If, when you get behind the wheel of a car, your thoughts turn toward auto accidents, or if, when you board a plane, you worry that it will crash, you are apt to face your digital life with trepidation, too. 

When you learned that Russian rogue operators (or were they put up to it by the Politbureau?) had hacked into the computers of members of the Democratic National Committee, for example, did you say to yourself, “Yikes! I better watch out”? Or did you feel perfectly secure in being a small potato, like I did?

This week my antennas went up, however, when I received two suspicious emails in a row that weren’t connected with anything I recognized. The first came from “support” — with a lower case “s” — and no further identifiers. It asked me to reset my password. My password for what? That wasn’t indicated. I read the email but did not follow its directions. That was not a hard decision, but then the second came, from someone purporting to be Howard Yang of No. 200, Changjiang West Road, Hefei, China. 

His message was that Tankp Capital Limited had applied to register easthamptonstar as “their brand name” and that I should let him know if that company was authorized by my company “as soon as possible in order that we can deal with this problem timely.” 

I’m a pretty curious person, and I am a pretty good proofreader. The grammar was a little off. I am also someone who tries to be polite when I call a “help desk” about a problem with some device or system and reach someone whose English is heavily accented; just because the email might not come from someone with impeccable English didn’t mean it was a scam. In the case of Howard Yang, however, curiosity got the better of me.

Going to Google, I searched to find out if Mr. Yang’s address could be a legitimate one. Was there such a street and such a street number? Someone did seem to be running a trading company — selling groceries and dry goods — from that address. On Tripadvisor, I learned that accommodations were available at the 7 Days Inn or the Jinjiang Inn High Tech Zone in Hefei, China, otherwise known as Anhui. I then decided to see if Tankp Capital Limited could be found at any address. After a bit of a diversion during which the algorithms thought I might be trying to buy Chinese tank tops, I wasted a bit of time looking at a corporation named NKP, rather than Tankp, based in Dubai. After a while of perusing the mission of NKP, I looked at hotels in Dubai, too, trying to remember the one I stayed in once while en route to Ethiopia in 2011. Finally, looking for gentlemen by the name of Howard Yang in the city of Heifei, I at last came across a website called domainnamescam. wordpress.com — and, hey, presto! There he was. Good old Howard.

Concerns about how much time adults as well as children spend in front of screens have been in the news recently. American children from 5 to 16 apparently spend more than six hours a day starring at screens, while, according to the Nielsen Company, adults devote about 10 hours and 39 minutes each day to consuming media, including tablets, smartphones, personal computers, video games, radios, DVDs, DVRs, and TVs. Perhaps that’s the reason Donald Trump won the election.

I’ve been reading in comparative mythology recently, about ritual regicide, virgin births, thefts of fire, trees of life and of death, resurrections . . . that kind of thing, and apparently, at least according to Joseph Campbell, it’s all one — more or less the same stories and symbols from Day One aimed at reconciling earth with the heavens. 

“Ad astrum per aspera,” I said to O’en this morning as we headed, with hope, for The Star. And no sooner had I sat down than the phone rang. A call from the West Coast, from my erstwhile doubles partner, Gary Bowen, with whom I’ve won East Hampton Indoor tournaments in successive summers. 

He hesitated at first when I answered. “Do I sound like Mary?” I asked.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he said, I did. 

“We’re becoming one!” I said. “Like the myths — the earth goddess entwined double helix-like with the slayer of aging doubles teams.”

We talked about meeting up around February (when our ninth grandchild is to be born out there) and were commiserating about the winter and the election and about how we yearned to scrap the rurally biased Electoral College when he had to sign off to go do battle.

I shall gird my loins tomorrow, at high noon, and it is in this wise that we agile-for-our-age septuagenarians, not unmindful of our blessings, aim for the stars — engraved plaques at least. 

The Independent today quoted Einstein to the effect that to some nothing in life is miraculous and to some everything is. I would definitely put O’en, our 5-month-old white golden, in the latter camp. 

“We think nothing of walking around the block, but can you imagine what it’s like to walk around the block for him?!” I asked Mary. A garden of delights — the effluvia ever new all the time. Transcendence in the temporal. Beset by fear and desire we cling — that’s our “leash.” He is not so constrained — he just is.

We agreed that we should follow his lead. And in fact that is, when we are out on our walks, what we usually do

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.

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.

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.

News that the Maidstone Club, having just gotten a new irrigation system in place for its golf course, now wants to build a new bridge over an upper reach of Hook Pond reminded me of my childhood in East Hampton Village. In those days, the mid-1970s, we could roam a lot more freely than kids can today. 

