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.

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.

An image of a grandmother with an apron tied around her waist showing someone young how to make a cake came to mind last week. I am not certain whether it was wishful thinking or guilt. The truth is, I never bake much of anything and don’t even remember making chocolate-chip cookies when my kids were kids.

What actually happened in my kitchen last week was that my granddaughter Evvy, who just turned 13, was hanging around my house, saying she had nothing to do. She took me up on it when I rather halfheartedly suggested she bake a cake. Turns out, she is a whiz at baking cakes.

It’s a new world, we know. Evvy didn’t need me or any other grandmother to tell her how to go about it. She just went to her iPhone and found a recipe. Fortunately, the necessary ingredients were on hand: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, Hershey’s cocoa, safflower oil. But, oh dear, when it came to pans for a layer cake, there were none. I could have sworn we used to have many, many cake tins, left over from the days when my daughter used to take any excuse to bake a cake — snowball coconut cakes for birthdays, bundt pans for blueberry cakes, orange frosted with chocolate. . . . Anyway, taking this discovery in stride, Evvy used one square baking dish and one shaped like a star. We would have two single-layer cakes rather than one tall one.

I was amazed to observe that Evvy had her baking techniques down pat. For example, she cut parchment paper to place at the bottom of the pans so the cakes would be easier to get out, and even just the cutting out was a tricky feat with the pan shaped like a star. (I don’t know why I have parchment paper around; probably for some exotic specialty my husband cooked one night.) She used a toothpick to test for doneness when the timer she had set on her phone buzzed (I knew how to do that part!). Finally, she put plates on both sides of each pan so the cake would be easy to turn right side up once it slipped out of the baking tin.

As I sat wondering how to make icing, Evvy had it down to a science. There was heavy cream in the refrigerator — I guess I’d bought it to eat with the last of the strawberries — so she whipped it up, then took a simple plastic bag and turned it into a pastry bag by making a hole at one corner and holding it just so. My goodness. In no time the cakes were decorated with swirls, stars, circles, and slashes. It was a celebration.

I asked Evvy’s father afterward if he had taught her to bake. The answer was no. Not him, he said, noting that he had recently made a cake from a Duncan Hines mix. But he added that Evvy sometimes makes a cake in a cup.

Old fogey alert: It turns out that Evvy learned to bake — and bake well — via YouTube, Instagram, and maybe some reality television shows about baking competitions. Social media have replaced me, and maybe you, and done a swell job at it. Well, I guess grannies have other things to do these day. I’m off to yoga now.

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.”

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.

“It’s all the same fuckin’ mall, man,” I said to Mary as we headed west from Pittsburgh last week on Route 80 in search of greener pastures, which we were to find in Perrysburg, Ohio, whose historic district reminds one of Sag Harbor on a river.

There were malls that appall and treeless tract housing there too, though well beyond the village, whose historic district is welcoming, its sidewalks lined by gnarly trees, whose roots have been known to thread through old sewer lines and cause cataclysmic cloacal backups such as happened the last time we were there — just as we had sat down to what was to be a celebratory family feast. 

Perrysburg’s spirit is upbeat, as it is here, nature and a sense of place, I think, playing a big hand in it. At an elementary school ceremony they talked of respect, responsiveness, and responsibility, honesty, creativity, and kindness. There was one sour note — no mention of irreverence, but then again I always got Cs in citizenship.

Everybody waves to you there! There’s a palpable feeling of comity, though I hear Democrats must meet in the catacombs.

While our trip to see our daughter, son-in-law, and two young grandsons was, likewise, brief, a few moments in their paternal grandparents’ deck chairs at the edge of the breezy Maumee in the setting sun can stay with you a long time. Indeed, it helped to make bearable an interminable eight hours’ slumping wait in the Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the hop to Islip.

Unresponsive, uncreative, irresponsible, unkind . . . Southwest Airlines would have merited no awards at Toth Elementary that day.

“The good news is we’ve beaten the trade parade, though barely,” I said to Mary as we tooled along Route 27 in the early morning hours toward home.

More good news: In the absence of any other traffic, the beauty of this place was, even in the dark, she said, all the more evident.

A few hours later I was back at work, and happily so, Main Street having been shut down to traffic at 9 a.m. so hordes of middle schoolers with the beach their goal could dash across it. 

A moment’s pause before the summer’s frenzy, which at its heights could well find me singing, “Why, oh why, oh why, oh / Why did I ever leave Ohio. . . .”

“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.

If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across “Painting Number 2” by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors wearing an expression that is best interpreted as “I could have done that.”

This commentary on “what is modern art?” surfaced last month at the Springs Mystery Art Sale at Ashawagh Hall — a three-day shopping spree of guesswork at which over 1,000 pieces of art by professionals, students, and dabblers, who had agreed to pit their talents against one another on 5-by-7-inch postcards, are all displayed anonymously, so you’re not sure who made what. It is one of the most clever and enjoyable fund-raisers on the East End. The game — the “mystery” part — is that buyers don’t find out who created their prize until the event closes.

