I told our eldest daughter that she was living in northwestern Ohio the Suburban Dream, which she knows. 

It’s quiet, it’s safe, her two athletic sons are moving every moment, and the houses — the ones in Perrysburg’s historic district, anyway — remind you of Sag Harbor’s architecture, frozen in time, pleasing to the eye. 

Modern-day America, the malls, the tract housing, is not far away, but far enough so that you’re really not aware of it as you sit on her porch on East Front Street, across from which is an estate that was given by Mrs. Stranahan to the municipality for everyone to enjoy. 

Its horticulturalist said she’d be glad to come over to tell Emily the names of her trees. I mean, you’ve got to know the names of your trees. The estate leads down to a winding river, the Maumee, near Fort Meigs, where the Americans twice withstood sieges by the British and their Indian confederates during the War of 1812 (so things were noisy once, though most of the residents had by then decamped). 

Her in-laws too live right by the river, about four miles distant, the house set off by itself, its front porch and turret on the second floor facing it. There’s always a breeze. A hammock’s off to the right under a cottonwood tree. There’s a garden and an old red garage. Mary calls it paradise.

Perrysburg is named after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie. You’ll remember it was he whose flag said, “Don’t give up the ship,” and who, following the naval victory, wrote General William Henry Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” which has since, of course, been transmuted into “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

They call Perrysburg a city, but population-wise it’s no bigger than East Hampton, which is a town — for most of the year at any rate. Our editor thinks the figure here may rise now to as much as 100,000 on summer weekends, qualifying it as a city, I suppose, and pushing the excitement meter reading here to the max. I told Emily I was sorry there were no celebrities to fawn after out there — adding that that fact undoubtedly was reflected in their lower standard of living — though she said she was quite happy where she was, and I think she meant it.

I’ll admit it: I enjoy show tunes. Listening gives me great joy, and I particularly like breaking out into song with a selection from a favorite musical. Be it Broadway hits like “Rent,” “Chicago,” or “Wicked,” I’ve been known to belt out a number or two. But only when appropriate, for instance when I’m alone, like in my car or in the shower, or when it’s clearly okay to make a ridiculous spectacle of yourself, like at a karaoke night at a bar. Since when is that a crime?

Since I showed up at karaoke night at M.J. Dowling’s, apparently.

Despite a brief stint as a Noyac resident, I’d never been to this particular restaurant before. But on a recent Friday night out with a friend, we decided to skip our usual favorite places and go somewhere neither of us had ever visited. Upon looking around, we thought M.J. Dowling’s felt welcoming, and we decided it was appropriate for two 30-something women to sit and enjoy a drink. Our thoughts were confirmed when, not once but three times, we saw a television commercial promoting Anna Throne-Holst, who is running for Congress as a Democrat, featuring a message clearly aimed at our still-somewhat-youthful demographic.

M.J. Dowling’s has karaoke on Friday nights, of course. Around 10:40 p.m., the karaoke M.C. announced he would begin taking requests.

The bartender turned to me and asked me and my friend if we would be singing. She declined, but I nodded my head. That’s when he narrowed his eyes at me and said something that left me deeply saddened: “Okay, but no show tunes.”

Now here’s the thing. I worked as a karaoke M.C. myself for a few months, toward the end of 2011, and I get it. When I had my gig, I encouraged my singers to sing upbeat songs. It keeps the rest of the crowd happy, and happy crowds spend money, which keeps the bartenders happy, which keeps the management happy, which means they keep paying a karaoke M.C. But if someone really wanted to sing Adele or something else kind of slow or emotional, I couldn’t stop them. The customer is always right, right?

There are plenty of upbeat show tunes. But I shrugged it off and picked “Heartbreaker” by Pat Benatar. If someone else were to scoop up that song before I did, I would have requested “Waking Up in Vegas” by Katy Perry as a backup. Solid non-show-tune choices, I thought.

It was only in casual conversation a couple of weeks later with David Rattray, The Star’s editor, that he identified this experience for what it was. I’d been profiled.

I was wearing dark-framed glasses and a deep shade of berry-colored lipstick, and I had on a gray dress with blue flowers, and tall boots. Maybe I looked a little eccentric. Could that be what pegged me as a Broadway enthusiast? I had ordered a pint of Steam Anchor and French onion soup. Was beer and soup a weird combination? Was that what did it? Maybe I was just way too enthusiastic when the karaoke M.C. opened up requests.

That night, though, the profiling got worse. “No Disney songs, either,” the bartender said.

I swear the only reason I have an iPhone playlist of all of Walt Disney’s princess ballads is my former gig as a dance teacher specializing in classes for toddlers. But the bartender didn’t know that, and I certainly didn’t volunteer the information.

