Sitting in the lotus position, inhaling the Universe — and nothing else, mind — I marvel at the profane, embattled creature I was the other day on the tennis court.

A spectator said steps should be taken, that a letter to the editor of The East Hampton Star should be written, citing in detail how unsportsmanlike its sports editor was, and added that he knew they wouldn’t print it. My wife, Mary, who was sitting nearby, said, “Yes, they will.”

“No, they won’t,” he said.

“It’s The Star’s policy,” she said, “to print every letter it receives exclusively, except those judged to be an invasion of privacy, libelous, or obscene.”

“I would deserve it,” I told her later. “I’m a wretch, normally well-spoken on the outside, but with an unconscious that is a cess­pool of demons on the inside.”

“Do you feel that way all the time?” 

“No, no. It’s just that I can’t put a lid on the id when I’m playing tennis. . . . Did you see when I got stuck in the fence?”

“No, I missed that.”

“I’d gone back for a lob and got it back, but in doing so my right foot became wedged between the base of the fence and the cement edge of the court. I was desperate. The Monty Python knight would have cut the foot off and rejoined the battle. In extremis, I would butt the ball with my head.”

Mary agreed that Tom, Leif Hope’s friend, was right when he recommended that I clear my mind during the changeovers, that I take full advantage of the allotted 90 seconds, visualizing a geode, a halved amethyst with glowing crystals in side, for the first 30, concentrating on my breathing for the next 30, and focusing on my game plan for the remaining 30.”

“And did it work? Did you clear your mind?”

“So well that I forgot what my game plan was, other than to get the ball back. I drank the electrolytic elixir too, but it didn’t save me in the end.”

“Well, you and Gary played hard. So did they. You all gave it your best — it was a good match, it wasn’t boring.”

“I fear the total solar eclipse may top it. Meanwhile, where can I buy a geode?”

To the dismay of many, Labor Day weekend has arrived, and for Hamptoners it officially marks the end of summer. White, beachy apparel, nautical stripes, and floral bohemian dresses will be stored away for next-summer use, or likely for the holiday season when St. Barth’s, the Bahamas, and Palm Beach seem better suited for weekend tans and holiday getaways than the windy, white winters on the East End. 

For locals, on the other hand, Labor Day weekend marks the finale of a long-awaited three months of pop-up shops, celebrity sightings, summer concerts at the Surf Lodge, hours of traffic, and the inability to get a reservation at just about any and every restaurant.  

While locals will revel in the tranquillity, and travelers will anxiously wait for next year’s Memorial Day weekend to mark a new beginning to summer, ambivalence is undeniable when you’re in not one, but both of these groups. 

Having left home at 15 years old for boarding school, I grew up yearning for summers in the Hamptons, and so did all of the friends I made. Maybe they’d heard about it from their parents, listened to librettos from a multitude of music artists, watched “White Chicks,” or wanted to experience a real-life “Gossip Girl” episode (all of these have ways of infiltrating conversation when you say you’re from Southampton).

Though I suppose the South Fork can be all of those things, the reality of hectic summer months — no beach parking spots, bustling Main Streets, lack of dining availability, and heavy traffic — while far from the glamour “the Hamptons” exudes, had an air of excitement . . . maybe because I, to a degree, was a vacationer . . . a faux local. 

Memorial Day marked my arrival and Labor Day my sendoff to Sheffield, Mass., and eventually Winston-Salem, N.C., but now my days in academia are over. This year I will outlive the expiration date on my summer beach parking sticker and end the seven-year streak of spending September elsewhere, and while it’s a bit unsettling, I’m equally thrilled. The weather (insert emoji with heart eyes)!

For the record, all those episodes and songs . . . they’re misleading. Sure, summer is great, but oh, the fall. . . . The air is crisp, the fields are voluminous, the ocean is warm, the leaves transform into every shade from fiery red to canary yellow, the roads are open, light beams glisten and bounce off everything in their direct line, and the sunsets. . . . Civility takes the wheel and ruckus patiently sits in the passenger seat for a ride through the fall, winter, and spring seasons. 

Maybe it’s the frenzied summers that make falls on the East End so glorious. Maybe it’s just as beautiful, only now we have time to digest it. 

Jackie Pape is a reporter for The Star, and about to spend her first fall on the South Fork.

