Ever trying to reconcile good and evil, I came across in Joseph Campbell’s book on Oriental mythology what Chuang Tzu said when his friends found him drumming and singing after his wife had died. 

Not only nature, but mankind had seasons, he said. Why would we think we could alter the eternal round, what use would it do to wail and lament someone’s death?

“Maybe he just didn’t like his wife,” said Mary.

She’s always injecting reason into my reverie. (And beating me far too many times in backgammon.)

But this is spring, the season for revery as well as revelry. No sooner had the leaves popped than our population did too. “Stay in your backyard,” I said to Russell Bennett on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. “Even better, stay in your backyard for the rest of the summer.”

It was during that weekend that I celebrated some rites of spring. No, no, I made no sacrifice to propitiate the gods as in ancient times — I simply fired up the grill and put on some chicken thighs. It is one of the things I do fairly well now. Mary, who’s witnessed my selective ignorance up close (and my general ignorance too), says she doesn’t even know how to turn the grill on or off. A likely story, but in so demurring she’s helped raise my self-esteem.

And earlier, before firing up the grill, I had immersed myself in the waters of our outdoor shower, toasting the Omphalos in the presence of the leafed-out trees and prehistoric ferns with a small glass of Mud House, it being midday.

“I’m trying to live in gratitude and awe amid the mystery of things,” I said to Mary on emerging. “Shintos do that, you know.”

Whereupon I got my leg (shin . . . toe . . . leg . . . kneed I say more?) pulled. “It’s a mystery you haven’t mowed the lawn,” she said. “I’d be in awe if you did, and you’d earn my gratitude.” 

Naturally, being a Mariolater, I set forth on a quest for the mower, which had overwintered in the shed, tugged on the cord until it turned over — a third rite of spring — and traversed the mossy front lawn, stirring up a lot of pollen as I went. The headiness of spring is not — sneeze, cough — unalloyed. But I try to remember that it’s all one — the beauty, the allergies, the crowds, all the people frantic to relax. Still, you can’t help but be hopeful this time of year. 

It just comes naturally, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is, here and abroad, and there’s plenty. Still, we live in what East magazine has said is a happy place, so be happy. Well, if not happy, pleasant.

And so I’ve made a note to myself consequently to be pleasant this summer, to be as sunny in disposition as our extraordinary natural surroundings warrant. In fact, the lichen demands it. 

Though it is tempting to just stay in the backyard.

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 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.

A dark shape flitted past as I headed toward the house after parking my car in the driveway Tuesday night. In the near distance, a whippoorwill was calling, and I assumed the stocky black bird that moved across my vision from left to right was one of them. 

One of the pleasures of living where I do, surrounded by swamp on three sides in Amagansett, is that the underbrush is filled with life. The insects on which whippoorwills feed thrive here, drawing in other birds whose voices are the soundscape from dusk to dawn.

I have written before, and recently, about how much I enjoy hearing the voices of birds, even when I cannot identify them. The whippoorwill makes itself known. It is one of those species that declares its name or seeks a mate or defends its territory with nearly every breath, and seemingly for hours on end. 

Whippoorwills display, at least to me, a pleasing stubbornness. From their calling, it appears that they stake out a perch and hold that spot, declaring their possession to all that might listen. Some years back, one decided that my garbage enclosure, a roughly built low shed, was a proper spot to claim. It was close enough to an open window so that from my bed I could hear what I took to be its buzzing breath between the echoing calls.

With the household unable to get to sleep on Tuesday, I went out with a flashlight to have a look. Two large copper eyes reflected back at me as I waved the beam in the whippoorwill’s direction. It flew off and was silent for a time, but soon returned. I conceded defeat, and did not bother it again.

This week, there seem to be three or four in the neighborhood. They begin their repetitive conversations as night falls. I slip outside, away from the blare of a child’s TV, to listen, having no idea whatsoever what they are really talking about.

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.

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.

“We can get sick now!” I said to Mary, as she enthused over the pain-free coverage we’ll receive as a result of enrolling in our AARP supplemental plans.

God, it’s been a long time coming. All those years when we feared we’d lose everything were we to become debilitated, those years when I would say, in my usually glib (but not altogether off-base) fashion that a night at Southampton Hospital (or in any hospital, to be fair) would run one $10,000. 

Consquently, we tried desperately to stay healthy, however stressful that was, and now that we’re soon to be nestled within the bosom of Medicare we can have all these unattended-to ills treated, and at virtually no charge. 

Mary can trace a bum knee to wrathful waging of wretched weed warfare, and I suspect I have stage four terminal alliteration, but while it’s a pre-existing condition, Medi­care covers the surgery, I hear, and the rather long subsequent period of rehabilitation. You’ll note that I said “hear.” Because of new hearing aids, provided by Emily Bunce of ENT and Allergy, of Southampton, I can pay attention for the first time in my life, and now there are no longer any excuses when someone maintains I’ve made them sound smarter or funnier than they really are. 

“I can even hear better than the dogs!” I said to Mary after she’d pulled into the driveway one night recently and I’d bounded up from the couch while O’en and Marley continued to just lie there, oblivious, as I used to be. Soon we were all at her. When she said, “Sit and lie down,” we immediately did.

As for the new aids, it took me five years to act. (I played Hamlet once and I’ve been majoring in avoidance ever since.) That was when Emily, during a lifeguard tournament at Main Beach, first suggested I drop by. I had become fatalistic — none of the aids I’d had over the years worked all that well. Too much feedback, they died in the dampness, my ears itched, and the music was never loud enough. (I was in my early 70s when the cops knocked at the door during Johnna and Wally’s wedding in Palm Springs and asked me to tone it down.)

Now I’m hearing things, all sorts of things — mostly musical, as when I pee, but frequently cacophonous. Nothing’s left to the imagination now. I wonder if Medicare will pay for an implant.

At any rate, if something is gaining on me, I’ll be able to hear it now and step aside.  

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.

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.

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.