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How funny that a pre-digital, pen-and-paper device should store outdated information more effectively — or simply longer — than our constantly updated digital files do.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 bought recently for our 6-year old granddaughter “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” and then started reading Robert Graves’s encyclopedic version of them, only to realize that while vastly imaginative they are bloody as hell too, to put it mildly.

I presume the D’Aulaires took the rough edges off for young readers, so as to inspire wonder rather than fuel phantasmagoric fears.

In this connection, I remember starting to read to my son, who was then about 5 or 6, “Le Morte d’Arthur,” and then, with his ready approval, putting it down early on because of the gore.

Yet, despite the rapes, incest, castrations, flaying of flesh, and cannibalism (some of that albeit inadvertent), you can’t help but be fascinated by the Greeks’ vivid storytelling and by how at one with nature they were, to such a degree that gods, demigods (my wife sometimes puts me in that category), and humans often metamorphosed into swans, kingfishers, crows, cows, she-goats, ash trees, serpents, lizards, doves, mice, quail, myrrh trees, anemones, laurel trees, hyacinths, olive trees, spiders, owls, golden cicadas, poplar trees, nightingales, woodpeckers, snow-white bulls, eagles, ants, mushrooms, stones, and so forth (though, fortunately, no ticks).

Nature was so much with them. (This was before malls.) It is still somewhat with us out here: I showered outdoors this morning and later parked under The Star’s mulberry tree, like the one where the starcrossedlovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, were to meet, its white berries dyed red by his blood.

Persephone’s about to rejoin Hades for a while. I wish she hadn’t eaten those pomegranate seeds, but a third of the year in the underworld is what the gods decreed for having done so, and so we must have winter.

May it be a time to reflect upon who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. E.O. Wilson, the antman, thinks there is yet time (though not much) for our “Janus-like species” to work toward restoring the inheritance we’ve largely spent. Will we evolve to that point, or will we remain at war with each other, ourselves, and nature?

What will we metamorphose into?

“I’ve got no one left to root for,” I said to Rob Balnis during a workout at East End Physical Therapy the other day. “First the Pirates, then the Mets, then the Steelers. . . .”

Then, knowing he’s an ardent Buckeye fan, I added, “Maybe I’ll root for Ohio State. . . .”

“No, no, please!” he said, figuring that given my track record I might well be the kiss of death.

That reminded me of Dr. Astorr, who every now and then would come to Wolfie’s Relics slow-pitch softball games. We’d invariably be winning when he came, and then, as he watched, we’d invariably go on to lose. Hughie King dubbed him “Dr. Dis-Astorr.”

Still, given the fact that we were all in our mid to late-40s at the time, it was nice even to have one fan. Mr. Quigley, a St. Louisan, a writer and friend of Stan Musial’s and Red Schoendienst’s who was beloved there, and who summered on Old Stone Highway, was one too, and Mary, who would always say, “Hit me a triple,” made three. 

Then, Friday, the East Hampton High School boys cross-country team and its top runner, Erik Engstrom won county championships at Sunken Meadow State Park — the first time a Bonacker has ever done so — and my spirits were renewed.

I admit I had hesitated — it’s a long drive to and from Sunken Meadow, almost two hours each way — though such a rare feat warranted full-throated cheering, and I’m glad I was there to do that, with the team and its coaches and parents on that balmy fall day. (It’s been 13 years since Kevin Barry’s last championship team.)

Goose shit dotted the broadmeadow where the races began, though Kevin assured me, when I asked if he weren’t worried about his charges slipping, that his runners had cleats.

Erik — his stamina keeping pace with his ambition — won by a mile.

Then came his teammates, each placing high enough so as to best their chief rival, Bayport-Blue Point, in the aggregate by 8 points, according to their coach’s running count.

There were smiles all around then and fond embraces, and the quiet joy that caresses you when you have given it your all.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Thursday mornings at The Star are a time to regroup. The prior week’s news and features have been neatly filed, edited, printed, and bundled. The slate is clean. And although the editorial meeting to discuss the following week is only minutes away, there is a sense of relief, ease, and release, a calm before the next approaching storm.

In this climate, more wide-ranging discussions than the local focus we take during the early part of the week often develop. Last week, David Rattray, The Star’s editor, and I were discussing a story we had heard on NPR about how scientists had genetically modified brown fruit flies to become blond and how the application could be used in the future for eradicating Lyme disease in deer ticks, malaria in mosquitos, and in other momentous ways.

It was great science-nerd stuff and fascinating, too. But then, my eyes settled on the coffee cup he was holding, or, more precisely, the lid. It was flat, one of the ones that have the pull tab that is supposed to fold down but generally sticks up in the air, hitting your nose when you go to sip from it, and that also doesn’t close again all the way, leaving puddles of coffee in the car cupholder.