“You’re good to go,” my dentist, Perry Silver, said after cleaning my teeth.

“That’s what I said yesterday to Mary after we had the cesspool pumped,” I said. 

I don’t know, there’s something about the way you feel after you’ve had your cesspool pumped — cleansed, ready to begin anew. 

I’ve been reading Jung lately, about the unconscious and its repressed contents that we ought to face if we really want to know ourselves, and there before me, once the cover had been pried off and we were peering down, was the unconscious metaphorically speaking. 

“Not bad,” the pumper said. I gloried in his words. “Not bad, that’s good,” I said. 

My daughter was coming, that was one thing that prompted me — an avoider as well as a voider — to take action. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened just prior to a festive dinner out there in Ohio, a root-caused massive cloacal contraction that cast us to the winds — Emily, Anderson, and the kids going to his parents’ house for the night, and Mary and I to his brother’s down the street, which was unoccupied that weekend.

Mary loved it that Todd’s house was so neat, so uncluttered. “Is he an architect? An engineer?” I asked. At any rate, its sleekness was the polar opposite of ours, whose dark living room with its raggedy books, sideboard, knife boxes (so the servants couldn’t steal the knives), velvet love seat, and dining room table that can be folded up against the wall when you’re having guests over for champagne, gavottes, and quadrilles is more 18th century than 21st.

Emily wants us to open and brighten it up, to consciously face our collective mess by ridding ourselves of the ratty oriental rug, by painting the classic burgundy window trim white (maybe Anderson will get to that when he visits next week), by replacing the three-cushion Jennifer convertible couches with one or ones more conducive to conversation, and by putting the plasma TV up over the fireplace, which we won’t do because that’s where Billy Hofmann’s beautiful painting “Louse Point,” with its moody allusion to the collective unconscious, is. We never tire of it. I’m glad I told him so once at One-Stop.

A founder of the Maidstoners softball team, the other being Dan Christensen, Billy, who could also pivot neatly in turning a double play, used to say he presumed Thoreau was my guide, and that if he wasn’t, he should be. This morning, in a review of a new biography of him by Laura Dassow Walls, I read that he once said, “Surely joy is the condition of life!”

He’s batting 1.000 in my book then.

But back to the unconscious, I dreamed the other night that my late stepfather was maniacally at the wheel of a car in which I and my mother were captive passengers. He was careening down the street toward a bank — we couldn’t stop him — and, as we feared, smashed the car right into it. A shot rang out.

I’ll admit it was puzzling, until I remembered that my basketball-playing grandchildren were on their way here and that they had great bank shots. Voila. Don’t talk to me about the unexamined life. 

For whatever reason, I did not get the old Sunfish rigged and onto the beach ready to sail until about halfway through August. Summer is like that, I told myself: Something always comes up.

One of the kids finally got me around to it. Evvy had taken sailing lessons in Sag Harbor and wanted some of her friends to come over to try our boat in the bay. The Sunfish, unnamed as most are, was given to me long ago by a friend who had won it at some corporate event. Initially, its sail carried a large Pepsi logo; I swapped it for a nondescript used one found on the internet.

Simple as Sunfishes are, I miss some of the boats I grew up with. My father was a big fan of catboats, and we had a series of them, mostly old and made of wood, in my youth. The last to go was a Beetle cat, a small version without seats, in which we sailed toward the end of his life. He was 47 when he died, and he had made it plain that he wanted me to learn as much as I could about the water, sailing, and the old ways as he had from his great-grandfather on the same waters when he was a boy.

The various catboats eventually went to new owners, one after the other. We donated the Beetle to a wooden boatbuilding school after its planks got too loose for me to deal with. On its last voyage, with my hand on the tiller, I had to take it into Hog Creek and tie up at a private dock as the water came in at a rate I could not keep up with using a clanking bilge pump. 

Fiberglass-hulled Sunfishes don’t usually have such problems. With age, though, even the industrial pop-outs begin to weather. Last weekend, sailing in the bay with two of the kids, the mainsheet block came loose. A rivet had worked through the thin-walled aluminum boom, leaving a U-shape bracket dangling. We were able to get back to the beach, though, and after looking around at the lumberyard, I found the needed parts.

