Well, you can’t go to heaven again, as I found out these past two weeks in Southern California. While, I’m glad to say, we did as good a job as we’ve ever done in escaping Christmas, we couldn’t escape the human condition.

I tried my damndest, but even I, who washed my hands almost continuously, and who cradled babies only under duress, could not duck the bullet.

To have been the only one to have done so would not have been commendable. I’m glad to say, then, that I too got sick, like everyone else.

And there was more good news: Not once did I worry about what was going on back at the ranch, as it were. I do confess to having read Baylis Greene’s wonderful, free-wheeling account of the East Hampton-Amityville boys basketball game shortly after our arrival in Encinitas, on our hosts’ computer, and emailed him my praise, but otherwise remained blissfully oblivious the entire time inasmuch as The Star was concerned — a “first,” I think, for me, in 47 years.

Knowing that Baylis and Craig Macnaughton, whose photos are a wonder of their own, had my back while I was away further contributed to my peace of mind.

So, at long last, I know, really know, that I am dispensable. Do you know what a freeing feeling that is? To know that you’re a wisp, on the wing to being swept away. Here a moment and then gone as others pick up the thread, not a beat missed.

I wrote recently about having won my wife’s blessing. Couple this with the fact that Baylis and Craig have my blessing, and you’ve got to agree it’s been a good year — actually, a great one.   

Winter is hard on Leo the pig.          

For those of you who may not know about Leo, he is a 70-pound pet pig of the white, perhaps English variety, that is, distinct from the Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that were all the rage a few years ago.

Over my bitter protestations about two years ago, my eldest daughter and wife bought him from a con artist of a breeder in Texas who had insisted Leo would not grow to be more than 10 pounds. I told them, one, that he would eventually be about the size of a Labrador retriever albeit with short legs, and, two, that I was going to move out to live in our shed if they got him.

Leo likes things the way he likes them. During warm weather he grazes on the lawn or roots among the leaves, then sleeps away the rest of the day in sunny spots out of the wind, coming into the house only to drink from his water bowl or to bed down for the night.

Winter breaks his sybaritic routine. He becomes bored, surly, pees on the brick-tiled, unheated porch. Little spats with the dogs break out over trifles. Early in the morning, when I am trying to enjoy a first cup of coffee, he pokes defiantly at my ankles, rattles the covers on the baseboard radiators, or scratches the front door with his tusks. If no one is around, from time to time he will pull cookbooks off a low shelf and tear out their pages.

Heaven forbid one of the kids has dropped a backpack on the floor with even a crumb of food in it; he will gnaw at it until he has ripped through the fabric. If I leave The New York Times within reach, he will shred and distribute it as broadly as possible. And on it goes. If I leave the downstairs bathroom door open, he will go in and knock over our 5-year-old’s tub toys, and he has done this a hundred times.

As I wrote this, Leo was nipping my bare feet, hoping to be scratched, given a treat, or otherwise entertained. Unlike dogs, which are bred to want to please us, pigs see things differently, more, perhaps, as cats do. It is, after all, all about them and what we can do to serve their needs.

Scientific American reported this week on a Dutch study that asked whether pigs were capable of empathy. The researchers put groups of pigs in various situations, stressful and pleasurable, while repeating bits of music. Then they introduced new pigs into the groups, played the music in the absence of the rewards or stress-inducers and found that the newcomers picked up emotional cues from the veterans.

Conceding that it is difficult to argue with science, whatever the researchers saw is hard to call empathy. Pigs, well, they’re just too piggish.

We were talking the other day about attaining a balance between the ways of the West and East, a discussion that sort of dovetailed with my reading lately, which began some months ago with William Blake and has wound its way through Lewis Thomas, who thinks everything’s connected, George McGovern, who thinks every child in the world should be fed and that we can afford it (what a radical thought), and which has now alit upon D.T. Suzuki, whose “Essays in Zen Buddhism” Northrop Frye had mentioned in a book of his, “The Great Code,” about biblical language.

So now I want to know how to, if not defeat, at least rein in my annoying ego. I want to know how one can ever attain peace in such a sea of troubles as this world is, and, of course, now that I’m getting closer to it, I want to know how to step over the threshold without drooling overmuch.

Our instructor talked to us about periodically clearing our minds, cleaning the slate. We could do it, for instance, in the midst of a busy day, simply by going into the bathroom and standing there for five minutes. “But then there’ll be all this pounding on the door,” I said, knowing what it’s like at The Star.

In the East they bow when they greet one another, he said. Here, we shake hands. “And give each other diseases,” I said. Down, down, ego.

I tended to fidget when in the lotus position, I said. In fact I wasn’t sure that I could even approximate it, given my two knee replacements. That was all right, he and others said. Just sit on a chair, or with a pillow between your legs. In short, just do it.

