The name Dita Von Teese meant nothing to me, so I thought of nothing as M. and I neared the marquee at the Gramercy Theatre, where the burlesque dancer would soon take the stage and command the gathered crowd. 

M. had an altogether different take, emitting a piercing “Ahh!” upon seeing the name, shock given way to ecstasy. Unwittingly, I had earned many additional merit points. 

Two weeks prior, we had attended Le Scandal, which stakes the claim to “New York City’s longest running variety burlesque show,” and had a splendid time, so, when I happened upon what looked to be similar entertainment, I secured tickets for Friday, the third of four sold-out performances. 

“She is so beautiful,” M. observed of Ms. Von Teese. Among other attributes, “she has such beautiful skin,” according to M., who is from Tokyo. And indeed, she does. The pearly-white-skinned performer led a troupe of the bold, the beautiful, and the bizarre at the Gramercy, which was packed as though hosting the rock ’n’ roll concert we’d attended there last month. 

The winters in East Hampton, they get me down, and I go to New York more than I used to, and think about the old sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg and sometimes wish I had moved back, and tell myself that maybe I’ll finally do it in the fall. Or maybe I’m just full of hot air, as usual. 

But I’m free again, and I’m bored. Or I was, until M. and I found each other on a bleak December afternoon, day-tripping, once-and-maybe-future New Yorkers escaping our present, and most weekends since then have been devoted to thrilling, blissful rendezvous there. 

The city always takes me back, circling back to the beginning, everything old new again. On the abnormally balmy Saturday, we awoke near Times Square and found a Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner, and I savored the sweet jolt of an extra-large coffee like the ones I bought daily for years on my way to the office at 53rd and Seventh, or Ninth and Broadway, or 31st and Park Avenue South. Later, we circled Gramercy Park, the scene of so many early-childhood memories, and rode a subway uptown to stroll Central Park to the carousel, the setting of so many others. 

The night before, we had reprised an earlier adventure: sushi at Yama, downstairs at 49 Irving Place, the onetime home — at least, according to local legend — of Washington Irving, followed by an evening at the Gramercy. 

On that night last month, the theater hosted the Magpie Salute, an offshoot of the Black Crowes, a great band I saw more than a dozen times in the Nineties and Aughts. The Magpie Salute played many numbers from the Crowes’ catalog, each drawing myriad memories of late nights at the Beacon and Irving Plaza and CBGB and that private party on Spring Street in April of ’01, where guests including Mick Jagger and Howard Stern and Don Was and Oasis, and a couple of us from Billboard marveled at that defiantly live and loud rock ’n’ roll powerhouse. 

On that first night at the Gramercy, M. and I partied like it was 1999, dancing like Elton John and Mary J. Blige had done before us as we all listened to the playback of “Deep Inside” (her take on “Bennie and the Jets”) at Quad Studios in Times Square in, yes, 1999, and then drank our way to the Lower East Side and stayed up until 3 and slept late and spent a small fortune on brunch but God it beat waking up alone in East Hampton in January. 

“Who can tell, when he sets forth to wander, whither he may be driven by the uncertain currents of existence,” Irving asked, “or when he may return, or whether it may ever be his lot to revisit the scenes of his childhood?” I, for one, often revisit the old neighborhood, still trying, I guess, to get back to where I once belonged. 

M. cheered wildly for Ms. Von Teese and the others. Seeing her so happy made me so very happy too, and loosened the sorrow and regret to which I tend to cling. “How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him,” Irving wrote, “and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

If digitization makes keeping track of everyone and everything easy, what do those of us with old, pre-computer address books do with them? I don’t remember how I managed to get all the information from my Rolodex transferred to my computer; perhaps I spent long nights keyboarding (or maybe I hired someone)?

For those of you born after, say, 1990, a Rolodex used to be indispensable in almost any office. It is a rotating spindle on a metal stand with removable address cards arranged alphabetically. When people left a job, they sometimes made a big show of taking theirs with them, if they didn’t want anyone in their old office to access their data. I, of course, have not left my job in lo! these many decades, and I still have a huge Rolodex on a low office shelf. The Rolodex company seems to have gone digital, but I have found a couple used and old-stock units available on eBay, starting at $7.50. Each of the listings reads “Only one left.”

