Why are there Russian teenagers wearing $700 down parkas on the popcorn line at the East Hampton Cinema?

I walked over to the movie theater on Main Street the other night thinking about high blood pressure, and how I ought to exercise more, and nearly blew a gasket when the ticket-taker told me he had to search my bag. 

“Are you serious?” I asked. “What for?” 

“For guns,” he said, gesturing like his hand was a pistol: “Guns.” 

“Are you serious?” 

I turned from the ticket-taker to the suited guy in the booth for confirmation. “Is he serious?” 

“He’s serious. It’s company policy.” 

The ticket-taker poked around in my floral cinch-top bucket bag for a concealed weapon. “Not guns here, so much, but guns other places,” he said. “It’s Regal Cinema’s national policy.” 

“Really?” I said, looking pointlessly around at the Russian teenagers for sup port. “I’m still upset that you don’t sell Peanut Chews anymore — and now you have to search our bags for guns?” 

The man in the ticket booth gave a quizzical nod of empathy. 

I continued to protest: “I’m still upset that when you phone 324-0448 you don’t hear the recorded movie times anymore . . . and now you’re searching our bags for guns?” The guy in the booth shrugged, gave a weak smile, and turned away. 

Obviously, they are not as sentimental as I am at the East Hampton Cinema about phone numbers and Peanut Chews. I moved home from Nova Scotia last year, after seven or eight living in Canada, and have spent the last 18 months complaining about changes around town, much to the irritation of my children. 

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. 

What happened to the red rosebushes on the fence at Odd Fellows Hall (a.k.a. Gordon Peavy’s dance studio, a.k.a. Eileen Fisher)? How did they become so meager?

The matching, velvety-red roses on the fence at the train station? I can guess what happened to those ones: The evergreens someone planted to “beautify” the space parallel to the platform grew so tall while I was away in Canada that the rosebushes no longer get enough sun. The train-station-fence roses are a frail shadow of their former glory. Who is in charge of the roses? Can I write a letter to someone?

When did people start calling the East Hampton Town Board the “town council”?

Am I the only one who is unhappy with the newfangled Halloween ritual of marching children store to store for trick-or-treating instead of letting them run (somewhat) wild and (relatively) unchaperoned through darkened neighborhoods?

I have accustomed myself to the sight of the men and women in pseudo-Moroccan caftans or Vilebrequin swim trunks who whiz down the street on bicycles or skateboards as they simultaneously fiddle with their phones, eyes down, but I do worry I will run one of them over with my car.

The parking lots at the ocean beaches this summer were, predictably, even more crowded than they were eight years ago, but, weirdly, the water was emptier. Why aren’t there more swimmers? Do people only swim in pools nowadays?

Furthermore, where is the white corn?

Winston Churchill — supposedly — said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” I have to admit I must be middle-aged now. I will never be conservative politically, but I’m a radical conservative when it comes to preservation of any sort, even of things like Peanut Chews, the natural-born right of Americans to jaywalk, and telephone area codes.

I’d like to turn back time to the summers when small children didn’t wear string bikinis. A functional one-piece maillot or, for the very-very young, just running naked at the beach was better. The weekend after Labor Day, I saw a mite of about 5 or 6 wearing tiny bikini bottoms with no top other than a peekaboo white-crochet halter: the Kim Kardashian look for the kindergarten set.

Does this make me a curmudgeon?

The caste system out here has definitely gotten more entrenched — the class divide more shocking — since I left the country in 2009. I mean, have you ever seen so many Maseratis in your life? Are all these new Euro summer people shipping them over for the season on freighters, or what? My children, in July, took to counting them as we sat in traffic, en route to day camp: two Maseratis where the bowling alley used to be, a vintage DeLorean near where the horses used to graze at Hardscrabble, a Bugatti here, a Lamborghini there. . . .

In a Sag Harbor home-goods store, a few weeks ago, I noticed a set of highly expensive throw pillows with screen prints of Masai warriors’ faces as a decorative motif. People’s exoticized “ethnic” likenesses as an interior-decoration pattern: That’s not just bad taste, that’s a whole other level of . . . something not good. Obtuseness about our own privileges, maybe?

