The osprey are not the first birds to wake up and start carrying on. Near Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett in the minutes before dawn, when there is only a scattering of light in the east, birds I cannot name by their voices alone twitter from the scrub oak.

It is not until there is sufficient light to peer into the water for prey that the osprey launch from their nests and begin to soar. But from the sound of their keening and because they call from so high above the bay, I assume there is more to the morning for them than hunger. 

Birds are, ornithologists tell us, not interested in aesthetics, which seems reasonable. Yet osprey tuck all sorts of shiny and colorful things into their nests. I remember when, as a child, my father pointed out a green plastic child’s Army jeep toy among the sticks in a nest on Gardiner’s Island. Just down the road from my house in a nest at the old fish factory this summer, you can see ribbon and bits of Mylar balloons.

Watching the fish hawks, as we called them growing up, spiral slowly in the sky, it is hard to escape the notion that they are doing so for pleasure. They are at too great a height even with their extraordinary eyesight to hunt; their cries sound more like conversation than warning.

I had also been flying over the house a couple of weeks ago. My oldest friend, Michael Light, had brought his small plane east from California for the summer, and he took me up for a look early in the day on the Fourth of July.

I don’t recall if it was Michael’s observation or my own, but one of the main things we talked about over the aircraft’s headsets was that everything below seems softened from 700 feet. This is especially so for me, since, at the newspaper, our stock in trade as much as anything else are points of conflict, many of which have to do with who wants to put a house where or which road is at high risk for car crashes. All that fades away from the air. Osprey have the right idea.

It is strawberry time again, which means time to think about putting up some preserves from the local crop. But the way things go, South Fork strawberries are usually gone by the time I get around to pulling out the canning kettle.

Spring and the beginning of summer have a too-quick quality in this and other ways. David Kuperschmid, our new fishing columnist, said just the other day that the porgy fleet in Cherry Harbor had pulled anchor already, presumably following the bite into cooler, deeper water. I had been watching the boats from the living room window but had been unable to join them for one reason or another that  seemed so important but that I have since forgotten.

Strawberries, though, I think I can get to. All it will take is a couple of quarts, some sugar, pectin, and an hour at the stove. 

Last year, I was pretty good at canning, getting a fair number of beach-plum jelly and blackberry preserves jarred. Rummaging around on one of the kitchen shelves this morning, I noticed the last remaining summer of 2015 pickled okra behind the chocolate chips that were about to go in a child’s pancakes.

There are, in fact, so many jars of this and that tucked away that it is time to pass on a few. I proposed the general idea of a swap to my friend Jameson Ellis, in which I might bring extras and hope to exchange them for the extras of others that I do not have in my own stash. Turns out I have quite a lot, more than is reasonable for the family. But there is no strawberry. 

After a winter of eating the same two kinds of preserves, I am itching for a change. The problem is that in the run-up to July Fourth there is just too little time. Slow August days, when the beach plums are ripe, are much more suited to jelly making. Still, if I can sneak in just four jars’ worth, the effort will be worthwhile.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

A recipe in The New York Times for shrimp broiled with honey and hot pepper caught my eye the other day, and as I read it, it occurred to me that the approach would be worth trying on sea robin. Yes, sea robin.

From what I can tell (at least off the bay beach where I live in Amagansett), sea robins are the dominant fish along the shore this year. At dusk for the last couple of weeks, they have been rolling in the shallows, chasing smaller baitfish, breaking water like bluefish. 

Because they are aggressive and hungry, they are easy to catch, and this has gotten Ellis, who is 6, suddenly interested in fishing. His enthusiasm has been so unshakeable that it survived a hook snagged near his elbow. It was easy to remove, though his howls echoed to Barnes Landing, I am sure.

Ellis is less interested in eating sea robin than in catching them and looking at them. Twice, he has filled an old washtub with seawater and added some sand and rocks as habitat for his live catch. Since he hates throwing them back, that they stay alive in the tub is a good thing; as night falls, I quietly tip them back into the bay as he heads up the stairs to the house.

Since sea robin is an essential part of a proper bouillabaisse, I’ve long thought that it deserved more attention from cooks. Video how-tos on skinning and filleting them can be found on the Internet, but there’s a lack of specific recipes or cooking tips. 

The Times shrimp thing is not much more than an interesting marinade of lime zest, ginger, garlic, and cayenne, with the shrimp — or searobin if I get around to it — baked briefly in a very hot oven. Since sea robin fillets, like monkfish fillets, are substantial, I’d say they are likely to hold up well on the grill, too, and you could forget about the oven. Dealing with them like this might be a good way to deal with their slightly gelatinous quality — essential in a French fish stew, but maybe a bit tricky for a traditional preparation.

All this is speculative, but with its abundance this year, plenty of house guests, and long days just right for experimenting in the kitchen, sea robin is going to have a place at the table before too long. I’d be curious to know if readers have any advice on the subject.

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.

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.

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.