Finally, that year is over. But will it ever fade to black and be gone? Or will it prove a harbinger, someday to be known as Year One of the Bad Times?

I think I speak for many of us when I say 2016 was a horrible year. Personally, it was particularly hideous. I wonder how others have been coping with its ceaseless parade of death, of violence, of ever-more-dire warnings of climate cataclysm. How did they weather 2016’s political campaign, surely the ugliest and most dispiriting of our lifetimes, and how do they manage the gnawing, ever-present anxiety over what is to come? 

I listen to Marvin Gaye. A lot of Marvin Gaye. Above all, of course, “What’s Going On.” Surely the greatest soul album ever, it is on a near-constant loop of late.

To listen to this 1971 release on New Year’s Day 2017 is to know a curious condition: at once saddened by its lyrical content and ecstatically moved by the music to which those lyrics are set. Last year’s lesson, I regret to conclude, is that for all the world’s incremental progress — in scientific discovery, in health and human rights, in the eradication of poverty — we’re still the same people, after all, making the same mistakes.

Like Stevie Wonder, his colleague on the Motown Records roster, Gaye broke free from the label’s insistence on pop sounds palatable to white audiences, refusing to record again until “What’s Going On,” the song, was issued. Upon the single’s success, he quickly recorded the rest of the album, giving birth to a poem of deepest sorrow and yearning set to a 35-minute symphony. To these ears, the artist had never sung with such passion, nor would he again. 

On one hand, the album feels like a requiem. “There’s too many of you crying. . . . There’s far too many of you dying. . . . Say man, I just don’t understand / What’s going on across this land. . . . Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury. . . . What about this overcrowded land / How much more abuse from man can she stand?”

And yet, musically, “What’s Going On” is a genre to itself, an amalgamation of languorous rhythm and blues, lush, dreamy strings, and sensual percussion grooves such as no one had heard before. Can one listen and not feel moved to dance?

The climactic final track, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” is a five-and-a-half-minute shock wave of frustration, a multitracked Gaye pouring out humanity’s anguish. To listen, four and a half decades later, on the first day of 2017 was unnerving. “Make me want to holler / The way they do my life / This ain’t living / No, no baby, this ain’t living. . . . Crime is increasing / Trigger-happy policing / Panic is spreading / God knows where we’re heading.” It has a familiar, troubling ring. 

In what has become a sad refrain, Marvin Gaye was shot dead. One of America’s innumerable victims of gun violence, the artist, strung out on heavy, prolonged cocaine use, had intervened in a dispute between his parents. Allegedly afraid for his life, his father, an alcoholic minister with whom he’d had a most arduous relationship, shot him twice.

We hurtle, or stagger, into 2017, and I can’t help but feel an ominous mood of upheaval in the offing, of disorder and possibly violent change. 

“Father, father, we don’t need to escalate / You see, war is not the answer / For only love can conquer hate / You know we’ve got to find a way / To bring some loving here today.”

That part is up to us. Unless, of course, we’re still the same people we were in 2016, making the same mistakes.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama seem to agree that joy springs through suffering, and so, I suppose, it’s appropriate that I’m reading “The Book of Joy” at the moment, while in the throes of a wretched cold.

There is probably no better time, for I — the “I” that I thought of as being so spry — have been flattened, and quickly too, beginning on Christmas Day. A good time, then, to read about the importance of reaching out to the world — as O’en, our 6-month-old white golden retriever, has done since day one — rather than simply reach out for another cough drop.

Joy, the two sages say, goes deeper than happiness, inasmuch as it has its roots in the commonality of mankind. 

We are the same person, says the Dalai Lama. We are who we are through others — that’s ubuntu, says the archbishop. Joy, then, is about more than simply feeling good about oneself and being content with one’s good fortune.

I had always thought of sportswriting as “the joy department,” as in celebrating the moment, being in synchrony with the creation, that sort of thing, but that may have been at the expense of reality, in which joy and suffering are intertwined.

I’m still not going into the frigid surf on New Year’s Day, though! That’s for those further along the path than me. I will be there at Main Beach to celebrate, yes — and I did mail in a donation to the East Hampton Food Pantry today — but not as a co-sacrificer.

Such rites, I suppose, have their roots in mankind’s earliest times, though there was a lot more blood then. Yet the point remains, as the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu say, that we’re all in this together — even as we reach for another cough drop.

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Leo the pig. Regular readers know all about Leo, a supposed teacup pig that now, at age 4, has grown to what I estimate to be 130 pounds.  

