In the last few weeks, the old house we live in has been crawling with roofers and repairmen. I guess it’s a case of extreme spring housekeeping, but we are finally facing some of the overdue renovations we’ve ignored for too long: The place needs re-shingling, at least on the south side, as well as new roofing over the flat ceiling of the master bedroom; some of the window trim and soffits have gone soft, and we need to add insulation where the foam that was blown in years ago has gone. 

And that's just the exterior. I can hardly remember the last time the interior was painted. I guess I should thank heavens that we chose pleasing, non-trendy, Williamsburg-ish colors back in the 1970s and 1990s. I think I can say with confidence that they remain in good taste!

In this day and age, homeowners around town seem quite overeager to clutch at any excuse to get rid of the old to clear the way for something bigger and better. I’m glad the younger generation venerates this house as I do, because in other hands, these necessary maintenance issues would be more than enough license for a tear-down.

Sitting on the sun porch, looking into the yard, I remember the friend who long ago advised us to build a circular brick patio in the L-shaped outdoor space between the kitchen and bedroom. That turned out to be a grand idea. I also recall waking up one fall morning, long ago, to see a friend who was much older than I digging in a garden patch by one of the backdoors: He had ordered too many daffodils for his Northwest Woods house lot and came by without ado to plant bulbs. They are blooming right now.

This old house has lots of tales to tell.  

Originally, some 150 or 200 years ago (or more? I've frankly forgotten), our living room was a silversmith shop that stood near Main Street and was later moved up the lane to become a family house. If you gaze up at some of the old beams in the basement, you can still see where the forge had been. 

Sitting on the sun porch, I also think of E.J. Edwards, my late first husband’s grandfather, a member of the venerable Edwards fishing and whaling clan, who ran bunker (or menhaden) boats out of Promised Land. It was E.J. who planted the holly tree that still grows in the front yard, on the occasion of his granddaughter Mary Huntting Rattray’s birth. E.J. also put down the green boat paint, containing bunker oil, that can still be seen on the floor of the sunroom. The boat paint has chipped away to bare wood in some spots, over the last, oh, 80 or 90 years or so, but I do really like that green. E.J. thought it would last forever, and it just about has.

I have lately been thinking that it might be a good idea for the Village of East Hampton to embark on an education scheme, explaining to realtors and home-buyers — in our historic districts and beyond — why preservation is usually a nobler (not to mention more attractive) route than tearing down and rebuilding. Maybe the Ladies Village Improvement Society might be involved in creating a brochure on the merits of old houses, and what the rules are regarding preservation? It’s just a thought.

Leo has an Instagram account. He launched it after learning that a pig in Canada had 200,000 followers, and a book deal. Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling people.

At first, our daughter, the one who convinced us over my repeated objections to get Leo in the first place, was outraged. Then, after some of her school friends saw Leo’s account and declared it “the best thing ever!” she lightened up.

Instagram, a photo-sharing smartphone app, in case you didn’t know, is more or less where people go online these days when they want to brag about something great, great, great that they are doing or eating or whatever. A week in, Leo the Love Pig, as he calls himself on Instagram, had about 30 followers not counting family. On the other hand, Esther, the pig with the book deal, was on the cover of People magazine the other day.

Jealousy is part and parcel of the Leo experience. Heaven forbid he catches me or Lisa scratching one of the dogs. He hits the roof, whining and whining, when Weasel, our Lab mix, so much as stands on the staircase within a stride or two of the water bowl. 

Why Weasel’s mere proximity vexes him so, I have no idea. But then there is a lot I don’t understand about the pig mind. I tell anyone who asks that they are like cats; they like human company but only on their own terms. There is none of that drooling, eager to please stuff you get with dogs. No, it’s all about them — what they want, when they want it.

And, oh yes, they’re smart. Leo knows, for instance, that the minute I step anywhere near the cutting board on the kitchen counter that it’s time to start poking at my leg with his snout. If you’ve never examined a pig close up, I recommend you take the first opportunity. Their noses, like the rest of their hulk, can be soft and tentative but at other times a real pain in the, um, ankle.

Leo, unlike that fancy pig in Ottawa, is small for his species. On a good day, I can still lift him off the ground and wobble us over to the bathroom scale. The last time I did it, he weighed in at about 104 pounds; judging from Esther’s Instagram, she might want to lay off the cupcakes a bit.

Leo would eat a cupcake, but with a pair of perpetually hungry kids at home, one would have to be completely inedible before being tossed to him. Instead, we try to give Leo snacks of the healthy variety. No matter how deeply he might be wedged into his bed by the fireplace, the second I begin peeling a tangerine, he will appear at my side peering at me, his tiny eyes filled with longing.

