The time has come for us to get a dog. I’ve had many over the years, and a rescue dog is now in order. The problem is the difference between our perceptions of what would be a perfect pet and the perceptions of the highly meticulous staff at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons as they size us up.

To be sure, some would call us elderly and might therefore be suspicious of our ability to care for a dog. I bristle, of course, when I hear myself described that way and point out that elderly is a changeable concept. 

(Who is “elderly”? The I.R.S. has a program called Counseling for the Elderly that provides free tax advice to, get this, anyone 60 or older. Is 60 elderly? I recently found a perfect takedown of the word in a report from NPR. It quotes the executive editor of The Washington Post in 1956 telling his staff, “A lot of us old folks in our 50s do not like to be called elderly. When you are a great deal older than you are now, you will discover that the time a man becomes elderly is exactly like the place where the Earth and sky meet.”)

But back to dogs.

We have been visiting ARF on and off  for nearly two years now, in our hunt for just the right pet. In the last few weeks we have gotten charged up about the prospects of taking home a dog displaced by one of this season’s bad hurricanes, but we’ve not gotten very far. Don’t get me wrong, the people who work at ARF are helpful and patient, but we keep missing out. More than once we have arrived hoping to meet a dog we saw on the ARF website, only to learn it was out of town at an UpIsland event. Another time, a dog we were absolutely sure we would love already had been adopted. We have asked about others whose pictures and descriptions are in a big loose-leaf book on ARF’s front counter, but have been told they were too energetic or too big for the likes of us.   

We don’t want a puppy, but would prefer a calm adult dog, possibly even an older dog that others might not be drawn to. (Just don’t call it “elderly.”)

Things have changed a lot since a dog named Goodie, which ARF called a Lab mix, as I recall, came to work with me at The Star. In my opinion, she was a real Bonac dog, exactly like the dogs you would see in the back of a green pickup truck hereabouts once upon a time. We didn’t have as much off-season traffic on Main Street in those days, some 20 years ago now, and Goodie would come and go as she pleased. I had to put a stop to that, however, after someone called one day asking if the dog lounging on the sidewalk in front of Guild Hall belonged to me. Goodie was heir to the kingdom once ruled over by another ARF dog belonging to my daughter, a magnificent giant named Mookie. 

Goodie and Mookie were the only dogs, in their day, who worked at The Star, while today there is apt to be as many as three or four hanging around the editorial offices. 

The good news is that new dogs arrive at ARF all the time. Canines displaced by natural disasters have been nurtured there recently, as I mentioned, and some seem to be continually arriving from puppy mills or kill shelters. ARF was expecting 18 just last Sunday. I am sure there will be one for us there before long.

I only realized later what had happened. On my way to drop Ellis off at second grade, I decided to stop quickly to vote. Election District 12, where I was registered, never has all that much of a line, so I figured we would be in and out of the Amagansett Firehouse quickly.

At the E.D. 12 table, however, I was told that my name did not appear on the roll. I could fill out an affidavit ballot instead, if I wanted. My immediate thought was that the Russians were messing around in United States election databases and had penetrated the Suffolk County Board of Elections. I mentioned this to one of the poll watchers. “Maybe so,” he said.

We are living through an odd time, with my first instinct doubt about the validity of the election. Score one, Vladimir Putin, I guess. 

At the table where I filled out my affidavit, another poll worker said there had been about five people already that morning with some kind of registration snag. I began to feel nervous. Could something really be happening here? 

A third poll worker tried to look me up on the New York State Board of Elections website. Nothing. He looked himself up. Nothing. He looked alarmed. The second poll worker announced that they probably should phone someone. 

After all of this, Ellis was a half-hour late, though with his “I voted” sticker on his down vest, he was happy enough. 

At work, I had a look online at my registration details, which I found associated with my work address instead of my home address. Having been booted from my box by the Amagansett postmaster this summer for not picking up my mail frequently enough, something to that effect must have been sent to the board of elections, and someone there decided I had moved and made the change unbidden. 

Rather than head back to Amagansett and try to withdraw my affidavit ballot, and then vote in East Hampton while later correcting my registration to show the accurate address, I opted to let things be. I just hope that my lonely ballot, stuffed in its sealed envelope, gets counted. 

At the very least, Ellis got his sticker.

