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.”

The East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan is an amazing 114-page document including tables, charts, and maps. It was adopted in May 2005 after about a year and a half of study by professional planners and of public debate. For the most part, we hear of it these days only when an official or activist points to something in it that is relevant to a current project.

The plan was largely based on data dating to 2000. Is there any wonder that many of its recommendations seem out of date? The town’s recent hamlet studies, which had been recommended in the plan, concentrated on commercial centers, without particular attention to other issues effecting the quality of life or even broader aspects of the economy (I’m thinking of the boom in home-based businesses, the “trade parade” and traffic in general, and the regrettable impact of the luxury-business takeover of our main streets). The forums held surrounding the hamlet studies helped gauge public opinion, yes, but they hardly provided fresh ideas about the current effects of zoning and growth.

Most East Hamptoners surely agree with many of the goals in the comprehensive plan. For example, to “maintain, and restore where necessary, East Hampton’s rural and semi-rural character and the unique qualities of each of East Hampton’s historic communities” is one such laudable goal, and to “take forceful measures to protect and restore the environment, particularly ground water” is another. Another goal that remains pertinent is to “reduce reliance on the automobile [and] encourage investment in alternative transportation — including sidewalks, bikeways, rail, buses, shuttles, and ‘shared’ cars.”

Where opinion might begin to veer away from apparent consensus is on how to reduce the impacts of human habitation, how to “provide housing opportunities to help meet the needs of current year-round residents, their family members and senior citizens, seasonal employees, employees, emergency services volunteers, and other local workers,” and how to “encourage local businesses to serve the needs of the year-round population and reduce the environmental impacts of commercial and industrial uses.” That these goals pretty much refer only to the year-round population might be enough reason to think a revised comprehensive plan is overdue.

Because the political climate in East Hampton is, like the nation, more inherently divided than it was a dozen years ago, it undoubtedly would be a much tougher challenge to revise the plan than it was to create it. It might take almost twice as long to complete, which is likely to bring us to 2020 before a revised plan could be adopted. That would be a good 15 years after the existing plan was approved, and much too long a hiatus, given the pressures of continued population growth and the escalating needs of seasonal residents and summer revelers.

As we get closer to November, it would help voters — perhaps even be definitive  —  if those seeking election to the East Hampton Town Board showed the public they know what is in the comprehensive plan and told us where they think it is on target or falls short. Their ideas about what it would take, in time and money, to bring it up to date, would also be interesting.

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.

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.

Corn and tomatoes. What more could anyone want at the height of the season? Right? 

But nothing, even luscious just-picked corn and tomatoes, is simple on the East End anymore. I wrote East End rather than South Fork or the Hamptons to describe this region because the food grown on the yet-to-be Hamptonized North Fork is surely among the best anywhere in the country.

We boast of perfect meals at this time of year, with fresh local fluke or porgies, perhaps, adding to the pleasure of corn and tomatoes. But no matter how good such a repast may be, it is, well, old-fashioned. The atmosphere of excess that pervades the air in these parts at the height of the season even affects the fish and produce we buy. If you have enough money, the world is your oyster, literally and figuratively.

I suppose expanding variety was to be expected. After all, for years fish markets here would sell primarily tried-and-true fish caught in local waters at the right season. Most city folks arrived here with a taste for fish and other foods from all over the world, and little awareness of why one might prefer a fish that is local and seasonal. 

About three years ago, I asked the person behind the fish counter at the East Hampton Citarella if the bluefish on display was local, like the sign said, although I knew bluefish had yet to arrive in our waters. My friends at the Wainscott Seafood Shop set me straight: Certain fishmongers had taken to calling fish caught anywhere along the East Coast local. Okay. I got it. 

By the way, bluefish, which my family thinks makes great eating, is so unpopular these days that it isn’t often put out for sale even when it is abundant here. Fishmongers have taken note, it seems, and are more likely to offer red snapper, for example, which is indigenous to the Gulf of Mexico. 

I have no quarrel with red snapper, and, as for produce, I am willing to try almost anything that comes along. Garlic scapes, for example. I brought a quiche home the other day from Open Minded Organics in Bridgehampton, intrigued that it was made with scapes (the stalks of garlic) and fennel. It was good, and obviously more nutritious than one with traditional ham and cheese.

