A recently married couple I know moved from their apartment in Queens into their first house last week, and what a house it is!

Just shy of 3,000 square feet, not counting its ample decks, the two-story house is on a wooded lot of about an acre, and they bought it for $270,000. The property is a good 45 minutes west of Bridgehampton, off the William Floyd Parkway in Shirley.

Take a look at the classifieds in today’s Star or go to one of the real estate websites to see if you can find anything — even a tiny vacant lot — at that price here.

Their house lot is unusual in being quite narrow but very long. Whoever developed the area managed to place the footprints of neighboring houses at varying depths from the road so they do not intrude on each other. In addition, the neighborhood is dotted with many tall, healthy trees. And, oh yes, the land across the road is a county park.  

The house has three good-sized bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in one of the two main bathrooms, a large open loft with several skylights, and a basement where a former owner was able to create an apartment with a separate entrance — kitchen, bath, bedroom, and living room — while leaving plenty of space for utilities and storage. If it sounds like a bargain, you better believe it.

The house was built, solidly, in the late 1990s and has built-in air-conditioning and a vacuuming system, which are in good condition. Its style is unique, I think, but hard to categorize. 

The exterior, perhaps influenced by Egyptian architecture, rises to a central peak, but some of the walls, inside and out, are curvilinear. An alcove off the living room, for example, ends in a rectangular space at one side while the other side, following a sidewall, is curved. Two somewhat mysterious hollowed-out spaces at eye level on either side of the living room doorway to the bedroom wing are apparently intended to display artwork. My young friends haven’t figured out yet what to put in them, although otherwise they are already comfortably at home.

And there is more. The former owner, a widow in her 70s, left behind a still-registered 20-foot runabout with a 40-horsepower outboard at no extra cost.

Shirley is one of the hamlets in Brookhaven Town, near Great South Bay and its tributaries. It is about 60 miles from Manhattan and only a 20-minute drive to the Tanger Mall in Riverhead. A search for information on the internet turned up a description of the community as working class; I guess that is pretty accurate. And along with Riverhead and the East End towns, it is in the First Congressional District, so we vote together.

A map shows Shirley as just west of the Moriches, which are sometimes considered steppingstones to the Hamptons. This geography underscores the fact that the South Fork and Shirley are quite near each other — though, at least in terms of real estate, very far apart. 

Three generations of Rattrays have enjoyed the old house I live in, which, as you might guess, is both awfully nice and, at least on occasion, headache-inducing. I like to say that this or that treasure “came with the house” when someone asks about a vase or a chair, but I also find myself worrying about who has saved what and whose responsibility it is to do something about repairs and storage and suchlike. 

This week, though, as summer arrived, I realized we also have left our mark on our outdoor spaces. Goodness knows, the South Fork must have hundreds of extraordinary gardens created personally or professionally, as the Parrish Art Museum’s Landscape Pleasures and Guild Hall’s the Garden as Art programs attest. There’s Madoo, the unique conservancy garden in Sagaponack originated by the late painter and writer Robert Dash. And the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days are an inexpensive way for some of us to see how others have embellished their landscapes.

 Our very humble garden is absolutely nothing like those! But we have something else going for us in the backyard: a sort of homey, old-fashioned feeling of being in an outdoor room, the result of decades of only moderate tending and a fair helping of benign neglect.

  The maples on a neighbor’s property have grown so tall that they shade what had been (back in the 1960s and 1970s) my mother-in-law’s thriving garden of roses, poppies, and tiger lilies. Our yard is no longer suitable for growing tomatoes, but we have heaps of ferns, which took over after the deer ate all the tiger lilies. These lush mounds of greenery are a pleasant respite from a boring lawn.

 Going outside on a nice morning this week, I thought about the few old roses that have been around longer than I have. They aren’t the most beautiful, but they add touches of pink and magenta to the borders. The person who put in these dainty rose bushes many years ago would no doubt be pleased to see them surviving. We also have two rose bushes descended from those that arrived by shipwreck years ago, given to us recently by a friend.