My thoughts turned to my own raised lid with the tiny hole cut out of it and something a man told me in Tate’s Bake Shop a few years back when I was pouring my coffee. He said that women always choose the domed lids and men the flat lids.

Since I often go to Java Nation on my way to work and David does too, I interrupted to ask where he had bought his coffee. It turned out both he and I had stopped at the same coffee shop, were confronted with the same decision, and he had gone for the flat lid, while I had chosen my usual, the raised.

Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about the observation of that man at Tate’s. When I asked David why he chose the flat lid, he said he just liked it better. I told him the story. He said, “That’s great. You have to write about it.” (Note to self: Do not bring up quirky observations on Thursday mornings.)

I’d like to say I’ve done extensive research on this matter and have devised some perfectly random sample for a definitive survey of this thesis with a 95 percent confidence level, but that is not so. During the editorial meeting that followed, only one other male in the office had a coffee cup. His lid was flat — a good start.

Starbucks, which determined long ago that only the raised lid would do for its coffee cups, is such a big player that it was difficult to collect much data outside of its loyal following. It really came down to just a few conversations I’ve had over the past week with local baristas and coffee merchants who provide both types of lids.

One female, who hadn’t thought about the connection until it was proposed, agreed that men tended to reach for the flat lids when there was an option. As for a reason, she suggested that women like the neatness the raised lid provides with sipping and in the car. She joked that men tend to make the same ingrained choices over and over again. The flat lid was good enough for their first cup of coffee, and that’s what they’re sticking with. After that conversation, I was sure I was on to something. The next day in Java Nation, however, both men in the store had cups with a raised lid.

Now, when I’m around town, in stores, lines, or wherever I see anyone holding a coffee cup, I look at the lid. I’d say the guy in Tate’s has a point, but there will always be outliers, creative types, lone wolves. To them and to those of any gender who make those lid choices everyday, I say vive la difference. And feel free to let us know your preference and why, because now I am intrigued.

A friend with a bad cold handed me a sheaf of papers the other day, and although I was pleased to receive them, I was secretly thrown into a panic. I wasn’t in a place where I could immediately wash my hands, although when I eventually did, I sang “Happy Birthday” to myself — twice.(That’s an old trick for figuring out how long you should wash for it to be effective in removing germs.)

Actually, I wasn’t just thrown secretly into a panic; I was aghast. That’s an overdramatic word, but I had gotten over a cold only about three weeks ago, and have been sneezing and blowing my nose ever since.

As I write this, I must admit that, if indeed a cold is what we’re dealing with, it was more than likely I and not my friend was responsible for passing the germs around in the first place. But I wasn’t in a mood to admit it: This sneezing has goneon so long that I am feeling the need to find someone to blame.

Now, my husband hasn’t had a cold this autumn at all. We sleep in the same bed and are apt to share a spoon over dessert and he hasn’t shown the slightest sign of catching this never-ending cold. So maybe it’s allergies, after all. But how could it be allergies? We had at least one frost recently, and frost is supposed to kill whatever pollens are flying around. Isn’t that what they say?

Okay, yes, I know, there are many other nuisances you can be allergic to — mold, for example, or plain, old-fashioned dust. I don’t think I’ve been around much mold, and whatever dust is near my workspace or home has been there, well, forever. (I think it would be excessive to do an extra-zealous cleaning of the house and office just because I sneeze a lot. And, besides, this cold has left me in no mood for overzealous bouts of house-cleaning. Have I mentioned my mood?)

You, like me, might also have been sneezing a lot lately. It seems like everyone’s got it, whatever it is. What allergens are in the air in October and early November? Isn’t it a bit late for ragweed and goldenrod?

Along with a mild but obnoxious illness of this sort comes a certain civic responsibility. Do you venture out among strangers, friends, and family? If they are thrown into a panic by your sneezing and nose-blowing, do you explain that the cold-versus-allergy question remains unresolved? Are such symptoms sufficient excuse to stay home and read a good book under a blanket on the couch?

Google has plenty of suggestions for how to stop a sneeze — many of them on the painful side. You can pinch your upper lip, your earlobe, or the fleshy place between thumb and forefinger. You can squeeze the tip of your nose, clench your teeth as if in anger, or bend over and hang your head while sticking out your tongue (in the privacy of your own home, I’d suggest).

A few of the remedies sound more pleasant. You can inhale peppermint oil or lemon oil, drink fennel or chamomile tea. But the one I like best, maybe because it sounds strong and just nutty enough to conceivably work, is to crush four or five garlic cloves into a paste and to inhale the fragrance. Tonight at supper, maybe. At the very least, it might discourage my husband from poaching my ice cream spoon.

There haven’t been a lot of cranberries in the bog down our way in Amagansett lately, and there haven’t been all that many foxes either. It is probably related.

