One of the things that sets East Hampton apart from so many other American communities is respect for its own history. Up here around our office, Main Street looks much the same as it did 100 years ago. Some of the houses here date much further back still, as much as a century before the Declaration of Independence. My own office window view is of the Mulford farmhouse on James Lane, built shortly after Capt. Josiah Hobart aquired the land in 1676. By that measure, the Star building at 153 Main Street is just a baby, built around 1900 for my great-grandfather as a pharmacy with an upstairs apartment. My office on the second floor overlooking the East Hampton Library was until not that long ago a bathroom. 

As far as getting in touch with the past goes, one could do far worse than this end of the street, though actually being here is no longer necessary. An online collection at the library provides access from anywhere to, among other things, editions of The Star from 1918 to 1968. The plan is to soon have the years since the paper’s establishment in 1885 available as well.

Searching the East Hampton Star archive in the Digital Long Island feature at easthamptonlibrary.org gives a picture of how much distance we have traveled metaphorically from a page-one call for substituting wood for coal to aid the World War I effort in Europe to a story about the soon-to-open Montauk Downs golf course clubhouse in 1968 — written by our current sports editor, Jack Graves, no less. 

Browsing the old Stars turns up some surprises and peculiar coincidences. A November 1919 edition reported that a 61-pound striped bass had been netted in the ocean near Mecox and referred to a 101-pounder that Capt. Nathaniel Dominy seined up off East Hampton some time earlier, which was said to be the largest of its species ever. In the modern era, the official record bass weighed 81 pounds. The Dominys were the subject of Helen S. Rattray’s “Connections” column last week and will be discussed next Thursday by Hugh King during an outing organized by the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society.

 That the past was of interest is clear from a 1923 Star I happened on in the library collection. A front-page account by Harry D. Sleight gave great detail about an armed sloop, the Hampton, built in East Hampton or Southampton for the purpose of trading with the slave plantations in Jamaica and elsewhere. A 1757 manifest lists pork, barrel staves, Indian corn, onions, horses, and sheep among its outbound cargo. And so it goes. I recommend the archive to anyone curious about East Hampton in earlier times, or those just looking to spend a bit of time forgetting today’s troubles. After the latest news from Washington about the president’s firing of the F.B.I. director, this seems even more necessary.

I had been asked to make O’en’s dinner and had not — at least by the appointed time — and heard about it, concluding that it had not just been the dog’s dinner, but the last 32 years.

When takers are called on things by givers, all sorts of justifications dance in their heads. I react to criticism about the same way I do to an opponent’s volley at the net — I smash it right back. I can do “put-upon” quite well, though I am no innocent, as Mary well knows. It was only one thing she’d asked me to do, on her sole workday, and I had dropped the ball. (Actually, I’d been hitting quite a few of them earlier that afternoon at East Hampton Indoor, which contributed to my tardiness.)

Oddly, we’d been talking lately about couples who somehow carry on once love’s blaze has died down, living separately in the same house, and have agreed that neither of us could or would do it. Yet there we were, estranged for a day or two, in lovers’ limbo. 

Once we were able, we talked of a column I’d written long ago in which I compared love to a carburetor (you remember them?) inasmuch as adjustments every now and then had to be made. 

Ironic that I, who had been heedless, wrote recently that we should all pay attention. 

Fearing that her adjustment might be to wash me out of her hair and send me on my way — thus rendering me twice shed maritally — I set about spring-cleaning labors of Herculean proportions. 

Six or so trips to the dump later I was done; and although I was done, I was — judging by her look and how it felt then between us — not finished, I’m happy to say.

We visited Winterthur, the Henry Francis du Pont estate in Delaware, last weekend at the invitation of Charles F. Hummel, the curator and scholar whose 1968 book, “With Hammer in Hand” (reprinted in 1973), describes three generations of Dominy craftsmen in East Hampton and the objects they made — clocks, chairs, case pieces, looking glasses, tables — as well as the conservative rural culture here from the early 18th century to the mid-19th. The book presents a meticulous look at more than 1,000 tools, which the Dominys used in making and repairing clocks and furniture and in building houses and an occasional windmill.

The star-crossed story of the Dominys’ house and its attached clock and woodworking shops, which stood on North Main Street not far from what is now the East Hampton Grill, begins in 1941. The Dominys were at that time known primarily for their clocks, but had moved on from their old family business. The property was owned by a neighbor.