  I have no idea if earlier householders are responsible for the white and yellow irises, or if I am, but they are out of control this summer. A butterfly bush seems to have seeded itself in the wrong place, pushing out bleeding heart, but I have to say it is attractive, and not overwhelming, at least not yet. I admit that I am responsible for two peonies, however, but one has never flowered while the other made a big-whoop first effort this year with three blooms. As for the yellow yarrow, I wouldn’t have planted it in a place where it is too bold and too close to nicer plants, would I? Someone else must have put it there.

Forsythia aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (I’ve even heard them referred to as “the vomit of spring,” which gives an indication of the disdain in which they’re held in some quarters), but our oversized forsythia brightened things up in early spring. That burst was followed by an explosion of old-time snowball viburnums, in full white dress, and then by the sweet white flowers of a mock orange. 

Out front, we used to be able to rely on an everlasting crop of giant-puffball white hydrangeas; they’re gamely attempting to make a comeback after the deer almost did them in. A few daisies and what look to me like bachelor buttons have cropped up by its rather sad-looking side, and I have no idea where they came from.

We are surrounded on the South Fork by the most privileged, expensive, high-maintenance household environments, but I am happy to bask in a pretty little garden that has come, somehow, to require little attention. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence: Without half trying, I can find something blooming in the yard that is lovely and ready to be brought inside. And how nice it is to be able to say the bouquet “came with the house.”

“Watch out now, take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers / Dancing down the sidewalks, as each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly / Beware of Maya.” 

These lyrics looped in my consciousness as I sat frozen on the third floor of State Supreme Court in Riverhead. There was no escaping them — not the lyrics, nor the proceedings. 

Last week saw me on the long road to Riverhead and back, and then again to Riverhead the next day, and then back again. Monday saw a repeat performance, followed — no rest for the weary traveler — by another interminable nighttime meeting in East Hampton. 

In between, the nation’s customary and routine carnage was atypically brutal, if that is possible, and uncharacteristically concentrated in Orlando, Fla., but let’s be honest: With some 30,000 killed in gun violence annually, is anyone surprised? And if 20 murdered little children couldn’t change anything, what could possibly? 

I digress. Sitting in that courtroom, Maya was on the brain. Though the name has several meanings in Indian philosophies, George Harrison, in the song “Beware of Darkness” from his first post-Beatles release, was apparently referring to Maya as illusion, a false reality that stands between us and our realization of the oneness of all and everything. (“And the time will come when you’ll see we’re all one,” he had predicted in an earlier song.) 

In that climate-controlled third-floor courtroom, a few dozen miles and a trillion light-years from a sandy ocean beach on Napeague, the ownership of parts of said beach was considered, with carefully constructed arguments and legal precedents and frequent quips from the judge, instructing a particular participant to proceed at a pace that would allow a conclusion before his scheduled retirement, now just 15 months away. 

One hundred and nineteen months ago, in an exposition on the ego and its perils presented at the Mahabodhi International Meditation Center in Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, an instructor explained that the notions of “I” and “mine” inevitably give rise to those of “you” and “yours.” 

The players on the confining, climate-controlled stage in Riverhead may have simplified things: “I” and “mine” front and center, duality all the way, dialogue or conciliation tantamount to defeat. But I’m no lawyer, nor even university material. 

On Sunday evening, Gypsy jazz emanating from the speakers in my tiny home office/music and contemplation room, I gazed out the south window. In the expansive backyard, rabbits hopped this way and that, and squirrels scampered in and out and up and down and to and fro, and birds landed and stayed awhile and then took flight again, all going about their own business and blissfully unaware that this was private property, in the hyper-exclusive Hamptons, no less, and south of the highway at that. 

