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.  

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.”