In December of that year, he offered to sell the house and workshops to the Village of East Hampton for $6,000. The public, with other preoccupations, failed to respond to an appeal for funds by the mayor, Judson Banister. The house was eventually demolished, but the clock and woodworking shops were saved by a second-home owner, who merged them to serve as a guesthouse on his Further Lane estate. The most recent owner of the property has now given the buildings to the village.

The preservation of the Dominy tools, however, took an almost miraculous turn in 1957, when a large collection was spotted in a Southampton antiques shop; as interest grew, other objects were uncovered. They were purchased for Mr. du Pont and eventually found homes at Winterthur, where both shops were reconstructed and the woodworking tools laid out as they might have been in centuries past.

Winterthur is a 1,000-acre preserve known for American decorative arts, with 175 period rooms in Mr. du Pont’s mansion. Instead of taking a look at the period rooms, we spent most of our time there with Mr. Hummel and then took a tour of the grounds, which in sunny weather showed off thousands upon thousands of flowers: cherries, viburnums, azaleas, bluebells. . . . 

And now, in addition to the village’s owning the shops and nascent plans for a Dominy museum, there is other good news. Mr. Hummel has continued his research and prepared an expanded, digital version of “With Hammer in Hand,” which is expected to be released any day now. It will help guide the new museum. We hope to hear a further update when he comes to present a talk at a Ladies Village Improvement Society fund-raising lunch that will be held in November.

The Dominy legacy is nationally significant because no other similar collection of rural American craftsmanship over such a long period exists. Not only were three generations of tools preserved but account books, letters, bills, notes, receipts, templates, and machinery, all of which tell a cultural and historic story. The details of how this all came about, Mr. Hummel says in “With Hammer in Hand,” is “as fascinating as the objects themselves.” 

After Matthew Lester died this January, his mother, Dana Miller Lester, posted something online about dandelions. 

Dandelions had been a special thing for Matthew. He had become interested in them as a freshman at East Hampton High School, learning that they were a favored food for honeybees. In a letter to this newspaper three years ago, Matthew challenged the people of East Hampton not to put herbicides on their lawns in order to protect the common flower often thought of as a weed. “Let’s help the pollinators, and in doing so, help ourselves,” he wrote.

Dandelions are everywhere this spring in as massive proliferation as I can remember. The Hook Mill green dapples with them. Like stars at night, the grass between our office and the library is studded with their modest yellow faces. They freckle the triangle that sets James Lane off from Main Street. In the distance, they climb up the small hill in the yard at the Mulford Farm.

As an Eagle Scout project, Matthew envisioned planting a garden suited for bees at the farmhouse museum on North Main Street. His Scout troop intends to see it done in his memory.

Dana works at White’s in the village, and when I saw her this week I mentioned that I wanted to write about Matthew and the dandelions he treasured. Dana and I had been in high school at more or less the same time way back when, and I am always glad to see her, but Matthew’s suicide left me at a loss for words with her. The dandelions finally gave me something to say. 

I think about Matthew every time I see them, I told her, and I’ve seen  them a lot lately. The bees less so. Maybe it is too cold for them yet, with gray fog-filled wind blowing in from the ocean. 

The thing about the dandelions is that I wonder if there are really so many more of them this year or if, because of Matthew, I just see them more clearly. The bees, once they do show up again, will find plenty to feast upon, a fine honor to a young man gone too soon.

“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.  

Maybe it’s because Memorial Day is almost here, the time of year when (at least in the decades before year-round weekending) second-home owners used to arrive in force, saying they were going to “the country.” Whatever the reason, I cannot stop anticipating the deluge that comes with the season — not of people, but of luxury vehicles.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no quarrel with those who drive expensive cars. Some of my best friends are Mercedes owners. My issue is that, unfortunately, fancy vehicles draw my attention to the aging car my husband and I share. It certainly doesn’t warrant comparison with a late-model Range Rover, for example.

My first car was a Fiat, a small Italian automobile you don’t see around here much, whatever the season. My Fiat helped me pass my very first driving test, because when I stalled on the railroad tracks in Riverhead, the examiner said, “It’s not you. It’s the damn foreign car.”

Chris and I drive a 2006 Honda Civic hybrid and haven’t taken it on very many trips so the mileage is only 86,747. Consumer Reports lists the Civic among 10 cars most likely to reach old age at 200,000 miles. Still, my husband has been ogling new cars, especially those that have rear-end cameras. He even asked the Honda dealer, where we take our car for maintainance, how much it was worth. He was told its trade-in value was about $1,000. Kelley Blue Book says that a car of our make and year is worth about twice that, but maybe the dealer was taking into account our propensity for fender-benders.