By now, however, the data in the folder on my desktop labeled “Old Rolodex” is historic. It contains names, addresses, and phone numbers of people and businesses I don’t remember, as well as (I must confess) many who are no longer alive. It would seem disrespectful to pluck them out.  

Although my digital address book has grown huge on my email accounts, I do frequently look up the entries in the “Old Rolodex” file. I had occasion to do that the other day, but had a strange guilty feeling as I clicked through. Guilty for not keeping up with various old friends who live on, on my Rolodex cards. Guilty for not staying in touch with a relative. Guilty for having entirely forgotten the existence of an old acquaintance. Guilty about those whose information is still listed with a now-divorced spouse. 

Sociologists — someone writing a dissertation, for instance — might be able to mine old Filofaxes (remember those?) and Rolodexes (remember when the letter “X” seemed to signify modernity?) to learn about the time and place when the data were entered. But as my file cards were done without dates of entry, perhaps not. Indeed, I have to admit that I sometimes still add people to my Rolodex. I wonder how many people still do that? All too often, I surprise myself by finding they are already accounted for. Well, forgetfulness: I guess that’s why they invented Rolodexes in the first place.

Jeannette Edwards Rattray, the late publisher of this paper and my mother-in-law, died at the age of 80 in 1974. I am uncertain why it fell to me to care for her red, leather-bound “address and telephone” book. Perhaps it was just left in the desk. She filled its narrow lines with a remarkably fine hand, and a postcard with an 8-cent Dwight Eisenhower stamp on it fell out when I picked it up this week. It gave me a turn to discover that postcards were 8 cents in the year she died. 

Mrs. Rattray traveled quite a bit, so it was not surprising to find addresses of people living in far-flung places, from Cuba to Holland, France, and Yugoslavia. She even saved the name and contact information for the maitre d’hotel of the S.S. France in 1973. 

My own Rolodex is equally revealing of the times in which I have lived and worked. Yesterday, I noticed the name of Carrie Moritz under letter “M.” I remember Carrie quite well. My mother feared I would grow up with a Brooklyn accent, even though we lived in New Jersey, so she sent me to Mrs. Moritz for elocution lessons. Thank you, Mrs. Moritz!

Unfortunately, I also remember a poem Mrs. Moritz had me memorize and recite in what was supposed to be an Italian accent. “Giuseppi da barber, ees greata for ‘mash,’/ He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache.” I can’t imagine what good she thought it would do me or my elocution.

What do you do when you get up in the morning? Many people — provided they don’t, say, have proverbial buses to meet or children to stuff into snowsuits and send out the door to school — turn to the news of the outside world. My husband picks up his cellphone and checks out The New York Times right after waking, even though I remind him that the daily print edition is waiting just outside the door.

I follow the coffee ritual, but then usually find myself tidying the house on autopilot, putting things away, especially if I don’t have to think much about where they should go. Others like to sit down for a proper breakfast, but I myself don’t want to eat till a little later in the day. I think I should follow the lead of those who exercise before they do anything else, every day, but that is unlikely. I fancy the idea of taking the dog out for a walk, but that is foolish since, for the moment, at least, we don’t have a dog. 

My mornings were defined decades ago when, having been thrust into responsibility for The Star, I spent 20 years meeting its immediate demands. Up and at ’em was the only option. 

I never did learn that it is okay to waste time in the morning, perhaps to even enjoy wasting time. I remember very clearly waking up on Saturday mornings in the very first years of my tenure as editor and being at a loss about what to do. It’s been almost 20 years since I took a back seat here at the paper, but the impulse to take care of whatever I see before me hasn’t gone away.

