It’s difficult to say yet whether the electric do-dad that was among the highlights of our middle child’s Christmas and Hanukkah haul was total junk or something really cool. What was clear was that when she lost a tiny and critical metal part at bedtime on Monday, crisis ensued.

An early riser, I had retired by that time, so I was only half awake when she came to seek help. I told her to go have a look around with a flashlight, maybe under the stove, where she had been working with the gadget, and if that didn’t work, I’d see what I could do in the morning.

Sometime around about 5:15 I heard Leo the pig jangling the kitchen radiator cover. He had been feeling poorly after eating a gingerbread house the day before, which had been my idea when the kids called me, bored and looking for something to do. So I had no one else to blame for what awaited me on the tile passageway floor.

That mopped up, I sat down at the table, where Evvy had left her device, a 3-D pen that extrudes melted plastic any which way, still missing the metal piece. Along the way I managed to down a cup of coffee and eat a reheated blueberry scone. That and the missing part put me in a cleaning mood.

I looked under the range’s burner plates, in the oven, alongside the refrigerator. Nothing. Then it was time to pull out the range itself, then the fridge, which meant sweeping up the various and sundry there and scrubbing the floor with water and ammonia. Aside from a notable collection of lint, a working calculator, 37 cents of good U.S. of A. money, and a few marbles, nothing of note was behind either appliance, and no metal part.

Having nicked a sloped portion of the kitchen ceiling while jogging the refrigerator out of its place, I next went down to the basement for a bit of sandpaper, wallboard compound, and a putty knife to begin its repair. Priming and painting would have to wait.

By then the sun was up, and as I swept up the last bits, I noticed what looked like a scrap of candy wrapper in the cabinet under the sink. There it was, the metal piece had been sitting in plain view all along. I slipped it back into the 3D pen, and headed to the office. No one in our household was even up when I pulled on my rain boots and headed outside, what felt like a full day’s work already done. The pig was still on his bed, looking somewhat the worse for wear.

“We’re going to Emily’s for Thanksgiving next year,” Mary said.

“That gives me something to live for,” I said.

“I’ll tell her you said that,” she said.

I was joking, I hadn’t meant anything by it — it’s just nice to have things to look forward to. We’ve been looking forward to a lot of things lately, and then, of a sudden, we pause because still other things to look forward to have supplanted what it was we were initially looking forward to, which is what we do until we replace the new thing, or things, we’re looking forward to with yet another thing, or things, to look forward to. 

In brief, we try not to dwell on the past. 

Besides, Thanksgiving at Emily’s — it will be my first trip to Perrysburg, Ohio, as in “Why, oh why, oh why, oh, why did I ever leave Ohio, why did I wander to find what lies yonder when life was so cozy at home?” — we are also looking forward to getting another dog. Assuming, that is, the breeders, who live in Virginia, after having perused our lengthy application, sort of like what you might have to fill out if you were applying to Harvard, concur that we are worthy.

When Mary asked, as she was filling out the application, when it was that Henry died, I said, “Not long ago . . . in May. . . ?” 

But it was, indeed, I learned later, while reviewing my columns, a long time ago — at the end of August in 2014. Fifteen months have passed and I can still see him looking at me from where he was lying in the kitchen as I was digging his grave.

“His world was narrowing,” Mary said, “and ours was too. He was almost there when he went, at our hands — a terrible duty this terrible beauty exacts. . . .”

We’re going to Emily’s next Thanksgiving, we’re getting a dog, and I’ve planted a small Christmas tree near where Henry lies. The new year’s begun.

The other day it was the teddy bear backpack that did me in, aqua blue and sodden with seawater on the shore. “Teddy bear backpacks should not be washing up on beaches,” the caption said. 

Then the report that a baby had died of exposure after sleeping rough in a cold tent at the camp. The first child of 2016 to die in the Aegean Sea. Tonight’s news that 36 people perished when two boats overturned. 

I’m falling apart a little; one has to fall apart. How can someone see firsthand the refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and not shatter into pieces?

What I saw on the Greek island of Lesbos, what I keep learning since, is splitting head and heart.