There had been a frost or two out on Cranberry Hole Road, a sign that it was time once again to go gathering. Since Sunday was a pleasant day, our son, Ellis, and I walked over from the house to a spot that in my own childhood memory was always full of cranberries.

With our trousers tucked into our knee boots, Ellis and I avoided getting wet as we pawed among the grass to expose the plants and look for the ruby-hued fruit. We found a few handfuls, enough for a small dish of turkey-side relish, I suppose. But more interesting, as we crept about, we noticed tiny, winding trails in the mud.

Walking a bit farther into the bog, I flushed a deer mouse, which dashed off toward the edging pines. It was gone by the time Ellis ran over for a look. That got me to thinking.

If mice eat cranberries and foxes eat mice, then fewer foxes might mean more mice, which would mean fewer cranberries, all other things being equal. There were more foxes around when I was a child and my father took us to get cranberries in advance of the Thanksgiving meal. Maybe it made sense.

Of course, plenty of other factors might be at work. There is an absolutely prodigious acorn crop this year; both the red and white oaks have been dropping them like so many tan hailstones. Ellis and I were at the town youth park on Abraham’s Path the other day, and the bike track there was studded with them.

I offered up my idea about the relative lack of cranberries to Russell Bennett, who lives about a half mile to the west of us on the road. His take, considering the number of rabbits and pheasant he has seen lately: “Next year will be a very good one for the foxes.” He might have a point.

Lisa said it would get worse  before it got better and she was right. There is a rule of etiquette that says that it is impolite to talk about one’s health, but if describing the cold that has been working its way through our household will convince one person to go scrub their hands, it will have been worth it.

My wife is hardly the type of person to get sick. Colds usually set her back for half a day. Then she bounces up and goes back at it. This is good, because as a high school teacher she is exposed to all sorts of things, from great gossip to nasty viruses. Mix in our kids as vectors, and if there is something going around, we’re going to be right in its gunsights.

Back when our first child was little, the Country School in Wainscott she attended for prenursery had a rule (and probably still does) that each student had to wash his or her hands upon arrival in the morning. For us, it was a fun ritual; she would put her hands under the running water, and I would work her wrists as if she were a puppet. At this point, I can’t remember if we had fewer colds, but the hand-washing was a good lesson.

The current cold goes through the usual running nose, aches, and sneezing. Then, when you think it has run its course and you feel a little better, it takes you down again. And so it goes, in my case now, for more than a week. I blame the inflammation; Advil is about my only relief.

Science tells us that there is a link between rest and catching a cold. A study I heard about on the radio found a 20-percent reduction in symptoms among test subjects who got ample sleep. Unfortunately, circumstances have had me awake well before dawn too often lately, which does not bode well for recovery.

Keep those hands clean, people. Get enough rest. But keep the Ibuprofen ready just in case.

A woman overtaking me as I  walked up — or is it down? — Main Street the other day said in passing that it was a wonderful day.

Indeed it was, I said, “but I hear it’s supposed to get colder next week.”

Later, walking along the shady streets in Springs with Mary, she remarked on what a wonderful day it was. “Yes, but the hours are darkening,” I said.

“Will you stop. Do you have to be such a Gloomy Gus?”

“I’ve been in mourning ever since the Pirates lost that wild card game. Bases loaded, one out in the sixth, Marte at bat. . . . It could have turned around then, it could have turned around completely. . . . Ah well . . . it is a beautiful day. And if tomorrow is not, it’s a joy to be with you. You’re a thing of beauty forever, as Brett Rader said when Johnna posted a photo of us with the baby on Facebook. 

Still, there’s no denying the leaves are falling, that the outdoor shower will soon be a ruined choir, and that the birds will be left to stipulate in the snow, as we, if the past is prologue, fall and crack our heads upon the ice.

Well, bring it on. As Joey McKee told his charges recently, football is life — you get knocked down, you brush off the tire shavings and get back up. Ah, resilience. Give me the seasons. Who wants to live in a place where the weather is unvaryingly fine?

(Thousands do, if Temecula, Calif., where we recently spent two weeks, is an example.)

“It’s like Naples with mountains,” I said as Mary and I drove down the main mall-flanked drag.

I was yearning for the cold and damp then, and now that I have them (another week and the spiders would have taken over) I’m yearning for . . . what? Spring? But we have no spring here. Summer then? Never. Today is rather nice. The late afternoon light is golden and the air is fresh. That ought to be enough, Gloomy Gus.

It had been some time since we last thought about the Montauk Monster around the office. But on Tuesday, our memories were refreshed by a query from a National Geographic television program producer looking for images for an upcoming program.