Looking ahead to the next 20 years, and aware the time has come to adopt some new rituals, I’ve started musing and puttering in the morning. Reading? No. I prefer to read, whether newspaper or book, at the end of the day. I could pay better attention to the houseplants, at least in winter, and take up gardening in spring and summer. Or maybe it would be nice, once I actually do retire, to organize a breakfast club with friends. Or maybe I should devote myself to the memoir friends ask me about. In the back of my mind I hear T.S. Eliot: 

What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

With my hair down, so.

What shall we do to-morrow?

What shall we ever do?

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a 

knock upon the door. . . .

Hurry up please it’s time.

The Rev. Samuel Buell never made clear exactly what kind of sin he was talking about in his account of an outpouring of Christian faith he observed in East Hampton in the winter of 1764. 

My attention was drawn this week to this period after a small and tattered book written by Buell and printed in Sag Harbor in 1808 emerged from a chest in my mother’s music room. It is a well-worn volume, having been roughly recovered at some point in its long existence with thin pieces of straight-grained wood just a little heavier than oak veneer. These, in turn, fell apart themselves over the years.

Buell was East Hampton’s third settled minister, following the Rev. Thomas James, for whom James Lane alongside the South End Burying Ground is named, and the Rev. Nathaniel Huntting, who got his own lane as well. So did Buell, for that matter. I can see his intersection with Main Street from my office window; the frequent minor car accidents there and near-misses are an interesting diversion from the work I do.

Up until 1764, Buell wrote, he had had a “small harvest of souls” each year. Something broke loose that March, however. In an outpouring that he saw as from divine influence, the number of townspeople attending his sermons grew large and more solemnly attentive. “I now heard many sinners making the most mournful declarations of their exceeding sinfulness before God, and their infinite danger of eternal damnation,” he wrote.

The account that followed described how the 30 or 40 people who had been at the service that day returned home to declare that they feared the worst. This stirred others to similar concern, and the word spread a shock like sevenfold thunder through the town, as Buell put it. The next worship was filled, with many staying until 9 at night. The next day more people showed up, expecting a service, though none had been planned. 

Newspaperman that I was, I wanted to know what the sinners had been up to. Buell did not let on. 

As I was talking about Buell’s book in the office this week, a member of the staff joked that the townspeople might have been trying to put one over on the good reverend. Bonac humor being of the wry variety, I could see the possibility, if slim. Buell reported fewer people in the pews in the weeks that followed.

“So,” said Perry Silver, my dentist, looking at the chart. “You’re 76.”

“Almost 77.”

“And so how do you feel compared to when you were 66?”

“Uh . . . better.”

Of course there were laughs. I like to make people laugh, or at least smile, but it was, on reflection, more or less true. I’m feeling fine and having fun, as I used to write in letters home from camp. For the moment, that is. You always have to say that as you age. Or perhaps you always have to say that but don’t bother to when the world’s your oyster. I’m still batting ideas back and forth with Mary, still batting tennis balls back and forth at East Hampton Indoor, and still batting 1.000 when it comes to shirking responsibility.

“You were an only child — at least before your mother remarried,” Mary says to me. “So who else was there to look at when you’d say, after something got broken, ‘Don’t look at me.’ ”

“I don’t know. Don’t look at me.”

I did act semi-responsibly recently, agreeing to assume a fiduciary role in my sister’s behalf — but only after having been assured I would almost never be called upon to act responsibly. “I’ll sign, then,” I said, in a sober tone that I summon up whenever trying to come across as a responsible member of society, as a grown-up in brief.

So far, I’ve sidestepped the types of burdens that tend to weigh one down, which is why I find it odd that I hunch. Mary’s mother, who rather liked it that I had no ambition whatsoever — at least as the world defines it — was concerned about the hunching, though. Hunching, to her, was a sign of decline, of giving in. And so, having accepted her as my personal savior, I’ve been dutifully strengthening my shoulders and back for the past several years, which has done wonders for my tennis game, but has not entirely eliminated the hunching. Whenever Mary cautions me to stand up straight, my stomach sticks out. 

Caroline Cashin told me to lie back on the floor the other day at Truth Training, and, in truth, because of my crane-like neck, I could not. So now I’m trying to fix that too. 