Have I ever mentioned, here in print, that when they were young my children nicknamed me “Helen Wheels”? It was eventually shortened to just “Wheels,” which I actually answered to sometimes for a few years there.

I’m not so sure about a new car, myself, despite my husband’s wandering automotive eye. I would have to be comfortable driving it, which means it would have to be small, while nevertheless holding its own against all the big-bully S.U.V.s, which apparently are still outselling conventional passenger sedans and such.

Still, maybe I will start thinking about it. You come to appreciate the value of style when the car you drive has absolutely none. I don’t remember how it got into my head as a young married woman to imagine myself owning a convertible Jaguar, but it did. In my mind’s eye, it was yellow. I even inquired about the Jaguar reputation, once, and was told they were too high-maintenance for the likes of me. At that time, I drove one of those long, heavy, American-made station wagons that were so common in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, I drove a giant, rear-finned Cadillac, the uncoolest car of all time, mainly because it made me feel safe. The Cadillac was an odd beige-pink, the color of a pencil eraser. 

I asked a friend to tell me this week what the small and snappy sports car I saw him driving was. It was a classic BMW Z3 roadster. Now, a nifty little car like that would be the right scale for me, even if it would be ridiculous to think I would ever take advantage of its alleged top speed: over 120 miles an hour. But, then, there is the aforementioned propensity for fender-benders. And I believe a BMW convertible costs around $50,000. I have another friend who owns a Tesla, in which he tools around Springs. That one is pretty stylish, too. I think a Tesla costs even more.

Truth is, I am jealous of the car belonging to the editor of this paper, my son David. It is a 2014 Chevrolet Volt, an electric car bought at a local dealership, and he has given it high marks in the weekly column that sits below mine every week. 

Is electric the way to go? I’ll check it out and keep you posted.

Over drinks with a couple of friends at the American Hotel the other night, Maziar Behrooz posed the question of what this place would look like in 100 years. 

Would eastern Long Island be part of a city that stretched from New York to Montauk? Would it be abandoned as sea levels rose, or parkland perhaps? Would there be sea walls around the entire area?

Transportation would have to be vastly better, Maziar said, if the Island were to go the city route. Fast and frequent trains would serve the sprawling metropolis. Bridges across Long Island Sound might tie us to the Connecticut mainland. Things would not be the way they are today, he said.

“Montauk will be an island, itself,” I said. “Sea level rise is going to cut it off east of Amagansett, and there is going to be open ocean all the way to Hither Hills.”

Based on lowland inundation models alone, if worldwide air pollution levels remain as they are today, East Hampton will be reduced to a fraction of its landmass. Half of Springs will be underwater. What was once Hook Pond will be a bay reaching nearly to Three Mile Harbor. 

High spots will remain, the old Devon estate houses, for example, Jerry Seinfeld’s place on Further Lane, my in-laws’ house halfway between the village and Sag Harbor. The Star office and the East Hampton Library will be waterfront; Guild Hall will be gone.

“Politicians are simply not equipped to deal with it,” I said.

I can’t say that Representative Lee Zeldin walked into the hotel lobby at that precise moment, but I looked up and there he was, giving the conversation, at least for me, an even more surreal edge. I smiled and nodded; he nodded back.

According to prediction maps, the American Hotel’s first floor will be underwater by 2100, as would the rest of downtown Sag Harbor, Bay Point, and most of North Haven. Barcelona Neck will be its own small island. Northwest Creek will have grown as large as present-day Three Mile Harbor.

Even the best-case scenarios are not all that good. With extreme carbon cuts, Montauk is still an island 100 years from now. On the bright side, surfers of the future will enjoy really great waves where Gerard Drive once was.

Speaking about land-use policy at a forum in Amagansett the other day, Bill Chaleff, like Maziar, an architect and big thinker, said we were headed 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction.

“Just stopping the car, forget about turning it around, is almost impossible,” I told Maziar Bill had said. He agreed, and conversation moved on to other things, as it does, and the questions remained for another day.

We were positively giddy the other night, thinking that, at long last, we’d finally made it in tandem to Medicare.

“And now, freed from all care — just show your card, not worrying whether the doctors and anaesthesiologists are in-network or out-of-network — I’ll probably go out and get hit by a truck,” Mary said.