Unlike the meticulously landscaped adjacent property, a model of rigorous planning bordered by a tall fence the landlady likens to that of a concentration camp, here the verdant trees hew to no grid, as though the tiny seeds had found their mark in the fertile soil wholly by the whims of chance, within them all of the unseen intelligence needed to create what I now beheld, swaying in the cooling breeze as they reached heavenward. 

“Watch out now, take care, beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go / While weeping atlas cedars / They just want to grow / Grow and grow / Beware of darkness.”

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

I had finished reading of the last linotype machine operator at The New York Times, who’d quietly taken his leave last week at the age of 78, declining to be interviewed on his way out, and dreamed of the days when unions held some sway.

Of course those were the days of the middle class, when one wage earner per household sufficed. There was some balance then between the plebes and patricians. It’s no longer the case, which is why, I suppose, I’ve been standing up and cheering when Bernie Sanders speaks. Long may he rave.

I’ve belonged to a union only once, yet have always been a fan. For three weeks one summer, I was a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — a period during which, from 3 to 11 p.m., I watched, with rubber gloves on, pipes endlessly descend into and out of a sherardizing bath in a plant in Ambridge, Pa., for which tedium (interrupted every now and then by union-assured breaks) I was handsomely paid — probably better-paid in real terms than ever since. Those were the days when a union could shut you down. 

Since then, inequality has crept on and on and on on little cat feet, to the point where most of the money is in a very few hands. Ben Franklin famously (at least to me) said that when one had amassed enough, the excess should be repatriated. Instead, nowadays, lucre is expatriated, to Panama or Switzerland. It’s treasonous, frankly. 

So, let’s redistribute the excess — a bit of it, anyway — through fiscal policy primarily. Also limit executive pay to a certain percentage of what the lowest-paid worker makes. Readjust the scales. 

I think people would remain ambitious, I don’t think raising taxes on the rich would sap our national resolve, our preternatural inventiveness. As was the case in the old days, when upper incomes were taxed a lot more than today, and milk and diapers were delivered to your door, the more you made the more you got to keep. I’m not an out-and-out leveler, I just think, as Bernie Sanders has said, that we can do better. We can be a fairer, less greedy, I’ve-got-mine society.

Of course that brings us to the inconvenient truth that Bernie Sanders, despite his marvelous, invigorating campaign, will not be the next president, nor probably even the next vice president. Presumably his voice will continue to be heard in the land — it seems that it’s that way we’re tending, toward a more united rather than divided society.

After all, freedom’s just another word for too much stuff to lose.

It wasn’t a hairpiece. Or a toupee. It was a full-blown wig, a helmet of synthetic hair that I kept on a Styrofoam wig stand in a corner of my loft where nobody but my wife would see it. 

It wasn’t some off-the-rack model from Ricky’s. I had it styled in Macy’s wig salon, which was on the main floor of the Herald Square emporium, adjacent to the cosmetics department. Fresh from assaults by atomizer-brandishing salespeople, women would look askance as they passed the young, smock-covered man whose obvious rug was being so carefully snipped and combed. They regarded me with sympathy, the way you look at a dog suffering a grooming at a kennel.

It was 1971. I wasn’t bald yet. The purpose of the wig wasn’t to hide baldness but to hide my hair. Three years before, classified 1-A by my draft board, I reluctantly put my name on the waiting list of an Army Reserve unit. Several months later, and just in the nick of time, my name had reached the top. When the time cameo sign up, go to jail, or leave the country, I signed. 

Except for four months spent in basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, my six-year tenure in the reserves consisted of weeknight meetings at the unit’s headquarters in Newark and two weeks at Fort Dix every summer. We were a clerical unit. If we were ever activated, we would be stationed at Fort Dix as a reception station for new recruits. Did I already say I was lucky? Privileged? But that’s another story.

For three years I kept my hair neatly trimmed in order to pass inspection at weekly meetings. I remember with considerable embarrassment showing up for the first day of my new job at the Museum of Modern Art in bellbottoms, a turtleneck, a sport jacket purchased four years before on Carnaby Street in London — and short hair. No wonder Roberta Smith, today the powerful art critic of The New York Times, then a secretary in the painting and sculpture department, shook her head and let loose a disparaging chuckle when she first saw me. 

