The Hampton Jitney is a great leveler. Other than the media moguls and Russian oligarchs who come and go on private jets or noisy helicopters, most of us 99 percenters — when we eschew our own automobiles — are apt to find ourselves crowded into a true cross-section of East End residents and weekenders on the Jitney. And something crazy is always happening there, isn’t it?

I’ve been riding the bus since its first year of existence, and I’ve seen it all: fights between riders, quarrels between riders and attendants, even a rider booted from the bus and left by the side of the road by the old Grace’s Hot Dog truck. But the set-piece drama that played out when I was coming back from New York one recent afternoon really took the cake.

We had barely pulled away from 40th Street, and I had just picked up my Kindle, when my attention was drawn to a woman of a certain age sitting behind me who had started whispering.

My first thought was that she was rehearsing a script. There’s a lot of theater here at this time of year, after all, and it seemed to me that her conversation was somehow too clichéd, too Hollywood to be the stuff of real life. After several minutes of nosy-Parkering, however, it became clear that the truth was less glamorous: She was on the phone.

 Calls on the Jitney are supposed to take place only in emergencies and be limited to three minutes. You are advised to “let your fingers do the talking” (that is, text). The woman behind me was on the phone for almost the whole two-and-a-half hour ride. The attendant never seemed to notice.

Naturally, when someone starts whispering, one’s interest is piqued. Blatant attempts at secrecy only draw our interest more strongly. What can I say? I haven’t much excuse. Does it count that I’m a journalist and am supposed to be ever on the alert for news? No? Well, the fact is, I was losing interest in the book I was reading and felt that, besides, someone who talks for two hours on a crowded bus when specifically asked not to rather invites eavesdroppers.

I’m a certain age myself, and it’s possible that my hearing isn’t the sharpest, so I can only surmise that if I heard the whole thing, many of my fellow riders did, too. I missed words here and there as the bus rumbled over uneven pavement, but I got the gist of the conversation.

“How could you do this to me?” she stage-whispered. “You know how I feel. How could you do this to me?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Someone was learning about a lover’s infidelity on a phone call on the Jitney. It sounded like her husband had just told her — by phone — that he was in love with someone else.

I attempted to focus my attention elsewhere. I picked my Kindle back up. The drama continued to unfold.

“How long did it go on?” I heard her ask. “Three years? No, I can’t keep it to myself. My sister will take one look at me and know something’s the matter. No. Don’t come to Amagansett.”

Hmm. Maybe it was a cheating boyfriend on the other end of the line, not a husband. I couldn’t help myself; I wanted to know more. I actually pondered getting up to go to the lavatory (as it is referred to on the Jitney) to get a look at the speaker, but I didn’t. I think a few others on the bus might have.

After quite a long time, it sounded as if she was crying. Oh, dear.

The whispering stopped. She had hung up. Everything was quiet for a while.

Then she dialed someone else. “I just have to tell somebody,” I heard her say.

The whole episode would make a good cartoon in The New Yorker, I think. I can visualize it now: A busful of Hamptonites snug in their Jitney seats, snacking on free pretzels, slyly rolling their eyes and bending their ears toward a damsel in distress, as she tearfully exclaims into an iPhone: “I just had to tell someone!”

 This anecdote doesn’t having a moral, unfortunately, and I admit it doesn’t make me look terribly good. But it does inspire a couple of tidbits of Hamptons advice. The first is: “Everyone can hear you on the Jitney. That’s why they have the three-minute rule in the first place.” The second is: “If you’re looking for a reality-television concept, consider the bus.”

Ever wonder why there are no carnivals in East Hampton Town other than the one each summer at Havens Beach in Sag Harbor? Well, the answer is that they were banned long ago over concerns that have echoes today.

From time to time lately, I have been turning to the East Hampton Library’s remarkable online collection of old issues of The Star. These are searchable by word or phrase and can be browsed by date. It was in the July 18, 1968, issue that I noticed a lead headline, “Town Will Enforce No-Carnivals Rule,” and became intrigued.

According to the story, that summer, the town board granted one final permit for a three-day affair on the Amagansett American Legion grounds, but went on to agree that all groups would thereafter be informed by letter that there would be no more carnivals.

