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.

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.

It was one of the hottest days so far this summer, but it was one of the best.

Grandchildren visits are exactly what grandmothers crave — but this one was most unusual. One of my 7-year-old grandsons made my day by getting me to do something I never, ever thought I would do. I can safely say it was the first time in my life that I pitched some baseballs.

When my kids were that age, their father was on hand for sports and other such activities. He was more of a sailing man, but was able to throw a ball if the kids were interested.

As I said, it was a very hot day, and the sun was beating down on the grass in the front yard, with no clouds overhead. Teddy’s mother and sister had gone off to participate in some artsy acting project, and he and I were alone at my house when he found a cardboard box filled with old baseball bats, wood and metal, and started swinging them about.

He is a most remarkably persistent person, this grandson, and lately he has been telling his mother that he is going to be a professional baseball player when he grows up. (Even though the only baseball game he has ever seen was the Sag Harbor Whalers versus the North Fork Ospreys a couple of weeks ago. He’s never even seen a Little League game yet.) Teddy went back into the cardboard box, pulled out a regulation baseball, and began cajoling and encouraging me to pitch to him.

I followed him to a shady part of the lawn and he began swinging for the bleachers.

After a few tries I began actually to be able to get the ball to arrive in the general vicinity of boy and bat. One of his early hits flew quite far. “Home run!” I shouted as he ran around an imaginary diamond behind a tree and back to home base. He was wearing his favorite hat, a blue baseball cap with a “B” for Brooklyn Dodgers.

Honestly, I was a little afraid. The ball seemed very hard and quite heavy, to me, heavy enough to be dangerous. Would I throw it so badly that it would hit him in the head? Would I be too slow to get out of the way of a fly ball falling back down to earth? Yes, I guess I understood that I was supposed to catch a ball that was in a trajectory to hit my shoulder or face or stomach — or whatever body part was in the way — but I have never been too good at catching things, even when I was a second grader like Teddy.

Determined to play ball, my grandson rummaged through the box again and came up with another ball, this one soft enough for scaredy-grandma.

The game went on.

Teddy apparently took my pitching in stride, as if it were something I had done all my life. At least, he made no comment on my skills or lack of them.

I don’t think I was throwing strikes, but I was astonished to discover that I could throw the ball into the zone where he could reach it with his bat.

Amused by my prowess, I wished someone in the family had been around to video this unexpected octogenarian achievement. Had his mother or his father or sister or any of the cousins been around, he would no doubt have convinced them to play ball, instead, and I would have missed my chance to demonstrate that it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks.

Teddy is aware that the Dodgers no longer play in Brooklyn and spent a few weeks in July trying to decide which major league team was going to be “his.” I’m told he has settled on the New York Mets, and plans to become a fan. Maybe he’ll take me out to the ballgame one of these days in Queens. Do they still serve Cracker Jacks?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

It had been such a long time since I was on a chartered bus with a pack of friends, or travelers with common interests, that I was surprised when it turned out to be fun. The bus was taking some 40 of us back to the South Fork Saturday night after a concert at St. Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan, where we joined the Greenwich Village Chamber Singers in a performance of the Brahms Requiem. (You may want to get tickets for the Brahms Requiem concert — with the Choral Society of the Hamptons, the G.V.C.S., and a 38-piece orchestra — on July 8 at the Parish Hall of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church.)

There was a time in the distant past, when I was in college, when I joined  skiers on organized bus trips from Eighth Street in Greenwich Village to and from familiar Northeast ski slopes. What I remember most of those skiing days is the joy of executing a perfect turn called a stem christie on a beautiful spring day, but that is another story. The point is that in the bus we indulged in song. 

On the way home from the city Saturday night we found ourselves singing, too. True, we are choristers, but it had been a long day, we were tired, and you would think we  had already sung ourselves out. It was the bus driver’s fault. All was quiet till we reached the Manorville exit. Three of our number had left cars that morning in the King Kullen parking lot there, but the driver missed the turn. Shouting ensued before the driver realized what he had done and found a way to turn the 54-seater around. All was quiet again until the bus failed to make a right turn off Route 27 into Southampton Village, where others had left cars. The bus barreled along until the intersection of Hampton Road, where the driver made a turn into the village. It was then that the singing began. 

I’m not sure which wag came up with it, but if anyone was beginning to get a little grumpy, those feelings soon evaporated. “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed” rang out. Laughter was added to the lyrics. Then Christine Cadarette, who teaches voice and piano and is the Choral Society’s rehearsal accompanist, led us in other entirely appropriate songs —“Goodnight Irene,’ for one — easing the rest of the way for those headed to East Hampton.

As for me, I couldn’t help thinking back to those long-ago ski trips and remembering a word game we used to play that had something to do with music. The game went on for as long as the good storytellers among us could imagine and describe a series of outrageous adventures supposedly experienced by someone on a difficult quest to find a “tis bottle.” What is a tis bottle, you ask? It was one of a series of bottles tuned to ring out the tones of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” when struck; the tis bottle was the missing fourth note. Well, it was funny for music nerds, and it was funny at the time.

“God, look at all the fireflies — I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many. But I haven’t seen many bees. We must call Larry.”

“Are those things roaches?”

“No, no, roaches don’t fly.”

“We better call Larry.”

“He said, by the way, that the best nature walk he’d ever been on, in all of his 81 years, was in Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor.”

“Are you sure those aren’t roaches?”

“Don’t be so jumpy. The night is tender, and the fireflies are beautiful.”

“Roaches multiply like crazy.”

“Roaches don’t fly. . . . Where are you going?”

“To call Larry.”

“Don’t forget to ask him about the bees.”

A few minutes later:

“He told me that the bees wouldn’t be endangered if they went to organic farms, and that, moreover, moths and wasps were pollinators too.”   

“Oh, really? Did he say roaches fly?”

“I didn’t get a chance to ask him, he had to answer another call.”

“People must be calling him all the time. ‘Hello, yes this is Larry Penny, will you hold. . . ?’ How can he be at one with Nature when everyone’s calling him with questions about it — was it a hummock they saw, or a tussock, for instance. There’s a difference, you know.”

“Sedge who?”

“Sedge me.”

“Speaking of tufts, weren’t you the one who said the bird I saw that time was a tufted towhee when you knew it wasn’t.”

“When you don’t know what you’re talking about you must say it with certainty — that’s rule number one.”

“Which is why I think these are roaches. . . . I mean I know there are tufted towhees . . .”

“No, there aren’t. . . .” 

“But that wasn’t one.”    

“There are no tufted towhees. I was conflating, conflating a tufted titmouse with a towhee bunting.”

“Where’s our bird book. . . ?”

“I don’t know, better call Larry. Meanwhile, let’s not obsess. As La Rochefoucauld said, ‘Tender is the night and the fireflies are beautiful.’ Try a new approach: Blend your spirit in with the vastness, with the ten thousand things.” 

“Maybe, but only after a few of those ten thousand things stop encroaching.”

“I told you, roaches don’t fly.”

“Larry would know. . . . But let’s let him be.”

“And that’s where we came in.”

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.