Jay I. Meltzer, a revered nephrologist and retired professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, used to warn his patients, and I dare say still does warn anyone who will listen, about the urgency of having an ongoing relationship with a doctor. You need to know your doctor well, he always says, and your doctor needs to know you, especially when you become ill. 

I was reminded of this advice when my stepson Bob was stuck in an UpIsland hospital for four days, beginning last week, during which neither he nor his family could figure out who was in charge of his case: the emergency room doctor who admitted him, a surgeon, or a consulting gastroenterologist. 

Bob had wound up in this hospital not far from his home after symptoms of an undiagnosed complaint became hard to bear. It never is good to be sick, but it is absolutely awful to be stricken unexpectedly and wind up in a hospital you never heard of without a doctor you rely on. 

I don’t need to describe his condition, but standard tests — a C.T. or CAT scan, X-rays, blood tests — did not seem to provide good answers. It’s hard to be objective when someone you care about is suffering. In this case, the possible causes and potential treatments were described incompletely, and that added to the anxiety and unease. 

Worrywart that I am, I headed straight to the internet to see what the hospital’s ratings were. What I found out was scary. The hospital, and I quote, “reported 13 MRSA infections in 73,752 days its patients spent in the hospital between 01/01/2015 and 12/31/2015. This is 364 percent worse than national rates.” The hospital also reported 83 C. difficile infections during the same period, and the report said, “This is 57 percent worse than national rates.” This information came from Consumer Reports, which I have to assume is reliable. 

Checking further, I found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called C. difficile “an urgent threat to patient safety,” while MRSA infections, despite not always being serious, can be life-threatening. C. diff and MRSA? I really started to get anxious.

Despite the lack of any definite diagnosis, by Monday morning, the fourth day Bob was there, he was scheduled for surgery. The next thing we knew, however, that decision had been overruled by the consulting gastroenterolo­gist. The about-face and confusion were enough for Bob, his wife, and other members of the family to agree he should be moved to Stony Brook University Hospital. I had held off telling anyone about the Consumer Reports statistics until that morning, after hearing that the doctors couldn’t agree on surgery. On the fifth morning (actually it was the middle of the night), Bob was transferred, and as of this writing is being treated at Stony Brook, with reassuring results. 

All of this got me wondering what Dr. Meltzer might have to say about the Affordable Care Act and its imminent repeal. Not being able to select and keep the doctor of your personal choice has been one of the main bones critics have picked with Obamacare. Of course, with the new administration and the anti-Affordable Care factions in Congress still totally mum about what their alternative plans might be and how they could do better, we have no idea what the future of health care in America will be. 

One thing seems certain, though, and that is that the insurance companies, released from some of the Affordable Care Act’s rules and safeguards, will have more power to control our choices. I’m not sure this bodes well for maintaining long-term relationships with our physicians, but I’m pretty sure it is going to stir up a fair amount of anxiety and unease among the millions of Americans who might be left out of the bargain.

“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.

Time was that people here bent small oaks to mark property lines. They were called lop fences, and more than a few remain visible on roadsides if you know where to look. Or not look; what seems to be a lop fence can be found at the edge my house lot in Amagansett on a plot of land that has been in the family since the 19th century.

Best I can figure, these particular bits of work were not fences exactly. Rather, they were an easy way to mark boundaries that, if done correctly, would last for years. Trees grow vertically; a horizontal half-trunk is likely the work of human hands long ago, a kind of Bonac bonsai.

Old books that mention lop fences suggest that, in fact, they were just that, fences, or at least parts of fences made from brush. Stone walls, like those found as near as Connecticut across the Sound, are almost never seen here, appropriate rocks being hard to come by on the glacier-sourced sandbar that is Long Island.

The lop fence in my side yard should have been obvious to me. Growing up, it was a favorite climbing tree, and at one point I got in trouble with my father for taking an antique pew door down from the attic and nailing it unknowingly into its branches as a down payment on a tree house.

It does not look like all that much, a scrub oak of about 20 feet high with a trunk that divides about two feet off the ground. The lopped portion, called that presumably because some kind of axe-work was involved, juts out horizontally almost due south from the main trunk, and is nearly as thick.

It was only recently, walking around the property with an old survey, that it occurred to me that the climbing tree was most likely a marker like those I liked to go see from time to time in Northwest Woods. While not precisely on the line, as shown on the paper I carried, the tree was close enough. That the branch that had been split and bent more than a century ago ran from north to south sealed that conclusion.

My lop fence is a small one by local standards. If you take a drive along Springy Banks Road you can see quite a few of them, including the largest one I know, near where Hand’s Creek Road runs in. This lop fence tree is worth pulling over into the small town parking area nearby and getting out of the car to see. The portion that follows the ground seems as big around as a rhinoceros. Whoever made it must have been showing off, or at least had a lot of time on his or her hands.

