“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 Star’s 130th anniversary, although a milestone, passed almost unnoticed here last week. It was on Dec. 26, 1885, that George Burling first printed 500 copies of what he called The Easthampton Star, only later deciding to separate the East and the Hampton, in keeping with local tradition. Mr. Burling can be forgiven for the error, given that he had started The Southampton Press only the year before.

That Mr. Burling thought it fit to introduce his new paper the day after Christmas seems a puzzle today. My father, writing in his own column in 1977, observed that the 26th of December came at a time of year when even the most curmudgeonly of letter-writers couldn’t be motivated to pick up a pen, and that a publication that survived the quietest week of the year could survive anything.

Times were different then. Shore whaling, a mostly winter activity, continued as a meaningful source of income for some East Hamptoners. The summer tourist trade was only in its infancy, with farming and fishing the main livelihoods, along with the trades and shops to supply them. The year’s end might have been as good a time as any to expect the townspeople to find the time to read something fresh. And for a publisher, a sense of hope and expectation at the beginning of a new year must have seemed auspicious.

Today, The Star thrives in a very different era. The days when once Mr. Burling and the editors who inherited the mantle enjoyed a new monopoly, in terms of both readers’ attention and advertising, are long gone. So, too, is a sense that a newsthings the way it always has.

Around the Star office, the biggest shock of the year past might have been the way the Army Corps project in Montauk, which we had reported and editorialized on extensively, blew up once the bulldozers started rolling — mostly thanks to Instagram. Despite the thousands of words about the plan in The Star, it was only when people began to see what was going on, largely thanks to an aerial view posted by James Katsipis, that opposition erupted. For us, it was a lesson.

One of the great puzzles about newspapering today is that even though we have far more readers than ever before, paying for the newsgathering operation is a greater challenge than, say, a decade ago. Weeklies are not alone; a friend at The Times tells me that business-side conversations there are dominated by the same conundrum. 

For us, 2016 starts with a look at our growing audience and how to reach would-be news consumers in the digital spaces they inhabit as much as it will be about bringing them to us. It’s an exiting and never-ending series of puzzles Mr. Burling could never have imagined.

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.

“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.” 

So wrote Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast,” the writer’s recollections of life in 1920s Paris among fellow expatriates and the “Lost Generation” that survived the First World War. 

Upended, lately, by assorted turmoil including the insomnia that has afflicted me on and off since college, I awoke, disoriented, in the evening, a few Fridays ago, to the news from Paris. 

Had it really come to this? Young adults slaughtered at, of all places, a rock ’n’ roll concert, that boisterous, communal expression of youthful exuberance, of freedom? It had. 

I thought of lazy, early summer days in that city, 13 lucky years ago and midway on a long journey home from India. Fresh from the choking filth and chaos of Delhi, I wandered near-empty streets in the predawn silence, was languorous in the sunny afternoon at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and in the evening savored pints of beer on the cobblestone streets at Montmartre. 

Seven years on and just after another Indian excursion random impressions endure of a few days in Lyon and then Paris, five or six of us on a boozy, blissful junket. On the last night, a few of us seeking out and staying late at a subterranean jazz club. In the morning, a lone exploration through narrow, winding streets to a photographic exhibit of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 exile to Cap Ferrat in Nice. In the taxi line outside the Gare de Lyon, an elderly woman stood, patient and radiant in a classically chic blue dress. And everywhere flowers and shady terraces and conversation and wine. 

I thought of a night and a day in Mumbai, two years after another nihilistic band of nobodies, on the eve of another Thanksgiving in America, had gunned down random human beings in the hours before their own violent demise. To the slayer comes a slayer. 

How hideously apt, and aptly hideous, that the philistines assaulted laissez-faire concertgoers — and many others — in the city of both light and art. Fitting, too, that the clash of present and primitive took place where the United Nations Conference on Climate Change would, barely two weeks later, set a course for the future. 

On Monday, according to The Times, President Obama said that the conference represented “an important turning point in world history,” and that he believed, “in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late.” 

While at least 170 countries have announced a plan for future fossil-fuel emissions, The Times reported, India’s leader, Narendra Modi, said that his country plans to double its use of coal by 2019 and triple its 2005 carbon emissions by 2030. (On Monday, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi recorded air pollution levels “well into ‘hazardous’ territory,” Reuters reported.) 

Syria’s civil war, which has drawn and further radicalized French and other European nationals, may have been sparked, in part, by climate change, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The “worst drought in the instrumental record,” the report stated, caused “widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers.” The water shortage, said National Geographic, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million into Syria’s crowded cities, “just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.” 

A movable feast or a future of famine? Free expression or mass extinction? 

“You expected to be sad in the fall,” Hemingway wrote. “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.” 

But, he added, “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.” 

“This isn’t political,” Josh Homme, a co-founder of Eagles of Death Metal, the ironically named band that was performing when the slayers came to Paris, told Vice magazine. “We’re going to recruit people to be part of life, to be citizens of the earth,” Mr. Homme, who was not with the band that night, said of their future plans. “We have a chance to come together.” 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

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.

This past September I went to see Madonna in concert at Madison Square Garden with my concert buddies, Yuka, Maxine, and Tom. 