Whereupon, she went out and almost got hit by a truck. On our evening walk with O’en and his houseguest, Marley.

She was at the corner of Harbor View Drive and Delavan with O’en, and I was trailing not far behind, with Marley and a large flashlight, when a big truck swung way wide in making a left turn onto Harbor View, almost onto the shoulder, and, as I yelled, he or she came mighty close to Mary and O’en before swerving and straightening out. 

You never know. Mary seemed to take it more philosophically than I did. I got the three letters of the license plate as the driver  drove on down the road, slower than moments before, chastened, I hope. I’ll keep on the lookout for that truck.

I’ve been heedless too. It’s one of humankind’s worst traits. What was it Leander Arnold used to say to Georgie and Johnna and their Lassie League teammates? “Pay attention.” 

Pay attention. That about sums it up. 

The pity is, we don’t. Maybe for as many as five minutes in a day, as Peter Matthiessen once said. Maybe that. Mostly, we’re distracted, diverted, unaware, in our own worlds until the real one intervenes.

You would think that springtime, and the burgeoning life that is about now, would tend to sharpen our senses, would make us more keenly aware — in short, that we’d be paying attention, especially at this time of year, as Leander Arnold urged.

Now, I’ll probably go out and do some boneheaded thing. I hope not, but it may happen, which is why I don’t want to come across as being self-righteous. 

I hope I — and the driver of that truck — will remember that we’re all in this together. We ought, above all things, to keep that in mind.

I think it was the poet Marvin Bell who advised my freshman English class as to overcoming writer’s block. “Lower your standards,” he said. 

Let me tell you, I’ve made a career out of Mr. Bell’s counsel, and see no reason to stop now. 

Just the other night, I was having a drink with a writer in Sag Harbor, and we have in common the good fortune to have made our way around India a few times. Talk about stories! Between the poet’s guidance and India’s limitless capacity to present surrealistic imagery and experience, I could write about those journeys for years to come. Perhaps I will. 

Did I ever tell you about the time I was nearly crushed against a stone wall on the banks of the holy Ganges, on a hot summer afternoon in Rishikesh? 

How was I to know it was high season for pilgrimage to the places sanctified by Paramahansa Yogananda and the saints and holy men he described in “Autobiography of a Yogi”? I knew next to nothing about any of it, but (here I go again) the Beatles had studied meditation at an ashram there in 1968 and, bored after nearly a month in Ladakh, in the remote, eastern part of Jammu and Kashmir State, I wanted very much to explore. 

I had been led to believe that the ashram, by then abandoned, was across the Great Ganga (also the name of a hotel, near the Ram Jhula Auto Stand in Muni-ki-Reti) from my accommodations, a self-styled chalet in Tapovan, offering stifling heat and exotic spiders for 150 rupees, around $3 at the time per night. 

“Beatles ashram?” I’d asked the keeper of the chalet. “Do you know where the Beatles ashram is?” Across the Ganga, was his answer. 

It was midafternoon when I set out to cross the Lakshman Jhula, a 450-foot suspension bridge, into Jonk, to walk down the banks toward the ashram.

Here, where the Ganga leaves the outer Himalayas and flows into the plains of northern India, the river was muddy, engorged, and bursting forth. The air was thick and moist, the Lakshman Jhula thicker, with chanting, saffron-robed pilgrims, tourists, and the occasional beggar. I was sopping with perspiration long before reaching the other side. 

The ashram was said to be far down the banks of the Ganga, and on and on I walked, stopping at temples along the way, photographing depictions of Hanuman and Vishnu and many other of Hinduism’s colorful deities. 

The sun bearing down and the ashram nowhere to be found, I was drenched and dizzy, pouring the remaining supply of water over my head for relief. When someone passed on the narrow path, I begged for an answer: “Where is the Beatles ashram?” I was losing hope that I would find it that day. 

“Where is the Beatles ashram?” 

“On the other side,” a man said. 

Disappointed, but more than ready for potable water and a cold shower, I turned back. But now the Lakshman Jhula was completely packed, all of us jostling to stay upright as people crossed in both directions. This was going to take a long time. 

Finally nearing the far banks of the Ganga, beyond which lay the chalet, the sea of humanity was too thick, those still on the bridge unable to move forward as the riverbank, bordered by a very tall stone wall, was itself jam-packed, some people trying to get onto the bridge, others continuing in either direction. The point where the bridge met the land was hopelessly choked. 