Checking up on the Halsey family’s Green Thumb in Water Mill, one of the longtime organic produce markets on the South Fork, I found it had gone upscale, or you might say, been carried off with the tide. It grows and sells Asian produce, including red and green mustards, mizani, tatsoi, and shiso. I haven’t looked the latter up just yet. The Green Thumb also makes seven different kinds of pesto. That’s right. Seven! 

I forayed into the farmers market in the Nick and Toni’s parking lot when it first opened for the season to find numerous out-of-town vendors with high-priced goodies. Sang Lee Farms of Southold was among them. Depending on whom you ask, Sang Lee may be from away  — or completely local — but, either way, I am not going to complain about the innovative and tasty sweet potato sliders I took home.

Yes, exclusive Manhattan restaurants have popped up here this summer, but in any event the East End has become more and more like the metropolis even in the food we buy and take home. If this is a revolution, I am happy to take part in it.

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.

Speaking of having one’s wits about one, I, on my return home the other day from a hectic day of doing nothing, worrying as I was about what I would possibly write about that week — summer largely being what a sportswriter’s imagination says it is — I called out, “Have you seen my wits, Mary?”

“Think — where were you when you last had them about you?”

“I’m not sure. . . . I could swear I had them about me when I was in the outdoor shower this morning.”

“Well, look there then.”

“. . . I was looking up through the trees at the blue sky. . . . Ah, here they are! Wait a minute, I’ll gather them about me to see if they still work. . . . Summer is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake! Do you find that sufficiently witty?”

“Wit’ll do.”

“If you can keep your meds while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . . .”

“Please.”

“Once more unto Citarella, dear friend, once more . . . stiffen the sinews, set the teeth, and stretch the nostrils wide. . . .”

“Lay it on, Macduff.”

“Bring me no more private callers. Let them fly all. Till the Walking Dunes come to Newtown Lane I cannot taint with fear. . . . I have supped full with horoscopes. . . . Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty place from day to day to the last tweet of recorded time. It is a tale told by a cidiot, full of surround sound and chicken curry, signifying nothing. . . .”

“. . . Nothing much to write about, that is.”

“Something will turn up, something will turn up. . . . Well, I’m off.”

“You have your wits about you?”

“I do. Thanks to you.”

“Well, drive safely then. Don’t forget the kale, and farewell.”

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.

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.

The dune line to the east, and for a distance west, of my north-facing house on Gardiner’s Bay has been moving landward for as long as I can remember. Looking carefully the other night, I noticed a dark horizontal line in the low bluff, what was once the bottom of a bog, perhaps, above which was centuries’ worth of white sand, like vanilla frosting on a cake.

This stratigraphy caught my attention while I was walking to Promised Land and back with my son, Ellis. He had been home all day with the remnants of a summer cold and was eager to get outside when I returned from the office. The short hook of beach where Multi-Aquaculture is now is covered with old bricks and rusting things, relics of the fish-processing plant that once operated there. 

Until about 1968, bunker steamers, as my father’s generation called the big, low boats, would bring freshly caught menhaden, bunker in the local parlance, to the dock at Promised Land. There, it was taken up into the giant, now-gone steam ovens and cooked down for oil and meal. The smell, which I can still remember, was astonishing and overpowering and why our house, about a half-mile upwind, was the nearest one to the plant until after it closed for good. Old gears, fragments of conveyor-belt chains, and broken firebrick remain, though, and for a 7-year-old recently interested in treasure-hunting, it was all solid gold. 

On the walk back with our loot — me with a bird skull, Ellis with an assortment of bones, plastic, and metal bits — the light was just right to see the line in the dune in strong relief. The dunes here go way back, I presume, to the period when the last glaciation receded, leaving bare sand and gravel in its wake. Wind did the work, assembling the loose sand into dunes, which it then shaped and scalloped. With very limited exception, that process ended long ago on eastern Long Island.

Now, as sea level relentlessly creeps upward, the dunes are being taken apart. At our house, erosion has cut through the highest portion of the post-glacial dune line and is beginning to chew its way down the progressively lower landward slope. To the east, several of the houses built 50 or more feet back from the edge years ago now dip their toes in the water at high tide. On Tuesday night, one of my neighbors had three men out putting up snow fence on metal stakes, like King Canute, in an effort to trap any sand at all.

Snow fences work at building new dune up to a point, but when they are placed where the water now wants to be, they are, in the end, a waste of time and money. One good storm and it is all for naught. 

That is what the dark line at the base of the dune is telling us. The bay is rising. The beach is receding. And there isn’t a thing three men and a roll of snow fence are going to do about that.