Today, though, as he chowed down on half my breakfast, I was able to turn that tender moment into Instagram glory.

Up!

A photo posted by Leo the Love Pig (@leothelovepig) on Apr 4, 2016 at 2:25pm PDT

One of the myths I’ve entertained over the years is that athletes are somehow immune when it comes to what can drag you down. 

Wasn’t it I who once said, “While my athletic days are pretty much over, I take comfort in the company of athletes, men and women, boys and girls, and like taking photos of them, deriving joy from the at times sublime headiness of sport, a headiness I’ve known running and playing, of being in the moment, when all within the realm of consciousness seemed, however briefly, perfect.”

And yet . . . and yet the list of athletes I’ve known or have known of, who’ve died before their time — by no means all because of depression, but a few of them — is steadily lengthening. John Villaplana, Brandon Hayes, Kendall Madison, Chris Schiaffino, Chris Cosich, Annette MacNiven, Andrew MacNiven, Steve Tarpinian, and now Mike Semkus come immediately to mind. So I am finally disabused of thinking that all athletes are forever blessed.

Jean Mellano, who lived more than 30 years with one of these outwardly buoyant souls assailed within by demons, has in a memoir of Steve Tarpinian called “Slipped Away” celebrated his successes (he was among triathlon’s founders on Long Island, in the early 1980s) and his kind spirit, while at the same time drawing attention to a painful disease, clinical depression, that if it is ever discussed is done so in lowered tones.

Knowing someone who is clinically depressed myself, I told her it was extraordinary, and a great testimony to his strength, that Steve, who took his life a year ago, at the age of 54, had in spite of his suffering accomplished so much. 

Having made a vocation of his avocation — something his friend Chuck Sperazza, a top amateur triathlete who’s won many times out here, said he envied — Steve Tarpinian joyously competed, in Hawaii, Lake Placid, and on Long Island, with his peers (just about always, as I recall, coming out of the water first, or very close to it), and vigorously promoted the multidisciplinary sport under the Event Power and Team Total Training banners, setting numerous students, many of whom at first didn’t think they had it in them, on their way to triathletic careers. He himself had 18 Ironmans (in Hawaii and Lake Placid) and 17 Xterra championships to his credit. 

“Slipped Away” abounds in testimonials from peers, Dave Scott, John Howard, and Scott Tinley among them, and from students.

“Steve encouraged, motivated, and helped people to realize their own dreams,” Jen Gatz said in thanking him “for passing on your enthusiasm and positivity. I can’t help but notice that those touched by you continue to spread that message.”

“He left a legacy and set a standard for us all to live up to, of giving, sharing, smiling, hoping, believing, and then giving again,” said Al Lyman.

“I always wanted to do my best for him,” said Nancy Burpee, a U.S. Paralympics pool racer. “Everyone did. He brought that out of you.”

“You’ve inspired me, intimidated me, encouraged me, drafted me, beaten me, congratulated me, and handed me trophies — all the time making me feel better about me,” said Ric Stott on learning of Steve Tarpinian’s death. “After lifting so many spirits, it’s so confusing to hear that you struggled with yours.”

The memoir is available through SlippedAway.org. Most of the profits, Ms. Mellano has said, are to go to a Long Island veterans organization, Project Nine Line, perhaps toward the development of a program that helps returning veterans overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, or to help an individual know that he or she is not alone in confronting depression and suicidal thoughts.

It is time — long past time — that the subject come out of hiding and into the open.

Oh man, that was fun. Though it went by in a flash, as I’ve been telling people since Sunday, it was well worth it. Well worth the 57-mile after-work drive to and from the rehearsal studio in Bohemia. Well worth the hours holed up in the tiny and cluttered studio/writing room at home, learning new songs. And well worth all of Saturday’s downtime as the hours ticked away and the butterflies took flight. 

It had been exactly one year since anything resembling a formal performance — a short-lived band that gave exactly one performance before falling apart, as these ventures usually do — and in the ensuing months I’d wavered between a mild enthusiasm to soldier on and, more often, fervent cynicism and negativity. When time allowed, I’d hole up in that tiny room in what seems a futile effort to attain even passable dexterity on the piano. The guitars weren’t played at all, silently gathering dust as they hung from the walls. 

Is anyone even listening? Does anyone care? In my observation, live music is received as background noise. Don’t the kids prefer a D.J. these days?

Maybe, but the audience that packed Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday, at least, showed a pronounced preference for the real thing. The crowd definitely skewed older, shall we say, and when queried at the top of the show, many testified to personal experience with the Fillmore East, a downtown Manhattan rock ’n’ roll venue that closed when I was 4 and to which this event paid tribute. 