Because I cannot end this short essay on a grinch-like note, I will now press myself to admit that not all the changes I’ve noticed since my return home are entirely bad. Some of them are actually good.

I’m glad the public in general is finally talking about beach-access rights.

And our food, for instance, has gotten even better. It’s spectacular, really. Farm stands have proliferated; that’s beautiful to see. I cannot understand who is buying $10 single servings of bottled juice at Citarella — 10 dollars? really? for a single-serve watermelon juice? — but I practically swooned when I found smoked, locally caught bluefish salad in Amagansett not long ago.

True, I haven’t heard the cry of a single whippoorwill since I got back from Canada, but there were far more fireflies flashing and beaming in my yard all August than there ever were before. The pleasant chorus of insects at night is far, far louder than it used to be, too — are those cicadas?

I can’t get behind the chic-ifying of the Old Stove Pub, but I’m so glad the luncheonette at the Poxabogue golf course hasn’t changed, and that the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton hasn’t changed an iota, either. The only thing at the Candy Kitchen that has altered over the last decade is the ketchup dispenser: It used to be the pointy-ended squeeze-bottle kind, with which you could apply a smiley face to your hamburger patty. Do you remember? The squeeze bottle. I miss that.

Bess Rattray is a freelance writer and editor for The Star’s East magazine whose work has appeared in Vogue, Vogue.com, Bookforum, ELLE, and Salon.com.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Concerned Citizens of Montauk forum. I had been invited to take part by its president, Jeremy Samuelson, and had expected the subject for Saturday’s discussion might include summertime crowds, water quality, and short-term rentals. But as it turned out, the nearly two-hour meeting centered on only one thing: the United States Army Corps of Engineers sandbag seawall.

One of the problems with off-season policy discussions is how soon we forget. The South Fork, and Montauk in particular, is overcrowded in the summer, and one would think that how to regain a degree of control might be taken up. However, with Montauk’s main commercial district jeopardized by the immediate threat of storms and the long-term certainty of sea level rise, thoughts of what to do about it tend to dominate.

Much of downtown Montauk is simply in the wrong place. Few, if any, of the 90-plus people, as well as those of us on the panel, seemed to disagree with that observation. There was less unanimity about what to do.

During the forum, I said that the Army Corps’s offer to place hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand on the ocean beach will only put off the day of reckoning. Human nature being what it is, I said, once the immediate threat of the front row of motels falling into the sea is gone, attention will shift to other issues.

Paul Monte, the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, spoke for many when he said he favored an ongoing program of sand replenishment to buy time until a long-term answer is found. For that, he received a round of applause.

My comment that the Army Corps should be removed from the coastal management business in favor of a different, more natural resource-focused federal agency was well taken. The corps is all about protecting structures and private property. Tellingly, I think, its symbol is a tower-like, immovable stone fortress — wholly at odds with the dynamics of shifting shorelines and climate change.

Over all, I was impressed both by the size of the audience at the forum and by the crowd’s sharp attention. It is difficult to imagine as large a group with as intense a focus anywhere else on the East End.

Had I met Larry Brown at the pickup games the other night, I would, had I not been barred at the gates — “No media,” they said, though, looking about, it seemed I was the sole medium around — have told him that were he to coach here I intended to become the legal guardian of our 10 and 7-year-old basketball-crazed grandsons who live in Perrysburg, Ohio.

The more the merrier, I say. After all, we’ve got a puppy who, in dog terms, will approach their ages in little more than a year. It would enliven the house, whose upstairs, while beautifully appointed now, is unoccupied. And there’s a Ping-Pong table in the basement that’s looking lonely.

Puppies keep you on your toes, and so do grandchildren. It occurs to me, however, that it will be hard to train O’en out of jumping up if Jack and Max, in going for the hoop, which, of course, we’d put outside, are always doing so.