Time, though, is another thing. The rivets are on a shelf. The rivet gun was on the floor of the passenger side of my truck last I saw it. I have other things to do, like mow the lawn and take the recyclables to the dump. It could be the middle of September before I get the boat back in the water. As I said, something always comes up.

As host of the third panel on timely, serious issues under the umbrella of Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute on Monday, Alec Baldwin wore a number of his many hats comfortably. The topic, “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” was explored by Mr. Baldwin and a prestigious panel: Nicholas Lehmann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a frequent essayist for The New Yorker, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!,” the long­time muckraking radio program, and Bob Garfield, the author of five books and a podcast on journalism and advertising and a co-host of the radio and online program “On the Media.”

Mr. Baldwin said he has been a news junky since he was 10, something we know here at The Star from the letters to the editor he has submitted over the years. As president of Guild Hall’s board of trustees, he helped plan the panels and took this one to heart, asking tough questions and eliciting generally jaundiced views of the corporate media and TV pundits from the panelists. He even found an occasion to bring down the house with his comical and by now familiar Donald Trump impersonation.

Acknowledging that the panelists could all be considered liberals, he said Guild Hall had tried but failed to get an avowed conservatives like Tucker Carlson to take part. And he drew out an apparent lofty consensus: Despite apocalyptic change in how and where people get news, and the many questionable sources, intellectual honesty continues to be the reporter’s credo.

As someone who has dedicated more than the last 50 years to newspapering, it was an evening well spent. The conversation was informative, sometimes provocative, and helped put “fake news” in perspective. Besides, Nicholas Lehmann had quite a few things to say about today’s Columbia School of Journalism, where the late Everett Rattray, who edited this paper from 1958 to 1980, and I met and sealed our fates.

The panelists bemoaned the lack of press coverage of local and state government across the country, saying it resulted in the loss of an informed citizenry, and Mr. Baldwin cited the Los Angeles Times as a major newspaper that managed to do it all. I couldn’t help think he could have applauded The East Hampton Star for being a community forum, where issues are brought to light and opinions of all stripes are published week after week in our expansive (and sometimes exhaustive) letters pages. Turn this page and take a look. There are 40 letters this week.

Lots of people went to Southampton over Labor Day weekend to do lots of things, but I went to cross over from “the Hamptons” into the Shinnecock Nation, which was hosting peoples of many tribes, and all kinds of visitors, for its annual powwow. 

It smelled of woodsmoke and sage. Walking slowly around the grounds, the sound of anklebone jingle bells swelled and faded as dancers behind me approached and passed. The vendors sold Shinnecock clams, Wampanoan frybread, Aztec tacos, and Mexican-style corn, mixing and matching cultures.

My heart set to the drumbeats, as it always does, the moment I arrived. 

Preteen friends in powwow garb hurried through the gates into the dancers’ area behind the stage. Their footsteps, without effort, fell onto the soft ground in that circular, staccato native dance, in sync with the drums. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know just what I mean; it’s a step at once grounded and skittery, like the way some small animals move through the woods, a connection and light touch upon the earth, the push and pull of a magnet.

On stage the M.C. welcomed dancers and drummers representing different tribes, moving through their traditions, enacting stories, marking the wheel of life, honoring the Great Spirit.

A seagull flew diagonally across the field of clouds overhead as Arvel Bird, a composer and performer, stood front and center with flutes and electric violin. The wind, rising, rustled branches of the tall trees, livening the background of green. “The wind spirits are waking,” he said. Before playing a song from his “Animal Totems” CD he talked about the message a young hawk trying to fly has for us in its example of determination and fortitude.

I left before the Grand Entry lineup of all the dancers dressed in colorful ceremonial clothes, but stopped to buy an Arvel Bird CD. I was looking forward to putting it on at home whenever I need a breath of life, an elevation of spirit.

In the parking lot, the hatchback of his minivan raised open, the man who had earlier sat eating barbecue fresh from the fire was adjusting his full regalia, a spread of long dappled feathers blossoming from his back like the mouth of an anemone. 

The moon was up, almost full; enough light lingered for me to see the shine of the blue bay at the end of the lane. I turned right, toward the highway, and back into the fray.

When I got home the tree frogs and cicadas were making their own music, the steady rolling chirrupy voice of one chorus overlaid with the 1-2-3 rhythmic saw-buzz of the other. 