A few months ago, Randolph Hudson III, a guitarist and wonderful guy, asked if I owned a 12-string guitar. As it happened, I had bought one, on a whim, just a few months earlier when an offer I thought insultingly low was unexpectedly accepted. Randy kindly referred me to Joe Lauro, of the HooDoo Loungers and the Historic Films archive, who has helped to conceive and organize many similar musical events at Bay Street in the last few years. 

Joe and I had a short conversation, and I was invited to play with a group that would perform music of Jefferson Airplane, a group I’d always liked yet wasn’t especially familiar with beyond a spellbinding scene in “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers’ document of a 1969 festival at which a young man was stabbed and kicked to death by members of the Hells Angels as the Rolling Stones played on. 

Paul Kantner, who died in January, played the 12-string, an integral component of the psychedelic band’s sound. The “Airplane” would play between groups performing music of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two other icons of rock ’n’ roll’s long-ago golden age. 

In Bohemia — what a suitable name for these hippie revivalists’ rehearsal site — it was immediately apparent that Joe had assembled a fantastic crew, perhaps none more than the vocalists, George Feaster and Carolyn Droscoski, who would be our Marty Balin and Grace Slick. George, I later learned, is also an accomplished actor; as a frontman he is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When Carolyn belts out “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” it is, as Joe said, as though Ms. Slick is standing before you. 

Time and logistics allowed for just two group rehearsals before the big day, and by Saturday we just about knew what we were doing. When it was time, we proceeded to the stage in darkness, the last minutes of the original “King Kong” playing on the screen overhead, as Jefferson Airplane had done at a Fillmore East concert. 

“Well, Denham,” the police lieutenant said, “the airplanes got him.”

“Oh no,” Denham replied, the orchestral score swelling to its climax. “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” 

And then we were off, “3/5 Mile in 10 Seconds” and “The Other Side of This Life” and “White Rabbit” and more, ending with our own climactic “Volunteers” (“Got a revolution, got to revolution!”). It went by in a flash. 

I hope those veterans of the Fillmore East were able to relive a moment in their lives, and I wish I could relive the moment I hope they relived, if that makes any sense. Can we all do that again? 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Maybe it’s a good thing that interest in the presidential election has been revved up by one candidate who denigrates so many people — targeting them by place of origin, religion, and sex — while another foments revolution (albeit a peaceful one). Everyone I know keeps talking about the primaries.

I cannot believe disrespect and name-calling are good for democracy, but if more of the electorate turns out in November as a result, we might be able to say that this cloud of national humiliation has had a silver lining.

A report on voter turnout in national elections between 2000 and 2012, from an organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center, showed it “dipped from 62.3 percent of eligible citizens voting in 2008 to an estimated 57.5 in 2012. That figure was also below the 60.4 level of the 2004 election but higher than the 54.2 percent turnout in the 2000 election.” So it seems that somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of voters were the decision-makers in those years. 

Of course, a simple majority hasn’t always assured national election. In 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president, lost in the Electoral College after Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to George W. Bush in a 5-to-4 Su­preme Court decision. That then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor voted with the majority was considered the deciding factor. Mr. Gore had won the popular vote, although by only a very small percentage; Ralph Nader had won almost 3 percent of the vote and was probably the spoiler rather than Justice O’Connor. In addition to talking about the primaries, friends and relatives who admit to being surprised by the size of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s support have found it amusing to take something called the Bubble Quiz. According to their score on 25 questions, they were able to find out if they lived “cloistered together . . . with little to no exposure to American culture at large.” 

The quiz was devised by Charles Murray, a well-known political scientist and author who describes himself as a libertarian. He was recently interviewed about it by Paul Solman on the PBS NewsHour.

The Bubble Quiz questions range from “Have you ever walked on a factory floor?” and “Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?” to whether you have seen certain popular movies or eaten in certain chain restaurants. If you are interested in finding out where you score, it’s easy to find on the NewsHour website.

I myself took the quiz earlier today, but didn’t find it particularly enlightening. I guess I’m already aware that I live in a bubble of privilege. Also, I am not entirely sure that Mr. Murray is an oracle on what constitutes “American culture at large.” Still, if those who took the quiz were a fair sample of the voting public, and if their answers were carefully analyzed, perhaps it might serve as a barometer of the next election.

What we all know for sure is that the electorate is deeply divided, and that the societal culture gap is real. Trump and Sanders are only making that division so obvious we cannot ignore it any longer.