In the end, I guess I just looked the part. I have to say I felt a little “On My Own.” But to that I say, “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” and that night will surely make for quite a “Memory.”

Christine Sampson covers education for The Star.

Louise W. Knight, a historian who is the author of two books on Jane Addams — the 19th-century activist and founder of one of the country’s first settlement houses, in Chicago — keeps in touch with my husband, whom she has known for many years. After the heinous massacre in Orlando this week, she sent him an email in which she took issue with the media’s calling it “the worst mass killing” in United States history. She made the point that what happened in Orlando can be called the “worst mass shooting” in United States history only if the deaths of hundreds of African-Americans in 1917 in East St. Louis, Mo., is categorized as a race riot. (She also wrote to The New York Times and The A.P.)  

Between 10,000 and 12,000 black Southerners were drawn to East St. Louis in 1916 and 1917 to find work in wartime industries, as part of what is known as the Great Migration. On July 2, 1917, the city of East St. Louis exploded in the worst racial rioting the country had ever seen. The violence went on for almost a week and included drive-by shootings, beatings, and arson. Nine whites and hundreds of African-Americans were killed, although the actual number has not been recorded. The country had already witnessed the deaths of countless others in race riots, including the one in 1908 in Springfield, Ill. (where Abraham Lincoln lived for many years), that resulted in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P.

Riots caused by groups of rampaging armed men are different in kind from a mass shooting by a single person, certainly, whether that lone killer is motivated by politics, bigotry, lunacy, or some volatile combination of all three. For Ms. Knight, the difference lies in the availability of assault-type rifles, which fire many rounds of ammunition accurately in a relatively short time, and which were the weapons of choice in the murders in San Bernadino, Calif., Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. At first, reports said that an AR-15 had been used in Orlando; later, that report was corrected to say it had been a Sig Sauer MCX Rifle, invented for the use of Special Forces, and apparently loaded with bullets that shoot more quietly than an AR-15. But what difference do these details make? Isn’t it an obscenity that the American public has to be conversant in such matters? 

Every single person in American public life has expressed sorrow about the horrendous deaths of 49 innocent people last weekend, to the point that we all started remarking that words, finally, seem to have failed us. 

Perhaps this time, however, words will lead to action.

Representative Jim Hines of Connecticut may have been the first member of Congress to say he would not take part in a moment of silence on the House of Representatives floor on behalf of the Orlando dead because these pious moments have become an “excuse for Congress not to take any real action to address gun violence.” Connecticut’s senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are vocal gun-control advocates; like Mr. Hines, they represent Newtown, where 20 children and 6 adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

Senator Murphy unequivocally blam­ed Congress for the latest massacre: “Congress has become complicit in these murders by its total, unconscionable, deafening silence. This doesn’t have to happen, but this epidemic will continue without end if Congress continues to sit on its hands and do nothing — again.”

The old $50 lawn mower that I bought quite a few years ago from Harvey Bennett may have mowed its last lawn. At this point, I don’t remember if I had spotted it in the Star classifieds or if Harvey had mentioned that he had one to sell. But for $50, how bad could it be?

It was a White brand, made in Canada. Red deck with a black motor and a starting cord that had to be teased back into its coil after each pull. It looked like hell then — and it looks worse today — but it worked and still does.

It is something akin to a miracle that it has lasted the eight years or so that it’s been mine. Other than drain the fuel in the fall and change the oil, if I remember, maintenance has been minimal. I don’t even really put the thing away for the winter; I just tip an old washbasin over it out by the shed and let the snow cover it up. I can tell from the beach plum pits they leave behind that the mice find it a suitable home.

The cool and rainy weather this spring has got the grass and weeds in my lawn growing fast. And, like all those springs before now, I gave the mower’s carburetor a quick cleaning, blew a little solvent into the sparkplug hole, and put everything back together. After a dozen or more pulls on the finicky cord, it started and ran, only briefly sputtering and fogging the immediate area with a blue smoke. And so I mowed the lawn.

But it was time, I thought, to retire Harvey’s mower. The blades are a dull mess from the stones and sticks and kids’ toys it has run over, and at some point the cord is going to just refuse to be wound back into place. I had noticed the other day that my sister had a new-looking mower in her garage. Would she loan it to me before my weekend guest arrives?

Bess’s mower is in the back of my truck now, and I’ll take it home and give it a go after work. Harvey’s mower, having performed far above all reasonable expectations, will be given a decent burial — among the metal recycling at the East Hampton Town dump.

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.

“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.

Perhaps you were among those who saw the feature about The Star in The New York Times on Memorial Day. Such positive publicity, and the subsequent rally of support from readers and the advertisers upon whom we depend, is no small thing. It’s not every day that reporters and publishers get a pat on the back and, for this, we are truly grateful.

