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.

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.

“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 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.

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 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.

In June it will be 50 years since Israel and its Arab neighbors, Syria, Egypt, and Jordon, fought what is known as the Six Day War, a conflict in which Israel secured a military victory, though, to put it mildly, hardly a lasting one.

My husband and I were a young married couple, pleased as could be to live in a small house near Gardiner’s Bay with our three small children, a place that was calm and surrounded by environmental beauty. We were stay-at-homes, happily so. He was even reluctant to go to New York City, though he had had a good year there getting a master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism.

But then dear friends made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They were planning to bring their commodious sailboat back to the States from Antigua, where it had spent the winter, and we were invited to tag along. My parents were alive and well and could take care of the kids, and we couldn’t say no, even though the youngest was not yet a year old. 

Fifty years ago: a joyful excursion into a part of the world that was new to us and bound to be exciting. The Wonny La Rue would pick us up on Great Inagua, an island at the southern end of the Bahamas that I, certainly, had never heard of. Even going there would be an adventure and a treat. Life was turning out the way it was supposed to.

Great Inagua, which is just north of Cuba and Haiti, is home to thousands upon thousands of flamingos that roost on its huge salt lake. Internet sites estimate the number of what Inaguans insist on calling “fillymingos” as between 60,000 and 80,000. The human residents of the island number only about 1,000. It is said that when huge flocks of flamingos fly up at one time the clouds turn pink. The Morton Salt Company also has a home on the island, its facility producing about a million pounds of salt a year. We were thrilled to see the flamingos and did not take in Morton Salt.

Inagua is a flat, dry, seemingly lackluster place. Waiting for the Wonny La Rue, we stayed in a house whose keeper was a woman called Nurse. Our room was separated from the hall by a wall that didn’t reach the ceiling. We saw no shops; a neighbor sold chickens, and another household goods.

Any sense of quiet was broken, however, by the intrusion of tragic reality. Papa Doc, the long-lived Haitian dictator, had absolute power at the time. It seemed that money-hungry mariners had promised to take a group of desperate Haitians to Nassau, only to drop them only 135 nautical miles away on Great Inagua, where there was nothing for them. (Does this sound familiar?) They were in the island’s primitive prison when we arrived, and we witnessed their being corralled aboard a Haitian government boat for whatever their fate was going to be. Not a very cheery start to an idyllic vacation.

And then Nurse told us war had broken out in the Middle East. She had heard it on the radio and was inclined to quote biblical verses to the effect that the end of the world was ordained. I ignored what she said the Good Book had to say, but felt absolutely awful that we had left our children at home at a time of war. 

By the time we got home, Israel had taken control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Fifty years ago, and the rest is unfortunate history.

So I was down at Town Hall the other day, picking up my dump, ahem, recycling permit, and a clam, uh, shellfish license. As I waited for the next available assistant clerk, I noticed a Latino man taking care of some complicated business at the next assistant clerk’s station. A moment later, a tall man with a long beard wearing a white crocheted cap came in, seeking town taxi paperwork.

No one besides me looked up when the tall man’s cellphone loudly announced driving directions, saying he should make a U-turn. He pulled the thing from his trouser pocket and silenced it. It would be only speculation to guess where he was from. 

According to Google, his cap is called a Kufi, and is worn by Islamic men in many countries. The Latino man was perhaps from Central America, or Mexico, but unless I asked, I would not know for sure. The three of us at the counter made up our own United Nations of a sort, and reflected in a minor way East Hampton’s past, present, and future.

Of course, the sample at the town clerk’s office was much too small to be significant. The Census offers a glimpse of a far-more complex demographic reality, even though outdated and incomplete. Of the resident population in 2010, the last time a field sampling was conducted, 5,660 Hispanic or Latino people lived in East Hampton Town, of which just over 2,300 came from Ecuador alone. These figures are out of a total of about 21,450 people, meaning that Latinos and Hispanics made up more than 26 percent of the population at the time, with Ecuadoreans almost 11 percent of the total.

The population has changed since 2010, for sure, and it changes from season to season. The Census is conducted in April; even seven years ago, the summer makeup of the local population would have been different. Driving a child to school early on Monday, I noticed what looked like a group of Jamaican men on bicycles headed east on Amagansett Main Street in the foggy drizzle. The Census had nothing to say about them.

My son-in-law and I were treated to a squash lesson by the young Egyptian pro, Mohamed Nabil, at the Southampton Recreation Center recently. He was kind, kept feeding the ball back to us so that we could smash it crosscourt or down the rail, and it was a lot of fun, especially for one whom the game has long passed by. 

Squash, as Mohamed says, is “exhilarating” — that’s probably the best word for it. I liked it too when he said that in order to win you had to be calm on the outside and very angry on the inside. 

