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.  

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.

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.

“It’s so green, O’en, so green!” I said as we walked down Main Street recently. “See the dark green, the yellow green, the gnarly roots. . . .”

Back at the office, Isabel and I talked, I forget why, perhaps because the giddiness that the grass, the trees, and the deliciously chilling spring air invoked, of “Moonstruck.”

“La luna, la bella luna!”

“Loretta, it’s a miracle!”

“I’ve got a question: Why do men chase women?”

“They’re afraid of death?”

“That’s it! That’s it! They’re afraid of death.”

Don’t look at me. I’m not afraid of death. Well, just a bit maybe. If the universe is ever-expanding, will I feel expansive — as I often do down here — in the afterlife? I do like that feeling, that feeling of leafing out that spring brings. Winter is inward-turning, which is all right too, especially if you have someone to turn in with. In short, I still rather like it all. Aum Sweet Aum. And O’en’s just begun and we must keep up with him, look after him, keep him safe as he waxes in wisdom teeth.

Jimmy used to think perennials were boring inasmuch as they kept coming back all the time. In his case, though, I might be partial to reincarnation, hoping that the next time he not be plagued by schizophrenia. He was the most intelligent of them all, Mary says, and deserved much better. She thinks of him all the time now, and was wondering the other day if that was what happened when somebody close to you died, to wit, that they became part of you. We are not individuals, then, but composites, communities in fact if we live long enough. We are they. Higher souls probably leaf out far more than the average, though I imagine severyone does to some extent. There is death, yes, but resurrection too. And, as a result, we left behind are not our same old selves, but augmented! Reborn in a way, as are they. Spring is a good time to think of this.

Of course, spring also brings with it catkins and pollen, and, ultimately, the siege of summer people. “This is the raiment for their entertainment,” I said to O’en, pointing up at the elms and down at the manicured grass in front of the 1770 House. 

I’ll try to be nicer this year, not such a grouch, more democratic, as O’en is. I’ll try to look at the big picture. And besides, it’s Mary’s birthday, more than enough reason to exult in the season and to look with equanimity — if not with giddy anticipation — toward the next.

Those returning to East Hampton after a time away will be sure to notice that the green near the flagpole does not look quite the same. Where until this year it was unbroken grass, a winding ribbon of plants and low shrubs now extends to the little bridge on Mill Road. This, we are told, is a bioswale, which is, as I told a group of Ladies Village Improvement Society members in a recent talk, a fancy word for swamp. This brought a laugh, as one of the next speaker’s topics was to be the Village Green and how it recently came to look different.

So it was in time past. In his 1849 history, Henry P. Hedges said what is now Town Pond was not a pond exactly, when East Hampton was founded 200 years earlier. “There was no collection of water, and a swamp or marsh covered the centre of the street.” Like today’s bioswale of native plants, “a small rivulet or drain communicated with and ran into the swamp from the north,” Hedges wrote.

The swamp was soon to be changed. In June 1653, according to town records, “a watering pond” was “diged at the Spring Eastward.” Around this, the English were already building houses and setting out their plantation, as they called it, and their bodies were relegated to the earth in the South End Burying Ground there. The second and more substantial church was built in 1717 along the rivulet’s bank, where the newest wing of Guild Hall stands in all its concrete-block anonymity across from the Star office.

Maidstone, as the plantation was first called, existed independently of other European outposts for a time, but the founders relatively soon voted it under the authority of the Connecticut Colony. There was little interaction with the Dutch who lived at New Amsterdam far to the west; it was difficult to reach, for one thing, and far easier to sail across the Sound when the need arose for trade or to adjudicate a complicated legal matter. 

In the first division of land, 34 allotments were divvied up around what would become Town Pond, the parcels long and narrow and between 8 and 12 acres each. The first laws that might be considered precursors to today’s zoning rules came early, too: In 1650, the town trustees declared, “yt whosoever shall take up a lot in Towne shal live upon it himselfe and also yt no man shal sell his alotment or any part thereof.” 