I’m trying, I’m trying. Trying to step up to the plate responsibility-wise, trying to stand erect, trying to strengthen my core, trying to lie flat on my back. . . . 

Though perhaps I ought not get too comfortable in that position.

On August 1981, Judge Shepard Frood married Christa and me under the big oak tree in front of East Hampton’s Town Hall. We moved to Los Angeles two months later to break into the movie business. 

Sometimes in life you take a wrong turn, but it usually feels right at the time. It started in 1978 with Frank Andrews, known in New York City as the “psychic to the stars.” Christa gave me a session with him for my birthday, and I sailed out of his SoHo brownstone on his premonition of me as a future movie mogul. 

At that time I hadn’t thought of a career change. I was working at the Whitney Museum and Christa was a video artist. We had never discussed making movies, but a few months after that session we gave up our careers in the art world to make an independent film in New York. We read Syd Field, wrote the script, but didn’t know the first thing about raising even a modest amount of money. So we flew to L.A. with a dozen copies of our screenplay. Four days later, we returned empty-handed — except for the scripts.

We wrote another and again flew to L.A. to peddle it. That did not go any better. Perhaps because they were recommended by a successful screenwriter friend of ours, the agents tried to let us down easy. For a while we called it the land of encouragement. After two years it became the land of disappointment, and eventually the slough of despair.

Our third script drew a call from an agent at William Morris, who said she loved it. I told her we wrote it with Goldie Hawn in mind. She chortled at my naiveté and explained it wouldn’t fly as a feature, but maybe as a TV movie, and she promised to route it to one of the TV agents. 

Fired by a jolt of optimism, we headed west in my yellow Toyota Tercel with two bicycles on the bike rack, a trampoline on the roof, and the rest of our belongings jammed into whatever space there was inside the car. We rented a typical Hollywood bungalow with a lemon tree in the backyard, a block south of Sunset Boulevard near Fairfax. We liked the weather, we liked the palm trees, we liked the beach. We never heard from the TV agent.

Soon after we arrived, I contacted a cousin. It had been 10 or 12 years since I had last seen him, but we had been friends. When I called him, he didn’t know who I was. When I explained, he reluctantly agreed to come for dinner.

Now, this cousin had already produced one movie and was to go on to be a partner in Castle Rock and a big-time producer. He told us how it happened. While he had a law degree, the only place he practiced was as a pro on the tennis court, where he volleyed with people like Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks, and Charlton Heston. 

The evening was excruciating. It was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want to be there and was obviously dreading that we would make a pitch — which we did over dessert. He looked as if we had poisoned him and made for the door.

I had one more contact — another cousin who was a top executive at 20th Century Fox. When we finally reached the inner sanctum, after waiting for an hour, she dismissed our screenplays and suggested we read “Butch Cassidy” and “Chinatown” to learn how it’s done. Strike two!

The rest of our time there had a clear arc, even if our screenplays didn’t. Things slowly improved until one script had a producer and director committed and another was optioned by a production company. That was the closest we got. 

The production company folded, the other script withered on the vine of almost-but-not-quite projects, and we gradually slid down the other side of that parabola. We had written 11 scripts in four years and had nothing to show for it, not even an agent. 

I was finished, demoralized, but Christa wasn’t ready to call it quits. She had a screenplay she had written about a green card marriage that was still in circulation, and she wanted to give it a fair chance. 

What finally brought her around was literally a near-death experience. She had a little problem with food. Once at a Studio City sushi bar with an all-you-can-eat special, the chef kicked her out because he caught her dumping the rice into her napkin and eating only the slivers of fish. By then, she was so thin you could almost see through her. 

In the summer of 1985, she developed a pain in her abdomen. Our doctor diagnosed a pelvic abscess and immediately checked her into Century City hospital, where she was put on intravenous antibiotics and nutrients. After a couple of days he told us she was too thin to survive surgery; our only hope was that the antibiotics would be effective. It was a long two weeks at that hospital.