Then I heard about the wig scam. It wasn’t legal, but more and more reservists were buying wigs under which they would tuck their long hair when in uniform. Hence, Macy’s. It was worth the discomfiture of that public grooming to be able to let my hair grow as long as it was able to — which was never quite as long as I wanted. But, finally, I could pass.

By the time I was discharged in 1974, my hair was long and thick in the back and receding in the front. My mother’s father and her two brothers were bald. My older brother was well on his way. I had avoided conscription, but, six years later, found myself caught in the crosshairs of male-pattern baldness.

It was probably 20 years later, when she was 8, that my daughter first called me avocado-head. It didn’t bother me. In fact, because I knew long before it happened that it was inevitable, losing my hair has never been an issue for me. Except for those moments when I catch sight of a photograph taken when I was a senior in college, shirt unbuttoned, a big smile beneath my tousled head of wavy hair, and wonder what might have been — and whatever happened to that wig.

Mark Segal is a writer for The Star who covers the arts. 

I just read in one of the local papers that there was a U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1996. 

“There was no U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1996,” I said, with finality, to Baylis Greene. “There was one in 1986. . . . I should know.” 

I rolled my eyes and smiled wanly as I said so, which, of course, elicited a wan smile from him. 

But then . . . but then I remembered that while I remembered there had been a U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1986, I had forgotten, until I remembered, that I didn’t go. 

Mary had won a free all-expenses-paid weeklong trip to London with a day’s side trip to anywhere in England that beckoned in the days leading up to the event. 

I recall her saying after having been vouchsafed the news on the telephone, “Can’t I just experience 30 seconds of joy before you say you can’t go because you have to cover the U.S. Open?”

Moments later, I made the case to Helen Rattray, who, bless her, agreed that it was a once-in-lifetime opportunity and that the staff (with Uri Berliner, now NPR’s business editor, in the lead role) could stand the gaff. 

(And she was right: We’ve never won a damn thing since. Except for a dinner-for-two to Zakura two years ago, which was pretty good, come to think of it.)

Frankly, I hit the lottery when I met Mary, but we’ll speak no more of that. (In fact those were her very words to me this morning after I’d suggested just one or two more things to think about when addressing a tennis ball.)

Anyway, it was a wonderful vacation. Everybody on the British Airways plane — we were all winners of The Times’s contest, from both coasts — was in a giddy mood, pretty much in agreement that — on this occasion at least — we’d all die happy if the plane went down.

My mother suggested we go to Bath. We went to Brighton instead, a busman’s holiday. I had clotted cream.

And the paper came out, in all its glory, as it always does.

Shotaro Mori, a bassoonist who joined the South Fork Chamber Orchestra for the Choral Society of the Hamptons concert at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor last weekend, was among the freelance musicians for whom choristers played host. Mr. Shotaro and a young cellist spent two nights with us between rehearsals, and he became an overwhelmingly welcome guest.

 What happened was that one morning, after the cellist had gone out for a walk, we got talking about Japan, where he grew up, and it occurred to me to ask if he might know something about three Japanese prints I inherited. Thus began a few hours of enlightenment.

  Ev Rattray, my late first husband, had visited Japan after graduating from Dartmouth in 1954 and, fulfilling his obligation as a recipient of a Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, he joined the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade. The prints had been gifts to his mother, way back then.

 Mr. Shotaro immediately recognized them as woodblock prints, that their paper was old (perhaps even ancient), and he began reading some of the calligraphic script. 

Before long, I learned that one of the prints, which had hung in a downstairs bathroom, showed men, and a few women and children, parading in front of a ceremonial tree that probably represented a god, with a two-story building at rear and a drum offstage at right. Mr. Shotaro then turned his attention to a similarly framed print, which hung in my bedroom. It showed men logging on a river under a dark and snowy winter sky. A large, seemingly incongruous umbrella in the foreground contained the script for “fish.” 

