What woman out there hasn’t had to fend off unwanted advances from a boss, a host, a guest, a guy you just met, or a guy you know well? 

And did you know — of course you did — that if you did anything to stop him, he would shame you as “overreacting,” say “this bitch is nuts,” fire you, or give you a bad reference or a bad reputation? 

That masher owns your reputation and he knows it. In fact, he owns the future of your relationships, your career path, and your reaction to food. He can control your self-esteem. This pisses me off.

Ask yourself, as a single woman at a party, who actually sticks up for you if you put a fork in the hand of the guy with his hand in your lap or pour hot coffee on the guy who goosed you? Nobody, and you know it before you even start looking for the fork. You know it is the troublesome woman who tends to get in trouble, not the guy. The guy gets high fives for copping a feel; the girl goes to the bathroom to throw up. The woman’s voice is so often muted by the power. 

The waitress complains, she is fired; the whistleblower is transferred, and the “locker room guy” is enabled again and again.

He gets to walk into the dressing room at a beauty pageant, gets to cop a feel in a crowded elevator, French kiss you while he shakes your hand, and gets to talk dirty on the radio while everyone says, “Boys will be boys.”

The other night I was reminded of a moment in my past. I was the date of a fellow on whom I had a crush. He worked for Rolling Stone magazine, and I was invited to a function. Maybe Magazine Publishers Association dinner, who knows? I remember what I wore because I bought it especially for that night. Expensive, Calvin Klein, silk. I wanted to make a good impression. I would be meeting the other executives, wives, and significant others. We would be at the good table, I was told.

At the huge round table the crush sat on my left and another male executive on my right. (Everyone at Rolling Stone was young, so all these folks with big jobs were my age.) The guy to my right had his hand in my lap before the salad was served. At first I thought it was a napkin issue and I brushed him aside, but he was back immediately, under the tablecloth.

This was 1979. I was new to this little tribe. Eager to have this crush turn into something, I just pushed the hand away, again and again and again, more times than I can count, all the while squirming in my seat to get far from him without making a scene. (What went through my mind in a flash: Good girls are polite. Maybe it’s a mistake. Do not make a fuss. Don’t embarrass your date.) The crush was no help. He was annoyed by my fidgeting and general withdrawal from conversation. When I whispered what was happening, he whispered, “Just push him away,” and did nothing to keep the hand guy away from me. 

The feeler kept it up through the entree and dessert, up the side slit in the skirt and above. I kept pushing and glaring. Eventually, I fled to the ladies room, which kind of broke the spell. When I came back, he had begun to bother the woman on his right. Or perhaps his hand was occupied in his own lap; I failed to notice.

Looking back, I was protecting my reputation (34, in the magazine business myself, hoping for a future with the crush), but amazingly I was protecting my crush from a guy he thought had power over him. I clearly put his situation equal to or higher than my own. 

I carefully avoided the masher for the next year or so. It turned out he was famous for this misbehavior. After the crush and I parted ways, and the masher stayed on the masthead at Rolling Stone, I ran into a number of women with similar stories to tell. Gender war stories. That might what be what gets talked about in the women’s “locker rooms” — who to avoid and why.

Why did he get away with it for all those years? Because he had the power to fire, shame, demote, and degrade. Sound familiar? He took advantage of the weak and weakened the strong. His behavior, even now, makes me deeply sorry that I did not muster the courage to stick the fork in the back of his hand, or turn over a glass of wine in his lap. 

Today, in October 2016, I am running that little bit of memory in my mind over and over and over. Would have, should have, could have. Not the worst thing that ever happened in the world, and I have been lucky in my life not to have worse stories to tell, but I still wish I had literally stood up for myself, and spilled something on him in the process. I do not blame the Calvin Klein dress with the slit, but I never did wear it again. 

Who among us hasn’t felt helpless, embarrassed, angry, and crushed that a fella got “over on us,” felt vaguely that it was the fault of our dress, our behavior, or the wine, the music, the job, the ambition, the weakness, the trust, whatever, that we should have been more something or less something. Anything that wasn’t the way that we were at that moment. 

Watching TV now reminds me that most young women who make a fuss still get nowhere. We knew it then, we know it now. I wish I could say things will change. I know how I will vote with that hope in mind.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer to The Star. 