A friend of my daughter’s, one who’s around my age, told Emily during a recent visit to Sewickley, Pa., that her kids reminded her of me at their age, though while I can lay claim to having been as athletic (my mother said I was running at 9 months), they, as I think is the case with all eight of my grandchildren, are smarter. I can do letters, but not numbers, which, of course, is why I was entrusted to do the budget stories for this paper in the past, and why I’m wondering if I’ve counted correctly. A ninth grandchild — I think I have it right — is to arrive in February.

The puppy has already outgrown the crate we had, and in bringing a bigger one upstairs this morning — on loan from a co-worker, Kathleen— I said to Greg, who was helping me, that O’en might be easier to look after in the office than at home — because we hadn’t taught him to read yet. 

Seriously, if Larry Brown becomes East Hampton High’s boys basketball coach, won’t this place become a lodestone for young relations, however distant the bloodline and however far-flung, who love shooting hoops?

The dribbling tide might put a strain on the school systems, but it could well revivify East Hampton’s aging population. It would get the blood flowing again.

Or maybe puppies alone will suffice.

A Trump voter told me a joke the other night about how Jesus was in the back office at the Pearly Gates using Hillary Clinton’s “lie clock” as a ceiling fan. It was amusing when he told it, though thinking about it later I figured it would not win any comedy awards.

In this man’s view, what he called Mrs. Clinton’s mendacity was the reason he didn’t like her; he did not care for Donald Trump much either, and said that if there were a viable alternative candidate on the right, he would consider voting for him or her. Then he said some things about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and I changed the subject.

Politics are in the air even here on the South Fork this August (as the “Connections” column above attests). Mr. Trump was at Woody Johnson’s house on Highway Behind the Pond in the village the other day for a fund-raiser. Mrs. Clinton will be around this weekend for her own round of events. As they say in Manhattan when a dignitary is in town, expect delays.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul stopped by the Star office late on Wednesday last week. She was here for an overnight in the area in advance of a clean-energy announcement in Montauk the next day. As I gave her a brief tour of the building, the subject of the election came up. 

She said she had known Mrs. Clinton since she was in Congress some years back, and had been struck by the same quality I had noted the one brief time I saw her speak: how authentic she seemed. Bernie Sanders people, as well as the Trump voter with the joke will differ with that observation, but Ms. Hochul’s take mirrored my own, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Clinton comes across as someone who knows what she is talking about when one hears her speak. And it seems to come from the heart.

 Mr. Trump also seems to believe strongly in what he says, even though only a fraction of it is true, or could even be considered rational. It was odd, listening to the Trump guy after having read in The Times just that morning that Mr. Trump claims his golf courses are valued at more than $50 million each on disclosure forms and in public boasts, but he says they are worth far less in property tax filings. Whose lies one tolerates depends on one’s point of view, that much is clear.

A biblical-grade plague descended on Montauk in recent days, according to residents and visitors. And what has people talking is not the oversupply of bros and hipsters. 

Swarming black flies have suddenly appeared at Montauk Point and on north-facing beaches in stunning numbers. As far as I know, these are not the same dreaded black flies of New Hampshire and Maine — those things leave swelling welts; the Montauk menaces just hurt like hell.

I first met up with the flies with my son, Ellis, at Hither Hills, where we had gone to snorkel and look at fish on Saturday. Going into the water, there was no sign of what was to come, but when we emerged it was as if we had stumbled into a nest of hornets. 

Slapping at our legs and arms, Ellis and I ran to my truck, jumped inside, and started to go. The problem was that a good three dozen of the flies had followed us into the cab. It was difficult to fend them off my exposed ankles and drive at the same time, let me tell you.

Monday night, getting out of the water after surfing near Montauk Point, it was even worse. Hundreds of them, drawn, it was clear, by the moisture on my skin and surfboard, rushed in. Cursing and stumbling, I made my way as quickly as possible back up the trail. The bug spray that I had stashed with my flip-flops did nothing at all, diluted, I assumed, by the saltwater still on my skin.

