The grandchildren were visiting one day last week when one of the boys noticed a large box with a bull’s-eye logo on it, and came running. “Target,” he shouted, “Is it for me?” Yes, I know this is a visual age, but I was still surprised. Thinking he was just too smart for his own good, I grabbed the box and slid it under a bed, out of sight. 

I believe in shopping near home, but had ordered something from Target that didn’t seem available anywhere in this vicinity. When the package arrived, I noticed that it looked awfully large for what I had purchased, but I didn’t get around to opening it until Friday night, the night before Christmas Eve.

Oops! Instead of the very specific and specialized Lego set I’d paid for, the box contained two children’s cardigan sweaters, size 7-8, two T-shirts with silly branded “Star Wars” images, and two pairs of snow pants, one with a bib. UPS had dropped off the box at the right house; it was addressed to me, but it contained Christmas items bought by a stranger in Maryland.

You can imagine how long the wait was when I called Target to speak with someone who might help. Eventually, a person who was pleasant enough — considering the pressure he must have been under, some 36 hours before Santa’s arrival — told me there was no way to get the right present in time, even though I had clearly paid for it. I was able to give him the name of the woman for whom the box had been intended (her name was on the packing materials), and he told me she had called a day or two earlier and her replacements had already been sent. 

As for my grandson’s longed-for Christmas present, nothing could be done; it was just too late to get something from the warehouse to UPS for delivery the next day. The customer-service person ordered a replacement anyway and said if I was lucky it would arrive the day after Christmas. (It didn’t.) 

I wanted to be a good Samaritan and send the snow pants and T-shirts and the the rest of it back to Target, but I didn’t want to pay for shipping. This time, the man on the phone was unmoved. He could send me a return label only for what I had ordered, even though it hadn’t arrived. Going back and forth with him, I felt the pressure rising. He wasn’t going to send a return label and that was that. Did Target want me to throw it away, I asked indignantly? “Just give it away,” he said. Give it away? All right, then.

My grandson had told two or three different Santa Clauses that what he really, really wanted was this particular Lego set, so I was upset, but couldn’t really do anything about it until the next day, Christmas Eve, when I formed a search party.

The Wharf Shop in Sag Harbor, one of our favorite stores of all time, had all sorts of toy treasures, including a quite impressive selection of Lego sets, but not the Ghostbusters Ecto 1 and 2 set (whatever that might be!) that was my grandson’s dream.

But, guess what? 

All’s well that ends well. 

Stevenson’s, Southampton’s very fine toy store — it used to be Lilywhite’s — had the very thing in stock. One left. Exactly what I was looking for. Undeterred by pouring rain and wind on Saturday, I made it to Southampton, and Christmas was saved.

I gave away the Target clothes and felt like Chris Kringle himself.

My sister, who has agreed that she was “a basket case” not so long ago, has made a complete turnaround, thanks to an Egyptian-born psychiatrist who utterly revamped her medications with what I would call miraculous results, “and, ultimately, God.”

Or He and Allah.

I wrote a while ago that I, for my part, had faith in her — though that faith was shaken during a period in which everything (soul, body, mind) seemed to go south, and during which she told me she was no longer talking to God. 

It seemed as if she were throwing in the towel, and we didn’t know what to say other than to persist in urging persistence and in cheerleading, in trying to make her laugh, which had worked for me and Mary — an even better cheerleader than I — in the past. But there did come a time when it seemed there was nothing more we could say. 

During my last visit to her, recently — the one in which I found her vastly improved, much more lucid and calm, lighthearted even — she said she had had suicidal thoughts in the previous months and had thought more than once of jumping out of a window. “Thank God you were living in a first-floor apartment,” I said.

And the interesting thing was that on that weekend trip, she, who had been saved by Dr. Ayyash and by God, saved me from getting us hopelessly lost while exploring Mars in my rental car. Yes, Mars, for that is where she is living now, Mars, Pa., having moved there from Moon. I’m not kidding. And, of course, I am the Star of the East . . . Hampton.

Well, I shouldn’t go that far, but she was happy to see me, and I’m glad that, homebody though I may be, I made the trip — through the airport where there’s a statue of Franco Harris making the Immaculate Reception.

Actually, her recovery is like that! I remember running from our car — we’d been Christmas shopping — into a hair salon in Sewickley to find out what had happened, and everybody was going crazy: The Steelers, they said, had just beaten the dastardly Oakland Raiders in the last seconds of the A.F.C. divisional playoff game! It had been a miracle.

As has been my sister’s recovery. 

It’s fourth-and-10, the ball is on the Steelers’ 40-yardline, there are 22 seconds left. . . . Bradshaw, under pressure, is scrambling to his right. . . . He lets it go. . . .

The rest you know.

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.

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.

My wife and I had been tuning into C-Span since we first were connected to cable. “Thank you for C-Span” was a standard opening for callers talking live on the network’s broad array of shows.

The network, founded by Brian Lamb as a not-for-profit in 1979, was dedicated originally to airing every second of every session of the House of Representatives. There was always time to kill between sessions, and an eclectic, fascinating, and varied string of guests would appear in segments frequently moderated by Mr. Lamb. The guests spanned the political spectrum, all the way out to the fringes in each direction.

So, too, did the callers. “Thank you for C-Span,” many would say, before launching into sometimes bizarre critiques of the federal government or one or both major political parties.

I remember during the 1992 presidential election, a group of political journalists were fielding calls from uncommitted voters. They were analyzing people’s fears about the election. One woman caller said, “I’m afraid.” A panelist tried to draw her out, but came to the simple conclusion, after a few moments, that “this woman is afraid.” 