I was amid the acquisitive swarm on the first day of the sale. Despite arriving an hour before the doors were set to open, the red dots I purchased for $20 each had number 53 on them. Some of the 52 ahead of me sat around on beach chairs, chatting. Others sprawled out on the grass with laptops open, working as they waited. Or perhaps they were doing some homework on artists like Charles Waller, April Gornik, and Peter Dayton, who were known to have submitted items this year.

Surely, the idea was to walk in and relish the democratizing power of an anonymous art sale. Buy what you like, as the old adage goes.

Well, I do like April Gornik. I whipped out my phone for a quick refresher. Landscapes. Skies. Stormy clouds. I like Peter Dayton, too. Google said flowers. Colorful stripes. Surfboards.

I wondered if artists ever try to fox the audience, joke with them. Would Peter Dayton submit a macramé dream-catcher instead, that would only catch the eye of a 10-year-old?

By the time the doors opened there must have been a hundred people behind me. Inside, the gallery was a cacophony of miniature art, mostly contemporary, all smudges and blurred lines. Modern art isn’t easy. It is not obvious. You need to be told. This stuff has to be — simply has to be! — better than it looks. I even wondered if the fire extinguisher on the wall was part of the exhibition. I spotted a landscape with big, stormy Gornik-esque clouds. Person number four had already claimed it. I continued to swirl through the room, unable to really focus.

Then something caught my eye. A pair of line drawings on Priority Mail postage labels. One had an old-school cellphone, like those from the late 1990s when they resembled walkie-talkies. Instead of the number pad, there was a face. The other had a surfboard (Peter Dayton: surfboards!). Yes, they were simple enough to be drawn by a child, but then every Gerhard Richter I’ve seen could have been done by a toddler with a squeegee. 

And isn’t modern art supposed to be about communicating ideas? Aren’t artists inveterate cultural borrowers who harvest ideas from the realm of our times? Wasn’t this artist using a visual pun with the telephone to make a statement about device-addiction — literally, our faces in our phones? I convinced myself this had to be the work of a clever artist living in the information age, making art that anyone can decode and respond to.

A docent who could see what I was eyeing whispered over my shoulder, “An artist from London who was just here pointed to those and said they were his favorites.”

An insider tip! I stuck my red dots on the two prints and left as smug as Charles Saatchi the day he discovered a shark swimming in formaldehyde.

David Hickey, long regarded as the enfant terrible of art criticism, once said: “The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it’s graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it’s Raphael, and I prefer the latter.”

Apparently, so do I. 

On revelation day, the Sunday after the event ended, I went to collect my acquisitions. The signatures revealed that two sixth graders from the Springs School were the artists. I tip my hat to Juan Moscoso and Carolina Condon. Their drawings are not simply works of art but works of geniuses. Theirs are pieces of bona fide art that made me question whether art validates the artist or the artist the art. They had got me thinking. And that’s the whole point of art, right?

Judy D’Mello covers education, art, and more for The Star.

In rehearsing a speech to give on Helen Rattray’s behalf at her induction into the Long Island Press Club’s Hall of Fame, my nerves got the best of me and I began hamming it up. Actually, it was my inner imp that was getting in the way — I was upstaging myself.

“Think of her,” Mary said, pulling me up short. “Stop all the clowning around. Nobody will pay any attention to what you’re saying, they’ll just notice your tics.” She had learned that years ago in a public speaking course. Next to death, her teacher had told her, people are most afraid of public speaking. I am in that number. 

Mary’s advice was, of course, sound. Make ’em laugh — or at least smile — is more or less my metier. Get in and get out. Which perhaps is why I’ve never written anything longer than 500 words. The speech was more than twice that, and I had fallen so in love with my easeful words that I refused to brook any more changes. Still, I was tending to rush at times, Mary said. Think of Helen and slow down. I had written a good speech. It would be all right.

But would it? The crowd at the Woodbury Country Club that night was raucous. Umpteen awards were being handed out and everyone was hooting and hollering. I remember thinking Karl Grossman, the club’s founder, had created a monster. I was hungering for perhaps one more glass of wine, however unpalatable. 

Best Blog, Best Use of Facebook, Best Use of Twitter, Best Social Media Campaign, Best Non-Local News/Feature, Best Non-Local Photo, Best Food and Beverage Narrative, Best Entertainment Narrative, Best Entertainment Video, Best Interactive Presentation. . . . I remember turning to Helen and saying, “We’re dinosaurs!”

Then they said no one speaking that night (Helen was one of three Hall of Fame honorees, Jimmy Breslin and Carl Corry being the others) should exceed five minutes. We’d timed mine at just under nine! Hurriedly, Mary and I began to slash and burn, Xing out, alas, some funny things. And then I was cued to come up. 

The noise level was still pretty high when I began. 

“After Ev Rattray’s funeral 37 years ago, his widow, Helen Rattray, whom you are honoring tonight, took my hand and held it, as if to say, ‘Well, here we go. . . .’ ” 

As I said this — slowly, and looking at her — I could sense that voices had lowered, that people were listening. 

As Mary had said, I could indeed take my time in addressing myself to Helen, whose night it was. In short, I knew I had them.