I must say I am intrigued. A woman who has been breathing for quite a while now said that concentrating on her breath had changed her. Of course, she cautioned, it takes a long time. I may have to concentrate doubly hard then.

I had told Mary that Shunryu Suzuki, in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” had likened inhaling and exhaling to a likened inhaling and exhaling to a sliding door. But that was wrong. She’ll be trying to breathe through her ears if she listens to me! It was a swinging door, Mary, a swinging door, not a sliding door.

And then the ultimate question, having to do with what it’s all about and how we came about. It’s a great mystery, the instructor, after pausing a bit, said.

Suzuki, I said, had used the metaphor of a waterfall. Before we were born, he said, we had no feeling, we were one with the universe. . . . Birth separated us from this oneness. In life we were like the drops falling from the waterfall, in great difficulty because we had feeling. But water was water, and we were one with the river. It was only when we didn’t realize it that we were fearful. Our life and death were the same thing, he said.

It’s something to think about when you’re standing there in the office bathroom.

Before there’s pounding on the door.

“Ya never know.” 

That was Burnsie’s credo.

Johnny Burns was a bookmaker on the West Side of Manhattan. He looked like a frail, little old man. But I remember once tapping him on the back, feeling his body stiffen as he turned, relaxing when he saw it was me.

He went bar to bar, booking bets, collecting and paying out, until he got to Jimmy Day’s on West Fourth Street, the popular neighborhood saloon I worked in. He would go to the back bar, have a beer, and talk.

He told me about a day in the Bronx, many years ago, a doubleheader between the Yanks and the Indians. All the action was coming in on the home team. They lost the early game, and the Yankee starting pitcher couldn’t make it out of the first in the nightcap.

The Indians were up by seven or eight. Burnsie was looking at a big score. But, the Yankees kept chipping away, chipping away, winning in extra innings.

The thought of the big one that got away was a life lesson for Burnsie. “Ya never know,” he repeated ruefully.

Back then, I bet on pro football every week — $10, $20 a game, two or three games a week. I can’t imagine doing that now: 32 teams, 17 weeks, my God, it would all quickly become one big blur.

But my mind was less addled then, and it was a hell of a lot of fun.

I made most of my bets on the phone on Sunday morning. I would call Tommy Butler, the consummate bartender from the Lion’s Head around the corner from Jimmy Day’s.

The Lion’s Head was a writers’ bar. The walls were covered with dust jackets from books by the regulars, names like Pete Hamill and Norman Mailer. Tommy was the resident expert on jazz. The jukebox at the Lion’s Head was proof of that expertise.

Tommy was a big man. People listened when he spoke, a good thing if you are tending bar in New York City. Yet he had a certain tranquillity about him.

Tommy also loved football. He would razz me about my Jets (has anything changed?), and lay off my Sunday morning bets with his bookie.

For about 15 years, he and I would talk a few minutes every Sunday during the football season.

In 1995, I got off to a bad start with my bets, losing the first two weeks of the season. I was out in Montauk with Carole. If I lost money in week three, I’d have to get together with Tommy and settle up.

I called him that Sunday. No answer. I dialed several times. The phone rang, endlessly.

I knew something was wrong. I was right. That big man was dead, a stroke.

The wake was held in Washington Heights. I met, as I recall, Tommy’s daughter there. I handed her a check, around $85. “He loaned it to me,” I told her.

I took the long subway ride back to our Chelsea apartment.

Burnsie was right. Ya never know.

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

Tony Prohaska’s memoir, “The White Fence,” which he introduced at the East Hampton Library in October, is a mother lode of local history, anecdote, and opinion. Imagine a coming-of-age story set here in the second half of the 20th century, as a boy grows up amid expatriates and Bonackers, artists and writers, and the families of fishermen. 

Much of the material in the 350-page book has been gleaned from 176 oral histories, which Tony and his partner, Martha Kalser, collected here between 1997 and 2004, but much is also mined from Tony’s exhaustive memory about people from diverse walks of life — who their forebears were, who married whom, what people’s proud accomplishments and pitfalls were. The oral histories are now archived at the library, along with more than 1,000 photographs. 

Imagine what it was like to be Tony at 12. He describes himself as a “young voyeur being dragged around to parties from Water Mill to Montauk dressed like a midget cow­boy. . . .” You begin to get the unique flavor.

Tony (Anton) and Martha are retired now, living in Delray, Fla. As the son of artists who came to live in Amagansett at about the time the first Abstract Expressionists found a haven here, Tony knew, and judged, the lifestyles of many of them. He says they were heavy drinkers and tormented. His father, Ray Prohaska, an illustrator, was also a semi-abstract painter and miffed that his successful magazine work was held in less regard than the “serious” art of his peers. He was a big man, whose word was law, and Tony doesn’t make him sound particularly nice. He was a surf fisherman, which informed some of his best-known artwork. 