Since you know we made it back to East Hampton, you know she survived. We were relieved to be back on the East Coast but unsure what was next. I was halfway through a novel but had no idea what I would do with it when it was finished except undertake the sure-to-be-futile search for an agent. Christa was still recovering, mentally and physically. We were in a kind of limbo: too long away from New York and the art world, but with nothing concrete on the horizon. 

Then one day soon after we returned, we drove by Town Hall and saw the oak tree was gone. So was Los Angeles. We were home.

Mark Segal is an arts writer for The Star. 

“In Aleppo Once” is a 1969 memoir by Taqui Altounyan, who spent most of her young life in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo, where her Armenian father and grandfather were doctors and her grandfather was revered because he established its only hospital after World War I. He had studied medicine in New York, coming to the United States with the help of American missionaries he had met during the Armenian genocide. Altounyan’s mother was an Englishwoman.

Why my husband happens to own a copy of “In Aleppo Once” is another story, but noticing it recently on a bookshelf I could not help but take a look. 

It has been widely reported that Aleppo and some of its World Heritage sites have now been demolished. Many of its surviving residents have scattered as refugees, and Christian Armenians, such as the Altounyans, are prominent among them. 

Aleppo had a population over two million before this latest war. It is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world. At one end of the Silk Road, it was occupied by people over the centuries from all over the East and Middle East. By the time Taqui arrived there at the age of 2, it might well have been called a melting pot. Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, French, and English were commonly spoken on the streets.

The Altounyan family came to Aleppo after Germany lost World War I, in the twilight days of the Ottoman Empire. Syria was put under a French mandate at the Treaty of Versailles, at the same time that Palestine was put under British control. Uprisings followed, but the Altounyans lived an upper-class life, with a fine house, servants, a mountain retreat during hot weather, leisurely sailing, riding, and tennis, and trips to the countryside, as well as extended periods in England.

The book vividly describes the life of Aleppo’s elite a hundred years ago. Taqui and her siblings, for instance, went to tea with a neighbor named Dr. R, a French doctor and diplomat whose house was grander than theirs. “There were rare carpets on the floor and on the walls; the furniture was the typical Damascus work, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but very delicately done. There were brilliant Aleppo silk cushions on the hard sofas. We had an uncomfortable but delicious tea . . . with eggshell porcelain and filigree silver, and handmade lace mats. After tea we were shown his collection of gold coins. Drawer after drawer was carefully taken out and we were allowed to handle, weigh, and breathe on the gold discs gleaming dully from their black velvet cases.”

Despite this pleasant life, and sorties out of Syria to boarding schools, the troubled history of the country did not escape their notice. The children saw “beggars who sat on our step all day; usually on one side was a mother holding a baby to her withered breast, the child very dirty and its eyes black with flies; on the other side sat a man with one leg.”

In 1959, long after World War II had ended, the Syrian government, by then under civilian rule and after a series of coups, expelled the Altounyan family without warning. The hospital Taqui’s grandfather had founded was turned into a school, their house was razed, and the street, which had been named in their honor, was renamed. At the time, Taqui’s father said Syria had become “a modern fascist Arab state,” which probably was true. 

Today, given the ascendance of Bashir al-Assad and the ongoing brutal war that has destroyed Aleppo, all of this has a very bittersweet, indeed tragic, air. President Trump has attempted to ban all Syrians — including medical students on education visas, families traveling to see relatives on legal visitors’ visas, and refugees escaping immediate physical peril — from coming to America. If this had happened a century ago, the Altounyans would have been banned, too.

This week’s snow notwithstanding, this winter has been a letdown, at least as far as ice goes. For skating the only option has been to pay for time on one of the local rinks. Likewise, the chance that there will be iceboating this year declines every day that we get closer to March.

In the mid-1970s, when my father was given our first iceboat by George Fish, a doctor and family friend with a house overlooking Three Mile Harbor, it seemed that every winter would dependably produce enough ice to sail upon. Mecox Bay was the center of a considerable flotilla of boats, some large two-seaters, most, like our second boat, DNs, so called after the Detroit News, in whose shop the first of the relatively inexpensive, light and nimble craft were built. 