William Wordsworth’s words came crashing into my head as I tried without luck to think of something cheerful to write about yesterday.

The unexpected, accidental death of Janis Hewitt, the East Hampton Star’s longtime Montauk correspondent, threw a wrench into all our proceedings.

The world is too much with us; late and soon

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;          

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Janis wrote for The Star for so many years that her work fills six thick manila folders in the backroom file cabinets, going back to at least 1996 and clipped from the newspaper by a part-time librarian before everything was digitized. She covered the gamut — news stories, features, and many, many personal columns under the “Relay” head. It was Janis’s 1996 front-page story that announced that Montauk residents had turned down a proposition to incorporate as a separate village by a 3-to-1 margin. A few years later, in 1999, she wrote about the “nightmare” of finding seasonal housing for the summer work force. The title was “Where to Put the Irish.” 

But it is likely that she will be remembered most for the humor she brought to the “Relay” spot, which is handed around among the staff. My guess is that there are more of them from Janis than anyone else past or present who works here.

The first Janis Hewitt “Relay” I found as I made a quick survey was published on March 14, 1996. In it, she said she had decided to spend her first winter in Montauk in 1973, and she went on to describe a Santa parade during which it snowed.

The deadline for this column has long passed, but I can think of nothing — or no one — else. Today’s Star has a story about the accident that claimed her life, but the full obituary her life will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that if Janis had decided to write her own obituary it would be full of humor.

You can find a number of Janis’s columns by going to The Star website and searching for Janis Hewitt Relay. 

Suppose we were chatting and I said, “I just got back from the SHAMF and went directly to East Hampton Town Hall because the board was discussing FIMP.”

Huh? Some of you may recognize the latter acronym because it sometimes gets into The Star (over my objection), and you may be able to figure out what SHAMF stands for, especially if I give you a hint: It occurred last weekend.

Dictionary.com defines an acro­nym as “a word formed from the initial letters or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or series of words and pronounced as a separate word, as in Wac from Women’s Army Corps.” The Star follows New York Times style, so the acronym Wac would appear in capital letters in our pages (WAC), like LIPA does, for example.

It seems to me that unless, like LIPA, an acronym has been in common use among a general population for a considerable time, and is pronounced as a word — like FEMA but unlike, say, AARP, which we pronounce as a series of four letters — its meaning should be spelled out. Otherwise, it is as if our reporting were directed at a select group of readers who are in the know, regardless of what other readers are able to make of it. 

Acronyms are like jargon, which the dictionary defines as words or phrases “used by a particular profession or group . . . difficult for others to understand.” 

As an editor of a newspaper that claims it “Shines for All,” I am against both jargon and mysterious acronyms. 

Here is another example: To many reporters, I guess, it seems obvious that ACAC (even if it has an unpleasant sound, a bit too close to “caca” for my ears) refers to the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee; but is ACAC not incomprehensible if you don’t happen to live in the general vicinity of Amagansett? 

Other acronyms are softer on the ears. I have to admit that I do not mind STOP, because it stands for Stop Throwing Out Pollutants (always a good idea). As for ARF, it’s such a perfect acronym that I don’t think I have to tell anyone what it stands for.

Soliciting other easy-to-grasp acro­nyms from those around the office on Tuesday, DARE and MADD were suggested: DARE is a program that offers Drug Abuse Resistance Education to young people; most Americans would probably remember that it had something to do with daring to keep off drugs. And I guess everybody knows that MADD is an acronym for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

But, oh dear. If you look up the acronym MAD on Google — minus one “D” — you will find about 100 other possible meanings, like Mini Attack Drone, Mosquito Abatement District (I liked that one), and Mixed Anxiety and Depression. The first definition to pop up in a Google search, in bigger letters than the others, is Motorists Against Destruction. I can’t explain that one. Further down on the page you might come across a MAD acronym that, like MADD, begins with the word “Mothers”: It stands for Mothers Against Decapentaplegic. (Again, I have no idea. Apparently it has something to do with fruit flies and protein.)