From across the street and through the woods came the sharp sounds of an edgy band, one of five playing at a party at the cold glass-and-iron trophy house built by the Euro-rich neighbor of a friend. 

The night before, drawn by the sounds of a party, the young people at her house went over to the neighbors’ to see what was going on. There were colored lights shining into the woods, music, fabulous guests.

One of the visitors remarked upon the neighbor’s house, and on the scene. A native Spanish speaker, the wealthy owner waved his hand. “All this,” he said, “I don’t know why.” 

Neither do I. But for it, the East End has been transformed, a heavy imprint on the quiet interconnected waterways, woods, fields, and skyways that the powwow dancing celebrates.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

A lot of the problems on the roads hereabouts could be solved if left turns were outlawed. This notion comes from a member of the Star staff who shall remain nameless and who also suggested with some seriousness that landscaping should be banned.  

A landscaping ban, while an intriguing approach to traffic tie-ups, leaf-blower noise, and huge equipment-filled trailers left in roadways, is a long shot. Eliminating lefts, on the other hand, could really result in something good.

I’d put U-turns in the category of ban-able lefts, especially between May and October. This season has seemed to be the summer of the U, with 9 out of the 10 dangerous motor-vehicle interactions I have been involved in having to do with someone attempting to turn around and drive in the other direction.

Just Monday on my way to Sag Harbor on 114 at around 2 p.m., a woman driving a blue Subaru suddenly whipped around from the right shoulder, causing the small car in front of me to brake suddenly to avoid a T-bone collision. In Sag Harbor itself the evening before that, a man driving a Toyota pickup backed into a driveway on Garden Street, then lurched forward in an opposite direction, yes, making a left without noticing that I was approaching from his right. My pounding on the horn seemed all that avoided a crash.

People are weird this time of the year, even people you know. Headed home later through Sag Harbor after the Garden Street incident, I was baffled to see a small knot of people standing smack in the middle of West Water Street opposite the Beacon restaurant. They did not so much as twitch as I drove into the opposite lane to avoid them, noticing as I passed that the ringleader was a friend who is an architect apparently pontificating about some aspect of the nearby streetscape.

But back to lefts and U-turns. According to New York City statistics, left-turn crashes take place about three times as often as those during right turns. Nationwide, lefts account for about 53 percent of all accidents, according to a federal study. Here, drunken driving and deer account for their share of collisions, but, in a recent town police report, drivers making lefts were involved in every single one of the crashes with significant injuries. 

Not making lefts is impractical, but if more drivers avoided them at major intersections, our roads would be much safer. I think of Stephen Hand’s Path, where a newly timed stoplight at Route 114 is causing long backups. Right here by the East Hampton Library, drivers making lefts from Buell Lane onto Main Street create no end of trouble. Banning lefts may be an idea whose time has come, at least in East Hampton between now and the first Monday in September.

Saturday morning, 10:32 a.m. to be precise, might be a good time to stop at the Montauk Beer and Soda store to pick up a water and orange drink for a thirsty kid. Or so I thought.

Montauk has changed a lot since the old days; we all know this. Still, I was not in any way prepared for just how busy it was this past Saturday when I rolled in thinking I could take the kids to the ocean beach.

The Kirk Park free lot was full, with drivers circling in vain looking for a spot. That should have been the first clue. Eastbound traffic was backed up and creeping when I turned right onto South Elmwood, hoping for a quick stop on the way to Ditch Plain. Ellis wanted something cold to drink. How bad could it be?

The place was hopping, more power to its owners, but wow. Meaty 20-somethings stood in the aisles trying to figure out what supplies to lay on for the day’s drinking — ice, 12-packs of Bud Light, that kind of thing. Much looking at cellphones and texting and discussion were involved.

Transactions at the front of the long line to the counter seemed to be complicated, too, involving who was going to pay for what. Two tall young men standing next to us waiting to pay looked and smelled like their partying from the night before hadn’t really ended.

Eventually we got our drinks and chips and continued east. By then, close to 11 a.m., it was too late to find a parking space at the beach. We passed the main lot at Ditch, then East Deck, and peeked in at Dirt Lot. Not a chance. We turned around and drove to Georgica all the way up in East Hampton, where parking was plentiful and we had a good remainder of the day on the beach. Still, I was left with a bad feeling.