My oldest child had found a Texas trailer park breeder on the internet who promised that the cute pink piglet would never exceed 10 pounds — money back guaranteed.  As I have written before, I said it was impossible that he would remain small, and, anyway, we did not need a pig as a pet. I was overruled, even if these four years later I am proven right.

The question now is what to do with him. I did not want Leo in the first place, but the way things turned out, he has mostly become my responsibility. Most mornings, well before my alarm goes off, Leo is up from his comfortable bed near the fireplace, looking to be fed. 

He makes his desires known first with a round of loud grunts. Next, if that does not get me out of bed, he increases the pressure by knocking over whatever he can, be it kitchen chairs, the metal bathroom garbage basket, or his self-filling water fountain on the porch. He is smart that way; I get up and fill his bowl as the dogs stand by wondering for all the world why they did not think of that themselves.

Truth is that I don’t mind feeding the pig and the dogs all that much. The bigger problem is that Leo enjoys chewing the woodwork. Some time ago he discovered the pleasure of snapping chunks off the shingles on the enclosed porch. An antique chest is increasingly distressed with teeth marks. He has chewed nearly all the way through the edges of the few stairs he can reach. Normal outdoor pigs root in the ground; Leo prefers to express his creative urges in the warm indoors.

We could move him outdoors, but with the cold months ahead that would be cruel. Plus, if we gave him a heated pad to sleep on or a shed to hide in, he would soon chew through the wires and electrocute himself or burn down the shed. The couple of animal rescue farms we got in touch with said they were full up with pigs. 

Keeping Leo seems out of the question. We are down to only a few pieces of furniture on the level of the house that he can roam in, and he smells so bad that having people over for dinner or a drink is impossible. 

My best plan, though I doubt I’ll get around to it, is to borrow a pony trailer and haul Leo back to Texas. If we are not going to get our money back, at least we might get the satisfaction of dropping him off at the breeder’s. Anyway, it would make for a hell of a story.

The late boys basketball coach Roger Golden, when I asked what it was he loved about basketball, said, “The gyms are warm.”

And indeed it’s so, especially in Bridgehampton’s, that tiny black-and-gold bandbox that has a precious quality that you don’t find in the more modern, ill-lit, cavernous ones. 

True, Bridgehampton’s Killer Bees, winners of nine state championships, with perhaps yet another on the way, deserve (have deserved for years) a regulation-size gym, one sanctioned for playoff games that the team would otherwise have to contest on the road. But it will be sad to see this jewel go. 

Well, it won’t go — it will remain an auditorium, with its curtained stage, the momentary resting place sometimes of the backsides of players intent on making layups, at one end, and, at the other, two wide doorways through which the ball can be inbounded more easily than when pressed up against the padded “Killer Bees” wall in between.

The gym is interesting, too, for the fact that, while it provides a warm and intimate setting for the lucky fans often jammed into it, it can at the same time be frightening for teams not used to playing in such close quarters. You’ve got to be good, really good, to win there because there’s no room to breathe. Hold on to the ball and you’re done. There’s no time, no space. Pass, pass, shoot. 

The games have a prizefight aura without the crushing blows that attend boxing rings, though crashing into the wall, however much padded, is not a fate you’d wish upon anyone. It happened in last night’s game with Port Jefferson to J.P. Harding, and it was nice to see him get up and make both free throws. 

Afterward, everybody comes out onto the floor and it’s a wonderful feeling, like a warm embrace.

A feeling that I doubt you’ll find many places in this world. 

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.

I feel like one of Emily Dickinson’s birds that stay, now that someone whose advice I valued and whose actions in my behalf over the years to a great degree have contributed to the feelings of good fortune I entertain these days has died.

An amiable genius of gentle good humor, Bob Wolf would often talk over my head when it came to financial matters, trusting that I understood. Yet he was patient — another of his virtues — and would always wait until I, stumbling along in trying to catch up, would arrive at the gist of it.

I made money in the first crash because of him, because he’d leveraged what I had inherited from my father — with puts, as I recall — so that when things tanked, as he had predicted, I was, wonderful to tell, left high and dry. He was one of the few in the country who did so. The Wall Street Journal wrote it up.

Thus when news of the crash came tumbling down during the course of that day, in 1987, I ran through the office like Catherine of Siena rejoicing amidst the mourners that her father was finally with God.

And Bob was always with us — with his keen intelligence, reflective turn of mind (he’d been a philosophy major in college), his market savvy, and with his constant good humor. “I think your dad thinks you’ve become irradiated by The New York Times,” he once said when I told him my stepfather — his law partner for many years — thought New York ought to be hauled out to sea and deep-sixed.

He was always in our corner — we dweebs of East Hampton.