Incidentally, FIMP, if you don’t happen to know, stands for Fire Island to Montauk Point, which is used in connection with what the Army Corps of Engineers calls its “reformulation study” for much of Long Island; they’ve left out the “R” and “S.” And SHAMF stands for Sag Harbor American Music Festival. I wonder if anyone has ever actually tried to say it out loud.

As has been previously established in the pages of this newspaper, I am a nerd. But I have mostly considered myself an extroverted kind of nerd who never really had a problem making friends, whether in elementary school, summer camp, high school, or college (junior high, of course, being the exception, but let’s not talk about that).

That’s why I was wholly unprepared for the difficulty I would eventually have making friends as an adult.

It is a trend that has been well documented by researchers and journalists. In April, while sharing commentary on a series of “friend dates” she had been going on, Elizabeth Bernstein, a Wall Street Journal columnist, cited a handful of studies and experts who had come to several conclusions. Among them: Adults lose friends when they become romantically involved with another person; adults have less time to invest in growing friendships, and life events such as marriages, divorces, and college graduations nfluence the shift of relationships. 

“A body of research shows that people with solid friendships live healthier, longer lives,” Ms. Bernstein wrote. “Friendship decreases blood pressure and stress, reduces the risk of depression and increases longevity, in large part because someone is watching out for us.”

I watched for many years as my father, a jovial kind of guy, made friends with ease. He was the unofficial Mayor of Everywhere We Went. He had the gift of good conversation and could chat folks up in almost any situation. Oftentimes it led not just to new clients for his contracting business but to new friends who later helped out in hard times.

I might look like my dad, but I don’t talk like he could. And for me, moving around a lot — seven times in the last six years — seriously impacted my ability to make and keep friends. Take, for example, my most recent move, to the South Fork.

When I came here in the spring of 2015, I had exactly one close friend east of the Shinnecock Canal. I was grateful for her friendship then, as I am now. But you can only ask your one friend to hang out so much before you start to be a pest or come off as clingy, and so there were a lot of subsequent dinners for one and solo evenings at the movies. I spent a lot of time and gasoline driving UpIsland, where the rest of my friends and my family were living — which then made it even harder to make friends here.

It got to the point where I seriously considered starting a simple social networking website, which I would have called Hamptons Friends or something like that, which would have been some sort of localized cross-pollination of Craigslist and Meetup.com. I checked the availability of that internet domain name once or twice — at the time, it had not been taken by anyone — but realistically, the thought of having to build and then moderate such a site seemed monstrous. It would have eaten up all the time I had available to spend socializing. Too counterintuitive. I decided I’d have to make friends the analog way.

Eventually, after I had lived here about a year, an out-of-state friend who knew of my predicament messaged me on Facebook. As it turned out, she had a friend who lived in Southampton, and she set the two of us up for a friend date at Wolffer Estate. We hit it off almost instantaneously, and have seen each other pretty often since then.

A couple of weeks ago, in casual conversation with the folks who run the John Jermain Memorial Library, the subject turned to the library’s monthly board-game night for adults. This was a no-brainer. When the time came, I piled my games into my car and headed up to Sag Harbor. As soon as the other gamers filed into the room, and we realized we shared some favorite games in common, I knew instantly that I had found where I fit in. Perhaps nerds will eventually find each other.

But even without my realizing it, over the past year and a half, the seeds of friendship had slowly been planted nearly everywhere I went: While on the job. While living in rented rooms in houses here. While taking classes at the gym or dance studio for fun. Even while waiting in line for food at La Fondita.

It’s autumn now, but those seeds have finally grown and blossomed, and it’s a really, really good feeling.

Christine Sampson covers education for The East Hampton Star.  

The last best hope for America, I’ve always thought, lay with the Kennedys, whose spirit was of the sort that would get us working with each other and for each other, but that was a long time ago, and, yes, in a different country. 

Now those stirring words have been turned on their head: “Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.”

And it appears that in Donald Trump’s case, it did a lot. He came hat in hand to the capitalist welfare state, which gave him a pass at the expense of others, for almost 20 years it’s been estimated. This is the champion of the common man? This is the guy who’s going to make things right again, who’s going to make America great again? If you believe that, I’ve got a basket of deplorables to sell you, and at a great price too, the best deplorables you’ll find anywhere, exceptional deplorables. Fresh-picked. Born yesterday in fact. Believe me, you’re going to love them.