The boats from Turkey have not stopped, even in rough weather and cold. The people who have left behind homes, professions, family members — maybe dead — need to move. The smugglers want to make their lucre. 

It’s all so very unbelievable: the faces of the people packed onto a rubber raft holding many more than it’s meant to carry, the sight of the flimsy boats riding low to the sea, just inches from swamping.

Frightened voices, keening sounds in the dark.  Jubilation and fear, determination, unspeakable sadness all twined into one as people — some of them — safely reach shore.

Half my mind, at least half, is still there on Lesbos, a sweetly scenic island where on a bright blue day, high up on the winding roads connecting harbor towns, you see the specks, just barely afloat, making their way across the Aegean.

Ask anyone who goes; you do not come back the same. 

At the cobblestoned center of the harbor village of Skala Sikamineas, a landing point at one of the narrowest gaps between Turkey and Greece, the fruit and vegetable vendor sells oranges from the back of his pickup truck. From the mud track a hard left at the foot of the hill come the groups of just-arrived refugees, wrapped in crinkly metallic emergency blankets flashing gold and silver around their shoulders and feet. Metal fabric blooms like flowers trail from ill-fitting used but dry shoes provided, along with warm clothes and hot soup, at the temporary reception camps as a welcome and a way to ward off hypothermia.

They walk up the steep road ahead to the bus pickup point, to the camp where they must register in Greece as refugees, to the ferry across to Athens, and then on, they hope. Only as far as the next closed border, sometimes; as far as the next refugee camp, the next closed door.

To be helpful, volunteers have to stay calm and strong. “Just be present,” a therapist friend advised me before I went. 

So I kept looking into the face of the man who told me his family was dead, kept my eyes on his even as they started to glitter and fill. I stepped forward to hug him; I offered dry clothes. He shook his head. “I am strong,” he said. 

I’d look up and smile as groups of people just off the boats passed by. In Arabic, I said, “Welcome to Greece,” repeatedly pulling a cheat sheet out of my pocket to practice. 

Men, women, children would smile back. Or gaze, too traumatized to respond. But often, two English words: “Thank you.” Or a gesture — hand to heart, then extended out. 

When you gather the pieces and go on, pull your coddled self together to help the people in crisis (how dare I complain or be upset? Afghan, Iraqi, refugee — it’s a spin of the wheel), the fault lines remain. 

It’s a permanently altered worldview, an obsession, perhaps. A need, once home, not to sink back into the comfortable familiar, taking for granted so many things. Shelter. Safety. Food. 

And don’t even talk about my heart. I went, deliberately, to challenge it. To recalibrate, to amp up my gratitude. To turn toward questions, unanswerable questions, about why the world is this way. How can I want or expect, well, anything, when there is suffering like this? 

In dreams I’m up and down the mud hill at Moria, the registration camp where refugees — where people — go and sign their names, become official numbers in a humanitarian crisis, in a political game.

I stood with them along the barbed wire fence eyed by armed riot police, waiting to take their next step into a vast unknown, stripped of any surety about who and where they would be, when they might eat, if they or their children would survive. 

There’s no way to write about this but in dramatic tones. 

In the dark Moria is bleak. Those huddled shapes are tired people wrapped up and trying to sleep, choosing a spot on the rock rubble instead of in the mud. Night tests courage; the desperation runs strong. With night comes hours that seem too much to bear.

In the light pops of color — pup tents with sagging sides — spread across the gray mud of a decimated olive grove. The cheery colors and picturesque landscape of the hill under a sweeping sky are a strange contrast.

Moria: a word that gave me “Mordor,” the black volcanic plain in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. “A barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust,” the author wrote, like the Syrian streets dissolved under bombs, where so many of these families lived.

This week, after heavy rain, Moria was not just a sea of mud, it was flooded.

But there are many focused efforts now to improve conditions, all led by volunteers, and they have snowballed since my time there in November.

While adequate food, blankets, may­be some heat is an uphill challenge, there is joy, blips of it, in a children’s art and play tent that was just getting under way when I was there. In bright paint, in crayon, the kids draw their worlds: a lopsided boat, stick people in the sea, an exploding bomb over a house. Under a hanging sock monkey in a now comfortable, padded-floor tent, they blow and pop bubbles; maybe they laugh.