From about seventh grade on, my friends and I spent a lot of time poking around Hook Pond and the Nature Trail dreen. From my family’s house behind the library, we could walk with our fishing poles and a bucket of worms across to Jeffery’s Lane, past the club tennis house, and onto the course’s longer bridge.

Other times we could push a little farther, crossing the bottom of a field that was still farmed to get to a shorter, falling down span known as Joiner’s Bridge. That bridge, which also reaches the golf course, was recently rebuilt by the new property owner on the private side of the pond. It still appears as if it is decaying into the pond, but this time on purpose.

In retrospect, I suppose we were trespassing when we cast for bass and perch from the pond’s bridges, but no one ever objected. In fact, golfers often would stop to ask how the fishing was going. Nowadays, the feeling is different; I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone fishing from either of these bridges, let alone the Dunemere Lane vehicle bridge, and there are signs reminding would-be visitors that the course itself is private property. May­­be there are fewer fish. 

My son, Ellis, and I got it into our minds to see what was what from the Main Beach side of the pond the other day. And, while we saw signs of fish splashing on the surface, we could get nothing to rise to our hooks.

For my dollar, I would prefer not to see another bridge over the pond, which belongs to the town trustees, but if the club insists that it has to have one, perhaps it might be willing sweeten the pot by allowing the public to fish from its crossings again.

The whole social-media dance has gone on for a long time now but, given its growth and its impact on the world in which we live, it seems well past time for me to get with the program. I use a Mac for work and read and write emails all day, every day, but beyond that I really have not participated in the revolution in how people communicate with each other.

When my eldest granddaughter, who at that time already had an iPhone, started using Instagram at the age of about 12 or 13, I wondered what the world was coming to: Wasn’t she too young? When some years later my youngest granddaughter, barely 9 years old this summer, tried to set me up on Instagram, I smiled benignly but ignored the whole thing. By then, my daughter-in-law had started posting stories from The East Hampton Star on Facebook, and although I clicked occasionally to find out which stories were attracting notice, I didn’t pay much attention.

I do have a Facebook account, but I rarely look at it and have no idea how many Facebook “friends” I may have. I do know, however, that my husband has many more. He has always been gregarious, and seems to have “friended” all of my friends online, as well as his own. Without trying to, he has become my social-media social secretary. When I forget someone’s birthday, his Facebook alert, promptly relayed, allows me to remain in good stead. 

I can remember when the activists at Tiananmen Square got news from the outside world via fax. More recently, the Arab Spring, another kind of revolution, was sparked by activism on social media. ISIS uses Facebook and other platforms (hey, at least I know some of the lingo) to spread hatred and recruit young men and women from the West. You can’t pick up a copy of The New York Times without finding articles about hacking and cyber war that often go right over my head and, I assume, many people of my generation. 

And then, of course, we have Donald Trump, with his addled talk of “the cyber.” I have read that, incredibly, he is even more behind the times than I am when it comes to computer literacy. Reportedly, he didn’t own a computer until about 2007, and his real estate business still uses a Windows operating system from 2003. But isn’t it fitting that he has embraced Twitter as his own favorite means of mass-communication, given his accusation that traditional media are part of a giant, secret conspiracy against him? (A news-media conspiracy that, by the way, the Illuminati or the “international bankers” or whoever else it is who is supposed to be running it have completely forgotten to tell me about.)

Not wanting to get left behind by history, I spent some time this morning trying to get up to speed on some relatively more up-to-date forms of social media. I came away with a list of the 12 most popular platforms in this country: In order, according to one source, they are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Tumblr, Vine, WhatsApp, Reddit, Flicker, and Pinterest. 

That’s too many for me to digest. Maybe one of our schools or libraries will take up the social media challenge by offering adult-ed courses for people like me. I would be the first to sign up.

In the meantime, I noticed an interesting headline on Google News this afternoon, from The Independent: “We Probably Just Heard a Message From Aliens, Scientists Say.” Apparently, extremely odd and inexplicable noises and modulations are emanating from a set of stars in deep space. 

I wonder if anyone will be offering a course in interplanetary communications one day soon? We’ve seen a lot of wonders in our lifetimes. If it all comes to pass, and our civilizations do make contact, I really have my fingers crossed that the first human being the aliens speak with at that intergalactic-introductions ceremony isn’t President Trump.

When Rob Balnis asked if I were coming to work out Saturday morning, I immediately said yes, inasmuch as the football game would be Friday night, at Mercy.

“We’re 0-6,” I said, “and so are they.”

“Really? I thought we’d won a couple.”

“That’s probably because of the way I’ve been writing things up. Losses become wins in my vernacular. You always want to look on the bright side,” I said, by way of explanation, before humming a few bars from the Monty Python song. 