Recently, I listened for eight of 11 waking hours, sitting in on a Killer Bee reunion on a Friday night and, the following morning, attending an equally long Hall of Fame induction ceremony at East Hampton High School. 

It was, I thought, a new world record for me. I’ve had a long love affair with my own voice, beginning in grade school when I first began to wave my hands wildly whenever questions were posed — at least in English, history, religion, and foreign language classes. “Teacher, teacher!”

Perhaps that is why I became a journalist, sensing I needed to balance out a proclivity to proselytize and to blurt out answers with some attentiveness to others.

(Speaking of proselytizing, I wonder why it is that this paper has included it among its epistolary no-nos, along with libel, obscenity, and nonexclusivity. Aren’t just about all letter writers proselytizing, inasmuch as they’re trying to persuade others to their point of view?)

You’ll notice that in regard to hand-waving I left out math. I tried to blend in with the woodwork in math class. In math it was the silence of the hams. Begin talking about train A and train B even to this day and I throw up my hands, not as an importunate show-off, but as someone about to be assailed by a swarm of yellow jackets, which actually happened recently and was not pleasant. 

Knowing something more than math’s basics (I can figure out tips in my head and slice budgetary pies with a reasonable degree of accuracy) ought to be on my bucket list, for I do believe in self-improvement, but while I know my days are numbered, I’ll probably go to my grave innumerate. I know math has its delights. In the next lifetime perhaps.

Back to paying attention to others, I’m glad when it comes to the above-cited cases that I did, even though the sessions lasted four hours each. It wasn’t as if I were at a town bored meeting or attending a political forum; however, the Killer Bee alums’ reunion, though born of criticism having to do with the recently premiered “Killer Bees” documentary film, and the Hall of Fame ceremonies were joyous occasions. 

And joy — at least when I’m thinking straight and simply listening — is what it’s all about.

Anyone who reads this column will have an idea of where I stand politically, but they haven’t heard much, if anything, from me about religion. My first husband and I used to say we had the same religion, by which we meant none. Our notion was that my Jewishness and his Protestantism were entirely secular. (It will remain for our children to say whether they missed a religious upbringing.)

Ev went a step farther than most. Coming home from college one day, at a time when The Star still did job printing, he found a membership booklet being prepared for the East Hampton Presbyterian Church — and physically lifted his name off the page. Those were still the days of what was called “hot type,” but even if you don’t know much about printing before computerization you can imagine how it worked. 

I grew up in a household that was one generation removed from Jewish immigration, and with the adults around me I learned about what happened to European Jews during World War II. My maternal grandfather had arrived here in about 1906 during a period of frequent pogroms in Bessarabia. I understood why he often said we could not trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t argue, either. 

Like my Jewish relatives today, I have always been comfortable in my ethnicity. Jews had a significant presence in the Bayonne, N.J., of my childhood. That community wasn’t free from bigotry; I sometimes heard bad comments about the black minority, although I never witnessed hatred in some physical form. Coming to East Hampton, I found that my mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, stood tall against prejudice. Out to dinner one night she told an East Hampton relative a thing or two when he came to our table and started denigrating Jews. I knew anti-Semitism existed here, as elsewhere, but it never seemed to warrant much attention. Haters will hate. 

But the news that anti-Semitism is rising in this country today, here as well as around the world, has to be confronted. According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged more than one-third in 2016 and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. The increase includes harassment, particularly since last November, and a doubling of anti-Semitic bullying and vandalism in nondenominational schools serving kindergarten through 12th grade.

It may be coincidental that anti-Semitism has been more frequent since last November, when Donald J. Trump was elected, or it may be simply that his election, combined with the flourishing of social media, unleashed hate and hate groups that had heretofore kept to the shadows. President Trump’s attempts to hold back immigration, particularly of Muslims, and his callous attitude toward unaccompanied minors entering this country from across our Southern borders, not to mention the Dreamers, who were brought here as children, fit an unacceptable pattern. Who will be targeted next? 

Mr. Trump’s lukewarm response in August to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in a protester’s death, is a case in point. Satisfied that he is not an anti-Semite because his daughter converted to Judaism upon marrying Jared Kushner, he may not have heard the white supremists in Charlottesville who chanted “You shall not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” Or he might not have found that offensive. 

We cannot know what is in the president’s heart, but I do trust that our community’s leaders and school and religious officials understand how serious this is and are on the alert. 