’Tis not that Dying hurts us so —

’Tis Living — hurts us more —

But Dying — is a different way —

A Kind behind the Door —

The Southern Custom — of the Bird —

That ere the Frosts are due —

Accepts a better Latitude —

We — are the Birds — that stay.

The Shiverers round Farmers’ doors —

For whose reluctant Crumb —

We stipulate — till pitying Snows

Persuade our Feathers Home.

In the name of the Bee —

And of the Butterfly —

And of Bob — Amen!

Does merely passing through someplace on a bus count as actually visiting that place?

Not really, I have been told. Maybe it’s a superficial way to see what a small piece of a place looks like, but there is limited opportunity for a meaningful cultural exchange.

Consider my experiences on Shelter Island. I am a fairly recent arrival on the East End, having lived here for about a year and nine months, but I had never really spent time on Shelter Island.

My significant other, Jason, himself a recent arrival in my life, was a bit incredulous when I told him this. He’s a big fan of Shelter Island and resolved to take me there for a date. My only experience there was a bus ride I took as a reporter in the spring of 2015 with a group of John M. Marshall Elementary School fifth graders who were on their way to a field trip on Plum Island. The ride was fun and interesting, but mostly because fifth graders are pretty hilarious. However, I wouldn’t have described that trip as a meaningful cultural exchange.

That changed on the afternoon of Nov. 20, when Jason and I loaded our car onto the South Ferry with a plan to drive around the town, visit Black Cat Books, break in my new digital camera with some candid photography, and meet friends for dinner at Commander Cody’s.

The start of the trip was far from auspicious. It was raining and the wind had seriously picked up. Our car was first in line on the ferry, so it was a bit like riding in the first car of a roller coaster, which I normally like to do. This was different, though, and as water splashed horizontally across the windshield and the ferry rocked hard on the waves, the song playing on the radio was “Cold Water” by Major Lazer and Justin Bieber.

Stop judging my taste in music. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of listening to the lyrics, the chorus begins like this: “And if you feel you’re sinking, I will jump right over into cold, cold water for you.”

Jason turned the radio off and held my hand.

I sighed in relief when we finally got off the ferry. I had been holding my breath. 

However gloomy the weather, Shelter Island welcomed me with the charming feel of a New England seaside village. The architecture intrigued me everywhere we went. I imagined myself living in a house there someday (then promptly imagined an almost daily round trip by ferry to work, at which point the anxiety returned). Why hadn’t I noticed the beautiful houses the last time I was here? Oh, right — that bus full of excited fifth graders was pretty distracting.

We drove to Ram’s Island, where Jason explained that the land bridge we were driving on is called a tombolo and told me all about the Shelter Island Conference of 1947. I later did a Google search to learn more about how the field of quantum physics was essentially born at the Ram’s Head Inn following World War II — fascinating. Sometimes you just never know what you don’t know.

At Black Cat Books, the floor-to-ceiling shelves of used and rare books were pretty exciting. After much exploration, my reading list grew by one — a second-hand copy of “Gone Girl” that Jason bought for me — and I found a Christmas gift for a family member: a hardcover book of reproductions of sketches by a famous Japanese artist. 

The sun finished setting while we were inside Black Cat. Not long after we emerged and began driving again, some illuminated stained-glass windows in a building on a side road caught my eye. The rows of vertical windows with stunning colors are embedded in my mind, but I can’t figure out what building it was. It was so dark out, and I cannot recall what street we were on. Was it a church? Historical society center? Privately owned building? If anyone knows, please call me here at the Star office.

When our friends arrived, we headed to Commander Cody’s, which Jason had been talking up for weeks. The fried calamari was tender, clearly made fresh rather than from a frozen source. I burned my tongue on a spectacular cup of Manhattan clam chowder, then Jason and I shared a pound of killer baby back ribs and a plate of fish and chips. I can see why it’s his favorite restaurant.

We headed home after that. Because top-40 hits are all radio stations seem to play these days, we heard “Cold Water” again on the ferry ride back. That got turned off, too.

With regard to the to-do list we’d set out with, we accomplished almost everything. I took exactly one photo with my new camera the entire time we were there, and it’s pretty terrible. But I have a strong feeling I’ll be back for more.

Christine Sampson is a reporter at The Star.

David Brooks wrote recently about the lack of trust in our society, and how corrosive walling oneself off can be when it comes to the intermingling a thriving democracy requires.

Still, when Sinead FitzGibbon recently said concerning a golf lesson I planned to take that it was “a social game,” I replied — by way of explaining why I hadn’t played it — that I had no friends. (Other than Mary, of course.) But that I did exult in having a great number of acquaintances.