Yuka and I drove to the city. When we arrived we were both tired, since we had worked all day, especially Yuka, who is a talented costume designer and was on call for a film set at 6 that morning. We joined Maxine and her husband, Tom, who were already at the concert — Tom, who once told us Madonna was his baby sitter. She would bring her boyfriend over while baby-sitting, he said, and told him not to tell his parents because she really loves to baby-sit. Sounds like Madonna. 

Before the concert started, we all appeared calm; I was falling asleep, since it was way past my bedtime. At 10 she came out dancing and singing with her entourage, and we had a surge of adrenaline. Later I was emotional as I sang along with her classic hits like “Vogue,” “True Blue,” and “Burning Up,” to name just a few. At some point during the concert Madonna said she was feeling nostalgic and that she had played at Madison Square Garden 30 years ago. She was lost in sentiment, and so was I. Her music was what I enjoyed listening to in my younger years. She was my idol and still is! Not only was I in the same place as she was, but we were also both in the same nostalgic mood. I was in total bliss.

Part of the lyrics to her new song “Rebel Heart” touched me the most. The part when she sang, “Hearing my father say: ‘Told you so, told you so. Why can’t you be like the other girls?’ I said: ‘Oh no, that’s not me and I don’t think that it’ll ever be.’ ”

It reminded me of my oldest daughter, Kelsey, who just became a teenager and started to show some signs of rebellion. Over the summer, she wanted to dye her hair blue. I said, “No, it would ruin your beautiful long hair. Why can’t you be like your best friend, Emma? She didn’t dye her hair and see how healthy her hair looks.” 

“But, Mommy, please, it’s my hair.”

“Yes, it’s your hair,” I replied, but I get to look at it and wish you didn’t have blue hair.” Eventually, after numerous pleas, I gave in. I said, “If you only dye the ends of your hair.”  

“Okay, Mommy,” she said in her sweetest tone. She dyed her hair at my parents’ house with my sister’s help.

The blue hair was not blue, but a seaweed green color, which was perfect because that weekend at a beach party we were going to she could blend in with the seaweed while swimming in the ocean. But she ended up dying half of it, rather than just the ends. 

I was mad and I couldn’t help but try to find comfort from my colleague the next day. Kathy said, “Don’t worry; this is nothing. Let her make her own decisions and her own mistakes.” 

I thought about it and I guess she’s right. But I’ll still be there to help and guide her with good decisions, whether she likes it or not.

Last week, she wanted to trim off all the dye, because that part of her hair looked all dry and unhealthy. Excerpts from that song came to my mind, “Told you so, told you so.”

Now she has the cutest hairstyle for the holidays. She didn’t look bad with the blue-green hair. But I like her new hairstyle better! 

Just wondering what my young rebel heart will do next. 

Yupay Vong works in The Star’s production department.

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!”

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.

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.

I liked what the woman in one of our papers the other day said she was thankful for: the moon (I would say especially the moon the way it has been the past few nights), the stars, the sun, of course, and air, water, fire, and a roof over your head.

Keep it simple is what I gather she’s saying. Love your neighbor as yourself and cultivate your garden. Speaking of which, Mary asked me what we should do with ours now that the calendar says winter’s approaching. “Put a blanket on it and when you take it off there will be growth in the spring, Ben,” I said. (We had seen “Being There” on TV the night before.)

She, who is keenly sensitive to the news, and who suffers because of it, has begun a file for me of stories attesting to the resilience of the human spirit.

One was of a bookseller in Islamabad who has, I think, the largest bookstore in the world, or one of the largest. Chomsky sells there, so do books on atheism and the Qur’an. In other words, he has, in a part of the world that we’ve come to think of as extremely close-minded, a catholic audience. 

Another best seller there is “Fallen Leaves,” by Will Durant, whose histories I’ve faithfully read, making me potentially knowledgeable up to the Napoleonic period, when the Durants left off.

Ahmad Saeed, the owner, told of elderly men coming in, offering to pay for books they’d stolen when they were children. “His late father, Saeed Jan Qureshi, would have been amused: He had always regarded book theft by children as an investment in a future where people still read, and thus become his customers.”  

“Fallen Leaves” struck a chord with me, of course, because I’ve been raking them, though there are fewer than there used to be because we’ve been culling the trees. My sister-in-law, who’d come for Thanksgiving, saw me raking and wondered why I didn’t get a blower. No, simpler (and quieter) is best, though I must admit I sigh when I see the village leaf-suckers plying their way along the streets of Sag Harbor (and when I look across the street at the house that now sits on what had been our leaf repository for years and years). A fellow carts them away now after I rake them, for a reasonable fee.

Another of the stories Mary clipped had to do with the owner of the Hummus Bar, Kobi Tzafrir, in Kfar Vitkin, a small village near the Mediterranean Sea, who wants Arabs and Israelis to reconnect over his hummus plates, which he’s offering at a 50-percent discount if they will sit together. “Give Chickpeas  a Chance” was the headline in The Daily Mail’s story.

There were also a number of stories here this week that had to do with cultivating the garden of hope and with loving your neighbor — not only in Sag Harbor, where people raised money for the family of a young athlete, Nick Kruel, who’d undergone open heart surgery, but in Lesbos, where Doug Kuntz and a group inspired by his photographs (which deserve to be in a national publication such as National Geographic) are now helping Syrian refugees, and in Malawi, as well, where a local teacher, Kryn Olson, wants to build five school libraries to hold books donated and collected here.

Mary’s file is growing.