The network gave, and gives to this day, a voice to those who may not have been ready for prime time, but had a point of view nonetheless.

In the late 1990s, I began noticing a reporter named Chuck Todd on C-Span. He was not afraid to get into the not-so-sexy workings of government. He would talk about an obscure bill before a committee and get into the details. His thirst for knowledge, his quest for understanding, and his calm, sober demeanor were a refreshing change from the entertainers posing as newsmen across the cable networks.

He also understood the political process, beyond the simple division of Democrat vs. Republican or right vs. left.

Eventually, he caught the eye of Tim Russert, who brought him over to NBC as the political director for the network in 2007. There was a natural affinity between the two. Russert himself had an easygoing, inquisitive style that made “Meet the Press” the leading weekly news show in the country.

A year later, Russert died of a heart attack. NBC eventually settled on David Gregory as his replacement on the show, over Chuck Todd. Gregory was smooth, much smoother than Russert. The patrician Gregory had been the White House correspondent for the network, a role he was meant for. But he lacked the nuts-and-bolts wonkishness of Russert. The show went into a slow, steady ratings decline. Finally, in 2014, NBC made the move they should have made six years earlier, moving Todd into the role of host of the Sunday morning show.

It immediately became one of two political shows I would watch every week, the other being “Washington Week in Review.” Gwen Ifill also had Russert as a mentor. She, too, was a serious journalist in a sea of glitzy, noisy talking heads.

Todd talked about her death Sunday. “Gwen was a trailblazer in our field. From newspaper reporter to NBC News correspondent to co-anchor of the ‘News­Hour’ and of course, host of ‘Washington Week,’ she broke a barrier everywhere she went,” Todd said. Gwen was tough and fair, and, at the same time, brought so much joy to her work, not to mention, she had a great B.S. detector, something many politicians learned the hard way. She made everyone around this table a lot smarter.”

And all of us, too.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star. 

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.

It was Tuesday night when it occurred to me that I hadn’t — because I was flying back from having spent the weekend in Pittsburgh — seen the first half of the Steelers’ delightful 24-14 win that Sunday over the Giants.

Mary had recorded it, and so it was with a light heart that I headed down the hall, with her behind me, toward the larger TV where I presumed she’d show me — yet again, for I have never kept pace with change — how to summon it up.

“Was it the football game you were interested in?” she asked when we got there.

“Well, just the first half — I saw the second half, you’ll remember, when I got home. The Steelers were leading 14-0 at the half, so I thought it would be fun to watch.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I thought you’d watched the whole game — I deleted it.”

“You . . . deleted it. . . ?”

“Yes, forgive me, forgive me,” she said, pitiably. “Maybe I can retrieve it. . . .”

“That’s a venal . . . no, no, that’s a mortal sin, you know. Now, I’ll have to read about Emily Dickinson!”

Well, it serves me right for persisting in ignorance. I will have to learn how to record things myself. And anyway, she didn’t do it with full knowledge of the sin, the one, you know, having to do with the erasure of vitally important shows. 

“You’re forgiven — you’re not guilty!” I called out reassuringly toward the living room, where she was watching a Sam Shepard play, knowing that that would resonate particularly with her, who’s never forgotten the sign on the Pittsburgh bridge, the one painted 20 or so years ago, in big white letters, that said, “She’s Guilty.”

Why is it that women, the chief reason that there’s any joy in life, or any life for that matter, have received such short shrift by and large down the centuries, except for the few societies, like Crete, that were matriarchies?

She’s guilty? The church, and often society, would seem to have it so. 

Why that is I haven’t the remotest idea. 

And let it so be recorded.

A week or two ago, with nothing much in the refrigerator, I decided to go down to the beach in front of the house to catch something for dinner. After the girls had been fed the requisite chicken nuggets, I took a look in my tackle box and had a rude surprise.

Like a lot of other things that go by the wayside for the parents of young children, my fishing supplies were in a sorry state. The hooks on the only popping plugs likely to get a rise out of a September bluefish in the bay were rusty and dull. Other lures were tangled madly in nylon leader or missing barbs that I had intended to replace but never got to. The box was a metaphor for my life.

Not that I am complaining. No, I wiggled a small bucktail free from the hell at the bottom of the box and went down to the beach. I did not catch much, only a small, tapered tan fish that reminded me vaguely of a snake. I had put another one of these, caught in a minnow seine, into our saltwater aquarium, where it hid for a few days in the sand, then took a suicide mission over the glass. I found it on the floor.

If you can imagine a meaner, toothy-looking blenny, then you have a picture of what this fish looked like. Neither my treasured "Fishes of the Gulf of Maine" nor an Internet search produced any suspects, so for now, the species will go unknown by me.

I suppose I am ambivalent about fishing anyway. Just where are all the porgies and blowfish of my youth, I wonder, the ones we used to catch from a dinghy just offshore? Now, even using ground-bunker chum, nothing comes to my line except spider crabs, and there are plenty of those. Maybe I am just lazy, but I get bored after a few casts if nothing is coming up.

There are fish around still, I am told. The bay is filled with porgies, although fluke are apparently in decline, and there were so few winter flounder around that a contest or two has been canceled.

Nature, particularly under the sea, does follow its own, nearly unfathomable patterns. A friend told me of one harbor here that was loaded with fat bunker. He said he even saw a commercial purse seiner chasing them in Gardiner's Bay, something that hadn't been seen around here for more than 30 years. It's hard to say what to make of it all.