For more than 200 years, the area around Town Pond was mostly a mudhole. Main Street, in an old glass-plate negative I found at an estate sale at its north end some time ago, appears a soggy mess of cart wheel ruts and horse hoof divots. The Village Green — and Hook Pond, into which it eventually drains — has long been a cache basin for what runs off the street or leaks through the groundwater. 

The village occasionally still hires wader-clad baymen to rid it of algae mats when they get unsightly. The recent bioswale is an effort to slow runoff as it heads toward the pond. Its plants will help that process, their roots taking up moisture and creating an underground net to trap contaminants, I suppose. 

I find the appearance of the now-planted bioswale appealing, though I detest the word. And I am keeping an eye out to see what birds and other wildlife will show up there. Whether it will be adequate by itself to improve Town and Hook Ponds’ water quality, I don’t know, but it is a nice reminder of how things were when a rivulet ran the length of a soggy Main Street to communicate with a swamp at the north.

It’s not often that The Star reviews student productions, but having seen — and having highly praised — East Hampton High School’s recent staging of  “In the Heights,” I decided to follow suit with “Thoroughly Modern Millie” at the Ross Upper School last weekend.

The original “Thoroughly Modern Millie” was a 1967 film that went onto the stage much later. The movie starred Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, and Mary Tyler Moore. At Ross, six of the seven leading actors were boarding students from Asia and the seventh a young woman from Russia. Their English was accented, but it didn’t matter. They pulled it all together beautifully with good acting and singing and lots of choreographed stage business. The production was terrific.

The story of “Millie” takes place in the 1920s. She is among young women seeking to make their way in New York City who rent rooms at the Priscilla Hotel, where the evil (but hilarious) concierge schemes to sell any she can into “white slavery.” Millie is determined to find a good job and marry the boss; love won’t have anything to do with it, she says. Suffice it to say love intrudes, and it all ends happily except for two women who disappear, apparently into slavery. 

Though every lead carried the day, the concierge, played by Maria Chernovisova, from Russia, almost stole the show. I was particularly impressed with Natsumi Nakamura’s lovely singing voice and by the acting and singing of two young male leads, Sung-Wook (Jadon) Han, who is 18, and Yuqing (Bill) Wang, who is 17.

As for the adults at the top of the bill, longtime  talented professionals were there, including Gerard Doyle, the school’s drama teacher, Sheryl Has­talis, choreographer, Adam Judd, music director, Janet Fensterer, accompanist, Sebastian Paczinsky, lighting, and Jon Mulhern and Bill Stewart, who did the sets.

Enrollment at Ross is big enough for a large number of students to have taken part in various aspects of the show, from stage managing and sound to the pit band. Given that 200 students in 9th through 12th grade are boarders, the cast did not have families nearby to invite to performances so the audience was made up largely of fellow students.

The play has roles for two men who are supposed to be Chinese and do the concierge’s bidding. They are called Ching Ho and Bun Foo and, in the original, they speak Cantonese. Guess what? At Ross, the actors spoke their native Mandarin, and brought down the house when Chinese students were in the audience. They were funny enough for me, too, even though I didn’t recognize a word. Talent has no borders.

So what was everybody talking about last weekend? People. Too many of them!

A taxi driver told me his weekend began on Thursday, not Friday. I am sure this was true, because by Friday morning the parked cars were chockablock on either side of North Main Street when I ventured out to the dry-cleaners. I wandered up the street to find out what was going on, and discovered that they belonged to people browsing in the farmers market in the Nick and Toni’s parking lot. 

Farmers markets, which everyone waits for eagerly in the off-season, are one of the nicest things about summer. But first thing Friday, the crowd on North Main was such that perhaps it was more delightful for the merchants than the customers. Poking along among the vendors, I stopped at an alcove for Sang Lee Farms, a fine organic-food enterprise on the North Fork, and actually was elbowed aside by a woman who didn’t even look to see whom she had hit. (I persevered anyway and bought some delicious sweet-potato sliders.)