It is kind of a fitting thing, I suppose, right when the waves are getting good, thanks to Hurricane Gaston far out in the ocean to the east and surfers have a little more time to get in the water, that a new challenge, like the flies, arises. There’s a bit of poetry in that, cussing like a sailor nothwithstanding. 

Perhaps someone among our readers knows where a bundle of damp beach things came from and will tell me. I found it on an upholstered stool near the living room door one afternoon in early August, and accused my 15-year-old grandson of knowing who left it there. He had arrived that day alone and left on foot and was as puzzled as I.

The bundle contained a thick, dark-blue towel about six feet long with a handsome insignia on it for Fighting Chance, the Sag Harbor organization that aids those struggling with cancer; a pale-orange T-shirt made of nylon and elastane with the brand name O’Neill emblazoned across the chest, and a red pair of GapKids extra-large boy’s bathing trunks. The shirt and trunks were obviously much too small for the 15-year-old and ridiculously too big for either of my 6-year-old grandsons.

I took them to the laundry room, where they have remained, and when I picked them up to take another look, a week later, they were still damp. August certainly was muggy, wasn’t it?

None of the neighbors is a young man, and no one seemed to have visitors who would fit into the trunks or shirt. Could this be one of those cases in which random roving summer visitors wander into the wrong house? You do hear about people coming home and finding strangers napping in the flower bed or porch swing.

Well, if anyone can claim these things, please give me a call. They looked almost new, and the swimming days of summer are nearly over.

Another August mystery, at least for me, is how the term “August people” became ubiquitous. I must lead a pretty sheltered life in the summer — hiding out, as so many of us do, to the point of almost becoming antisocial — because I hadn’t heard these words used pejoratively until a recent Star staff meeting. 

About a month ago, when a Bloomberg journalist phoned to ask for my opinion on what the nickname for this summer would turn out to be — something usually comes to the fore, like “the summer of the Surf Lodge” or “the summer before Sandy,” in reference to the hurricane — I suggested “the summer crowding got out of control,” which she said was too obvious to catch on. (She was right. It’s not exactly catchy. And heaven knows we’ve been saying the crowding has been “the worst” every summer for 15 or 20 years now . . . though this year, honestly, I think the cultural consensus is that it’s finally and indisputably true that we’ve reached maximum capacity. Anyway.)  

Later, I asked around and found that a number of friends and colleagues thought “August people”could be used for the whole season, to indicate it really had been the most dire: the summer of the August people.

Unpleasantries were described: a tenant who screamed at a landlord, claiming he was spying on her, when he arrived to pick up the garbage; a woman at a shop counter who angrily demanded her change be made more quickly; more and more drivers refusing to give way when obviously appropriate; neighborly pleasantries greeted with snarls and snubs; “namaste” being turned into a passive-aggressive come-back . . . and on and on.

“August people” as a concept was explained by the theory that visitors become tense and unpleasant, and occasionally aggressive, because they are desperately trying to squeeze the last few drops out of a waning summer (for which, in some cases, they have paid dearly). But this year, I was told, the August behavior had begun in July.

It was the summer of rudeness, they said.

Now, I’m not sure I buy it that the rudeness was turned up a notch, but I don’t really have anything better to suggest.

But while we’re on the subject: If you read my account here last week of the first Hamptons Institute panel at Guild Hall, at which the audience booed and hissed, you might be interested to hear that the second panel, on the Supreme Court, went smoothly, with nary a catcall. The audience was quiet and respectful of what the panelists had to say, and Alec Baldwin was engaged and engaging as moderator. It was August, yes, but everyone acted just like April.

I was sorry to miss the third panel, but from the live-streamed version on YouTube, it seemed the audience had reverted to form.

Who would have thought an audience at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater listening to a panel discussion on “Presidential Politics” would take to booing and hissing? But, yes, that’s what happened on Aug. 15. Even Ken Auletta, the eminent writer, appeared nonplused in his role as moderator. 