“I do a lot of my socializing at the dump,” I told her.

“Like we used to do at Mass,” she said.

“Yes, I get a lot of story ideas there — I should set up a desk and put up a sign saying, ‘The Quote Doctor Is In.’ ”

“The dump,” she concluded with a smile, “is the new Mass!”

“One does feel a bit righteous while recycling there, sorting out the wheat from the corn.” 

I recalled that her father, who is 86, once said he’d take up golf when he was old. 

“He still hasn’t,” she said.

And her mother, who, she said, was my age, which is to say 76, had “just signed up for a 100K bike ride.”

“And when will you take up tennis?” I said.

“When I’m old,” she said.

If old has to do with feeling weaker, then I am not — at least not at this moment in time. I have Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy to thank for that, or perhaps he and the life force left over from the Antareans’ visit 10,000 years ago. The residuum may be in the fern boles that O’en likes to dig up in our backyard. I won’t know for sure until I jump into the Y’s pool. 

Anima Sana in Corpore Sano. That’s the motto of the ASICS tennis sneakers I wear, though, while my corpore’s sano (for the moment, I say), my anima ain’t so sana. Aside from the question of trusting my fellows, I’m having difficulty trusting myself. Mary has said they ought to have a lost and found container at East Hampton Indoor Tennis just for me. I would say she’s as forgetful as I am, but that observation is skewed by the fact that she has many more things to forget than I do — a cellphone, its charger, rings, airline tickets, checkbooks, passports, other vitally important documents, crucial internet passwords, and the like. So, let’s just say she’s much less forgetful, but loses more things. 

I would say that that’s good news for me, for should I find whatever it is she’s missing, I can add indulgences, as it were, to the pile against the day when — through no fault of my own, of course — I may fall out of grace and be consigned to do all my socializing at the dump.

The distance between my house and the Star office building is less than a hundred yards, and some of the nicest moments of otherwise ordinary days are spent walking between the two. It’s a quick moment of stolen solitude, to listen to the wind in the high trees and, quite often, the roar of the ocean, about a mile away. I am supposed to walk a lot, at least according to the medical profession. But hurriedness often intervenes, preventing me from scheduling longer, proper hikes, and this gives my many short back-and-forth trips between house and office more significance than they might otherwise merit.

Among the last people to leave the office after dark about two weeks ago, I was headed toward home when a vehicle followed me slowly with its headlights on, lighting my path up the dark lane. I had walked past the lamppost that marks the boundary between The Star’s driveway and the East Hampton Library parking lot next door and continued my slow perambulation toward my house without looking back to find out who was lighting my way.

The truth is, I cherish these walks despite the fact that a doctor told me not so long ago that my feet were “kaput.” Time was, way back when, that I spent several summers as a counselor at a phenomenal summer camp for inner-city children on a 1,000-acre tract of untouched woodland in the northwest corner of New Jersey, where it meets New York and Pennsylvania. Everything we did there was intended to be in harmony with nature, and I still try to reconnect with that feeling. Simple campsites were spread out through the woods, and it was a point of pride if you were a counselor moving alone at night not to use a flashlight; a flashlight would be almost a sin, out there between the trees and under the canopy of a star-dusted sky. Now, all these years later, as silly as it sounds —and despite my night vision no longer being the best — I still balk at carrying a flashlight, especially on familiar ground.

To be certain, I’m not exactly the surefooted person I once was, even on sidewalks. So even though I didn’t like the idea that someone in a vehicle following me home the other night apparently thought I needed help finding my way, I accepted it as a kind gesture. 

The vehicle and its headlights kept up with me and eventually turned around the circular driveway adjacent to my house as I was about to reach the front door. Seeing the vehicle for the first time — I hadn’t looked back to see who was following me because I wanted to prove I didn’t need any help — I saw a white pickup truck. Assuming my son, who owns one, was at the wheel, I offered a somewhat perfunctory wave of thanks. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned he had nothing to do with it. Who was at the wheel? I still don’t know.

There are many perks that come with growing older: Children who are now adults, if you are lucky enough to have some, will remind you of certain realities you ought not ignore. (For example, in my case, I am frequently instructed not to drive at night. And at Thanksgiving, one of my kids not only shared the preparations but just about took them over, and I was greatly relieved.) But, still, I naturally cringe when I watch or hear others tell their parents what to do and when to do it. They ought not to forget that it’s empowering to be left to your own devices for as long as possible. So, whoever the mysterious Good Samaritan was, with the headlights behind me: Thank you so much . . . but no thanks.