Subsequently, Supervisor Bruce Collins explained that the board would enforce a 1936 law that had been reaffirmed in 1951 banning them, according to  the wording of Section One of Ordinance Number Ten, “to preserve public peace and good order and to prevent tumultuous assemblages.”

By coincidence, the trouble then, as it is today, was in Montauk. The earlier case concerned a chamber of commerce event there. The board had decided that the carnival would cost the town more money in traffic control and law enforcement than the chamber would make.

“When you have a carnival on an arterial highway there is a problem of traffic control. Special policemen have to be hired and paid extra to do this, and it becomes a considerable cost item that the board is not happy with,” Mr. Collins told The Star’s Jack Graves, who was then in his first year or so here.

“Then there’s the spinoff on the town Highway Department, which has to do a large amount of policing and cleaning up after the carnivals. The carnival operator may clean up his area, but there are still people who take hot dogs and wrappings and containers into their cars and throw things all over the road,” he said.

Times haven’t changed all that much. Only today it is not carnivals that are the problem.

Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.

Among other options are a pony on the beach at a kid’s birthday party, which drew the baffled attention of East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, and a maddening Montauk Highway tie-up on Sunday evening caused by the Cyril’s Fish House parking guys.  

But the thing that I think will stick with me as far as the first weekend of the 2015 season is concerned has to do with three young bike-riding visitors and an endangered plant.

Sunday afternoon, a little after 1, I was driving home on Cranberry Hole Road and noticed a bicycle on its side at the edge of the pavement. A young woman astride another bike stood nearby. As I got closer, I saw that a second woman, who I thought was not much older than 20, had crawled under the pines and  seated herself in a sprawl of small white flowers, apparently picking something. A young man waited in the grass by the side of the road a couple of hundred feet up the way. I thought about warning them about the ticks and the poison ivy, but it was clear that it was too late.

As it turned out, my sister, Bess, had passed these three only moments earlier. As we readied the kids for a trip to Montauk to play miniature golf, we laughed, rather unkindly, about what we had seen. “Ticks up the wazoo!” “Ha, hipsters!” That kind of thing.

Loading the car, with three kids in the back and my sister in the passenger seat, I headed east, turning onto Napeague Meadow Road. Near the big curve, where a new osprey nest on a pole is occupied, we saw them again. This time, a spray of pink flowers was bobbing from a backpack one of the women was wearing.

Almost simultaneously, Bess and I exclaimed, “Lady slippers!”

“Stop the car,” Bess cried, “I’m going to give them what for.”

Lady slippers, members of the orchid family, are protected in New York, as are the state’s other native orchids, all of which are rare. Cutting them from public land, like a road right of way, is a state law violation that can come with a fine. Even cutting them on private property is supposed to require the landowner’s permission. Anyway, in my opinion, a beautiful flower on the side of the road should be left for all to see. 

With a kid in the back of the car shouting “You are an idiot!” at the flower-snatchers, I had to roll up the windows, so I could not hear exactly what my sister said. Still steaming about it when she got back in the car, she said her remonstrations were answered by a repeated, weak, “Uh, okay.”

Judging from their blank expressions, it is  unlikely that they learned a lesson, although that is impossible to know. But they will not soon forget the encounter, that’s for sure.

And the season’s only just begun.

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

Our daughter from Temecula is with us, pregnat, as she used to say, and we’re grillin’ tonight. Wally, her husband, will teach us, and I will pay close attention inasmuch as outdoor cookery is generally considered a manly thing, a rite of passage that has come along quite late in my life.

Mary, who’s never forgotten the orange roughy I cooked outside for her mother and her in 1986, recently bought the grill — one fit for the middle class, not overly ornate — and, sparing me the trouble, bless her, put it together. I react viscerally when people tell me that all I have to do is “read the manual.” I don’t like manuals. I don’t like to follow instructions, especially when they accompany diagrams, and I also tend to dismiss as pettifogging any disputes as to rules, as when Mary accuses me of cheating in backgammon.