It became apparent early on that Democrats were in the majority in the packed house when Gov. Howard Dean stated that “Hillary is truthful,” and the audience broke into applause. The laughter and booing ensued when John Jay LaValle, an attorney and former supervisor of Brookhaven Town who was a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention, called his nominee “blatantly honest.” Some also booed when he that said Mr. Trump was a private person who just wasn’t used to using “politically correct” language. But Mr. LaValle was applauded when he said policy issues should be the focus of the campaign.

It was a rowdy evening. John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of  The Nation, got into a few brief shouting matches, beginning with one over their opinions of Bernie Sanders. Mr. Podhoretz was “extremely distressed” by the support Senator Sanders had received in the Democratic primaries, and he called socialism “a horror.” Ms. vanden Heuvel not only said she had supported the senator but that he “did a great service for the country.” Mr. Auletta asked them to cool it.

There also were shouts when Mr. Podhoretz said he would not vote for either presidential candidate and when Ms. vanden Heuvel said Jimmy Carter had been the best president. All this passion made for a lively evening, although Mr. Podhoretz’s insistence on continuing to speak when it was someone else’s turn put his arguments at something of a disadvantage. 

There were some things all the panelists agreed on: that many Americans feel disenfranchised and that the economy should be made to work for everybody; also, that even if Mr. Trump lost the election “Trumpism” would continue in our popular culture. Each of the pundits damned the media, agreeing it was “corporatized,” while Governor Dean expanded on that subject, saying short-term profit-making goals had warped dependable reporting. Mr. Auletta remarked that people today often pay attention only to those mediums that reinforce their pre-existing opinions.

Mr. Dean had the last word.

Noting that war after war had plagued Europe over the centuries, and mentioning our own war of 1776, he said a democratic political system was a step ahead for humanity because it was a substitute for war. The audience voiced its approval loudly again when he said, “Hillary will be a great president.”

While shouting isn’t what you expect when you go out for a panel discussion, it seemed to demonstrate how the toxic tenor of this year’s presidential campaign has seeped under the skin of even the most staid Hamptonites. (You can check out what went down by going to Guild Hall’s YouTube channel, but take note that while the panelists can be heard clearly, the commotion in the audience is muted.) The second of three programs sponsored by Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute, this one on the Supreme Court, took place Monday and was live-streamed. A third, on Aug. 29, will be on the topic of President Obama’s legacy. Tickets are hard to come by. Prepare for Round Three.

I came home from work two Tuesdays ago to find my 8-year-old daughter wearing a fancy summer dress, with her hair brushed nicely after a day at camp. “I’m ready to meet Hillary,” she announced.

When I told her that I did not think that would happen, she crumpled. “Why not? You said she’s here. You said we might see her.” 

Ever since learning that Hillary Clinton would be visiting East Hampton, Jade had been hoping she would have a chance to meet her. It’s my fault for mentioning that it was a slim possibility. I mismanaged her expectations. A failure of Parenting 101. 

It’s a curious thing, her fascination with Hillary. She’s the only famous person, aside from Elsa from “Frozen,” whom Jade has ever wanted to meet face to face. 

On Primary Day, she told me, “Mom, you have to vote for Hillary. We need to have a girl president!” 

“Woman,” I reminded her, but it floored me, first that she had any idea what was happening in national politics, and then that she had such a strong opinion of who should get my vote and why. A simple reason, and a lot of people would say that’s not enough, but clearly the significance of this election for women is not lost on little girls. 

Trump, she says, “is too bossy.” 

I’ve heard kids the same age as Jade chatting on the beach about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and which one they thought stood a better chance of winning and for what reasons. 

My son, who’s 6, refers to the whole thing as “the Lady and the Trump.” 

Pundits and pollsters would do well to listen to what children are saying. It’s hard to kid a kid. 

I’ve never met Donald Trump, but had the chance to meet Hillary as a much younger reporter. And like many who live in East Hampton, I’ve seen her from afar here a number of times. I know someone who’s related to someone who’s a close friend and someone else who’s a friend of a friend, and so on and so on. In Jade’s mind, it stood to reason that a meeting was assured. 