Mr. Shotaro seemed to be having as much fun as I was, although he apologized about what he called insufficient knowledge of the script. He then took his iPhone in hand and began Googling. 

The first print we had looked at was one of a triptych at the British Museum: According to the museum’s description, “a great street procession outside Tenno shrine in Edo; two floats of lion-dogs carried by bearers in centre; tree covered in devotional prayer-slips in left; sake barrels in right. Inscribed, signed, sealed, and marked.” It dates to 1795 or 1800.

The other print was one of a mid-19th-century series in the possession of the Brooklyn Museum. It is “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (modern Tokyo), and the original, “Lumberjacks at Fukagawa” (the river), had been painted by none other than Hiroshige, who is revered as the last great master of the ukiyo-e painting tradition. His family name was Utagawa but he used his given name in signing his art.

At this point, I ran into the living room and took down a small print of a ferocious samurai. This woodblock print was also of a ukiyo-e painting, and my copy was one of a large series of samurai at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. The artist, Utagawa Yoshiiku, was a student of another famous Japanese painter, Utagawa Kuniyoshi. And the samurai, Saito Tatsuoki, the son of a “great ruler,” was born in 1548. 

Enlightened, I was nevertheless chagrined. I had admired these works of art for years without attempting to learn anything about them. In the old days, doing so might have meant seeking out an expert or dealer. It would be hard to use such an excuse now that Google has arrived. Thank you, Mr. Shotaro, your visit was a gift.

The back of the hardcover of “Christine” that my 13-year-old daughter is reading is taken up entirely by a photo from 1982 showing Stephen King sitting on the hood of a vintage Plymouth in the mouth of what looks like a service bay. His spread collar is indeed spread, his sleeves are manfully rolled up, his zip-up leather boots, prominently displayed, are well traveled. Despite the rabbity Down East grin, was the weirdo ever cooler? 

Also that year, another writer with a jet-black Dan Rather hair helmet, truncated sideburns, and fashion-backward glasses, Paul Theroux, could be seen kicking back in the Cape Cod beach grass on every square inch of the flip side of “The Mosquito Coast,” which sits half-read on my shelf. The son of a bitch is even smiling for once in his life. And all, as they say, in glorious black and white.

These photos needn’t have been taken by Jill Krementz or Nancy Crampton — any old longhair with a Leica would do. They reveal something about the authors. They’re art. 

Instead today we have blurbs. So this is where we are. Publicists make the world go round. Every cover must be marred. But what to do about it? One answer readers of the late, lamented Spy magazine might recall was a feature called “Logrolling in Our Time,” which plainly laid out the credibility-compromising back-scratching appearing regularly on the dust jackets of the nation.

On the other hand, the way Iris Smyles went with the marketing flow and embraced the schlock with her National Blurb Contest was fun. From the publicity material that actually crossed my desk, here’s my favorite, courtesy of Andrea Martin: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those without peanut allergies and those who cannot tolerate peanuts or any food produced or packaged in a facility that processes peanuts. Both will love this book.”

(Favorite, that is, if fuddy-duddy nostalgia isn’t taking over, as I harbor happy memories of struggling to stay awake after Johnny Carson on Friday nights in high school in the ’80s to catch those 90-minute, thematically linked SCTV episodes Martin starred in — the best television comedy ever made.) 

But enough of book covers. What about reading what’s between them? I was thrilled to pluck Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” from the carts of community discards at the back of the East Hampton Library the other day. It’s been like nourishment to a shipwrecked man subsisting on rainwater and tree bark. The story of — 

Wait a minute, in one corner on the front of the paperback, above a photo of Eisenhower-era parents and child walking away from the camera, superlatives appear stacked like cordwood: “powerful . . . moving, generous and ambitious . . . fiercely affecting.” They greet me every time I pick it up, thanks to Michiko Kakutani of The Times in a review that in proper context simply could not have been that thuddingly bad.