Well, it is true. I am a liberal and I sleep in. But so did my father, who was a Vermont Republican. As in politics, so in dress. I still have his black linen tie, which he often wore with a white shirt and a dark jacket, to such an extent that a woman once said he “shrieked of conservatism.”

He was also very funny. Yes, the two can go together, though I agree that liberals, less concerned with original sin and all that, tend to be funnier.

I mean, life is pretty absurd when you think about it, so why not laugh. 

“Let No One Untrained in Absurdity Enter Here” is over my portal. And now, to complete the picture, I have a chair fitting my rank and years of service to swivel in. I saw the high-backed, leather (wait, let me smell), yes, leather throne downstairs yesterday. Affixed to it was a yellow Post-it with the name “Russell.”

And so I asked him. “Russell, is that your chair? If so, it’s a fitting reward for all your years of service.”

“It’s yours if you want it,” he said, acknowledging that when it came to hoariness and force of habit, I had him beat.

We trundled it upstairs and squeezed it through the doorway and set it down. I, in turn, took the low-slung, sprung ripped ersatz leather thing I’d sat on for God knows how long downstairs and, with some sheepiness, put it where the regal one had been.

I’ve just gone down to see if anyone happening to plop on it might risk injury and found that the back is now well adjusted and offers more support than I once thought it did. 

“Buyer’s remorse?” Russell asked. 

“No, no,” I said, “it’s just that I’m having trouble keeping up with all his change.” 

“Here today, gone tomorrow. . . .”

“Or the day after tomorrow. . . . The inauguration, you know. . . .”

And of course that reminded me of the film by the same name that Mary and I had watched during the recent all-night snowfall. Disasters can lighten your mood, I remember thinking at the time. At least fictive ones.

As for the non-fictive kind, one of which appears to be looming, at least I’ve got a plush seat to hold on to.

Having spent most of the past two weeks in bed with what appeared to be the flu, Twitter and I have gotten to know each other well. Not that I tweet, or post, much; instead I have spent hours upon hours following various threads on which the authors express outrage about the election. Twitter is as good a place as any to drive you to despair. But it is also a place where one can get a deeper understanding of what is going on.

There are plenty of straight-up maniacs, but there are also good, thoughtful people on Twitter. I have been reading closely, for example, posts from Norm Eisen, who was a top White House ethics lawyer in the Obama administration. Mr. Eisen co-founded a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and with Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, wrote a compelling op-ed in The Washington Post before the election laying out what they saw as the ethical challenges of a Trump presidency. 

The piece was persuasive — and here is where Twitter shines, in my opinion. Readers like me who wanted more have been able to follow Mr. Eisen’s thoughts in the ensuing weeks. Twitter is good for that. Used well, it is a way to understand the world as seen through many of its most qualified observers. 

On the other hand, it can be a bludgeon. See Donald Trump’s attacks on a union boss who crossed him at that Indiana Carrier plant ­or the president-elect’s tweet about the cost of a new Air Force One that tanked Boeing’s stock. There is some talk that Mr. Trump’s staff will wrest away his cellphone once he is in the White House to preserve the dignity of the presidency and avoid the possibility of a war based on late-night rant.

Whether or not Mr. Trump remains on Twitter, it is now an essential part of the contemporary political scene. Those interested in knowing what is really going on would do well to follow along.

Mobutu Sese Seko was by the time I arrived in Africa as a college student in 1985 renowned as one of the globe’s most corrupt leaders. Zaire, as the Congo was then called, had withered under his rule. The story was that you could have driven a Cadillac from the Rift Valley in the east all the way to the Atlantic without hitting a single pothole when he assumed power in 1965. Twenty years later, only traces of the road remained, most of it sucked up into the jungle.

Traveling around Africa as a young man, I was struck, as many were, at what was perceived as the continent’s preference for strongman, authoritarian dictators. Uganda’s Idi Amin, deposed in 1979, was reviled as brutal. Even in Kenya, which was thought to be a model for African democracy, elected officials were amassing wealth improperly, restricting students’ right to protest, and fomenting clashes among ethnic groups.

Why the masses put up with it in so many countries seemed a mystery. This week, after the Electoral College voted to formalize Donald Trump’s victory, the preference for an autocratic government is much less foreign.

It was in Zaire, toward the end of my stay in Africa, that I really began to sense the dangerous undercurrents. Arriving at the border from Burundi, I was swept up by armed men, who took me in the back of an open Toyota pickup truck to some office or other before letting me go on my way. I never figured out if they were police or something else, and I never lost the sense that I was being watched or that every man between 20 and 50 seemed a little like he was with the secret police.

