We must stay calm, O’en and I, though this is a particularly trying season to pursue the middle way, neither sniffing nor yearning overmuch.

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,” as I hear the men’s soccer team’s coaches urge pretty much constantly. “Calm, calm.” But how can you when you’ve been bumped from behind while waiting for the light to turn, cut off, jumped ahead of at a four-way stop, and such — all flagrant fouls, as it were, but nobody’s blowing a whistle and giving you a free kick. It’s a triumph of sorts simply to return home with your wits about you.

“If you can keep your wits while all about you are losing theirs. . . .”

It has, as I say, been difficult, but our littlest Little Leaguers have been instructive in this regard. They, wonderful to tell, have been keeping their wits about them, and have, as of this writing on Monday afternoon, been winning. No matter what happens tonight at the district championship game in Riverhead, they will have brought joy to this summer. 

Henry Meyer, whom I remember catching in Little League, just as his son, Hudson, sometimes does now, wrote in an email this morning that East Hampton’s 9-10-year-old traveling all-star kids have been wonderful, and that the parents too have been wonderful, letting the coaches — who I would add are also wonderful, Tim Garneau and Greg Brown as well as Henry — coach and the kids play. Refreshing words in these times of overbearing parents used to getting their way.

I would add that a team with a Meyer on it and with an Alversa on it augurs well for the revival of baseball here, for Hudson and Kai’s fathers not long ago were teammates on the East End Tigers, the foremost amateur baseball team on the Island. 

But I’ll not stop with them, for all should be mentioned: Andrew Brown, Tyler Hansen, Carter Dickinson, Leandro Abreu, Victoreddy Diaz, Hudson Beckmann, Bruno Sessler, Livs Kuplins, Justin Prince, Michael Newmark, Liam Cashin, and Luke Rossano.

“The most important thing,” Henry Meyer said in signing off, “is that the boys are working hard and learning how to play the game at a high level with high expectations.” He added that they have also been having “lots of fun.” 

Thanks to them the summer has not been a nightmare from which I have been trying to awake.  

Somewhere in cyberspace there’s an answer to this question: Why would someone buy four items on eBay, charge them to my personal credit card, and have them sent to my East Hampton Post Office box? It wasn’t me. I really don’t need a great big, cheap, water-resistant man’s watch, thank you very much.

It might have been weeks before I noticed something mysterious was going on, but for a phone call from an American Tourister vendor, who rang me up to tell me they needed a street address: The ugly luggage set I’d ordered could not be shipped to a post office box. 

A three-piece set of shiny black hard-side rolling cases? No, not mine.

Whoever did this also ordered a FitBit — well, I could use a FitBit, I suppose — as well as an overpriced copy of my late husband’s book “The South Fork.” How odd. The only answer to this strange occurrence was that someone out there was experimenting to see if they could successfully order some things to be sent to me, the legitimate holder of the eBay and associated PayPal account, before ordering some things to be sent to them, elsewhere.

But, really, if that’s the case, they needed to do this four times? I just don’t know.

To try to find out what was going on, I enlisted the help of my daughter, who is light-years ahead of me where computer research is concerned. She found out that the orders had been made on Tuesday, June 27, and canceled the luggage, which was the only order that hadn’t yet shipped. Then, just to bring more sunshine to my Friday afternoon, I had a long, unproductive telephone call to eBay’s customer service line. Eventually, we were able to cancel all of the purchases, thank heavens. 

It certainly seemed suspicious to me that my eBay username was  I’d never heard of before, my initials followed by a long string of illegible consonants. Apparently, “hsr.xbskxkx.phskjj” had been an eBay member since August 2016. Who? What?

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Two days later, eBay sent me a survey to find out how my experience with customer service had been. The request came to my correct email address but “hsr.xbskxkx.phskjj” was the salutation. Later that day, the Tourister vendor sent an email saying it had refunded my money, $159.99. I’m still waiting to get my money back for the rest of it. It was all very time consuming, not just for me, but for my daughter, the eBay customer-service representative, and, presumably, the scammer, too. Do scammers really have that much time on their hands? Does this sort of crime really pay, in relation to, say, a Starbucks salary?

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . .”

William Wordsworth was not aware that the computer would someday change how most of us go about getting and spending — or how much time most of us would wile away chasing white rabbits down endless internet sinkholes. But if you count all the time my daughter and I spent trying to get to the bottom of this eBay misadventure, the poet would concur that we had laid waste our powers.

It wasn’t me who pulled the biggest porgy to ever come over Zygote’s gunnels out of the water. I was fishing off Fireplace with my friend Eric Firestone early on the Fourth of July, and it was he who hooked the relative monster.

Eric seemed to have the magic touch that morning. The bigger fish all tended to come to his bait, though perhaps the mojo wasn’t his alone; the rod he used was one another friend had given me following her father’s death. “Did I want some fishing stuff?” she had asked. It was quite a haul.