The massive humanitarian effort, the refugee rescue work, moves forward one dry pair of socks at a time, one ride at a time, one baby bundled warm and given the doctor’s A-okay. 

You do one thing, and then the next. Pass on some information; smile, hug, shake a hand. Lend a phone to someone for a call back home to report that they made it so far, alive.

It becomes an exercise in belief, in the compounding power of the small. Just say yes and go. Do what you can, and then one thing more. 

A sleeping bag, a bottle of water, a little rabbit puppet to make a child smile. Hand on a mother’s shoulder, help covering her infant’s head. 

A moment of normality, of levity, in a snatch of sing-along song shared. Some things surpass language and cultural borders. I wore a smiley face sticker on my hand, peeled it off and slapped it on a young boy’s palm. Shared a smile snuck into the spaces between forbearance and fear.

“Why are you here?” one man asked another volunteer. “I’m here to help,” she said, and watched his face change at the realization that we, all of us, were there for them. 

I was impotent to really help. I’m not a medic; can’t translate to Farsi or Arabic. And the big picture — well, my heart broke when an English-speaking Afghani man, who was targeted by the Taliban for his skill, begged me to tell him where he should go. Would Germany let him in? What would happen to him at this border? At that? I hated my inability to reply, the world’s lack of the answers he needs. 

All I can do, I thought, is be here, be present, to stand up for you, connect person-to-person and represent all the people in the world who care.

Salaam. Salaam. Salaam, I kept repeating to the refugees. “Hands like a weave of heaven,” I wrote as a line in a poem I began one day over coffee at the harbor, thinking of the many caring souls working to help.

Four Muslim men from Birmingham, England, were the most passionate and compassionate, the most energized and charged people I met, focused not only on meeting the refugees’ basic needs but on safeguarding their humanity. “It’s about the food and the water, but it’s about the dignity,” Amir explained. I can still hear the emotion in Nadeem’s voice as we sat over late-night tea in the cafe. “We’re humans. We’re human beings, all of us,” he said.  

In recent days, news reports from Europe have highlighted some of the difficulties posed by the influx of refugees. I’m not naive; a mass migration is no easy thing. But look into people’s faces and you’ll see.

We are a web, all of us, now, sharing information and concern across the world. On Lesbos, a net of hard-working responders. If only we could do more. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

“I tried to talk with the dead last night, but the dead, being dead, gave no reply.”

I wrote that sentence over 20 years ago, channeling, I suppose, a little Edgar Allan Poe, with a dash of John Lennon. I had just returned from a walk on a damp, frigid fall afternoon on the beach at Ditch. The dead I was thinking of, at that moment, was my Tante Frieda. 

When I was born, my mother was in ill health. Frieda Evers, my father’s maternal aunt, came to live with us, to take care of the three children, while my mother recovered.

She had come from Germany at the height of that country’s post-“war-to-end-all-wars” economic meltdown. She carried with her a stack of trillion-mark notes, the worthless currency printed by the German banks.

A kindergarten teacher in her native land, she became a nanny in America, taking care of families with newborns, with my family being first and foremost. Shewould be with us several months, and then go away for a stretch of time, tending to another family.

She was an integral part of my father’s family when he was growing up, and became so with our family, as well.

Tante Frieda had a bedroom opposite my sisters’ room on the second floor. It was furnished entirely with dark, Gothic German furniture, including a big rocking chair. Beth, Cathy, and I used to jump into that chair, the three of us, and rock wildly back and forth. 

Tante Frieda doted on me. I could do no wrong. Murder? “Das weife ich nicht,” she would say.

She was Lutheran, and quite religious. That only added to the anarchy that was our unformed understanding of faith, what with a Jewish mother and a father whose family had left the Catholic Church. 

She had a foldout couch, and sometimes I would sleep in her room. She read to me at bedtime, either from the Bible, or a well-worn edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” or perhaps from Hans Christian Andersen.

When I was 7, my family moved to Forest Hills Gardens. She took an apartment nearby, and continued to join us for Sunday dinner. For the first few years in Forest Hills, I occasionally slept over in her apartment on that foldout couch.

