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.

Apparently, dogs go through a teenage phase. This according to the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Science in England, which, after much research, found that our canine friends display traits that are similar to those of human teens.

No offense to the learned institution, but I’m not buying it. With an actual 17-year-old human in my house, as well as a dog who went through his supposed teen phase a few years ago, I feel I have empirical evidence to invalidate the university’s conclusion.

Teenage behavior in dogs, say the scientists, which occurs when the puppy is just under a year, is characterized by refusing to respond to commands they sweetly obeyed when they were younger, outright rebelliousness, and a tendency to be impulsive, distracted, and erratic. “Training a dog during this phase is crucial or an owner could soon be living with an ill-mannered, undersocialized, hyperactive animal,” concluded the researchers.

While I will concede to a few tenuous parallels here, my own painstaking research in the field has led me to question whether the scientists delved any deeper than the mere periphery of the full-blown, kaleidoscopic teenage experience.

For a start, there is no mention of a teenage dog’s incessant need for Wi-Fi and phone chargers, or the arguments and eye rolling engendered by this need, especially when traveling. Or the long and ultimately irretrievable hours spent playing Xbox, an important and defining phase for at least male teens on the human side.

And if we really are to think of dogs as teenagers, how does one begin to explain their complete indifference toward Snapchat and Instagram?

Then there’s this: If a used, balled-up sock is lying on the floor, there’s a good chance you could get your dog to pick it up in its mouth. True, the probability of the sock then landing in the laundry basket is slim, but with hours of training, involving treats and kind words, it could happen. Not a chance with a human teen.

But it’s not their fault. Apparently, the human teenage phase includes a long spell of selective blindness that renders balled-up socks invisible, along with wet towels and discarded clothing, and also used cups and plates and half-empty bottles of soda.

What about the insatiable appetite of the human male teen, in particular, that often leads to eating mounds of pasta and meat snacks at 1 in the morning? It’s true that a dog too would happily scarf down the pasta and anything else in the middle of the night if presented with the opportunity, but that’s not a teenage phase for a dog — that’s just being a dog at any age.

Ever needed to have a conversation about pot smoking with your four-legged teenager? Or sex? I should hope not, since, at the very least, the latter was probably taken care of a while ago with an operation at the vet’s.

Plus, there’s the heartwarming human energy that teenagers devote to friendships and sociability, which I am often reminded of during 1 a.m. culinary exploits, involving clanging pots as a group of them attempts to make mounds of pasta and meat snacks. My dog, on the other hand, would have had such a hard time sharing his pasta with his friends that it could never have been so endearing an experience.

In fact, it is this ease of human teenagers to spend hours around one another that will always set them apart from dogs. What with their total self-sufficiency as a pack, their freedom to please no one but themselves, their never-ending openness to experimenting with the new, the strides they have made toward connecting with scores of people around the world, many of whom they’ve never met, and the mind-set they frequently exude that the future is all theirs and that it will be entirely compliant with all their expectations, why shouldn’t they spend the entire weekend in bed? I never got any of that from my teenage dog.

Frankly, I think dogs have a long way to go before they can do “teenage” properly.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter 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.

I read about “terminal lucidity” the other day, and breathed a sigh of relief inasmuch as I’m still wondering what it’s all about.

“At the end of life, it seems,” I said to Mary, “people who’ve been in comas and the like come to and ask how their grandchildren’s Little League season has been going.”

Actually, I don’t have to ask how the Little League season has been going: It went very well, thank you. It was Tyler Hansen, a 9-year-old, who caught my eye as I arrived one evening for the games at Pantigo. Strike, strike, strike. He was throwing nothing but strikes, and with zip too. I turned to a woman at my side — his mother, I was to learn — and said, “Wow, this kid is impressive!”

I don’t want to give him a swelled head, but his grit and his mechanics were so evident that it’s stuck in my mind, and I’ve seen many Little League games in my time, including those played by the 1991 team that won the district and county championships, the team that Brendan Fennell seemed always to bail out with grand-slam home runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and with East Hampton trailing by three.