Through his “old man” and their Amagansett neighbors, Tony came to know the prominent fishing families of Amagansett, many of whom also lived in the now-disappeared Montauk Fishing Village, which he describes in detail. He learned to love horses from the late Fanny Gardiner, a colorful member of the local aristocracy, and had what he calls a “five-year career as a teenaged cowboy.” He also writes about his childhood friends, who were, like he was, beaten, and about being invited to a dance at the Maidstone Club as a teenager.

Reading this book is a bit like panning for nuggets: If you are willing to mine the text, you will find some deep and intriguing bits of gold. You will learn that Jackson Pollock had a pet crow and that Bud King was the best bootlegger. If you trace your heritage to locals whose last names were Erickson, Lester, or Dickinson, you might want to give mining a try.

Artists and hangers-on, writers, men who made their names in early television production, a 20th century breed of year-round summer people . . . Tony knew them all. He describes an appointment with Wayne Barker, a psychiatrist who lived in Amagansett, and a renowned graphic designer named Alexey Brodovitch, who, according to a “Guestwords” Tony wrote for The Star, “rode around drunk.” And he quotes  extensively from an interview with Jeffrey Potter, who took an unusual path from Groton to Amagansett, and wound up writing an oral history of Jackson Pollock.

Tony’s mother, Carolyn, was a descendant of Henry Pierson, a founder of Southampton. She also was a Miss America contestant and a model before settling as a wife, mother, and overlooked artist. Tony followed her interest in reading and psychology. 

I found the book fascinating, even though I think I would recommend it less as a record of history and more as a rich and colorful memory piece. Tony is a writer to be sure, and I wanted to spread the word.

How we react to suffering is one of the questions raised in David Margulies’s arresting play, “Time Stands Still.”

That it is a fact of life we know, something we all must endure, to varying extents. Should we embrace it? Should we avert our gaze inasmuch as we are able? Should we accept beauty and suffering as the opposite sides of the same coin?

These different points of view are given voice in the Hampton Theatre Company’s production, which will be at the Quogue Community House through the weekend: A war-zone photographer finds it hard to avert her gaze, her longtime boyfriend, a reporter, similarly traumatized by the spilled blood he’s seen in the Mideast, finds in the end that he must avert his gaze to some extent, and their middle-aged editor and his young fiancée — a bubbly figure of fun initially who perhaps comes to embody most of us as the play progresses — choose what beauty there can be had in a world where suffering, because of the almost instantaneous speed with which news now travels, seems at times always to have the upper hand.

“They’re all trying to affirm life in their different ways,” Mary remarked as we, preoccupied by thoughts the play had engendered, got up to leave a recent matinee performance.

Were we guilty, for instance, in trying to put, as we have, suffering at one remove, reluctant as we have been to embrace what some say is its character-building, annealing quality? Have we distanced ourselves by choosing to live in such a beautiful place? Admittedly lucky, can we remain connected with others, as we should?

I would like to think, as the young mother, cradling a newborn in her arms by the play’s end, seems to say, that we can, that we can focus our gaze on both joy and woe.

What is the sound of one columnist caught napping?

Talk about suffering, I am chagrined that I mixed up the two Suzukis last week. D.T. Suzuki wrote “Essays in Zen Buddhism,” and it was Shunryu Suzuki whose talks were the subject of “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”

“It seems like nothing much has changed,” I said to Mary as we were watching “To Kill a Mockingbird” the other night, though I know it is frequently said in connection with Martin Luther King’s birthday that we have come a long way.

For the young people who pro­tested in cities throughout the country on Jan. 19, and who claim­ed that the import of the holiday was being hijacked, it was not just a day off.

It should be remembered that Dr. King had a challenging vision, to wit, that this country had within it the means and the moral gumption to achieve the society of brotherhood that he said had inspired our early national life.

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” he wrote. But that was in 1967, and, again, nothing much has changed, the insecurity net having broadened its reach now to include not only the poor but a wide swath of the middle class as well.

Those living tenuous lives were in the main addressed in the president’s State of the Union speech the other night, and it was uplifting to hear, echoing, as it did, at least some of what Dr. King had urged, though the president’s vision for America — a fairer America and, consequently, an even more economically vibrant one — took a far back seat to the “no se puede” crowd in the morning’s papers.

“. . . Harumph. A more fair society? Simply can’t afford it, my friend, simply can’t afford it. Free community college, tax credits for education and child care . . . what is the president thinking?”

They said 30 million watched — a Super Bowl-type audience. I hope they keep watching, and listening, in the next two years, because maybe if they do the status quo will change. And while I doubt we’ll ever be a tight-knit family, as the president would have it, we may come to increasingly acknowledge our common humanity and, insofar as this optimistic, inventive nation goes, our common purpose.