As I went into my teenage years, I became a wild thing. There was nothing she could tell me that was of any import. I saw her less and less.

She began falling down and moved into the Wartburg Home in Mount Vernon. She died when I was in my late teens, and was buried in a cemetery outside Philadelphia. There was no funeral.

Many years later, I went to that cemetery to find her grave. Carole was with me.

We figured out where her grave was from the maps. She has no gravestone. 

I don’t remember now what it was, walking on the beach that chilly day over 20 years ago, that made me want to speak to her for a moment, to hear her voice. 

Just one second, one tiny moment. That’s not asking too much, is it?

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star.

I told Jen Landes, who’s conducting a survey as to whether males are more inclined than females to put flat lids on their coffee, and whether, conversely, females are more inclined than males to put on raised ones, that she could put me down as a raised-lidder.

I generally don’t participate in surveys, but I thought I should stand up and be counted when it came to this one on liddership.

“Of course,” I added, “that I go for the raised lids may be owing to the fact that I’m older now and have less testosterone.”

I’m not unhappy about this seepage; I think it has increasingly connected me to life, to its infinite variety, as well as to its often baffling vagaries. 

Here today, gone tomorrow . . . flat lidders, raised lidders. . . . I hope there will come a time when we can get beyond what seems to divide us and celebrate our mutual affinities. (Bearing in mind, of course, that the raised-lidders were right!)

In the end, you’ve got to laugh, if only to keep from crying. And so I said to the nurse, while being elaborately prepared for a col­onoscopy at the hospital the other day, that I thought they were piling it on a bit. “When these screenings were done at the doctor’s office,” I said, “it seemed like you just went in and they’d say, ‘Bend over.’ ”

“Bottom line, they’ll say the same thing here,” she said, hooking me up to an IV.

Soon it was over and I was told I was fine — at least until Health Republic’s “explanation of benefits” came in the mail.

“I’ll see you when I’m 80 then!” I said, on the way out the door with Mary, cheered by the thought that I’d not have to sip two bottles of magnesium citrate for another five years — on a par in my dread department with having to cover another U.S. Open at Shinnecock, where again, I presume, I’ll have to scope out the holes from beyond the ropes.

It’s all connected, you see!

I was driving though Bridgehampton the other day and passed the place on Montauk Highway where a vehicle struck Anna Pump as she tried to cross the road. Ms. Pump, who died of her injuries at Southampton Hospital later that day, had been in a crosswalk.

Crosswalks can be dangerous, particularly at night and at this time of the year when night comes before the close of the business day. This is why the Town of Southampton is creating an illuminated, flashing crossing near the Hampton Library like those already in place in East Hampton Village. But even those are not without risks. 

At about dusk on Sunday, as I was driving westward in the left of two lanes on Main Street in my pickup truck, I slowed for two people approaching in the crosswalk from the other side of the street. I could not tell if they were together or not, as one was a step or two behind the other. What was obvious though was that it was, for them, a risky moment; they had not pushed the button to trigger the crosswalk’s blinking lights, and they were both wearing dark clothes.

I looked to my right side-view mirror; a sport utility vehicle was coming up fast, apparently oblivious to the fact that there was a crosswalk ahead. Not knowing what else to do, I lightly beeped the horn several times in rapid succession and then shifted my truck back and forth into the right lane.

The pedestrians made it across the street okay. I was unable to tell if the S.U.V. driver had understood what was going on or thought I was just another nut on the road. Bridgehampton’s new lighted crosswalk will turn on when someone steps into the road rather than relying on a button. This might help, but the trend is not good for people on foot. 

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the rate of pedestrian deaths as a total of all fatalities in the United States has been increasing over the last decade at a time when the annual rate of road deaths over all has been falling sharply. 

The agency also issues pointers about crossing streets. They include this basic advice: Never assume that a driver has seen you.

As soon as I read the Times’s review, which said “The Humans” might turn out to be the best Broadway play of the season, I reserved two seats for a Wednesday matinee performance a month in advance of a Rogers Memorial Library bus trip we’d signed on to. 