To be clear, The Star does not own the rights to the infamous photograph taken by one of our former interns, the daughter of our Montauk correspondent. It was Jenna Hewitt who snapped the shot of an odd, mostly hairless animal carcass found while she was walking on the beach in July 2008. I passed the message from National Geographic on to her via her mom, Janis.

A funny thing about the whole Montauk Monster business is that The Star did not break the story. The what-is-it! coverage began with The Independent and took off from there. By the time we wrote about it, it had become a full-blown Internet sensation. TV crews arrived and interviewed Ms. Hewitt and other discoverers of the sad beast, Courtney Fruin and Rachel Goldberg. Ms. Hewitt told The Star that by a certain point the whole thing had given her a headache.

“We’ve had invites. It’s fun, but it’s August, and we work in restaurants,” Ms. Hewitt said. Classic Montauk.

By then, we were on the story, though trying to frame it for our readers more as a media frenzy phenomena than a mystery. The Star’s nature columnist, Larry Penny, had taken a look at the photograph and conclusively dismissed the carcass as a dead raccoon a bit worse for wear for having been in the surf awhile.

Things took an interesting turn, though, when the thing went missing. Two men had taken the bloated and stinking thing away and left it in a wooded backyard to decay, apparently intending to salvage its bones to encase in resin and sell as art. As best as I can remember, the remains were never seen after that, as fitting an end to the story as could have been hoped, I suppose.

Of course, on the Internet, nothing really ever ends, and the Montauk Monster will live on in the vast, vast universe of cyber-speculation. Why, it’s even got its own Wikipedia page, and that’s more than I can say.

I ’ve been all a-twitter as the dismantling of the early-19th-century Hedges barn on our property — soon to be moved and reconstructed across Main Street, on the Mulford Farm — draws near. I’ve also been deeply appreciative of E.J. Edwards, my children’s great-grandfather, who saved the barn and moved it up Edwards Lane. Today, his descendants all agree that it is right and proper that the East Hampton Historical Society has acquired it for public use.

As we work on emptying the barn of two centuries of stuff, I’ve had a remarkable feeling of stepping back in time each time I enter it. Livestock hasn’t lived in the stalls for at least 70 years; it’s been even longer since grain was sent down the chute. But walking in the other day I could just about smell cows, horses, and hay.

 As habitual readers of this column might remember, I spent most of my childhood summers on my grandparents’ farm in the Catskills, where there was a three-story barn, a relic of its past as a dairy farm — although we kept only one cow in these roomy accommodations, and only briefly. You might find it amusing that my olfactory nostalgia centers on the smell of manure, but my memory of that smell is complex and entirely pleasant.

Four generations of family and friends have stored hand-me-down furniture, sports gear, toys, and household doodads in our Edwards Lane barn, not to mention bikes, fence posts, parade floats, air-conditioners, basinets, printing-press parts, grinding stones, antique post office boxes, sailboards, 80-year-old Flexible Fliers, girlie magazines dating to the 1940s, scythes, ice boats, storm windows, porcelain sinks, and, at one point, my late mother-in-law’s sporty hardtop. Trying to figure out what it all was and who it belonged to, or who might want to make use of it now, was no small task.

Recently, as the emptying enters its final phase, we’ve brought out a wonderful, ancient horse-drawn sleigh, some big old wooden barrels, and what a knowledgeable woodworker told me was a “chair vise.” Sure enough, checking out chair vises on Google, I learned they also are known as shaping horses and were common devices for making chairs and other furniture by hand. Any idea that the vise we found was a valuable antique, however, was dispelled when I told my son David about this 19th-century treasure we had unearthed. . . . And he replied, “Sure it’s a chair vise. I made it.” (I should have known. When he was a college freshman, he made chairs, and we have a few nice ones to prove it.)

The most challenging object still in the barn, though, is Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s huge kitchen stove. What to do with it? It turns out that the stove was made by the Kalamazoo Company in Kalamazoo, Mich., and was marketed as “A Kalamazoo Direct to You.” That’s right, the company, in the first half of the 20th century, shipped its steel-andiron cooking stoves directly to customers and offered a 30-day guarantee.

Ours, which probably dates to the 1920s, is covered in cream and ochre porcelain enamel, with a firebox on one side for coal and wood, and the slogan “direct to you” right there on the thermometer built into the oven door. My late mother-in-law — true to form in our family, reluctant to give up old ways and old things — cooked on this coal-andwood stove until her death in 1974. We removed it and stored it in the barn when we inherited the house and updated to a six-burner propane stove (which, by now a family relic itself, is still in use in the kitchen). The Kalamazoo behemoth has been kept under cover, with all its parts intact, I believe — including stovepipe — but the notion that someone in the family would want to actually use it someday seems a fantasy.

It’s available now at a wonderful discount. Would any of you like it?

I mean, it’s not like we can belatedly take the Kalamazoo Company up on its return guarantee: It went out of business in 1952.