That may not be utterly lucid, but it’s the way I remember it. Just as I remember Andy Tuthill repeatedly hitting a 4-year-old’s equivalent to a 500-foot (well, make that a 400-foot) homer with his father and me looking on, and Ross Gload’s three home runs into St. Joseph’s College’s parking lot, each farther than the last, in the small school county championship game of 1994.

Funny what you remember. Roberto Clemente’s rifled throws from right field that caught by surprise runners who’d made a wide turn in rounding first base is another. And how sad Muffin and I were when we heard he had died.

So perhaps baseball in East Hampton will come around again. If it does, we’ll have people like Vinny Alversa, Henry Meyer, Tim Garneau, and Kevin Brophy to thank for it, not to mention the players themselves.

It really is a matter of the spirit — not just mind and body — as I suppose is the case with all exceptional teams.

The spirit grows and flourishes and moves on.

Jordan’s Run, in memory of a young hero, wasn’t of course just a race, but a time to reflect. 

The memory that our government’s incursion 14 years ago into the cradle of civilization was impulsive, with profoundly tragic consequences, only serves to compound the suffering it has spawned and to widen the circle of compassion that attends it, even unto the small towns where the death of a soldier — a Marine in this case — comes, as Joi Jackson Perle said the other day, as a shock. 

And so it was that when Steve Xiarhos, a police officer from West Barnstable, Mass., with whom I’d been talking near the finish line, took off from his wrist the bracelet commemorating his son, Nicholas, who, like Sag Harbor’s Jordan Haerter, had also given his life in the Mideast, I said, truly, that I was not worthy.

He gave it to me still, saying, “I think you are, I think you have a good heart.”

“Maybe it will make me stronger,” I said, putting on the band, which said, “Cpl. Nicholas G. Xiarhos, USMC, 7/23/2009 * Garmsir, Afghanistan.”

“Maybe I can help others more. . . .”

I was deeply touched, deeply affected. I asked, “How old was your son?”

Twenty-one, he said. “How old was Jordan?”

“Nineteen.”

Nick, who was to die in combat 15 months later, had been one of those saved by Jordan, who stood his ground and fired when a truck packed with explosives was speeding toward the Marine barracks in Ramadi, Iraq, in the early morning of April 22, 2008. That act of heroism, of self-sacrifice, earned him, posthumously, the Navy Cross.

The rightness or wrongness of our representatives’ decision years ago is beside the point, which is that Jordan and Nick were honorable, and that they have united us in suffering and in compassion and, yes, in the joy that was so evident at the foot of Pierson’s hill that day, July 30, which would have been Jordan Haerter’s 29th birthday. 

Well, I can cross “Ulysses” off the bucket list, butgeeitwasawfullylong. Much of it is funny, though, and Molly Bloom’s 10,000-plus-word sentence at the end is wonderful. 

I read the last part to Mary my mountain flower yes and she said yes yes Bub I will Yes.

Now back to Jung (who didn’t think women thought, by the way) and to Joseph Campbell’s “Goddesses.” 

Is it that I’ve been fixed, or do we just end up that way, entwined with one another, differentiated in obvious ways, but not really, more or less one. 

I remember her mother exclaiming, with some incredulity, but with some delight too, that we still talked. Well, of course. Is that not intercourse too?

Inter alia interlocutory intercourse does not however always run smooth: When reminded periodically of my failings, I say, “I didn’t do nothing,” accenting the “I,” as in the Prime Unmover, and she will say, “I know, that’s just it — you don’t do nothing,” accent on the “nothing.”

That we’re readers spares me to some extent inasmuch as she acknowledges that reading is a worthy activity, albeit a sedentary one. She’d much rather do it than the laundry, shop for dinner, cook the dinner, deal with myopic ancillary personnel, fill out inane forms, check for ticks, floss, answer the damn phone, empty the dishwasher, load the dishwasher, sweep the deck, wrestle weeds, and attend to others’ problems, and so would I.

But slothfulness in purposeful clothing will only get you so far. There comes a time of reckoning and I reckon it’s time to mow the lawn, to edge the borders, and to lay a walkway. I do want to stay in her good graces inasmuch as she is one of them, a flower of the mountain.