It was only then that Mary told me she had wanted to see the hip-hop version of Alexander Hamilton. 

“Well, if ‘The Humans’ is depressing, we’ll go have a drink afterward, and if it’s not, we’ll have a drink anyway . . . to celebrate,” I said, mindful that not infrequently my enthusiasms can lead me astray when it comes to the arts.

“So, what’s it about?”

“A family’s Thanksgiving dinner,” I said, looking up from a thumbnail New Yorker review. “It says that the acting’s first-rate — the grandmother has Alzheimer’s . . . but that the play doesn’t lead anywhere. I don’t find that a problem, do you? I mean, about life not leading anywhere. . . ?”

“It sounds depressing. . . . Remember that movie you took me to on that other bus trip to the city, ‘Memphis.’ . . .”

“Say no more,” I said. “At least the theater seats were comfortable and we got some sleep.”

“This wasn’t the same reviewer? The one who raved about ‘The Humans’ wasn’t the same one who raved about ‘Memphis’ was he? Remember when you called the box office the night before and asked if there’d be any trouble getting seats the next day and the guy said he didn’t think so. Didn’t you say it sounded like he might have been suppressing an urge to laugh?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell for sure. . . .” 

“That should have been the tip-off.”

“But I was so fixated by then, fixated on treating you to a real work of art, one that held a mirror up to life. . . . Boring movies, depressing plays . . . I’m doing my best, I’m doing my level best!”

Five or six years ago I took the time to enter every single name, address, and phone number from my Rolodex into an A-to-Z computer program. (For anyone who doesn’t remember, a Rolodex was a spinning card file, and the more famous and powerful the names in yours, the more important you were supposed to be.) For quite some time, as new friends and contacts developed, I added their information to my computer file, but eventually I stopped keeping on top of it, and the whole thing tapered off.

Who needed a Rolodex in the era of auto-file? Electronics had taken over. It became more practical to keep phone numbers on my cellphone, and the email addresses I wanted usually popped right up when I started to input them, even when I upgraded to a new computer. Prudence might have suggested that I back up all this information, but the risk-taker in me prevailed. It didn’t make much difference that people’s contact information was scattered in different electronic storage places. Access was easy.

From time to time, the trusty old Rolodex still comes in handy. It is occasionally easier to find information I need there rather than to search for it any other way; it’s similar to the way leafing through the Yellow Pages remains easier on paper than in its virtual version. Reaching for the Rolodex, however, comes with a different set of problems, which I never anticipated. More and more, the Rolodex cards not only trigger nostalgia but consternation: Once too often, riffling through, I have come upon a card that lists someone I can’t remember at all, or businesses and organizations that have ceased to exist in my memory. 

How funny that a pre-digital, pen-and-paper device should store outdated information more effectively — or simply longer — than our constantly updated digital files do. The paper memory is still more indelible. 

Will these forgotten Rolodex contacts be of use someday? 

Should I hold on to data about people I cannot ever expect to contact again . . . or let it all go? 

What about the attorney who represented my parents after they moved to Florida, for example, some two decades before they died (and they died more than 20 years ago)?

I am sure I’m not the only member of my generation to hang on to old Rolodex entries for people we really cared about who are no longer alive, people we don’t have the courage to delete. A friend reminded me recently that one of our mutual friends, now long gone, had kept what he called a Dead Book. That sounds morbid, but, knowing him, I think he just wanted to chronicle their passing and to make sure he wouldn’t forget them.

After my mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, died in 1974, I inherited a small red address book that had been hers. I’ve saved it on the theory that her grandchildren might like to take a look at it some day; her life was long and fascinating. Will any of my heirs pay any attention to the A to Z on my computer? That’s highly doubtful. 

It’s more likely that I will go back over it myself some day. There may just be a memoir in there.

Back when my reprobate buddies and I were in high school and had our first cars we would nervously drive past a place we called the Mafia House down near Two Mile Hollow Beach. Because there was a heavy metal gate across the twisting driveway we concluded that the residents had something to hide. It was the 1970s, and tales of the Cosa Nostra were in the air, you know. 