East Hampton has 1,000 tons of compost it can’t get rid of.   A couple of weeks back, officials sent out a notice announcing the town had a large amount unscreened compost to unload. The stuff had accumulated at the recycling center, the end product of all the lawn clippings, leaves, and brush that flow into the place, which are run through a giant grinder and left to mulch. Visitors to the so-called dump can see it for themselves — a long, tall mound of steaming dark-brown, almost black soil. 

Homeowners and landscapers know all about the town’s compost. Though it is thought not to be all that good for growing edible crops, it is terrific for sweetening up portions of a tired lawn or ornamental plantings. For a modest fee, workers at the recycling center will put a load in the back of a pickup truck for commercial landscapers or gardeners; permit-holders with a few bins to fill can do so at no charge, as I understand it.

However, when the supply reaches the hundreds or thousands of tons, the town has a problem. No one responded to its request for bids to buy the stuff, and earlier this month the Purchasing Department had the matter tabled during a town board meeting.

Compost is not the town’s only recycling headache. Because market prices for the products it collects have gone up and down over the years, it sometimes costs more for the town to deal with the material than it can receive from buyers.

That said, it is better in dollar terms for the town to hold down the volume of solid waste of any sort that it collects and has to haul away. Yard waste and tree trimmings ground into compost represent that much less that has to be sent to a distant landfill or incinerator.

Even if difficult to get rid of when the supply piles up, the composting program is a net benefit for taxpayers. And while we might not be able to take care of that 1,000 tons all on our own, a bucket-load here and there that any of us can take and use at home helps out.

“Estoy feliz que Mexico no ha construido un muro contra noso­tros!” I said to the taxi driver as we arrived at the Las Brisas hotel outside Zihuatenejo.

He laughed, as had been my intention in saying I was glad Mexico had not built a wall to keep us tourists out. On that note, we began a week’s stay at the closest thing we’ve come to paradise on this earth, there being nothing to do there but read and swim and speak bad Spanish to the unfailingly pleasant staff, a wonderfully captive audience. 

And yet, even though I felt more at ease than ever with the language, to the extent that I was able to frequently get orange juice mixed in with my margaritas, and to make some headway in proposing that the name of Isaias Ochoa Hernandez, a former Las Brisas lifeguard who began protecting baby sea turtles there years ago, be added to the hotel’s history of the project, a history proudly affixed to a stone wall near the beach, it’s Mary who always received the compliments — heeding apparently the advice of my father that all one needed to say in French was thank you and goodbye, “merci” and “au revoir.”

In her case it’s “gracias” and “lo siento,” to which she adds, apologetically, “Mi espanol es muy mal,” invariably prompting her interlocutor to declaim, “No, no, senora, you speak very well! You speak very well!”

“I’m better than her in tennis, she’s better than me in swimming, and we’re tied in Ping-Pong,” I said to a waiter who had noted we were sporty. I forgot to add that she killed me in backgammon — thankful that I wasn’t that fluent.

For exercise, though, you needn’t do anything more than climb up and down Las Brisas’s steep stone stairs that lead through jungly growth to the pools, the tennis courts, the beach, and, if you’re of a mind, to the lobby, about as high up on the cliff into which the hotel is built as a sacrificial Aztec or Mayan altar. 

“It was like Syphilis,” I said, panting, to Mary following one of my steep ascents. “Sisyphus, rather. . . . You know, Robert Graves [no relation] says he was known as the worst knave on earth for promoting only Corinthian commerce and navigation.”

That reminded me of a certain knave on the earth now, though I held my tongue, not wanting our bliss to go amiss.

It would be going too far to say that my husband and I are cutthroat when it comes to the online challenge called Trivia Today. Intense would be more like it. 

Okay, maybe just a little . . . bloodthirsty.

Every morning and afternoon we check our computers for the day’s two questions. Before the sun goes down, one of us is sure to ask the other — always off-handedly, though a smirk or a scowl is riding on the answer — “So, how’d you do on Trivia Today?”

We’ve been competing in this maddening game — which is sort of like “Jeopardy,” only you get four possible answers to choose from — for about two years now. The enigmatic scoring chart, with 100 tops, has had us since January at 62 and 65, which is better than it sounds; the average score out there in virtual gameland is 49. Sidney had a long string of right answers recently, but it takes forever to gain a point and his number never budged, which has not improved dinnertime. “I don’t understand it,” he grouses. “Why aren’t I moving up?”

Most of the relationships of the long-married couples I know, and we are talking golden anniversary-plus here, seem to me to tilt almost soppily solicitous or — not so much. I met one woman in Florida this winter who was playing this same trivia game with her husband and confided that she was deliberately giving the wrong dumb answers to make him happy, and another who cuts the Times crossword puzzle out of the paper every morning and makes a copy of it for her husband before he wakes up. Then they have a battle over coffee to see who finishes first. They’ve been keeping score forever.