Whether from love or fear, many of the people I saw on the streets of Zaire wore small pins showing Mobutu Sese Seko sporting his signature heavy-rimmed glasses and leopard-hide cap. I had to have one and eventually found my way to a neighborhood political party office, where for a couple of Zaires, as the currency, which also bore the presi12dent’s likeness, was called, I obtained several. But the transaction was not without an air of menace. 

Leaving the country a few weeks later, the customs agents at the grass-strip airport refused to let me leave with the pins. “These are for the Zairouis. They are not for the outside world,” one said.

I was still in a fit of pique about that when we landed in Tanzania a couple of hours later, and I stuffed most of my shopping bag full of nearly worthless Zaires down a latrine by way of protest. 

It is only today, following the election of Mr. Trump, that I think I finally, so many years later, have a degree of understanding about how countries could go so wrong, how voters could welcome with broad grins a thug-like, divisive leader. I did not get it then, but I do now.

We’ve heard a lot these days about fake news and know that cyberspace is crowded with misinformation — and disinformation — which often make it hard for anyone to know who and what to believe. But I never expected to find a film on a kids’ TV channel infested with advertising masquerading as a happy holiday production for the whole family. 

I fell into the fake-news trap recently when I decided to take a look at Disney’s animated film “Frozen” on the Disney Channel on a night when I was at home alone. I hadn’t accompanied any of the grandchildren to see the smash-hit musical when it came out in 2013 and was intrigued because the kids all seemed able to sing “Let It Go,” the most popular song from it. 

I had begun watching a somewhat truncated “Frozen” when suddenly a different production intruded. Red curtains parted, and real live children and adults began “rehearsing” a performance of a pseudo-“Nutcracker.” Honestly, I didn’t realize what was going on, and blithely continued watching “Froz­en” until it happened again.

I had expected that a film on the Disney Channel on ABC would be interrupted by advertisements, but I didn’t understand that the performance behind the red curtain was a commercial. Eventually I noticed that before the curtains opened, a prominent bull’s-eye appeared. What followed, interrupting “Frozen,” was an insidious stealth holiday-marketing campaign by Target.

It turns out that holiday performances have been used as TV advertising by Kmart, Macy’s, and Victoria’s Secret, although the first two are brief and make the source of what you are watching evident quickly. Viewers don’t learn it’s a Victoria’s Secret commercial unless they watch the scantily clad, gyrating dancers to the very end.

Target’s publicists had announced: “In past years, guests loved following the ongoing adventures of a variety of characters — including our beloved mascot, Bullseye — in Target’s holiday marketing campaigns, whether it was a trip to Wonderland with Alice, or a magical journey to light up a tree.”

“This year, we’re turning up the dial on our storytelling by raising the curtain on a Broadway-style production. Our top toys of the season team up with celebrity friends. . . .” Not only does John Legend appear as the Rat King, but his wife, Chrissy Teigen, a writer and television personality, is in it, too. They were on hand for the New York City premiere of “The Toycracker” (which is what Target calls its “take on the classic story”) early this month, before its TV debut on Sunday night.

I’m sorry. I love Broadway-style musicals, but the blurring of the line between kids’ programming and advertising is a sad commentary on the culture of our times.

My first home of my own after college was an apartment on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, just south of the Sag Harbor Cinema. I lived there for six years in my 20s, watching the village’s daily life unfold through the front windows. 

On Memorial Day, the Sag Harbor Community Band would begin tuning up well before 9, tucked in the semicircular alcove in front of the Art Deco cinema. In the mid-’90s, on warm summer nights, kids would loop through the village from one end to the other, showing off their jacked-up trucks and people-watching as they drove. It was a thing, then. Maybe it still is. 

When I first moved in, Sag Harbor was still rebuilding from the 1994 Easter Sunday fire that destroyed the Emporium Hardware building. Before the new building rose in its place, I remember a view of the water from the roof behind our apartment, but could that really be? 

It was the perfect place to live at that time in my life, and I shared it with a rotating collection of friends who signed on as roommates for a few months at a time or just crashed on the couch for a weekend or so. 

After reading about the fire two weeks ago that destroyed the cinema among other neighboring buildings, my friend Carl, one of the many who laid claim to the second bedroom, described the apartment as “a kind of miniature commune.” And it was, in its way. It just lent itself to a good time. We were one big, happy family and did not yet need to answer any of life’s bigger questions. We danced and made movies and played charades and cooked huge communal meals together. Friendships were made and relationships fell apart, and I was one of the people at the swirling center before so many of us drifted off in our separate directions. 