To me, the takeaway wasn’t that Jim Rutenberg — who is now writing a weekly column on media in The Times’s Business Section — wanted to let a larger market know that The Star is a quality paper worth reading, or even that a really old, small-town, family-run newspaper could survive well after the forecast demise-date of print-newspaper journalism. What really struck home was his point that a small-town paper like ours, with deep roots in the community, can be of unique service to that community in ways no other form of journalism yet can.

On one matter, however, I am not sure I entirely see things as Mr. Rutenberg does. He wrote that The Star had thrived despite the advent of telephone, radio, movies, television, glitzy magazines, and the Internet — but, he warned, “Like its big-city brethren, it faces its worst, and possibly last, threat from the web.” 

We don’t see it that way. 

It’s true that how people are alerted to what’s happening around them is light-years removed from how it was done even 10 years ago. This was brought home to me by The New York Times story itself: Many acquaintances, and my husband, read the story first on their iPhones, or even via Facebook, the day before it appeared in the paper. 

But who is producing the content that is passed around with such lightning speed? 

Quite often — and especially in the case of local hard-news reporting, as opposed to pop-culture features, gossip, or human-interest stories — that content comes directly from the old local sources: newspapers like ours.

Mr. Rutenberg painted a picture of The Star as a traditional organization by contrasting it with a new magazine out of Montauk called Whalebone. He wrote that Whalebone had the “stylishly beachy sensibility of its surfer millennial founders,” and went on to quote its founders’ description of it as “subversive media,” rather than a publication. The free glossy magazine runs advertising “seamlessly, and openly, in the editorial content,” Mr. Rutenberg wrote.

In the years that Ev Rattray and I edited The Star, we kept the standards alive that had been instilled at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Core to those principles was a value that I believe is timeless: holding a hard and fast line between content and advertising. Blurring the lines between the two might possibly be all well and good when it comes to lifestyle articles — well, no, in my view it never is, but someone else might argue so — but there is never a place for “sponsored” reporting when it comes to serious news about government, corruption, crime, education, or, really, anything of substance.

I was there when The Star transitioned from manual typewriters to big desktop computers, and prided myself on catching on to word-processing (via an olde tyme program called XyWrite) early and without a hitch. It’s now the role of The Star’s editor, David Rattray, to keep pace with the changes in the ways texts and photographs are spread via social media, and to uphold the tenets of serious journalism. We’ve had our share of viral stories, too.

In the article, Mr. Rutenberg quoted David’s acknowledgement that unexpected and perhaps revolutionary changes were possible as the delivery systems for journalism continue to evolve: “I can only see out about 18 months,” David said.  

“Regardless of what happens after that,” Mr. Rutenberg wrote at the end of the piece, “this much is true now: The Star still shines for all; after 131 years, it endures. Its new media cousins should be so fortunate.” 

And to that, I’d like to add a P.S.: Watch for The Star’s own glossy magazine, which is about to be launched. You have our promise that no one paid to be included in a story.

I read a review of two sports books in The New Yorker recently and there was not once the mention of joy, though, admittedly, it was the business of sport — the money in it — that was the subject, not the headiness of play per se.

One book predicted that the commercial bubble would one day be pricked given the fact that television viewership is minuscule for sports on a day-to-day basis save for football, which all the major networks air. Still, the deflation of the commercial sports bubble remains hard to imagine — especially in this country — just as it is to think that our empire may one day be attenuated. (“Forever,” our stamps say, though nothing, we know, is forever.) 

The reviewer seemed rather dismissive of sport as a productive way to spend one’s time, which annoyed me, a sportswriter, though that may be to misread him: Televised professional sports and blindered fans were presumably the main thrust. 

Still, it rankled when he said sport, as opposed to art, produced nothing, and trotted out trash-talking quotes from Maxim Gorky and Fran Lebowitz (whom I fondly remember as having refused to yield at the East Hampton Cinema when ordered by a priggish fellow ticketholder to put her cigarette out) in his defense.

To the contrary, sport — at least when it comes to the participating in it rather than the watching of it — produces not nothing, but joy. 

It’s self-evident that there’s joy — at least to me, who’s written of people running, walking, pedaling, swimming, climbing, swinging, kicking, punching, leaping, skating, catching, passing, shooting, dribbling, grappling, riding, fencing, and dancing for the past 40 years. And, at times, there’s transcendence too. No less a one than Stephen Hawking said the other day, concerning the envisioned mission to Alpha Centauri, that he believed transcending our limits was what made human beings unique. 

To move freely, to play is a great part of life. I would even say that to play is to be.

Trying to determine if the East End is medically underserved isn’t very hard to do, but it might have been foolish to try to answer the question the day after a crowded holiday weekend.