On Saturday, when the weather was glorious, I went on an outing with some of my grandchildren to LongHouse, which was staging its annual Family Day. I went to LongHouse, that is, along with an estimated crowd of more than 700 others. LongHouse is an extraordinary oasis of multiple gardens and weaving pathways, with large-scale outdoor sculptures dotted here and there in surprising nooks. Having recently been to Winterthur, the gardens at the Rockefeller estate in Delaware, I think I can attest that LongHouse is more interesting, not just because of the greater variety of plants, large and small, but because of the sculptures. Still: 700 people in a garden on a Saturday afternoon? It was a delight for the youngest members of our group, who played noisily with friends on the lawn, but I cannot say that it was a peaceful idyll.

Asking others if they noticed unusually large crowds in other places on Saturday, I heard there may have been 300 people on the grounds of the Montauk Brewery, although the line of those waiting to sample beers and ales, they said, moved quickly. The melee at Starbucks on East Hampton’s Main Street could have fooled a year-rounder into thinking a film shoot, or something else extraordinary, was going on. But it wasn’t. It was just Saturday morning on Main Street on Memorial Day weekend.

Year-rounders like me learned long ago to avoid main thoroughfares, food stores, and restaurants when the season is high. There is a story, apocryphal perhaps, about a man on a supermarket checkout line shouting that the woman in front of him, whom he presumed to be a local, should not shop on weekends. 

But even the back roads were buzzing with traffic on Monday. Cars. Cars. Cars. They were playing dodge-’em under the railway bridge on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton, and as I drove back home from a morning appointment in Sag Harbor, the vehicles headed northwest on Route 114 weren’t quite bumper-to-bumper, but they were close. At the intersection of 114 with Swamp Road, a line of cars waited to make the turn, too many cars for me to count.  

Memorial Day weekend isn’t supposed to be as busy as July Fourth, but it seemed to have reached that point this year. Enough is enough, we all cry. Of course, we say that every year, don’t we?

The only moment of peace and stillness came, ironically, during the deluge of rain that fell as the veterans in their uniforms lined up to march from the flagpole at the town green toward the veterans memorial at Hook Mill. At least on our end of Main Street, the crowds waiting under umbrellas to honor the veterans were thin to nonexistent. A few stepped out from offices or stopped on the sidewalk to stand in their rain slickers and watch.

The message on the iPhone was from my son-in-law, a wildlife biologist who spends his days worrying about biodiversity, habitat, and endangered creatures in the farther reaches of Washington State, and rarely if ever emails or texts  unless I’ve written first, which I had.

“Jeff!!” I messaged him on May 29. “We have sent Julia’s birthday present, which will be delivered on June 1 by FedEx. If at all possible can you please somehow intercept the package and hide it away till June 15? No signature required for delivery so maybe you’ll find it on the porch who knows. XX”

“Consider it done,” he replied.

 It was a big present for a big, round-number birthday — a rose-gold, latest-version, Apple iPad with gigabytes up to here. We’d been puzzling over what to get her, until one day, in the wake of the United Airlines insanity where they physically hauled a man off a full plane for refusing to give up his seat to an airline employee, somebody wrote on Facebook that he’d just cut his Chase/United credit card in half.

I had that same card. I decided at once that I’d do that too. It wasn’t the same as picketing with the crowds in front of Trump Tower, but hey, you get to a Certain Age and you protest where you can.

Here now is what happened. While deleting the card, which I’d had for four or five years, from the computer, United’s “MileagePlus Service Center” page popped up, the first time ever. Lo and behold, I had amassed 110,000 miles! Who knew, who ever even bothers to know, when mileage upgrades, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, are almost unheard of today — a remnant of the distant past, unless you’re an airborne jewel of platinum or diamond status.