Paul Manafort has a nice pool. I should know, I swam in it once at a children’s birthday party. The water was fine.

I met Mr. Manafort, too. It was at a small St. Patrick’s Day gathering at a house in Northwest. Things were pretty well underway, the corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes already arrayed on the sideboard, when Mr. Manafort and his wife drove up in a fancy car. 

He did not say much, if I recall, but I was struck by the cut of his dark suit, his grumpy demeanor, and his thick head of hair as he sat in a corner of the room. I probably shook his hand; I don’t recall much other interaction. Uncle Paul, if that was what they called him, spoke mostly with family members that day.

It was only this week when news that his Job’s Lane, Mecox, house was included in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment and I went to Google Maps for a look that it all clicked. I remembered first the vast swath of slate around the pool, fully visible in the satellite view, and that a two-story pool house had ice-cold air-conditioning.

As the details slowly came back to me, I remembered that approaching the pool area from the driveway, one had to navigate some intricate brick work. Beyond that, the grounds, which the Mueller indictment said cost more than $800,000 to sculpt, undulated with deliberate earthworks (it had once been a dead-flat farm field), and specimen trees loomed here and there. A small man-made pond lay beyond that. 

To one side of the pool there was a covered area with upholstered seating, tables, and an outdoor kitchen-bar arrangement. Beyond that was a grass court for horseshoes, I think. Maybe boccie. I don’t know. Around back, there was a golf hole, about par-3. There was a tennis court, and a full-court basketball setup where Mr. Manafort’s Range Rovers were on the other side of the house.

Much has been made of the details in Mr. Manafort’s indictment about the unreported overseas money he allegedly laundered through the Job’s Lane property, a lot of it on landscaping and home improvements paid via wires from a bank in Cyprus — and none of it disclosed on his tax returns. 

I have no doubt that he could have done it, certainly  at Hamptons prices; the slate around the pool could have run more than $100,000 alone. 

Other work on Mr. Manafort’s Job’s Lane house ate up more than $5.4 million of the foreign payments, according to the Mueller indictment. 

And his suit — that might have come from the nearly $850,000 he spent at a New York men’s clothing store. With threads like those, you might have thought he would have smiled a little more.

I just know that this so-called tax reform plan, if what’s been intimated comes to be, will gore my ox, and probably will gore the oxen of numerous other members of the middle class here, this being a high-tax state where middle classers itemize. 

Doubling the marital deduction won’t do it. Retaining the mortgage interest deduction while erasing real property tax and state income tax deductions won’t do it. In other words, when all is said and done, we, the middle people, at least in these parts, will be saddled with a tax increase, not a tax cut, as is continually being promised.

But, waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’m thinking that my tax hike would be rendered more palatable if I knew it were destined for a fund dedicated to rebuilding this country, its rail system, bridges, levees, and ranger stations, for example, rather than the further buildup of our nuclear stockpiles. (Surely, by now, someone has figured out how many bombs are needed to assure utter destruction — many fewer, I would imagine, than we now have.)

So, since most everyone — me included — is lamenting the corrosive all-for-one and all-for-one attitude in the air these days, why not embark on a national rebuilding project that might bring us together in some shared purpose other than the extinction of malcontents everywhere, a national project that just might make us feel great again?

It’s quite obvious that this kind of thing is what the country needs. So say it. Tax hikes for everyone and this is where the money is going to go. Sleeves will be rolled up. Many jobs will be created. Gored oxen will be stitched up. Money will be earmarked for life rather than for death.

Again we’d be the city on a hill, an inspiration again, showing the world what good things can be done by people of good will working together.

It might be money well spent.

Thirty-eight members of the Cory family, if you count spouses who may or may not use that surname, arrived at a Pennsylvania resort at different times from different places in the country for a reunion last weekend — and what an event it was.

Here’s how we got to 38. Five siblings in the oldest generation came with five spouses. They accounted for nine kids, now adults or young adults as the case may be, and they came with seven spouses and brought 12 children, if you count one who attended on Facetime and another in utero.

The Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort is on the Delaware River in the Poconos, near the 70,000-acre Delaware Water Gap recreational area. The landscape is beautiful. A golf resort would seem an unlikely place for this generation of Corys, and indeed not one went onto the links. But the resort was large enough so we could be provided with a banquet room of our own to congre­gate in, look at memorabilia, watch slide-show images of old and new family photos, have one dinner by ourselves, and even do a little yoga.