When I was not that much older than she is and obsessed with all things Beatles, I would beg my parents to drive me by the Eastman estate, hoping I might see Paul McCartney just going out or just returning. Where I got my intel, I cannot be sure; we had just moved to East Hampton and knew only a handful of people. There were tall hedges surrounding most of the property, but as I recall there were some gaps by the tennis court, so when we drove by for the second or ninth or 23rd time, I would pay particular attention to the tennis court area. I’m pretty sure, though I cannot be certain, that once I saw his calves and his feet, but I never met him or saw his face in the height of my obsession. To this day, that’s one celebrity sighting that still holds a thrill. 

I didn’t go to such lengths to help Jade satisfy her desire to meet Hillary. There were no Spielberg estate drive-bys, we didn’t wait with a banner outside one of her fund-raising destinations, but boy did I kick myself when I saw Doug Kuntz’s photo of the Clintons smiling as they shook hands with a friendly passer-by at the Georgica Beach parking lot. Had we been in the right place at the right time, it could have been Jade. 

Back at home that Tuesday night, Jade sadly accepted that her face-to-face with Hillary was not in the cards this time around. The fact that she was so confident it could be is a beautiful thing. My daughter is 8 and she believes a woman could be president and she believes she will meet her. 

There will be a next time, I hope, and my smart and determined girl, a future leader to be sure, will be ready. 

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. 

I remember Arthur Roth likened dying to getting on a train. Here comes the train, he said, soon before he did. I’ve got to get on.

I, on the other hand, am thinking of jumping out of a plane. I did that as a youth, for a brief period, and, as I said to Rob Balnis, my personal trainer, the other day, it was at the same time scary and fun.

Whenever Mary and I go by Spadaro Airport, I say, “Why don’t we jump out of a plane,” but she will have none of it. I won’t either, not after having seen a friend of mine’s cheeks flap like a Bassett’s ears in the wind in the video of his 75th birthday’s descent.  I just say it to get a rise out of her. 

I didn’t puff myself up too much in telling jump stories at East End Physical Therapy. I just did it in training, I told them, never in combat. And there was no free-falling to speak of, only for the first couple of seconds before your chute, attached to a communal clothesline of sorts, popped open.

At jump school, we leaped from a 34-foot tower, 34 feet apparently being the height at which you either would or wouldn’t. And if you froze, they sometimes gave you a little nudge. There was no standing on ceremony. One guy prodded thus, did a 180 and grabbed the tower floor with both hands and dangled there. “He was the most athletic of us all,” I said. 

We were attached to a line there too, one that slanted down toward a berm. “Like a zip line?” said Rob. “Yes, like that.”

“Me and Jerry Hey used to take paperbacks with us when we jumped — there was this wonderful bookstore where we went all the time, Tuttle’s, of Okinawa and Rutland, Vermont, who would ever have thought of that? I used to read James Agee’s ‘A Death in the Family’ as we circled the drop zone. Hey would be reading Henry V’s ‘Once more unto the breach . . . stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. . . .’ ”

We were paper tigers, not King Henry’s kind. There was no noble lustre in our eyes. I wound up clerking for the chaplain and did time teaching tennis in satisfaction of a minor offense before I was discharged, having never left the island except to visit Yap and Babelthuap.

“At any rate,” I said to Rob. “I’ve come to the conclusion that jumping out of a plane serves well as a metaphor for birth and death. And I wish I could tell you, when it comes to the latter, whether my chute opens.”

I have always been able to draw. Not Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci draw, but I have always had the knack to make a thing look like the thing it is supposed to be. 

As a grammar school student, faced with high school, my parents encouraged me to apply to the High School of Music and Art. Uh-oh, a portfolio was needed for that. 

Now, I could draw, but I was never the easel painter artist who followed a muse and just had to create. I was always the fulfill-the-assignment kind of drawer. So, for the portfolio I had to make as a seventh grader I listened to my mother (who acted as my art director) when she suggested I look at the spots in The New Yorker and try to do some stuff like that. (Note to The New Yorker: Thanks.)  And then she said, “Just look around and draw what you see — a shelf of stuffed animals or a pile of shoes.”