Then he stuck the knife in. “What happened to the Steelers?!”

“A friend of mine is a Dolphins fan and he asked me over to watch the game,” I said. “I was so sure they’d win I told him I’d take a Xanax before I came — I didn’t want to annoy the hell out of him. Ultimately I didn’t go — a blessing in retrospect — and went to puppy kindergarten instead, which, in contrast to the game, was pure joy.”

Frankly, as a pick-me-up I know of nothing, nothing really, that can beat puppy kindergarten. They’re all so happy to see each other, having apparently absented themselves from felicity for a week. Unleash them and the party’s on — at play in ARF’s backyard.

I would recommend attendance to anyone, especially to anyone beset at times by depression. You will come away saying, like Florentino in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” keep on sailing.

Henry, I’d thought, would be our last dog, but, as my brother-in-law reminds from time to time, if you have love to give, give it.

“I’m the one being trained,” I said in the newsroom the other day when asked how O’en’s training was going. 

Trained to give my heart to someone else, which, for me, at least, isn’t easy. 

So I’m determined to do my best when it comes to that. It will be, I’m quite sure, my last chance.

Mary said they’d discontinued her makeup, and I said the things we liked seemed always to be discontinued, like the fleecy warm-up pants I just had had sewn, and which I’ll wear every day now until the end of eternity.

And, yes, not to sound too morose a note, our lives will be discontinued as well, and to prepare I’ve begun hauling my regrets to the dump to be deposited in the far corner with corrosive things unfit for recycling. 

Montaigne said that if you’d lived a while by the time death came you were pretty much dead anyway, so there really wasn’t much to it. Meanwhile he continued planting his cabbages, as I do too in a way if you consider what a wonderful compost heap could be made of my outpourings. 

Speaking of compost, we had to get rid of ours — just as was the case with my regrets — because rats, we thought, were delighting in it, as they evidently also were with the birdseed on the ground. I caught onetwothreejustlikethat in a Havahart trap, and felt very proud of myself, much as O’en does when he’s strutting ahead of me with a stick between his teeth.

Discontinuing the bird feeding has deprived us of colorful and compelling company, though I guess it had to be done, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, divested of regrets for the time being, I can, perhaps like the rats in the compost, spend more time delighting in transitory things, in the woodsmoke scent of Mary’s hair, in her warmth and laughter, and in the golden light at the end of summer days, in the memory of the proud tilt of a little wren’s head, and in O’en’s black eyes.

For, in the end, that’s it! That’s all there is, folks.

Let’s not blame the election but bad international news coverage for not knowing about the Peace Boat. You may not have heard about it, and I would not have if I had not been paying attention to what Judy Lerner, a part-time East Hampton resident and a nonagenarian, has been up to lately.

Peace Boat’s mission is to promote a nuclear-free world and the 17 “sustainable development goals” of the United Nations. It left Japan on Aug. 18, headed for 21 countries in 104 days. It docked at Pier 90 in Manhattan last month, with five atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki aboard, here to offer testimony at the U.N., and it sponsored a “Floating Festival for Sustainability” onboard on Oct. 20. Judy Lerner was there.

Ms. Lerner was honored with the William Sloane Coffin Jr. Peacemaker Award in early October by the Peace Action Fund of New York State. A longtime special-education teacher and former teachers union president who raised three children in Harrison, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., she has been a peace activist since at least 1971, when she was among the founders of Women Strike for Peace, which fought nuclear testing. She has been all over the world, fact-gathering and attending forums, including Cuba (when it was off-limits), Vietnam (with the antiwar movement ), Japan, China, Kenya, and Denmark. 

  Ms. Lerner was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for 20 years. Now the director of the executive committee of the 1,000-member Non-Governmental Organization Department of Public Information, she spends three or four days a week at the U.N., where she works to engage others, particularly the young, in its activities.

Cora Weiss, a part-time East Hamptoner who was profiled in The Star in August, gave a few words of introduction to Ms. Lerner at the dinner at which the Peacemaker award was presented. Speaking of Mr. Coffin, she said he could gather people of different persuasions together. “And you,” Ms. Weiss said, referring to Ms. Lerner, “persuade people also: to campaign against nuclear weapons, to call for no more war, to work together with other peace groups, to learn about the United Nations, and to call for education for peace in our schools.”

Noting that she was almost 95 years old, Ms. Lerner also spoke. “I only hope that I reach 100 years and can look back at all of my work and struggle for a world without war. . . . Together we will not only ensure peace and equality, but we will do something else significant. We will disrupt aging!” 

East Hampton is often thought of as a place where celebrities roam, and that is not incorrect. But among our celebrities are people who would never think of themselves in that way, but whose life work may help make this a better world.