Among the custom-made bottom-fishing rods were fly rod setups and a green plastic suitcase containing a spinning rig perfect for sweeping along with her dad’s business luggage. Everything was in perfect condition. I felt a little sheepish about using the free gear, but she said her dad would have wanted it out there catching fish. A porgy outing on the Fourth of July might well have amused him, I hope.

Porgies have somewhat of an ignominious reputation. Small, iron-scaled, and bony, they are not so easily filleted. But, with whole fish in vogue, they have been rebranded, including as Montauk sea bream, and reportedly do well on restaurant menus.

No one much was on the water yet when we left the creek and headed out onto Three Mile Harbor. There were three guys fishing from a small boat when we reached Fireplace, and a couple of boats came by as we drifted on the falling tide, but not as many as you would think on such an agreeable morning.

Clouds passed overhead. A light rain fell at one point, no more than a dozen raindrops apiece hitting our T-shirts. By the time we decided we were done, with our large cooler half-filled, it had turned into a hot summer’s day. We jumped overboard and drifted a while with the boat on the tide.

Back aboard Zygote and on the way back to the harbor, Eric wondered about the porgy world record. His would not come close, I knew, but all the same, I did put it on the postal scale at the office. It barely broke two pounds, which didn’t matter at all.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

I became an author in 2015. For those who weren’t around when I was tooting my horn: I became an author of a coloring book for grown-ups. Because it was totally my illustrations — my book didn’t have any words — it was easy for it to be “translated” into foreign editions. A Russian edition (Hello, Mr. Putin?), a Portuguese edition (Hello, Brazil), a Polish edition, and a Czech edition. (Yes, I have them all.)

The Russian publisher changed the cover completely, not to mention using the Russian alphabet. On the other editions my title, “Color Me Cluttered,” appeared to be crazy mash-ups of letters and accent marks. What did they really call my book, how did they word the subhead, and what did they say in the promotional copy on the selling page on Amazon? What were the Brazilians expecting when they bought my book? Or the Russians? 

First-time authors are allowed to obsess. I read that somewhere. What author wouldn’t want to find out how accurate the translation of their subhead is? My book’s subhead is “A Coloring Book to Transform Everyday Chaos Into Art.” Not an easy concept to translate, right?

Getting a look at the promotional text for the Russian book on Amazon proved to be problematic. (It has since disappeared.) Mr. Putin, do you color in coloring books?  

The title of the Polish edition translates to “Color Your Mess,” subhead: “Coloring book for adults from the inside” (“Pokoloruj swoj balagan — kolo­rowanka dla doroslych od srodka,” for those who like to do their own translating). 

In Portuguese the book is “Casa Em Cores” (“Color House”). Part of the Portuguese sales pitch on Amazon says: “Arrumar pode ser terapeutico, mas colorir e muito mais. Um sossego que funciona tanto para arrumadinhos quanto bagunceiros. E so adicionar cores.” Which, in Google-translated English, becomes: “Tidying up can be therapeutic, but coloring and more. A quiet place that works for both neat and rowdy. And only add colors.”

Rowdy? Gotta love the Brazilians. 

Energized by the first book, last year I illustrated a second one. This one had words in the drawings. No doubt daunting to translate, there were no foreign sales. Both “Color Me Cluttered” and the new “Color Your Happy Home” received good reviews on Amazon and people began to post colored pages from each of the books along with their comments. 

I became a bit obsessed by my reviews. You published folk out there might know what I mean: For a while I checked the reviews every day. On Amazon you can comment on a review, and I always write thank-you notes to reviewers. And yes, you can post a review of your own book (I gave myself five stars!). 

Then there is the mini thrill of typing just my first name into a search on Amazon and popping up at the top of books attached to my name and similar, the point being that of all the Durells who might have written a book, I was at the top of that list. And of course, since I looked every day, Amazon figured the coloring books were very popular. 

For months I enjoyed being the first listing. How exclusive. How cool. I got a smack-down when PBS broadcast that lovely series called “The Durrells in Corfu.” All of a sudden, there was a flurry of interest in that literary family. (No matter that they had two Rs, and I only have one; Amazon was willing to allow for a typo.) And thus, with the focus on those Durrells (Lawrence and Gerald and the rest), I fell from first in line to fourth on the Amazon search for Durells. I moved below “The Corfu Trilogy” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” 

My incipient narcissism erupted with this affront to my position. However, on consideration I have to admit in that context I am in excellent company. Onomatologically or even alphabetically speaking we are all sort of namesakes. I enjoy being vaguely associated with them. They were a zany family, after all. I wonder what they might think of hanging out with a couple of coloring books for company. I rather think the young Durrells might have enjoyed my books. I surely have enjoyed theirs. We are all a bit rowdy, no? 

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star. 