Time to just give up? Shrug my shoulders and move on? After all, as the saying goes, if advertising didn’t work, people wouldn’t keep paying for it. It can burrow its way into an associative mind. Why, here I think of Roth and his nearly exact contemporary, an equal in productivity, stature, and breadth of red-blooded American subject matter, one recently dead, the other, Roth, having reached a kind of working death, a self-imposed cessation of output, and — 

I’m sorry, the blurbs have got the better of me: Hey Michiko! You were wrong about Updike! Always.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

The East Hampton Town Police Department’s official Twitter account reported Monday night that traffic was tied up and creeping westbound out of downtown Montauk following the Fourth of July fireworks. No surprise — people tend to get up and go right after the show ends, no matter that their hurry gains them only a place in a slow queue.

You see the same thing on airplanes when everyone gets up simultaneously just to stand awkwardly in the aisles. 

Same thing on the Long Island Rail Road. Pulling into the East Hampton station the other day on a ride from Manhattan, we were all out of our seats by the time we rolled through Wainscott. What aspect of human nature controls our get-up-and-go-no-place urge I have no idea.

Monday evening on the ocean, there was a landward breeze, a hint of the late-night thunderstorms that were to come. It might have made sense for the crowds in Montauk to get moving as soon as the last sparks faded to black. Still, it seems a shame to flee the beach quite so soon. 

I dislike waiting on lines, but being caught in a traffic jam for a couple of minutes doesn’t seem to bother other people. I’d rather sneak slowly around the back way then jockey for a place at the Bridgehampton traffic light at Ocean Road. It’s not that I care to watch all the credits at the movies, but that seems better than the alternative: the foot-dragging shuffle up to the exit doors.

There is an art to patience — and rewards. Following the Devon fireworks on Saturday, I sat with some friends at a picnic table watching the lights of the boats making their way east toward Montauk across the bay. I had an impulse to bustle about, wishing guests a good night, but instead I just sat and watched the view.

I’ve been accommodating myself to death for a while now, but today I was actually wishing for it when I read that they’re not only to play the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 2018, but also in 2026.

“Surely, I’ll be dead by then,” I said as I reached for the calculator. “In 2026 I’ll be . . . 136! Dead for sure. Whew. No, no, wait . . . no, 1940 from 2026 is . . . ah, 86. Oh God. And of course I’ll still be working at The Star, and the U.S.G.A. probably still won’t let me inside the ropes. I’ll have to hobble along, peering over the legions with a periscope.”

My son-in-law wonders why we write about the Open anyway, given the fact that by the time we do it’s old news. Of course, that’s never stopped us — me, anyway — in the past. 

Though this time, I told him, I’ll watch it on TV in the media tent. You get a much better view that way, though my hearing will probably be even worse by then, and the announcers are always whispering. Better yet, I’ll check in periodically with Mark Herrmann, Newsday’s golf writer, to find out what’s going on. 

(I just Googled him to make sure I spelled his last name correctly and saw under Mark’s photo the following: “A former American college and professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League during the 1980s and 1990s. . . .” Look to it, Mark, look to it.)

Meanwhile, I am trying to acclimate myself by reading, at Orson Cummings’s suggestion, Harvey Penick’s “Little Red Book.” I told him I hated golf, but Orson — a very good tennis player — said I should read it anyway, and so I am. At one point, Harvey says, “The motion you make lopping off dandelions with your weed cutter is the perfect action of swinging a golf club through the hitting area.” 

So, I may go out and buy one, thus satisfying my curiosity even as Mary marvels at how helpful I’ve become. 

The fact is that, contrary to what I know is my natural bent toward excitability, I am intrigued by the calm, attentive approach the “Little Red Book” prescribes. 

Take dead aim . . . always play within yourself . . . left foot-right elbow. . . . Okay, okay. So much to learn, so much to forget.