I suppose part of it is wanting to outdo your father — or stepfather, as in my case. It was he who taught me the game, in my early teens, when I was even more excitable than I am now. 

I was a terrible sport then, as now, and he was a Christian martyr to have put up with me. We played in the plastered courts at the Edgeworth Club, in the basement, beyond the duckpin bowling alleys, and the thwack, thwack, thwack sounds the hard, hot ball made as it came off the walls was . . . exhilarating. 

Later, he admitted to letting me win at times so that I wouldn’t go off in a huff. 

Much, much later in life I wrote him a letter thanking him, whose patience I must have tried many times, for always being there for me in trying times. He said it was the best letter anyone had ever written him. Though I had forgotten, he said, one thing. He had (pace A.R. Gurney) taught me how to play squash.

As I say, we played singles with the hard ball then (used only for doubles now), and, as must have been the case with most Americans before meters replaced feet, we — my college teammates and I — were dismissive of the squishy English ball that the rest of the world used. America was great then, remember?

Anyway, that squishy ball later became universally used, and the court was widened just a bit to make the game even more maddening for a prima donna such as I, who because squash has long passed him by limits his strutting now to tennis — an easier game if truth be told.

If you’re agile and you like getting your heart rate up and feeling marvelously exhausted after half an hour or so of all-out effort, during which you have repeatedly ripped the ball (which warms up after a while) down the rails, dinked it into the front corners, teased up lobs so that they die in the back, and ceaselessly stretched yourself full length in mad, exhilarating pursuit of your opponent’s shots, you should give it a try.

And here’s to you, Dad, for teaching me.

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is his taste — not just in gold-plated toilet-paper holders, but in food. He may be plunging the world into dangerous waters, with aggressive talk aimed at North Korea and threats to take the United States out of the Paris accords on climate change, but he also is setting a terrible example for bad health, particularly among low-income Americans, by what he eats.

President Trump is an avowed lover of junk food. He particularly likes the Quarter Pounder and Filet-O-Fish from McDonald’s, with fries. He is also apt to devour a bucket of fried chicken from KFC or Popeye’s and wash it down with Diet Coke. He absolutely loves a meatloaf sandwich with mayo. His favorite home-cooked meal is a big, thoroughly well-done, slab of meat. 

Several years ago, he marketed frozen Trump Steaks through the Sharper Image, priced at between $199 and $999 for a pack of four. It was a public-relations boon for the Sharper Image, even though no one was buying the beef. “The net of all that was we literally sold almost no steaks,” the C.E.O. of Sharper Image told a reporter last year. “If we sold $50,000 of steaks grand total, I’d be surprised.”

By contrast, Michelle Obama, with her Let’s Move! and Healthy Hunger-Free Kids school lunch program, promoted fitness and nutrition, especially among children. But the example Mr. Trump sets as Eater in Chief contradicts all the advice coming from medical and nutrition sources these days about how to live longer and healthier lives. Mr. Trump claims to know more than anyone else about almost everything, from women’s rights to wall-construction to the art of war, so why would he have to listen to what the doctors, scientists, and nutrition experts have to say about taco bowls? 

The former first lady knew that obesity is the cause of serious health problems. She planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. She was quoted joking about her husband’s disciplined food habits, alleging that his late-night snack was seven (not six or eight) almonds. Mr. Trump likes to snack on Doritos and Lay’s Potato Chips. Now, I like a nice potato chip as much as anyone, but they shouldn’t be a mainstay of an adult’s daily intake. Mr. Trump obviously gets a bit of exercise when he plays golf, but his way of keeping his weight down is to save calories by eating only the topping on a pizza and leaving the crust on the plate.

This is not a Democratic-versus-Republican issue. President Clinton obviously wasn’t the greatest role-model, either. He loved McDonald’s, too, and he loved his Southern barbecue — but after having had several coronary bypasses and two stents, he is now a committed vegan.

Mr. Trump apparently watches a lot of television, but I am sure he hasn’t paid attention to reports about the higher cost of food and the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods. Of course, if he happened to hear any such thing, he would call it fake news. Let them eat beautiful chocolate cake?

What I am really getting down to is the unconscionable gap between rich and poor in something so elemental as the food we eat. The Trump administration’s proposed budget threatens programs that help poorer Americans, including children and the elderly, eat decently; these include nutrition assistance via the Older Americans Act, which helps 2.4 million older adults who might otherwise go hungry, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is run through the Department of Agriculture.

At Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, simple, hearty seafood dishes inspired by the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln were served. At Trump’s inauguration, steak with chocolate sauce and a chocolate soufflé accompanied by cherry-vanilla ice cream were the highlights. Do I need to say it? You are what you eat.