O’en will have none of it. I’ve got a bone to pick with him, he told me. It’s not the way things are supposed to be in this country. Playing around, as we do in puppy kindergarten, is one thing, but, unlike Trump, we don’t take delight in being the humper-in-chief. We take turns at being humpers and humpees. It’s all very democratic, and quite fun, but I doubt he’ll ever get it. Clearly, he doesn’t like to share. There is no give and take with him, it’s all take. 

And now, after effectively taking us to the cleaners, paying not a scent, he asks why he wasn’t curbed, says that he wants to clean things up now so that people like him won’t be able to get away with what he got away with. Yet his tax plan eschews that loophole! I just don’t trust him, and I’m a pretty trusting sort, if treated fairly.

In sum, O’en told me that contrary to what most people said, he rather liked the idea of this country going to the dogs; that they, perhaps, in their free interweaving, more closely embodied the ideals of our founding fathers than greedy humans — so-called dog in the manger types — who were ever intent on amassing more and more toys.

And remember, he said, with an engaging smile, it’s O’en for all and all for O’en.

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.

Summer ended late this year — a whole month late, this week’s high temperatures notwithstanding. It wasn’t until October 21 that the summer sun delivered its last, loving rays as we unloaded a good few thousand lobsters and crabs from the Kim & Jake. 

The phone had chimed its text-message chime a few minutes before 7 a.m.: The Kim & Jake would tie up at 8. With a meeting in East Hampton at 11, I could work two hours at most, but there was enough time to stop for coffee on the way, and that was reason enough to head east, into the rising sun. 

I gulped the last, sugary gulp on the dock a few minutes before 8, and it was on with the boots, the apron, the gloves. The sun resplendent, I glanced north-northeast and wondered if that was Watch Hill across the gentle Sound, the breeze light and soothing — sensual like Blossom Dearie hitting the highest notes in a bouncy ragtime workout. “And you, you come from Rhode Island, and little old Rhode Island is famous for you.” 

Sometimes I am on the dock, a long steel hook in hand, and as the crew fill plastic crates with their catch and heave them from the boat, I drag them inside, one after another, where they are hoisted onto the culling table. Other times I am inside, where the lobsters, sorted by weight into larger crates, are carried to a scale and then to one of many tanks where they await the end. Here’s hoping for an auspicious rebirth, I think, as crate after tightly packed crate is dropped into the cold, cold water. 

The last couple of times, I’ve taken a turn on the boat’s deck and, once, climbed into the hold, crouching and surrounded by innumerable sullen and forlorn Jonah crabs, many hundreds of dagger eyes on me as I toss them into a tall bucket that, when filled, is lifted to the deck and poured into a crate. 

If there is one thing I know almost nothing about, it is fishing. But a few minutes of this and I do know one thing: I am not cut out for this work. Shouldn’t I be lying on an ocean beach, blissfully absorbing the last rays of summer? Yes, but no: The winter is long and I must earn what I can while the summer lasts. 

My short unhappy career concluded, I return to the deck and the captain takes a turn below as the crew work another hold. I raise the bucket, dump it into the crate, and turn the crabs upright. A claw closed on a finger will make a man cry, I’m told. For now, I must take their word for it. Fortunately, the beasts move slowly. 

Back on the dock, I gaze eastward toward Shagwong Point, site of so much, so-long-ago sunshine and merriment, and beyond. Summer. Endless Summer. The Endless Summer, like that old surf movie, or that Beach Boys compilation, multipart harmonies pouring forth like the midmorning sun on the last day of summer. 

The love of my life

She left me one day

I cried when she said

I don’t feel the same way

Still I have the warmth of the sun

Summer ended in the afternoon. Famished and unable to wait for a promised clam pie, I sipped lukewarm soup in the car, the rain starting quickly and then pouring down, the cover haphazardly thrown across the broken, leaking convertible top, me inside, drenched and in near darkness as an old man shouted angrily on the radio. Time to kill and nowhere to go. 

Go east, not-so-young man, go east, a voice whispered. Toward the rising sun. 

Or south, maybe. To the endless summer. 

But just go. 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

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.

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.