With so many who had not seen each other in a long time, there was a lot to hear about:  Bob and Joe’s new house, Josh’s new job, Daniel’s new school, Ezra’s first days in college, Rebecca’s role in “The Nutcracker,” that sort of thing. Accomplishments were noted and praised. The memorabilia and scrapbooks were carefully perused, and old documents read.

The Shawnee Inn is huge. In addition to the 27-hole golf course, it has a restaurant, a café, a brewery, two brew pubs, a spa and salon offering treatments galore, and a wide, old-fashioned veranda lined with wood and wicker rocking chairs. The weather was sunny, perfect for relaxing there or taking walks on the many trails. Two outdoor weddings — not Cory relations — took place on Saturday, and some of us stole a peek. Others enjoyed the great big swimming pool, but too busy catching up with each other, none took the resort up on its river or waterfall trips.

As for me, the youngest generation drew lots of my attention, and I quickly learned all their names. I had recently seen the littlest — who is not quite 1 and not quite walking — and was pleased that she was wearing a dress I had given her. I enjoyed watching cousins make friends, a girl who just turned 10 and a 13-year-old boy, for example. 

On the afternoon most of us departed, the Corys, and it seemed to be every last one, engaged in a hug-a-thon, children included, creating an almost impenetrable mass in the hotel lobby. Electronic devices, which for the most part had been set aside, appeared for last-minute photos, with lots of bing-ing and pinging. 

I am sure that everyone will long remember the comfort they found in simple togetherness. We were a group of privileged Americans, to be sure, but there would be plenty of time when we got home to face, and do whatever we could about, the grim inequities of the world we live in.

There were no deer fences in sight on the farmland in Northern Delaware, where I was visiting one of the kids at school last weekend. I noticed this as I drove along back roads near Middletown and miles of corn and soybeans. There were no ticks, either, according to several people I talked with.

Linking ticks to deer is heresy among some people here. Similarly, just pointing out that the thick and healthy woodland understory of past decades is now gone, and that deer are probably responsible, can been taken as fighting words. 

At the Middletown Wal-Mart early Saturday morning, where I had gone for a phone charger, I noticed tree stands and big bags of bait corn piled in an aisle. Three men in camouflage loaded a stand into a shopping cart. At the checkout, a couple placed two bags of corn onto the conveyor belt and then got into a conversation with the sales associate about how hunting was going.

Friends who have lived in less, shall we say, suburban parts of the world are often amused by the anti-hunting fervor that answers any public discussion about culling East Hampton’s deer. Up north, they say, there’s no question about what to do. 

Deer have no natural predators here, unless you count the cars that take out at least one every night. We have become used to the morning carnage. I notice that my children no longer seem to notice when we pass a fresh carcass at the side of the road, they, like the adults, have become numb to what once was a disturbing sight. Down in Delaware, you rarely see road kill.

People can argue about the deer population, but there is no question that there are a hell of a lot more of them in East Hampton than when I was younger. Back in the 1970s and ’80s we could go weeks without seeing one; now I might count more than a dozen on an evening ride home between East Hampton and Amagansett.

Time was that North Haven was the only place on the South Fork experiencing a deer explosion. Those who have lived here long enough might remember that village’s vigorous debates about whether to allow the use of a pesticide application station. East Hamptoners went convulsive over a recent village sterilization experiment. Neither worked to reduce the herds to a noticeable degree.

A number of the candidates running for town office this season have been brave enough to say that hunting has to be part of the deer-management program for East Hampton Town. They are correct. It is simply inhumane to continue to allow cars to be just about the deer’s only limiting factor.

Fifty-one years ago this column began to be written. No, no need to genuflect. No, no, please. . . .

(I had thought it was 50 years ago, and was telling everyone I would have my party now, minus the gold watch, of course, when I realized that the time for hosannas and raised glasses had passed!)

The first 20 years or so were on me (I know it’s supposed to take 10 years to hit one’s stride, but my essays were half the normal length). And I remember during that time being overly serious when it came to what it was I wanted to say, and, as a result, not quite getting it right. Then I met Mary, and things began to come to me rather than me coming to them. 