“Who’s ahead?” I asked her.

“Oh, I am. And you can tell him I told you.”

The best thing about Trivia Today is that you learn a lot of stuff that seems useless at the moment but that might come in handy sometime. The first job I ever had, as assistant humor editor of a long-defunct magazine called Coronet, was like that. Coronet was the Avis of the day to the Reader’s Digest’s Hertz. We ran a column like the Digest’s “Life in These United States” where people would write in with funny things that had really happened, only we paid $25 and they paid $100.

Nine out of 10 submissions were handwritten, often in pencil. My job was mainly to decipher the chicken scratches, but also to pick out candidates for publication, and then the humor editor (a beyond-crabby woman who never cracked a smile) would decide who’d win.

Within a few months of starting work, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to plow through the whole letter, just skip to the punchline at the end. “No, 40 children are enough.” Yup, we’ve run that one already. It was as if there were only a finite number of comical things happening in America. By 11 a.m. the day’s work was done. 

Pretty soon I had hundreds of funny stories by heart, and oh boy, what that job did for me. “That reminds me of a joke,” I’d say. All of a sudden I was the life of the party.

But I digress. You know what I’ve really learned from playing Trivia Today? That a lot of us never listened to anything we were told in school. 

How else could you miss a question like the one we had on March 15: “Who was famously killed on the Ides of March?” 

Remember, you get four choices. Seventy percent of respondents got Julius Caesar. Four percent guessed John F. Kennedy. Thirteen percent picked Joan of Arc. 

Trumpists.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Amid the serious implications of this week’s terror attacks in Brussels, the pronounced lack of seriousness that the Republican presidential front-runner has brought to the race became all the more glaring.

Donald Trump is not normally a name that would turn up in The Star, though he has been on my mind a lot lately. What has been puzzling me is how a number of people around the South Fork whom I know and respect, and think of as reasonable, can like him.

From all appearances there is little to merit his wide support other than that the other candidates in the Republican nomination hunt have been uninspiring. Mr. Trump’s negatives are many, and in a foreign policy context made urgent after the Brussels horror, his ignorance is clear. And yet his poll numbers continue to be solid.

Among all the analyses of this phenomenon — that a hate-filled, misogynistic, and woefully underprepared narcissist could be the Grand Old Party’s nominee — something I read on Vox.com about political authoritarianism has rung true. Citing the work of several academics, Amanda Taub reported that a tendency to favor authoritarian leaders among Republicans polled was the best single predictor of Mr. Trump’s support.

The voters cited by the researchers in Ms. Taub’s article were individuals who express dislike of minorities coupled with a desire for a strongman leader. This is perhaps why those voters who have not lost their jobs, or otherwise do not fit into the dubious narrative about so-called dispossessed voters, might find Mr. Trump appealing.

Forceful action against perceived threats is attractive to those with hard-edged leanings. As Ms. Taub put it, “If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.”

Maybe that explains it.

A shout-out to one of Representative Lee Zeldin’s assistants, Terri Malloy, who, in paving the way with Connecticut’s passport agency recently, got me out of the doghouse and onto a plane bound for Mexico.

I had written in anticipation of the event that it would be restorative and blissful, but that was before I discovered my passport was to expire three days before we were to leave.

Mary, when I told her, was beside herself, though I, not wanting at that moment to be beside herself — which is to say, within her reach, much less her grasp — retreated, saying it was my fault, my fault, and vowing — without having any particular idea how I would — to make it right. 

First, I called the New York City passport agency, which is in the Federal Building there, and was told the next appointment I could get would be on March 15, two days before we were to go. I passed on that and called our congressman’s office the next day, hoping they could do something. And, wonderful to tell, they (Terri) did, by getting me an appointment the very next afternoon with the Connecticut passport agency in Stamford!

The next morning I was on my way to Bridgeport via the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson ferry humming “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores. . . .” 

The appointment Terri had made for me was at 1 p.m. There were maybe a dozen others. It had been a long day getting to and from, but, insofar as the passport was concerned, I was in and out in 10 minutes! 

It was only mildly Kafkaesque. I told them about my hearing aids, my titanium knees, and my congenital inability to follow simple directions, though they were compassionate. Twenty more dollars and the new passport would be within my grasp in two days, they promised. 

I emailed Terri to thank her ever so much. She replied that the Stamford office had yet to let her down.

And when the new passport arrived — just when they said it would — I told Mary, with a laugh, I was sure it wouldn’t happen again.

“Hey, you never know,” she said as we embraced.