Eureka! The “service center” turned out to be a Manhasset Miracle Mile, with page after page of temptations, from a field box to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Cleveland Indians for 10,000 miles, to, you guessed it, a rose-gold, bells-and-whistles-loaded, Apple iPad for 96,000. Plus tax, it left me with 604 miles that I will never use.

June 1 arrived. “Interception Day!” I texted. “Ball is in your court!”

“I won’t let you down,” he promised.

June 10. “The day approaches. Did the Box arrive?”

“It arrived and was intercepted before she could see it.”

Then, on Monday, Jeff called. He’d opened the brown shipping carton, he said, sounding strangled; removed the Apple box inside, wrapped it up in birthday paper, and left it downstairs atop a pile of other presents — visible from outside through a glass pane in the front door. He was working in the basement when he thought he heard footsteps above, but did not go up to check. 

Did I say the front door was unlocked?

Portland, Ore., where they live, is supposed to be low on the crime scale, but someone had walked into the house and taken the first thing they saw, ignoring everything underneath. He’d called the police, Jeff said, who came and said he was “probably out of luck.” 

It was not a happy day.

Sometime later, Julia, who was at work, got a call from someone in the neighborhood whom she’d never met, asking whether she’d left her house a while before carrying a package, and driven off. 

“No. Why?”

This neighbor said she happened to be looking out her window and saw a woman going from house to house along the block, trying every door. She called her son over, she said, and they watched as the woman slipped inside and left a moment later with the box. Mother and son hurried out, she said, and “stood and stared,” and the thief saw them seeing her, dropped the package, ran to a car, and fled.

At 6 that evening the neighbor appeared at the door and handed over the birthday box. “I was still stunned,” Julia said. 

They gave her a fine bottle of Willamette Valley pinot noir, and are thinking of installing a keypad lock. 

Happy birthday, baby.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

By chance Saturday night around suppertime, I had nowhere to be and nothing I had to do and ended up at Indian Wells Beach sitting in my truck in the parking lot having a bite to eat.

Not to plug a local business necessarily, but it is worth mentioning that Michael Clark, at the Cavaniola’s shop in Amagansett Square, had set me up nicely with some shrimp salad and a few other things; I had half a Carissa baguette that I had bought at the Amagansett Farmers Market in the morning. And so, I sat in the truck and watched the evening show. And what a show it was.

Memorial Day weekend brings ’em out, that’s for sure, and the comings and goings at the road end did not let me down. As I was about halfway through my first bite, a shiny new Jeep rolled up and barreled onto the beach and out of site. A few minutes later it came rolling up the other way, only to get stuck in the soft sand just before the lot’s pavement began.

The driver, a young woman, spun the Jeep’s shiny new tires, throwing up a cloud of sand. I stepped out of my truck and walked over to an amused-looking town employee who informed me that he was unable to help under Parks Department rules. I snickered and walked over to see what I could do. 

“It’s kind of a finesse thing,” I told her, as I helped let air out of the tires. After her next two attempts to get back to the pavement, I volunteered to do it myself. The driver accepted, and as I walked back to my truck the town guy sort of leaned over to whisper, “Jeeps are crap,” and then to ask why I did not just offer to drive it off the beach in the first place. “I wanted to watch the show,” I said.

Back to my open-faced shrimp sandwich, it was only a matter of minutes before my attention was drawn to a large Weimaraner doing its business next to the lifeguard stand, while its owner, a couple of steps away, paid no mind. A number of people around it and on a nearby bench stared, mouths agape in what looked like a parody of disbelief.

I grabbed a doggie waste bag from a pole-mounted dispenser, walked over, and asked, “Did that thing just drop a bomb?” It had, they said.

“I’ve got something for you,” I told the dog’s owner, as nonconfrontationally as possible, handing her the bag. Without any fuss, she took it and cleaned up the spot. I went back to my truck.

Things quieted down after that. A couple of young people pulled up and passed around a vape pen, blowing clouds of smoke. Someone talked loudly about real estate on a cellphone in another car. 

I finished my dinner and made a mental note to myself to do this more often.