“You hold me in too high esteem,” I say. “I’m not clever enough to cheat.”

“Trust but verify,” she says.

“Trust but vilify,” I say.

I will make it up to her. I will become, with the bright, shiny utensils Johnna and Wally gave us, a man of parts when it comes to barbecuing — “barbe-a-cul-ing,” as a French wit once put it to me. I know it is something I should do, that I’m programmed to do. It goes way back, she says, to when we were hunters and gatherers and women nursed the children and tended the hearth and cooked the food and made and washed the clothes and kept things clean and. . . .

“Really, not much has changed,” she said, “except instead of spearing wildebeests, you’re whacking tennis balls.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” I tell her. “Soon you’ll be saying, just like they do on WLNG, ‘And thank you, Jack, for charring.’ ”

What to do with the sunny Sunday of a long holiday weekend? 

Well, for starters, I had to coordinate with the workers who arrived bright and early to fix our dilapidated old picket fence and plant some privet to hide the back neighbors’ pool from view. Then I wanted to cut and bring in some lilacs before their bloom faded. Also, I needed a few flowering plants for the three ceramic pots on the patio, and that meant I had to make a run to the crazy-busy nursery — where everyone and their mother was out buying hydrangeas and roses, it seemed — to get more potting soil. And then I had to thumb through cookbooks to decide what salads I was going to make for a family birthday dinner . . . and then shop for whatever ingredients were necessary, then whip the salads up . . . then off to an early cocktail reception, and then, by 6:30, the birthday party itself.

Because of all these plans — which somehow felt like a lot to do at one time, even though it wasn’t really — I blew off my usual yoga session on Sunday morning, for the third time in as many weeks. The deep-breathing exercises, not to mention the “letting go,” just weren’t on the agenda last weekend.

I decided on pilaf, and — while taking inventory of the fridge — noticed we were lacking quite a few pantry basics, including milk and Ajax, so I started a grocery list. Roasted asparagus seemed like it might be a nice companion to the pilaf, and I also had to find fruit for the fruit salad my husband had signed on to make for the birthday. The shopping list grew.

It was no longer early when I set out for the supermarket. Trying to make the most of a dwindling day, I decided to forget the Ajax and go straight to Citarella. It was, of course, jam-packed, too. Anticipating mayhem, no doubt, the management had hired attendants to stand by the parking lot entrance, directing cars. One of them, a young man with a clipboard, encouraged me to edge into a very narrow spot. When did shopping turn into such a brouhaha? Somehow, the checkers at the cash registers were still smiling. They told me it had been even crazier there on Saturday.

Making my way home, I followed the loop past the post office to Egypt Lane and stopped in a line of traffic at the light. Unfortunately, that is when my car — to my horror — somehow slowly slid into the Jeep ahead of me! The driver jumped out and, running toward me, shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” I had jammed on the brakes in enough time to avoid any damage, however, and he seemed mollified when I answered meekly that I was sorry. 

The truth is that Memorial Day weekend has never been my favorite moment of the year, no matter how fine the weather or how sweet-smelling the lilacs. Everyone arriving in town en masse seems determined to play — I think the term is “frantically relaxing” — but, like many of us who live here, I’m not on that wavelength right now. Summer is coming, but, for us, it’s not the start of vacation season but the start of work, work, work season. Maybe we can relax in, say, October? Something tells me I should get back to yoga class. 

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor. “I mean, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold! All of a sudden, the stakes are raised, the level of intensity has soared. As in wartime or in lovemaking, or in lovemaking during wartime, the blood is flowing, no longer congealed by winter’s icy clutch. In the next few weeks I’m going to be really alive, giving full rein to my emotions rather than simply going through the motions.”

And with that, I was out the door and wheeling into traffic just in time to see a woman who’d rolled through a stop sign near the flagpole remonstrating vehemently with blameless drivers heading east and west on Main Street. “It is you, madam, you who are at fault!” I was about to call out, but she, still raging, was gone, thus denying to me what Philip Roth has called the ecstasy of sanctimony. Choler interruptus.