Many of the freshwater ponds were good. Memorably, one glorious season, homeowners in the Georgica Association let us use a landing on Georgica’s west side to get to its beautiful glassy surface. Three Mile Harbor froze as well one year or two. We sailed from Hand’s Creek across to the main navigation channel and back again, passing baymen spearing eels through holes they had cut in the ice. We sailed on Montauk’s Fresh Pond and on Poxabogue, anywhere that had a big enough slab. We don’t get ice like that much anymore.

The iceboat that came from Dr. Fish’s garage was a Mead Glider, a two-seater probably built in the 1930s and repaired and altered over the years. We called it the Bat, for its batwing sail, which had a single batten that ran from the mast out to the leech, or loose, edge. Its hard ware was largely cobbled up from toolbox assortments and not necessarily up to the stresses of sailing over a hard surface. 

One winter day at Fresh Pond, in about 1978, the Bat struck a pressure ridge in the ice, and the mast came down on top of my father and my friend Mike, who, as he tended to do, and still does from time to time, howled in protest.

It was last year or the year before, on a Monday in early March, that we last sailed in the Bat. I had left it at Mecox after the weekend, and my friend Jamey and I met there to take it out for a ride as a light snow began to fall. 

By the time we lifted the sail, the snow was falling in heavier clumps; sailing through it was marvelous, we could not see the edge of the horizon nor tell the difference between ice and sky. More snow came down, and as we rumbled along, we had the sensation of flying through space and that the clumps of icy flakes were stars.

The bat and the DN are stored in the barn behind my mother’s house. As I said, it would surprise me if we sailed this year, but the boats are ready, and so am I.

I want to begin by thanking our granddaughter Ella, who’s 8, for having turned my wife’s Ping-Pong game around, for having raised her Ping-Pong self-esteem (the fiery competitive spirit she’s always had) so that Mary and I are now on an even keel Ping-Pong-wise.

This is very important to me because she usually creams me in backgammon and, whenever we can find the rules, in gin. I have no card sense, none, though I will play these games to humor her. But it’s batting balls back and forth that I really love, and Ella, bless you for having said to Mimi, as you call her, that getting a Ping-Pong table was the best thing we ever did.

It’s a state-of-the-art royal blue Kettler that Geary Gubbins somehow put together in the fall after we’d had the basement brightened, neatened (the 10-year statute of limitations having run out on her brother’s tools), and dried out a bit. 

I had envisioned unending games, and had bought a space heater toward that end, but until Ella entered the equation, the handsome table wasn’t used all that much because Mary — despite the fact that our games were always close — thought she wasn’t up to my speed.

Ella proposed a freer format. One could serve twice, as in tennis, and serves were alternated point after point. Games were to be to 10, not to 21, and if you could fetch back onto your opponent’s side of the net a ball that had hit the floor, whether simply by way of a lifted shot or by caroming the ball off a wall, as in squash, that would count.

Thus less constricted, Mary, with whom I’ve always batted ideas back and forth in somewhat similar fashion, began to play with more verve, and the other night, after she’d creamed me 10-3, and as I was muttering to myself, she went upstairs to give Ella the news. 

I won one that night, she won two, whereupon she said it was over, which was fine. I was delighted. Whatever rules she wants to play by. Perhaps more will be added as we go along. That’s what kids do, make them up as they go, and that’s what makes it fun.

The day after the election, I was so freaked out that I moved all of my furniture around. I get it: the need to make myself feel safe, nesting in a time of crisis, etc. Well, it worked out, but not completely. 

Because of this ongoing uproar, I find I have a continuing and mighty need for personal control over my environs, so, a week ago, I took the baloney by the horns and decided to have the inside of my house painted. 

I know what you are thinking, and trust me, I should have listened to you, but I did not. My vague reasoning was that it had been 15 years since the one and only paint job and the rooms really needed freshening up. In reality, I was looking for a light in the darkness, and a road through the chaos, post-election. Chaos. In the midst of chaos, I created more chaos. What was I thinking? 