Why, I thought, should Montauk, once so open and laid back, now be completely overrun? Does the fact that some people are making piles of money justify the fact that an Amagansett family cannot go there unless they get out of the house by 9 on a weekend morning?

Yes, it might have been wishful thinking on my part to assume that we could have accomplished this on a Saturday in Montauk, but that does not make it okay. Indian Wells in Amagansett has been residents-only for a long time. It’s time something similar was tried out east.

Henry Thoreau said, “Joy is the condition of life,” and I believe him. Certainly O’en, our white golden, does, especially now that he has as a houseguest a goldendoodle from Ohio named Fozzie.

They are inseparable. Well, that’s putting it mildly. They’re the most vigorous, courteous love-makers I’ve ever seen, neither one lording it over the other unless that’s the scene they’re playing. Roles switch in a second, sort of like an ever-whirling yin-yang. Sometimes they just lie there, a foot apart, mouths agape, looking fondly at each other, exhausted.

The other night, Mary said she heard whimpers and thought they came from Emily’s bedroom upstairs where Fozzie sleeps in a crate. But no, it was O’en who was being plaintive. I could almost imagine him, eyes upcast, 12-string guitar in hand, singing softly, “Ay, ay, ay, here at your window. . . .”

When Fozzie descends the stairs in the morning, it’s as if they haven’t seen each other in ages. O’en leaps at the gate that has sequestered him in the kitchen, forepaws upraised and extended in utter delight, pouring forth his soul abroad in such an ecstasy!

I do worry what will happen when Fozzie has to go. Undoubtedly, O’en will be depressed, but he’s too much a part of us now to idly part with him. There was a time when we worried that maybe we’d bitten off more than we could chew, but we’re pretty much in sync now. He, the beautiful boy, dines on braised organic free-range chicken thighs, a recipe of Thomas Keller’s, and fluffy organic brown rice with which occasionally we mix in some bits of Cabot’s extra-sharp cheese to firm up the stool. Taking care not to intrude, we ask periodically, rubbing our hands together, if everything is to his satisfaction.

“This is the Hamptons, you know,” I say to Emily. “What do the dogs in Perrysburg eat? Kibble?”

She shoots me a look. “With children and Fozzie it’s L.C.D., Dad, as in least common denominator. We keep the bar low. Your children have grown, it’s just the two of you, I can see that. But tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off?”

“Only on special occasions.”

“Well, he is a wonderful-looking dog.”

“He is. We don’t walk, we take the air. And so it ever will be. Though I know that whenever he’s in our embrace hereafter he’ll be thinking of Fozzie.”

I stand very much corrected. Last week, I wrote with some frustration that it was now impossible to find a parking place at Ditch Plain in Montauk after 10:30 on a sunny weekend morning. I was wrong.

When I rolled in around 9 a.m. more recently, vehicles were backed up from the main lot onto DeForest Road. Others, left by drivers in no-parking zones, tempted expensive citations once the town traffic control officers got there.

The next data point was my friend Tim’s text saying the lots there were full by 8:45 a.m. on Sunday. Then, Russell in the Star front office moved the dial back to 8:30 a.m., when he had taken a pass through all three lots without luck.

Saturday had been cool and blustery with a hard wind from the northeast, so no one much went to the ocean beach, which might have contributed to what economists call pent-up demand. Sunday morning was lovely, with moderate wind and a bit of leftover ocean swell of the slow and easy sort Ditch surfers know and love.

I circled Dirt Lot, slowly, behind my friend Jeremy in his beat-up pickup, who apparently gave up and left. On my way out I was nearly in position to grab a lone spot that opened up by the portable toilets, but a driver on her way in saw it at the same moment and, being nearer by just a car length, began a 94-point turn to snatch it away from its rightful occupant — me. I did not particularly care and went downtown for a scone.

Well, it is not entirely true that I abandoned my surfing mission with equanimity. As I made my left onto the highway, I ruminated grumpily about how backward this town is in not providing sensible drop-off areas the way they do at some beaches on Martha’s Vineyard. And I groused to myself that I was damn sure that no one on the town board had tried to get a parking space at Ditch on any weekend recently — or else they would have done something, right? (Note to self: Remember to ask the candidates for town office about this when they come around in October.)

Everybody is saying that the driving here is the worst they can remember. That may be so, or maybe it’s not, but it’s inarguably the pits where beach parking is concerned.