Every year at about this time, people get to saying that they have never seen it so bad. What they mean mostly is that the number of cars on the road and people on the beaches seem greater than ever. 

Heading west on East Hampton Main Street on Tuesday after hearing Carlos Lama’s David Bowie tribute band, I was squeezed out of my lane by someone in a Tesla, which swerved, then slowed for a distance, and floated at an odd angle off Woods Lane toward Baiting Hollow without signaling. The driver did not seem drunk, exactly, more likely distracted by her passengers or talking on the phone. It was hard to know.

Summertime hassles are nothing new. I was looking at a copy of The Star from July 1967 the other day and was amused by the lead story about the then-increasingly popular pastime of surfing, particularly at Ditch Plain. In an effort to keep boards and maybe reprobate surfers away from ordinary bathers, the town board authorized $5 permits, with metal tags issued by the town clerk that presumably surfers would have to wear. The ordinance also limited the hours surfing would be allowed.

A young Chip Duryea spoke for the Montauk Association for the Preservation of Surfing, or MAPS, in opposition to the metal tag and the location of the only area at Ditch designated for boards. “Hot-heads, dope addicts, or those with half a load on” were not surfing anyway, Mr. Duryea said.

The July 6, 1967, story went on to describe “chaotic and unbelievable” parking conditions at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett, as well as “filth and debris on the beach” and cases of indecent exposure. 

One woman told the town board that the beach had become a “ ‘filthy hole,’ with groups of ‘L.S.D. hippies’ sleeping on mattresses.” And to think that today we complain about people sipping rosé at the Surf Lodge and think that’s a problem.

The summer of 1967 was, it turned out, the beginning of the end of free parking and free love at town beaches; a system of permit stickers for town residents came along shortly. All others would have to find another way to get to the beach, hot-heads, dope addicts, or LSD hippies, or not.

An image of a grandmother with an apron tied around her waist showing someone young how to make a cake came to mind last week. I am not certain whether it was wishful thinking or guilt. The truth is, I never bake much of anything and don’t even remember making chocolate-chip cookies when my kids were kids.

What actually happened in my kitchen last week was that my granddaughter Evvy, who just turned 13, was hanging around my house, saying she had nothing to do. She took me up on it when I rather halfheartedly suggested she bake a cake. Turns out, she is a whiz at baking cakes.

It’s a new world, we know. Evvy didn’t need me or any other grandmother to tell her how to go about it. She just went to her iPhone and found a recipe. Fortunately, the necessary ingredients were on hand: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, Hershey’s cocoa, safflower oil. But, oh dear, when it came to pans for a layer cake, there were none. I could have sworn we used to have many, many cake tins, left over from the days when my daughter used to take any excuse to bake a cake — snowball coconut cakes for birthdays, bundt pans for blueberry cakes, orange frosted with chocolate. . . . Anyway, taking this discovery in stride, Evvy used one square baking dish and one shaped like a star. We would have two single-layer cakes rather than one tall one.

I was amazed to observe that Evvy had her baking techniques down pat. For example, she cut parchment paper to place at the bottom of the pans so the cakes would be easier to get out, and even just the cutting out was a tricky feat with the pan shaped like a star. (I don’t know why I have parchment paper around; probably for some exotic specialty my husband cooked one night.) She used a toothpick to test for doneness when the timer she had set on her phone buzzed (I knew how to do that part!). Finally, she put plates on both sides of each pan so the cake would be easy to turn right side up once it slipped out of the baking tin.

As I sat wondering how to make icing, Evvy had it down to a science. There was heavy cream in the refrigerator — I guess I’d bought it to eat with the last of the strawberries — so she whipped it up, then took a simple plastic bag and turned it into a pastry bag by making a hole at one corner and holding it just so. My goodness. In no time the cakes were decorated with swirls, stars, circles, and slashes. It was a celebration.

I asked Evvy’s father afterward if he had taught her to bake. The answer was no. Not him, he said, noting that he had recently made a cake from a Duncan Hines mix. But he added that Evvy sometimes makes a cake in a cup.

Old fogey alert: It turns out that Evvy learned to bake — and bake well — via YouTube, Instagram, and maybe some reality television shows about baking competitions. Social media have replaced me, and maybe you, and done a swell job at it. Well, I guess grannies have other things to do these day. I’m off to yoga now.