She has been my muse ever since. And often, though more serious and compassionate than I, she’s been my amusing muse. I think if this connection were ever to be broken or frayed I would give it up. Isn’t 2,500 — I’m sorry, 2,600 . . . no, make that 2,599 because Helen Rattray wrote one of them early on — enough anyway? No, don’t, don’t speak.

I may not be very intelligent, but I know that when it comes to column writing if you don’t let the censorious mind go a bit, it won’t happen — at least as well as it would were you simply to let some of what’s down there in the unconscious rise to the surface. “Don’t write, type,” Robert Gottlieb said. 

Don’t even type! Listen. And it will get written. 

Along that line, whenever a co-worker says on being assigned a “Relay” column that he or she can’t think of anything to say, I say, “That’s wonderful! You’ll write something good then.” They look at me askance, but it’s true.

I was assigned this column on arriving here on Oct. 15, 1967, and inherited the name, “Point of View.” Left to my own, I would probably have called it something else, something more clever, but anyway, “Point of View” it has been and is, even though most of what I write is beside the point.

I thank the Rattrays for having given me more than enough rope. There is something joyous about being afforded intellectual freedom, about being afforded the freedom to say whatever it is you want to say even though you have nothing to say. 

And, yes, as I said, it can be daunting, I suppose, if you think about it — Ev Rattray once likened column writing to an indeterminate sentence. I’m embarking on my 51st year and the parole board remains resolute, somehow deaf to my annual insistence that I’ve turned my life around, and, as always, immune to my native charm. 

I’m making no claims (no clams either) for my writing, but when I began not to take it so seriously (around the time Mary enlightened my life) was when it began to go right — as right as it was ever to go.

The admonition that before you judge a man you should “walk a mile in his shoes” was, clearly, quite sorely lacking in Donald J. Trump’s upbringing. Does our president have even a shred of real empathy?

The saying has been attributed to a 1895 poem called “Judge Softly,” although some imagine that it originated with Native Americans and therefore replace the word “shoes” with “moccasins.” Either way, it is an all-American aphorism. 

President Trump indulges in a nonstop stream of invective, mocking the appearance, size, intelligence, and sex-appeal of anyone and everyone he perceives as an opponent or critic — politicians, members of the media, or, especially, any woman who dares call him out on something, no matter how seemingly trivial. Apparently, his fans find it clever (or at the very least no big deal) when the leader of the free world ridicules fellow Americans for having plain looks, small breasts, a few extra pounds, or a physical disability.

Like others, I am reminded these days of the words of Joseph N. Welch, who was an attorney representing the United States Army when it was under investigation for Communist activities by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had reigned over the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee for many years. “At long last,” Mr. Welch asked, “have you left no sense of decency?”

The man in the White House’s decency and, yes, honesty have been widely questioned. Now, too, questions about his ability to muster up even a modicum of compassion have been raised following this fall’s devastating hurricanes. Some observers say he is working on it.

A Fox News poll at the end of the summer showed that only 26 percent of Americans described him as “compassionate,” while 71 percent said that word described him “somewhat” (18 percent) or not at all (53 percent). Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac poll last month showed just 40 percent think he understands the problems of average Americans, compared with 57 percent who don’t. If that is true, is his so-called base eroding?

The polls show that you don’t have to be a Democrat to want those who represent you, regardless of ­at what level, to show empathy, decency, and honesty. The president actually got worse marks for compassion than honesty in the Quinnipiac poll, even though he was caught in more than 1,000 false or misleading claims in his first eight months in office, according to The Washington Post.

As for the question of decorum, his response would likely be a snort of derision. (I’d say that he would laugh if asked about it, but, oddly enough, President Trump never seems to laugh or even smile naturally.) The Trump administration has essentially made basic good manners out-of-date as a standard of social behavior. “Decorum” might be an old-fashioned word, but what it basically boils down to is a sensitivity to and awareness of those around you. A man who hogs the after-dinner ice cream or tosses out paper towels like souvenir T-shirts at a press event following a massively destructive hurricane isn’t just lacking in the politeness department, he’s lacking any clue of what is going on outside his own skin.

Polls also show, however, that regardless of Mr. Trump’s personal failings, his base continues to support him in the belief that his policies are good for the country. The only way I can explain this to myself is to surmise that when they look at Mr. Trump, they are projecting their long-held hopes and wishes upon him, rather than seeing him for what he really is. It’s a tragic situation, but can we blame people for willfully convincing themselves our president is a good man.