Well, it turns out I wasn’t thinking at all. Whatever you think I was thinking, I was not thinking that. I was just reacting, in that reptilian, back-brain of flight or fight that helped our ancestors survive in a hostile world. I guess my hope was to create warmth and comfort and a predictable world for myself.

However, what this paint job did instead of immediately giving me a bright and shiny future was to have me turning back time. 

I was experiencing the political version of Cher’s song “If I Could Turn Back Time,” and at the same time preparing to be painted. I began to  see my life flashing before me, running backward. Time is relative, relatively speaking. I found pictures of relatives I had forgotten I had. On Facebook there is this Throw Back Thursday thing where people visually recollect by sharing photos from the olden days a few years or a few generations ago. I found I was doing that while sitting on the floor amid shopping bags and bins ready to be filled with the stuff that I live with every  day. 

Taking things off shelves was particularly interesting. I found things I had forgotten about, things I didn’t care about at all and things I was really happy to find. Having found these things, I also immediately lost them in the deconstruction of their longtime hiding places. 

The dialogue with my things went like this: “Where have you been?” “Who/what are you?” “Wow, look at this thing?” “What was I thinking?” “What/ where should I put it now?” “Oops, where did I put it? It used to be over there. I just put it in with the. . . . Where did I put that? Where will I put it if I ever find it again?” And on and on.

What I found: a photo of myself in high school after I bleached my hair with peroxide and before it all broke off; a picture of the man who broke my heart, also called “the Crush” if you read my other “Relays”; a copy of Rolling Stone with John and Yoko saved in a glassine sleeve; four copies of “Eros,” and a very old copy of “Black Beauty” printed on cotton. And that was just from one bookshelf. I found interesting books I meant to read but will never get around to and interesting books I plan to get around to soon. 

I found that taking everything off the walls makes me not want to put anything back up, that rooms have really odd echoes with the rugs rolled up, that I do not have to put pictures of my late husband’s mother (whom I never met) on my family picture wall, and of course I found that I have way too much stuff, which I already knew. I have been drawing stuff (for magazines and lately coloring books) and I have been photographing stuff for this newspaper. 

I am known in shopping circles as Hunter Gatherer because I shop for stuff to photograph and publish in The Star. Stuff is the staff of life, in my opinion . . . but I digress. 

What I also found, aside from newly empty places on my walls, was an appreciation of the life I have lived and how much I have enjoyed it so far, broken hearts be damned. 

Had I not decided to be painted (and that was a clear reaction to the election and the inauguration), I would not have stirred up my personal pot. And in turning back time, and considering other family photos to go in the empty frames, I would not have found, tucked into an album, a letter to me from my aunt Sara Henderson Hay, a poet. 

The date of the letter is part of the interesting timing here: It was written on Jan. 29, 1964. Turning back time, it would have been delivered to me on the day I am writing this, Jan. 31. Sent to me in my freshman year of college, it referenced a fella, new to my social life, and a fella she thought I was done with (who amazingly stuck around until 1979). Since boyfriends were on her mind she included a poem in the letter that she said had been written a long time ago, but which she thought was “a slightly ironic little comment which you and your roommates might find amusing.”

Perhaps the proximity to Valentine’s Day inspired the timing, then and now. Who knows? 

Advice to Young Ladies

by Sara Henderson Hay

Love the proper man, my sweet,

At the proper age. 

When he stands upon his feet

Matrimonially complete,

When his assets all appear

Matrimonially clear.

Till that proper stage,

Keep your silly heart secure.

If a lover passes

Find him as devoid of lure

As he is when viewed through your

Mother’s glasses.

She sent it with love, and though she is in heaven, I share it with you with her love.

I am so happy that I got painted so that I could find this letter and turn back time, if just for a little while. And now to the putting back of all that I have torn asunder. Maybe there are more goodies to be found. Stay tuned.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The East Hampton Star, is also the illustrator of two recent coloring books that address the comforts of home and the creativity of chaos, “Color Your Happy Home” and “Color Me Cluttered.”