Because I am not much of a TV news viewer, my opinion about whether Megyn Kelly should have interviewed Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist, on NBC is neither here nor there. But the nonsense he sprouts is, to me, personally, not only outrageous but also obscene, and how to judge obscenity is something we have confronted from time to time even here on our letters-to-the-editor pages.

Over the years, The Star has occasionally published statements we thought were abhorrent, including those that were anti-Semitic. If they were signed by writers willing to make their identities known, we were satisfied that publishing them helped the community know something that was otherwise hidden, that civil society was better served when base elements within it were made known. The pat explanation is that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech was not intended to protect language everyone likes.

Nevertheless, it seems that somewhere a line should be drawn. The Star has consulted lawyers when something submitted seemed libelous, but the few judgments we have made about whether something was too obscene for publication were subjective. 

Which brings me to Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones. NBC and most TV and print commentators appear to have agreed that Ms. Kelly’s interview with Mr. Jones was a public service, the idea being to confront Mr. Jones and to make his outrageousnesses known. Did you know, for example, that he has said Barack Obama was the global leader of Al Qaeda, that Hillary Clinton was involved in the imprisonment of children as sex slaves in a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, that the Sept. 11, 2001, attack was backed by elements within the United States government, and that our government was trying to turn kids into homosexuals by putting chemicals into juice boxes? Laughable to most of us, yes. Mr. Jones even believes that the Apollo II moon landings were faked.

But not everyone recognizes these claims as ridiculous. President Trump, it appears, considers Mr. Jones his kind of guy. According to Media Matters for America, a nonprofit research and information center dedicated to ferreting out disinformation, the president has frequently repeated ideas promoted by Mr. Jones, among them that the 2016 national election “was rigged,” that millions of people voted illegally, and that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton founded ISIS. Media Matters quotes an InfoWars statement explaining that it is “seeking the truth and exposing the scientifically engineered lies of the globalists and their ultimate goal of enslaving humanity.”

(Globalists, huh? I think we’ve heard that one before.)

Mr. Jones’s radio program is a three-hour, Monday-through-Friday talk show that apparently is carried on more than 160 stations, as well as being streamed on the internet; InfoWars, the website, is touted as the “#1 Internet News Show in the World.” It has a huge readership; Mr. Jones claims it is above three million, though I haven’t been able to find a reliable fact-check of that boast.

The most emotionally distressing and offensive InfoWars crusade is Mr. Jones’s charge that the deaths of 20 children and 6 faculty members at Newtown, Conn., did not occur, that the story was fabricated by forces seeking to control guns and destroy the Second Amendment.

Recently, I took a careful look at the 1973 Supreme Court decision on obscenity. It offers three standards for judging obscenity, and Mr. Jones’s foul theory about Newtown doesn’t seem to meet any of them. Which means that if someone were to write a letter to this newspaper espousing this outrage, we would probably print it — and the inevitable rebuttals — following the open-letters policy and in hopes that the light of day is the best remedy for society’s darkest rot. But I am not sure. An internal debate here at the Star would be likely.

They say the first thing readers of The Star open to when they are young is the police news to see who got arrested. When they are older, readers turn to the obituaries to see who has died. I like to think they also turn to the obits for a good read and to learn a bit about lives well lived. At least that’s our goal.

Obituaries are among the most difficult writing tasks at the paper. I say “write” because that is what we do; the concept often surprises friends and family members who send us material after the death of a loved one.

There is a difference between a death notice and an obituary that might seem subtle. It comes down to this: Death notices are by and for the family and/or friends of someone who has died; obituaries are written by a newspaper’s staff and are intended for strangers as well. The lives of those with ties to East Hampton are incredibly varied. This is a place with a fascinating history of its own, and when we dig a little bit while working on obituaries, remarkable details emerge.

A mark of a good obituary is that readers come away with the feeling that they would have liked to have known the person who is its subject. We are lucky that East Hampton has residents with stories that range far and wide, and that at the same time many obituaries attest to the fact that both locals and people originally from away really enjoy clamming. 

I coach our new obituary writers to always ask about how someone came to the South Fork. There are familiar narratives, such as a vacation house that became a year-round home after retirement. There are world travelers who ended up here by chance and decided to stay. Others met a future spouse during a military deployment.

The process works like this: Most times, material from a funeral home, the family, or friends is the basis of an obituary, which we expand on, generally on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the Thursday paper. Once we have this material, we try to phone someone who was close to the person who has died to find those points in his or her life that make the difference between a mere recitation of facts and the story of a life. Obituaries are not intended as tributes and should never be larded with platitudes. Instead, they should be like short biographies.

Sometimes, family and friends object, expecting what we publish to be exactly as submitted. We try to explain why we do obituaries the way we do. It’s not easy, and when we make a mistake, it is mortifying. But a successful obituary is its own reward, and that is why we do it.