And then, of course, there’s the local news of late: They say they own us, that they can do what they want with their property, they say they can make as much noise as they want on arriving and taking off. Oh, ecstasy of sanctimony! Does not the communal good exert a more worthy claim to conscience than the license invoked by “haves” equating license with liberty? The gorge rises, the heart pounds, the tongue lashes. This is really living, and whom do we have to thank for it, for having revivified our torpid souls? Them! So, I urge you, don’t rush to judgment — even though it’s fun. Rather than vilified, they are more to be pitied perhaps. Working so hard as they do, they have little time to relax and think of the greater good. And so I say, as the season begins, “Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

Having had a taste of excitement, then, we decided to go whole hog, and spend a day in the city. Soon we were swept up in it, in the huddled masses, yearning for falafels.

But, wonderful to tell, there was ease there, a calm we’d almost forgotten. The sun was out in the city and it was, we agreed, as we walked along, a nice place to be. We struck up conversations easily, wished others well in parting, and returned here at peace, our heart rates having returned to normal and our sense of brotherhood renewed.

Perhaps you have wondered while making your way around why there appears to be next to no poison ivy in our fair village. That is not likely to be an accident, as this marks the 68th anniversary of the first annual Poison Ivy Eradication Week, declared for the first seven days of June in 1947 and each year thereafter by representatives of both the Town and Village of East Hampton.

Above the names of Supervisor Herbert Mulford Jr. and Mayor Judson L. Banister, as well as the town justices and village trustees and the respective clerks, officials issued a call to each landowner to “make a concerted effort to destroy poison ivy on his own property and to report to the Town or Village Clerk the location of ivy which is not being eradicated.”

It went on, “We also urge everyone to take the greatest precautions to protect himself from the poison ivy while spraying or destroying the ivy.”

My source for this, by the way, is the remarkable online archive of The East Hampton Star for the years between 1918 and 1968. Issues are searchable any which way from a link on the East Hampton Library’s website. There were some 180 references to poison ivy when I checked.

Poison Ivy Eradication Week in 1947 got off to a running start, The Star reported, with an objective to eliminate “this nuisance to summer vacationists.” The Ladies Village Improvement Society led the charge, with help from the Boy Scouts, American Red Cross, two garden clubs, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary. Details about how they all went about the task were not provided, but the L.V.I.S. ran advertisements in several May 1948 issues of The Star reminding readers that it was time once again to spray for poison ivy and recommending the use of 2,4-D, a weed killer that is still on the market, although we now know it is more ecologically sensitive to avoid chemicals and pull it out by hand.

The effort begun in 1947 appears to have worked, at least in the village. I can think of no obvious patches of poison ivy along Main Street or any of the places my friends and I explored here as a teenager. Get north of the bridge, however, and it pops up in the hedgerows and can be seen climbing trees. Our family’s place, down by the beach near Promised Land, is nearly overrun with the stuff. That and ticks, which are a subject for another day.

So, what’s so bad about a man wearing a fedora? To listen to some, men in fedoras in the Town of East Hampton are a sure sign that civilization as we know it has come to an end.

“Here they come, with their fedoras.” You would think, the way people talk, that the fedora-wearing crowd was a bunch of weird cultists instead of young people having fun. I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I am older than many of the people I work and associate with. When I was a child, my father wore a fedora. The sight of a man in a fedora is not alien to me.

The subways that I rode when I was growing up used to have signs that warned men to hold onto their hats. One such sign was at the Third Avenue end of the I.R.T. station for the 7 train from Queens. (If I really wanted to date myself here, I would tell you that I.R.T. stands for Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the first subway operator in New York City, which opened in 1904, though I was not there for the opening.)

That sign showed a man holding onto his hat, as I recall. The reason for the warning was that every time a westbound train burst into the station, there would be a huge gust of wind that would blow straight up the long escalator to 42nd Street. Goodbye, fedora!

As I said, my dad wore a hat, as did most men. Just take a look at photographs of crowds from the 1950s or earlier. Practically every man is in a hat.

Then came the 1960s and beyond. My hair, as with that of most young men, was long, long, longer. A hat over that? Forget about it!