On Tuesday, as the storm of traffic and crowds receded to the west, I was fortunate to reach Robert Chaloner, the chief executive officer of Southampton Hospital, who explained why and how most of the primary care physicians and some of the specialists here now function under the umbrella of the Meeting House Lane Medical Practice, which is associated with the hospital.

“I can tell you we are constantly trying to recruit more people to the community,” he said. 

Mr. Chaloner explained that South­ampton Hospital has a residency program through which several new doctors have been brought here, including one of the two at Wainscott Walk-In. “Unfortunately, a lot of young doctors don’t generally locate in our community because the cost of setting up a practice is so high,” Mr. Chaloner said. That’s one reason why the Meeting House Medical Practice steps in. It carries administrative burdens and requires that doctors associated with it are enrolled with the common insurance providers. He said doctors also were asked to see everyone regardless of ability to pay.

Admitting that needed care had been difficult to meet over the weekend, Mr. Chaloner said the physicians associated with Meeting House got through it. “It can get pretty hectic out here. I agree with you.”

Mr. Chaloner didn’t say the South Fork was medically underserved during the long weekend, but I think it is fair for me to do so. 

That may sound strange to folks from away, who might well assume that because the East End is a summer playground for the rich it is well served in everything anyone might possibly need. But seeing a doctor on a holiday weekend? Not so simple.

Except for a few independent physicians, most of whom are associated with the East Hampton Healthcare Foundation and see patients by appointment, people who sought less-than-emergency care over the weekend had to crowd into the walk-in clinics -— but neither the Montauk Medical Center nor the Wainscott Walk-In had weekend hours. By Tuesday, they reported, they were totally inundated. (East Hampton Urgent Care was open on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but a figure on how many patients were treated was not immediately available.)

When Wainscott Walk-In opened at 8:30 Tuesday morning, there were already 15 would-be patients waiting outdoors. I know because I was number four. Wainscott Walk-In tries to soften the blow by telling patients approximately how long their wait will be and allowing them to leave the building and return at an approximate time. But more patients continued to flow in until about 10:30, by which time the doctors there were up to their ears in work. I trust that anyone who had to wait for the next day would be first in line.

Meanwhile, it was reported that our local emergency medical technicians rose to the challenge of a wild Memorial Day weekend. The East Hampton Ambulance Association had 16 calls on Sunday alone. Do I need to remind anyone that the ambulance crews are almost entirely volunteer? If you know any of them, please say thank you. 

Nine American war veterans lie buried in a modest farm cemetery off Jericho Road in East Hampton. I had driven by their resting place from time to time on my way to Georgica Beach from the highway, but had never given it much thought until John Phillips, who lives next door, filled me in. 

The names of the veterans buried there ring of old East Hampton. Among them are Matthew Hedges, who fought in the Revolution and died in 1817 when he was 81. Isaac Dimon was 74 when he died in 1808. John Miller was buried there in 1791 and his son John Miller II in 1806. The most recent military man buried there was Wilmot Baker, who was born in 1891 and died in 1963.

Hedges was born in East Hampton and became a private in Capt. Josiah Lupton’s New York Company of Southold in 1775. The next year, his company fled to Connecticut as refugees when the British took Long Island. After the war, Hedges settled at the Jericho farm, where he would eventually be buried.

There are quite a number of small graveyards around town, and a color guard from the East Hampton Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion visit many of them the Sunday before Memorial Day every year. 

I met Mr. Phillips and his wife, Wendy, during an event at their house in connection with the Guild Hall artists-in-residence program earlier this year. 

He told me that shortly after buying the Jericho Road house, they were startled one morning by the sound of gunfire. Walking down their driveway to investigate, they discovered an assembly of about two dozen men in the uniforms of various branches of the military who were veterans of engagements of different eras giving tribute over the graves.

In the years since, the Phillipses have made the tribute a memorial observance of their own, inviting  friends and neighbors over for coffee, homemade muffins, and cut-up fruit before the bus from the V.F.W. arrives between 8 and 9 a.m. Would I like to attend, Mr. Phillips asked. Indeed, I would.

Coffees in hand, a group of about a dozen guests made their way to the cemetery at about 8:30 Sunday and walked among the graves, the oldest of which dates to 1790. It is unclear if any vacant plots remain, Mr. Phillips said.

Two winters’ hard freezes had tossed many of the stones, particularly the smaller footstones, out of line. Town workers maintain the cemetery, mowing it and cutting back a stand a bamboo that has crept under the fence from another neighbor’s property. Who might set the old stones to rights, Mr. Phillips said, is unknown.

Sunday morning’s ceremony was over quickly. Taps, a salute, and the men filed back onto the bus to make their way to the next burying ground. There were tears in the eyes of a few of the onlookers, who waved as the veterans drove on.