After 20 minutes, during which I’d traveled perhaps 20 feet, I was off the Lakshman Jhula, but now between a rock and a hard place — the stone wall and a steadily intensifying crush of people. That was when the worry began. How many times had I read, back in the relative safety of Brooklyn, about such situations, usually in developing countries, and the resulting inevitable mass casualties? There was literally nowhere to go but up. The wall, however, was far too tall to scale. 

As is His custom, however, Sri Krishna was with me. Inching along the wall while trying to keep myself from being crushed against it, a most improbable scenario presented itself. A bicycle leaned casually against the wall, somehow untouched and unbothered by the passing legions. If I could climb onto it, and stand on its seat, and reach toward the sky, perhaps I could pull myself up and out of the crush. 

Standing atop the wall, sweaty and filthy but elated by the narrow escape, rather than return to the chalet I resumed the expedition. “Beatles ashram?” I asked passersby. One pointed the way, and I was jubilant. I’d survived and would soon find the focus of my own pilgrimage. 

But when I reached the site, something seemed amiss. It looked nothing like the photographs I’d seen. “Is this the Beatles ashram?” I asked a very nice old man. 

No, was the reply. “This is the Vithal ashram.” 

In the locals’ accented English, “Beatles” and “Vithal” sound very much alike. Because of this presumed misunderstanding, I was back where I’d started, on the wrong side of the Holy Ganga, having traversed the dangerously overcrowded Lakshman Jhula twice. 

I would have to make the crossing again. But that would have to wait for another day. And that is another story.

Christopher Walsh is senior writer for The Star. 

Can it be true that this column has appeared in The Star more than 2,000 times?

Apparently, that is the case, at least approximately. And if the number is really thereabouts, how have I come up with something different to say every week? 

Well, to be frank, I haven’t. 

I would be the first to admit that I have touched on my favorite subjects more than once over the decades — from inherited antique kitchen implements (a prehistoric popcorn-maker has made more than one cameo appearance here in print) to family pets (my various searches for succeeding generations of canine companions) to gardening glories and mishaps (the deer, oh dear, have become a near-obsession).

This morning, as the deadline looms, the best subject I can come up with is to boast retroactively about how I took to computerized word-processing way back when my colleagues were still using the proverbial blue pencils. I probably have bragged about this in print before, and I offer my apologies to any oldtime readers who might remember that. . . . But what interests me about it now is that I have come to realize that my own private limit for new-technology adaptation has been met. 

Once I was at the forefront of it all, getting the staff at the Star office onboard with an early program called XyWrite, but these days I have taken an aversion to new electronic devices and the fuss and bother of learning to use them.

I realize this kind of talk makes me sound ike a curmudgeon, but take my cellphone, for example. It is definitely antiquated. It’s not exactly a flip-phone — it doesn’t have a cover that flips, 2001-style — but I don’t know what to call it other than an un-smart wireless device. I bought it in 2011 (!)  but have never bothered to explore all the apps on it; I didn’t recognize the term “apps” in 2011. Nor did I pay attention to the fact that you could use it to browse the web. Although I did take a few photos with it, at first, I quickly decided they weren’t good enough to bother about. Give me my old point-and-shoot any day.

Having an old phone is a lifestyle choice for me. I’m something of a Luddite, I suppose.

From time to time, I have considered buying an iPhone and asking one of the grandchildren to tutor me in its mysteries, but I haven’t succumbed. I even rejected my husband’s offer to give me his old iPhone when he upgraded to the latest (gigantic) version a short while ago. (He’s not a Luddite.) Instead, I continue to look around more with dismay than amazement when I encounter hordes of people with their heads down and their fingers at work on those little rectangles. Am I just an old fogey, unwilling to try anything new — or am I taking a stand for life in the real world?

Passover, the holiday that commemorates the Jewish people’s exodus from slavery in Egypt, has just passed. The story told at traditional seders ends with the song “Dayenu.” The Hebrew word means “it would have been sufficient.” God is said to have bestowed many things upon the people. The most telling perhaps is if He had led the people out of Egypt but not given them the Ten Commandments, it would have been sufficient. 

The food, family, and fun of Passover seders were highlights of my childhood, and I seem to have embedded what was a religious concept into my everyday secular life. If I have a wireless phone that connects me to whomever or whatever I need to reach, it is sufficient.

And if I have said this same thing here before, I hope you have forgotten it — as I obviously have.