And so, the fedora disappeared, as did the cute signs in the subway. (My favorite sign, looking back, was the one in the cars that read, “Little enough to ride for free, little enough to ride your knee,” accompanied by a drawing of a happy mommy with an even happier baby bouncing on her knee.)

Hats are civilized. There are rules regarding hats. When you walk into the East Hampton Town Justice courtroom, you darn well better have that hat in your hand and not on your head or you will get a swift reminder from one of the guards.

Recently, I walked into White’s Drug and Department Store in Montauk and tried on a fedora. Nice. I plunked down the 15 bucks and went on over to the other side.

I am now one of them, and you can tip your hat to that.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star who covers police and courts, among other things.

“He’s going to Little League?” our daughter asked somewhat incredulously, as if, I suppose, there were more important things to write about and photograph than that.

If she must know, I find it endearing. There is joy there among the 9 and 10-year-old boys, puppies leaping about, directionless but full of life, that is hard to find elsewhere. How the coaches manage to coach them I don’t know — they are unrestrained.

Most times, I think, they’re thinking of something else, their minds are wandering about — this, by the way, was something the late great basketball coach Ed Petrie used to speak of, with a bemused smile, when talking of some of his teams. But then, in rare moments, when they really bear down and concentrate, oh boy! It’s like Roy Hobbs meeting the Marx brothers.

And I think this giddiness, this joy of being a boy of 9 or 10 or 11, has a tendency to rub off on the crowd. I know parents are often accused of being overbearing, of taking the fun out of their children’s play, but those I saw seemed content just to be there the other evening at Pantigo in the sunset, and not overly concerned with the outcome.

(Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that by the end of that evening’s two games three teams, all at 9-3, could say they were pennant-winners, befitting my egalitarian view of this town.) 

And there were things, aside from that communal feeling, to marvel at: a terrific catch of a low, hard-hit line drive down the third baseline, a clout to the fence in deep center, a speared line drive near second that seemed as if it would be a base hit, relays that nailed runners trying to take an extra base. . . . There were miscues too, of course, as bases were overrun, as wild pitches, triggering a dash from third to home, were chased to the backstop, as cupcakes at times proved more compelling than the number of outs and the pitch count or a coach’s call to grab a bat and go hit for Johnny.

Why wouldn’t I want to go to a Little League game? It’s fun.

“Why are the flags out?” I asked Russell Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, if you don’t know,” I said, “it must be John Howard Payne’s birthday.”

And so it was! On June 9, in the year of our Lord 1791, in New York City. His grandfather’s house, where he spent his early years, has been preserved as Home, Sweet Home, a landmark down the street from this one.

With no further ado then, the lyrics:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There’s no place like home!

There’s no place like home!

And that’s the song — “that one touch of nature which makes the world kin,” as Harper’s magazine put it in 1883, when the actor-dramatist-lyricist-poet’s ashes were returned to America from Tunis for reinterment in Washington, D.C.

What would Payne think now. . . .

Mid ghettoes and famined lands though we may roam,

Be it ever so massive, there’s no place like (our second) home;

A charm from the market’s rise seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the suff’ring world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Second Home!

Tax-sheltered home!

There’s no McMansion like home.

There’s no McMansion like home!

There are not all that many be-they-ever-so-humble homes left here anymore, and in the not-too-distant future, presumably, with the exodus of more members of the middle class, either to a less expensive place or to what Sydney Carton called a far, far better one, they may be very rare indeed.

And that has just given me an idea, though perhaps it’s a little ahead of its time. Why not, instead of the usual upscale house tours of summer, give the well-heeled a chance to see how the other half lives, offering ticky-tacky treks, perhaps plumping ticket sales with the prospects of pest sightings. Who knows? You might even see a roach! “There! There! I’m sure that’s one, there, by the sink drain!”

And because they had become as rare as hen’s teeth, and thus by that time would have acquired a certain cachet, someone with foresight, someone with an interest in East Hampton history, would propose that a dedicated fund be established so that these few remaining rotted-shingle, lapstreak three-bedroom, two-bath flophouses of the fabled Hamptons — no more in number probably than you could count on the beringed fingers of your hand — be preserved, dustballs and all.