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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

We were having dinner at the home of friends when the conversation segued from the relatively safe subject of politics to the unfailingly dangerous one of cats. 

People who know me know to let their cats out before I come visiting, or, better yet, shut them up someplace so they don’t lurk about in the pitch dark waiting for me to trip over them as I’m leaving. A banished cat always knows who to blame.

My aversion to creatures of the feline persuasion is longstanding, traceable, maybe, to my mother’s fear and loathing of mice and everything associated with them, though I don’t recall her being afraid of cats. Not that anyone we knew ever had one. I was an only child and happy to be one; I used to end my nightly prayers with “and please, God, don’t let them get a brother or sister. Or a pet.” 

Fast forward a few decades and Sidney and I have bought the Amagansett house we’re still living in many years later, and are having a dinner party of our own. From outside comes a faint sound. Meow? Meow.

“Your cat’s wanting to come in,” someone says.

“It’s not our cat. We have no cats. I don’t even like cats.”

But my husband, Mr. Tenderheart, gets up, goes to the kitchen, and comes back with a bowl of tuna fish (solid white albacore) and a dish of milk.

“Aaaack. What are you doing? They say if you feed a cat it never goes away. Aaack!”

Too late. On the porch now, a starved-looking creature is already halfway through its first good meal in heaven knows how long. And what the old wives say turns out, of course, to be true. The cat adopts us. 

It could have been worse. It happened on a Memorial Day weekend, with a whole long hot summer ahead, which meant the cat could live outside and I wouldn’t have to look at it. Much. It was a head-turning cat, though; surely one of the ugliest specimens on God’s green earth, a black-and-white pipestem of a body on four stovepipe legs. The kids wanted to call it something cuddly, I forget what, but no, I said, we’ll call it Puss. With any luck, I was thinking, the cat will walk down the street and some kind soul will say, casually, “Here, puss, here, puss,” and it will follow them home. End of story.

It never happened. And too soon, Labor Day was on the horizon. There was no such thing as year-round weekending back then; you closed the house, drained the pipes, put big wooden shutters on the windows, and went back to the city until spring. No way was I taking the cat, but nor did I have the heart, much though I loathed it, to leave it to fend for itself. What to do?

The answer arrived disguised as a bicycle.

That summer, Sidney had won a case for a client who manufactured bicycles. Short on cash, the man offered to give him five of his top-of-the-line bikes instead, one for each member of the family, one to spare. It was that bonus bike that solved the Puss predicament.

We put an ad in The Star: “We will give a brand-new bicycle to whomever will give our cat a good home.”

A lot of people came to the house, every one of them eager to see the bike. We took all their numbers and promised to call. Finally, toward the end of the day, a woman arrived looking worried. Had anyone taken the cat, she asked. “No, not yet.” Could she see it? “There he is.” 

She held her hand out. “Here, puss. Here, puss.” And Puss got up and stretched and went right to her.

“I’d like to take him now,” she said. “I live in Sag Harbor. Is that okay?”

Okay? It was glorious. “But wait,” I said. “What about the bicycle?”

“The bicycle? Oh yes, the bicycle. Well, I don’t really want a bicycle. Only a cat.”

And away they went. Goodbye, Puss. You were one lucky feline.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

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.