Because the cinema was so iconic and appeared in so many paintings and photographs, our apartment next door often played a supporting role. We’d notice our lamp, the silhouette of our potted plant, in, say, a painting on the cover of Dan’s Papers. It was about the theater, but among those of us who knew 90 Main Street, it was our few minutes of fame, too. 

It was a shotgun apartment that ran the full depth of the building, with a big living room in front, a spacious eat-in kitchen in the middle, and two bedrooms at the back with windows onto an unheated sunroom. What passed for the master bedroom also served as the gateway to the sunroom, the roof beyond, and the fire escape out back. From the kitchen and bedroom windows, we could see over the roof of the cinema lobby, and from the front windows we could see the nighttime glow of the cinema’s neon “Sag Harbor” sign gently illuminating the sidewalk below. 

You could ride out on the Jitney, get off at the movie theater, and walk right upstairs. Out the front door, you could get everything you needed and go barhopping, too, without ever getting in your car. And if you weren’t in the mood to talk, it was best go out through the backdoor; it was impossible not to run into a friend or acquaintance looking for a chat. 

Main Street was my front yard, and its pulse beat inside of me for those years and quite a few after that. 

Now my old apartment is just a shell of itself, sky visible through the burned-out roof, and the cinema and the building to the right of it have been torn down completely. All of us who love the village feel the hole not just in the streetscape but inside of us. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Sag Harbor without that cinema facade is like East Hampton without the Hook Mill. God forbid the mill ever burned, there is no doubt we would rebuild.

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

The summer’s drought ended the last of whatever miracle had been holding up the old beech tree outside my office window. Two weeks before Christmas, Kevin Savastano and his crew arrived early on a cold Friday morning, as promised, to take it away.

For years, the tree had been a seasonal curtain on my view of Main Street and the comings and goings at the library. From my desk, I look out due south toward the Town Pond Green flagpole. When the leaves were on the old beech, I could not see much, but in the winter, it was different, with a view clear to the Mulford Farm.

Kevin stopped in the office on Tuesday, looking for a check for the work, and said  the beech had been imploding and had it not been removed it almost surely would have fallen apart this winter and damaged the Star building across the narrow driveway.

Not knowing what to look for, the beech had seemed all right to me, at least in the spring. Yet by the beginning of autumn, branches had begun to fall. 

There is a bright line between life and death, I often think, but it is less obviously so for a tree. When we humans are alive, even barely and in our dying days, we are clearly alive. I think of Richard Higer, one of our most faithful letter-writers, who died on Dec. 5 of pneumonia. Mr. Higer rarely, if ever, missed a week to share his opinions with our readers. His last message, full of his left-of-center thinking, arrived at my in-box on Nov. 26,

Looking out our front-office window on a rainy Tuesday, Kevin Savastano told me that two European beech trees just up the way at Woods Lane will soon have to be taken down. I went out for a look later; even in dying, trees hold on to their majesty far longer than we do. There was nothing about their massive gray forms with rainwater slicking down their bark that said their time had come.

With the big beech that had been outside my window gone, I can see farther down Main Street to the pond. I can see each branching twig, bare of its leaves, as it reaches into the lungs of the sky. This is when trees seem vastly more interesting; there is no discernable structure to a tree in June. Summer’s cloak hides what is really going on. January lets us in on the secrets.

In putting The Star together we agree that it benefits not just from a variety of feature and news stories each week but diversity among the opinion pieces. “How about the holidays or a funny anecdote?” I’ve been asked when trying to come up with a topic of late. In recent weeks, though, it has not always been easy to supply the requisite entertainment or light humor. 

Clearly, I am not alone in looking for words of wisdom about facing what looks to become a grim epoch in this country’s history: I apologize that two out of three columns on this page are devoted to the subject of how to conduct yourself under an authoritarian regime. (And, well, at least Jack Graves has written about his sister this week — see the bottom of the page — rather than the state of the nation, which he is also often wont to do.)

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale with a concentration  on Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Holocaust,  is the author of “Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century, Adapted to the Circumstances of Today,” an essay that is making the rounds online. He speaks 5 and reads 10 European languages, and has written six award-winning books and co-authored others. He is a prolific essayist and commentator on American politics.

“Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit­ler and Stalin” traces the circumstances that led to dictatorship in Germany and Russia. It  has won 12 awards and been translated into 33 languages.  His most recent book, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” will appear in 24 foreign editions. 

What better academic to take advice from now?

“Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism,” Mr. Snyder writes in prefacing his “20 Lessons.” 

Here are a few of his maxims that seem most appropriate to follow today:

“When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. . . .  Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.”

“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

“Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.” 

“Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.”

“Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up auto-pay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.”

“Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”

Until the Electoral College confirmed Donald Trump as president-elect on Monday, I refused to believe he would make it to the White House. Now, I’m afraid, it is time to take advice like Professor Snyder’s to heart.