She reminded me it was not so much the subject as how the subject was drawn.

That summer I developed an eye for clutter (seventh graders are really good making clutter), and I developed what later was called “a tight hand.” In short, that means a confident pen line without the sketchy wobbly bits, a pen or pencil line that could draw the contour of a chair or even a face without needing or wanting to stop. I got into Music and Art, and I continued to learn how to look. 

As for drawing, I got a few “art jobs” after college, all really in part because I could draw small and tight. An employment agent was the one who told me I had a tight hand, and she sent me to a job designing custom rugs. There I needed to be able to draw and then paint a very realistic rose three-eighths of an inch across. (Take a ruler and look at it and try it. It ain’t easy.)

Tiny roses and shaded acanthus leaves were added to my skill set. Meanwhile, as gifts for my parents’ friends in Orient, in the summer I would continue to draw people’s houses. Many of the large houses you see on the hill as you drive on the causeway toward Orient were rendered by me in pen and ink during those summers.

One of the best jobs I ever had was for an art materials company. I was doing graphic design for them but part of my job was, amazingly, to draw whatever I wanted, Photostat the drawings, color them in using the product (Bourges paper), and give the samples to sales reps to use on the road. Perfect, no? 

Finally I landed a job at Glamour magazine doing promotional graphic design. My portfolio of drawings got the attention of editorial art department, and (freelance) I became the illustrator used by Glamour for the whole of the 1970s. Eventually, I could draw how to bone a chicken, roll out a pie dough, how to short-sheet a bed, rewire a lamp, and how to put your hair up in pin curls. I had to draw exercises from Polaroid photographs and figure out how to illustrate trimming your own bangs. 

I invented a few characters who could not cope with the “sticky situation” of the month, and my drawings even got fan mail. Thanks to a collaboration with that art director, Michelle Braverman, I was the illustrator for the “How to Do Anything Better” guide and I got to draw stuff for money.  

In the 1980s that knack for what my father called “expository drawings” led to some cookbook illustrations for the author Maria Robbins of Springs, whom I had met through my husband. 

Her cookbooks led to other cookbooks and when Maria’s editor moved on and changed jobs I managed to stay in her phone directories. 

Every few years some crazy pregnant exercise book or “bread machine cookbook” or book on how to help your special needs child integrate learning with fun would need illustrations and I would get a call from that very loyal editor. Then I would haul out the very same pens I had used in college and at Glamour (Rapidograph 00 point, India ink) and do the assignment. They were always fun and I always learned how to draw something new.

Full time in East Hampton for many years now, I still practice “seeing” in my capacity as contributor to The Star and I still draw stuff. 

Fast-forward to March 2015, with many, many little books under my belt and a good relationship with my very loyal book editor. (Thank you, Maria, for the path to Marian Lizzi of Penguin Random House.) On that day in March, my friend Mo Cohen at the Ladies Village Improvement Society, where I volunteer, pointed out an article in The New York Times business section about a Scottish lady who was making a name for herself drawing coloring books for grown-ups. 

“Mo,” I said, “I can do that. I can do a coloring book, I can do that!” (Thank you, Mo. I might have missed that article had it not been for you.) 

I went home and emailed Marian Lizzi. “I can make a coloring book for you,” I wrote. 

She wanted to see samples and I sent some of the cluttered interiors I had always drawn. The next day came this message: “Can you give us 60 in a month?” 

I could, and I did, and the clutter of my life became a coloring book.

Eight months later there are people in Indonesia and Malaysia and Russia and Brazil coloring my drawn pages. Some share the colorations with me, and their work makes me so proud that my work is out there for them. A lady wrote to me to say coloring helps with the pain of her fibromyalgia. 

The ripple effect of ink on paper is quite remarkable. The pen is truly mightier than the sword.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer and illustrator for The Star and the newspaper’s East magazine. Her coloring book, “Color Me Cluttered,” was published in 2015.