Nina, am I you? Are you me? Standing before her tombstone at Oak Grove Cemetery as the leaves fell and were scattered on an autumn day, I did not expect an answer, but nonetheless had to ask. 

Hear me out, please, before pronouncing me insane. 

Nina is on my mind again, along with Tsuya Matsuki, who taught piano to me and to so many others across the decades at Miankoma Hall, where they lived.

Late last summer, in Amagansett, just after a grim and forbidding birthday, an email from a retired teacher near Philadelphia landed in front of me. He had purchased a recorder (the woodwind instrument) on eBay, and a label was affixed to its case: Tsuya Matsuki, with an address in East Orange, N.J.

This had spurred research into Miss Matsuki, which led him to my “Relay” in The Star’s Oct. 25, 2012, issue. He learned of Miankoma Hall. He found, online, page one of The Star’s July 13, 1950, issue, which included an article on a concert she was to give, at Miankoma, with the cellist Maurice Eisenberg. He found a 1954 article in The Star about another concert, with the violinist Max Polikoff, to benefit the Amagansett Village Improvement Society Scholarship Fund. He even found a 1908 newspaper report of a recital given by Tsuya Matsuki, age 10. 

And he found Miss Nina Harter. Miss Matsuki, he believed, had been a boarder with the Harter family in East Orange. 

“She was the organist at St. Thomas Church, Amagansett, for many summers, and presented Gilbert and Sullivan and her own operettas for the Red Cross during World War One,” according to Miss Harter’s obituary in The Star’s July 28, 1966, issue. 

“The performances were given in Bridgehampton and in Amagansett at Miankoma Hall, which was purchased from the American Legion by Miss Harter and her friend, Tsuya Matsuki, with whom she lived for many years, and made into a summer home and music studio.” 

“They were just wonderful together,” Josephine Crasky, who lived next door, told me last fall. “Tsu was easygoing and always a lot of fun.” (Ms. Crasky visited The Star’s office on Tuesday morning and gave me a trove of slides she had recently uncovered depicting Miss Matsuki and Miss Harter and Miankoma.)

“She and Nina lived together and were a couple until Nina’s passing,” said Wendy Turgeon, whose family bought the house next door in 1958. “After Nina passed, she had other friends out, but nobody as close as she was to Nina.” 

Maybe she said this to all her students, but Miss Matsuki always, always told me that I was gifted, and, even after Little League beckoned and I grew bored with the piano and quit for a while, she continued to offer my financially unstable parents the rate of $9 per hour, after raising it for her other students, and was ecstatic when I told her, one summer morning by the checkout counters at the Amagansett I.G.A., that I would resume lessons in the fall. Did she see something, or someone, in me? 

Long before I’d developed any interest in Buddhism or Tibet, I saw parts of “Himalaya With Michael Palin,” a BBC television series. One episode had Mr. Palin in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, where an astrologer told him about one of his past lives (likely as an elephant), and of his next life (the daughter of a wealthy family in the West). The idea that one could know such things certainly aroused my curiosity. 

Let me further state that in my limited research into Buddhism I learned of the bardo, the intermediate-transitional period between death and rebirth. According to some Buddhist traditions, this period, when one’s consciousness is not connected with a physical body, is said to span “seven times seven days,” or 49 days. 

Nina Harter was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 5, 1903, and died, in East Orange, on July 20, 1966. Forty-nine days later, on the Upper East Side, I was born. 

My brother was living in Dharamsala last year. Am I insane? I asked him. 

“Re: reincarnation, no, it’s not a crazy idea,” he said, “as ‘persons’ (the one Spirit incarnated variously) tend to meet up in successive incarnations. The movie ‘Cloud Atlas’ beautifully shows space-time to be illusory when the ‘future’ incarnation dies (soon after her lover is killed) and then her (nearly 1,000-year) past incarnation is instantly (as though walking through a door) reunited with his past incarnation when he returns from a life-threatening voyage.”

“So it’s and we’re all connected, above and beyond space-time, even.”

Nina, am I you? Are you me? 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.