of ways in which to puff ourselves up, often at others’ expense.

I would like to think, though it may be wishful thinking, that as the universe continues to expand, my ego will continue to deflate, as certainly it should given the immeasurable (thus far at any rate) immensity in which we find ourselves, which counsels humility and wonder. 

Temporary residents on a water spot in this vastness — a blue marble when seen up close — you’d think we’d be more inclined to reconciliation than to beating our chests.

Still, wretch that I am, I can’t help but beat mine after winning a tennis match. 

Yet, as I’m about to unveil the full panoply of my tail feathers in strutting before Mary, I consider that one of my opponents recently underwent open heart surgery, that his partner not only has two knee replacements (as do I), but also a new hip and shoulder, and that my partner’s ripped rectus abdominis must be bound by a girdle, even when he’s not playing tennis.

Such thoughts tend to tampen the ego, as happens too whenever I think of solar winds and asteroids and light-years and gigantic black holes, such as the one upstairs here in the attic into which many of my negatives and contact sheets have disappeared forever. Try finding 1982, for instance. It doesn’t exist, or, if it does, it’s in a parallel universe.

Do I feel at home in our galaxy? You know, as I do on Harbor View Drive? Sometimes. And I’d like to more and more, which is why I’ve begun to read “Cosmos” again, which is wonderfully well written, by the way.

But my main preoccupation at the moment, earthbound as I am, is to learn how to keep score in pickleball. 

Winning in that sport, in contrast to tennis, seems to be less of a concern than having fun. 

Yes it’s fun. Fun all the way down.

One cold winter’s night about 26 years ago, two friends and I shivered on West Third Street, craning our necks and peering in the large window of the Blue Note Jazz Club, straining for a glimpse of Ray Charles. We were barely employed musicians then, sharing a small apartment in Hoboken and busking in the subway when times were especially tough (they usually were).

On Saturday, I nodded hello to the shadows of those three poor scruffs as I strode into the club, now flush with 40 dollars and then some, to sit at the bar, sip wine, and listen to Jools Holland bang out rhythm and blues and boogie-woogie on a grand piano.

I’d seen a blurb about Mr. Holland, an original member of the band Squeeze, and his show at the Blue Note, “Piano, Vocals, and Drum Frenzy,” in the “Goings On About Town” section in The New Yorker. Learning that Ruby Turner, a wonderful British-Jamaican singer, would accompany him at the Blue Note, I had to attend.

Squeeze was a marvelous band that crafted superb, Beatles-esque pop in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since 1992, Julian Miles Holland has hosted “Later . . . With Jools Holland,” a BBC program on which new and established musicians perform and are interviewed by the host, who often joins in. 

My introduction to Ms. Turner came on “Small World, Big Band” by Mr. Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, a sprawling, 22-track release featuring blues and pop artists including Paul Weller, Stereophonics, Van Morrison, Taj Mahal, and Mark Knopfler. George Harrison’s final performance, completed shortly before his death in 2001, is one standout track. Ms. Turner’s contribution, the elegiac and deeply stirring “Nobody ut You,” is another.

But Saturday: Curse you, Metropolitan Transportation Authority! Fifteen long minutes ticked by before the F train pulled into the station, and by the time I got to the Blue Note, the bar, which accommodates just a dozen stools, was full. But, unlike that frigid night 26-odd years ago, fortune smiled. The nice lady at the door said that if the show wasn’t sold out, I could upgrade to a table seat for an additional 15 dollars. After an hour of lurking uncomfortably behind the bar patrons, I received the welcome news and was led deeper into the venue. 

How about this one, she asked, pointing to an empty chair. We can do better, I thought, though by now the joint was jammed.

And then I saw it: amid the dense crowd, an open seat, not three feet from the stage, directly in front of that grand piano’s keyboard! I was the new companion of a family of three, who had flown from Orlando so that the ninth-grade pianist among them could see Mr. Holland. They had apparently been the first arrivals, and I silently thanked them for their enthusiasm, their punctuality, and for not having had a second child. 

And then it was show time, and Mr. Holland and the drummer, Gilson Lavis — another Squeeze alumnus, smartly attired in three-piece suit and tie — were fantastic, surely living up to the show’s title with a flurry of rollicking, stomping duets.

On a frantic, boogie-woogie rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the pianist himself took flight, his left hand pounding an insistent bass as the right danced up and down the keys. Taking an odd, delightful turn, the musicians segued into, and then out of, a most uptempo take on Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major as the crowd sat, spellbound.

Finally, the gregarious Mr. Holland announced, “It’s time for our last very special guest of the evening, one of the most famous people in the whole of England.” No, he said, it “isn’t Her Majesty, the Queen.” Making her debut at the Blue Note — “apart from last night and the night before” — was “the living boogie-woogie queen of England.”

Ms. Turner, with her accompanists, brought the house down, belting out “Rock Me,” made famous by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; “To Love a Child,” and, finally, “Peace in the Valley,” the latter two featured on the 2015 album “Jools & Ruby.”

The lights came up, and so did the soundtrack, and the crowd made its way to the door, and as I thought again of those poor scruffs straining for a peek at Ray Charles so many cold winter nights ago, the unmistakable sound of a Wurlitzer electric piano sounded and the late legend’s “What’d I Say” filled the venue:

“Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long

All right now, hey hey, all right!”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.