As strange as it may seem now, time was when there was just one gate across a driveway in the Village of East Hampton, and probably in the whole town, too. Now they are ubiquitous and at least one property owner, Ronald Perelman, doubles down by posting guards in idling sport utility vehicles near his driveway. Mr. Perelman’s gate not that long ago drew the attention of officials, who said it was too tall.

Some might blame deer as the reason why gates have become an all but essential aspect of the South Fork roadscape. I’m not so sure; perhaps deer are to blame in some cases, perhaps not. 

It’s not as if gates present all that much of a security deterrent or that there are hordes of curious interlopers creeping in for a look at the average, run-of-the-mill Hamptons homeowner’s house. No, it’s more than that.

Personally, I don’t like them, but then I don’t like a lot of what passes for contemporary taste. For example, don’t get me started on Belgian block driveway aprons, eyebrow windows, or outdoor lighting pointed up into the trees.

Had we had a gate at our house, my own one real brush with crime would not have been prevented. This was an incident in which I surprised a young man from out of town whom I caught rifling through my truck one dark night. Fast and wiry, he could have easily scaled anything we had put up to bar the driveway.

I know that there is no way East Hampton is going back to the days when gates were the exception rather then the rule, when picket fences with trailing pink roses were prevalent. Still, we could do with a little less of what they represent.

What am I feeling thankful for this week?  

I am thankful that, like most Americans, I live a life insulated from the various calamities and wars going on elsewhere in the world.

I am thankful that I, like most of us in East Hampton, am safe and secure enough to be able to pursue personal well-being and the well-being of those I am close to.

I am not thankful for the fact that this country is often defined by the accumulation of material goods‚ though there appears to have been a silver lining of sorts on Black Friday 2015: Despite the popular circulation in social media of grotesque videos of shopping as blood sport, this year there were reportedly fewer riots than in other recent years. I guess that’s something?

Although I think assigning nicknames to certain days is silly, I am thankful that Cyber Monday was followed by Giving Tuesday. In case you haven’t heard, Giving Tuesday is when charitable organizations drum up donations; in my case, I got appeals from a slew, including cultural institutions close to home and groups fighting hunger abroad. 

I was especially thankful this week for those from the East End who turned away from their own Thanksgiving-feast opportunities to step out and help others. A Star associate editor, Joanne Pilgrim, was among those who traveled to Greece last week to offer what help she could to the refugees landing on the island of Lesbos in search of peace and a bit of the security we tend to take for granted.

Doug Kuntz, a contributing Star photographer, has gone back and forth to Lesbos in the last two months not only to chronicle the hardships of those attempting to find safe havens but to help direct funds to where they are most needed. East End Cares, an organization based in Montauk — founded to help Long Islanders after Superstorm Sandy — not only sent clothing and needed goods but also was able to send medical supplies and equipment to Lesbos at the same time it organized volunteers to fly over. I am grateful to them all. 

This week is also an appropriate time to commend those protesters around this country who are raising the veil behind which we as a people have hidden the truths about racial inequity and injustice in the criminal justice system. 

On the other end of the gratefulness spectrum, however, I am definitely not singing any hosannas for the slate of hopefuls seeking the Republican nomination to run for president. These are not great days for the Grand Old Party. I would call the spectacle tragicomic, but, really, for those of us who take pride in American democracy, it is just plain sad.

Donald Trump represents the worst in human nature: greed, self-interest, xenophobia, cruelty, belligerence, pride, vanity, and an absolute lack of mercy or respect for those weaker, meeker, or poorer than himself. He scares me. During Thanksgiving week, he took pains to denigrate not just the undocumented immigrants living among us, but refugees, as well. When debating political questions, many of us bandy about the term “fascist” much too casually, but I believe that a Donald Trump presidency would be fascist by all real definitions.

The choices Fox News and CNN made about who would be on the main stages for the Republican debates — and consequently who took the mantle of principal contenders — has been a bit disturbing, too, because those choices were based on polling. An analysis of polling and public opinion surveys by Jill Lepore in the Nov. 16 New Yorker magazine, “Politics and the New Machine,” casts doubt not only on polls’ and surveys’ validity but on the assumption that they are, in the end, democratic. 

Good journalism, like hers, is also something to be thankful for.