When I was a kid — and how many people hate hearing that from their parents? — I didn’t walk 12 miles to school in a snowstorm, I didn’t wake at 5 a.m. to deliver newspapers, and I certainly didn’t eat tuna casserole because the children in China were starving.

But growing up on City Island in the Bronx, there was nothing more exciting than waking up to a quiet, still morning and sensing that snow had fallen through the night and school would probably be closed that day.

The quiet that settled upon the outdoors was a welcome reprieve from the usual sounds of shouting garbage truck drivers making their morning rounds or neighbors’ cars heating up in driveways. Yes, everything was still for that short, special moment when the day dawned and snow had blanketed the earth.

We would run to the windows and see how much had fallen on a day when my mother usually couldn’t even get us out of bed to ready for school.

The subways weren’t closed, the roads weren’t shut down, and rarely did we panic-shop for bread, batteries, and milk. In my house we would have felt lucky to run out of milk, since it was force-fed to us by the nuns in our Catholic school and we hated it, especially because it was always served warm in those little waxed containers.

Meteorologists, which my husband, the fisherman, pretends to be, have taken the fun out of a surprise snowstorm. C’mon! “Juno, the storm of the century?” Half-hour weather specials pre-empting regular television programming? Snowmageddon? A little much, no?

And since the supposed storm of the century didn’t materialize, politicians are turning it into a political battle, blaming each other for the mistake they made by basically shutting down New York City.

I remember those surprise snow days with such fondness. Before bundling up with layer upon layer of clothing, three pairs of gloves, two pairs of socks, and our heavy winter coats, we would be fed a hearty breakfast, since my mother knew once we went to our snow hill, we wouldn’t be seen again until darkness had settled in or our fingers became numb with frostbite. Kids these days are wimps when it comes to a good snow day. An hour outdoors and they’re freezing their little bums off and crying to go inside, back into the warmth of their homes to play video games.

We always had dogs flying around us, running up and down the hill trying to avoid being hit with a sleigh. On one particularly long day of sledding my friend’s collie, who looked like Lassie but was named Tara from “Gone With the Wind,” disappeared for a while. After we had dinner and she still hadn’t shown up for her own meal, my friend and I went looking for her. We stopped a fuel oil delivery man and asked if he had seen a collie, and being the compassionate man that he was, he said, “That dog’s dead; it was hit by a car up on the avenue.”

Our tears froze when we found her lifeless body. The incident kind of took all the joy out of sledding for us after that.

I only tell this story so people know to keep their dogs in when the plows are around. They drive so fast, and I realize they have to for a strong running start, but any animal that crosses their paths is in jeopardy.

The latest snowfall will probably stick around for a while, and everyone’s favorite sleighing spot will be busy this weekend. So bundle up, my friends. Tether your dogs and let’s be careful out there.

Janis Hewitt is a reporter for The Star.

Because I am a doubting Thomasina, I went to Google to check out a statement in Tony Prohaska’s “The White Fence,” a memoir that was the subject of last week’s “Connections.” Tony reported that Jackson Pollock had a pet crow. The Internet is wonderful; I not only found references to the crow but also saw images of it taken with the artist in 1947. It was named Caw Caw.

I once had a pet rooster. I’m not sure about the pecking order — ha! — in a lineup of crows and roosters, but my pet liked to do what Caw Caw did: sit on my shoulder and follow me around my grandparents’ farm.

We left the farm that summer to spend a month at a nearby farm that took in boarders. I was 11 or 12, and I cried when I wasn’t allowed to keep my rooster. He was put in a big open field with 50 or 100 other birds, and, though I went there every day, he never showed himself. I didn’t eat chicken for a long time.

I got to thinking about that rooster this week after reading a horrendous account in The New York Times of the disregard for the basic health of pigs, cows, and sheep (as well as cruel experimentation on them) by researchers and administrators at a United States Department of Agriculture center in Nebraska. If you haven’t read the story and both care about animals and eat meat, I recommend that you don’t.

I suppose that children who grow up on picture-book farms come to terms early with the fact that most of the animals they see every day are destined for the table. Wilbur the Pig is saved in “Charlotte’s Web,” but that’s just a nice story. A family I know who raised children here always kept a pig or two; the adults made up stories about where the chops for dinner had come from.

Laura Donnelly, The Star’s food and restaurant writer, devoted a column to the production of chickens about a year ago, and I’ve been careful about what poultry I buy ever since. I’m not sure I am disciplined enough to become a vegan or vegetarian, although I think those who don’t eat animals are admirable. I hope something will come of The Times’s exposé about the Department of Agriculture’s misbegotten effort to help the meat industry develop more and more tender meats at lower cost, and if a petition were available demanding that taxpayer dollars be taken away from the department, I would sign it.

The overriding issue, however, is the humanity, and inhumanity, of homo sapiens. Day after day we learn of brutality and killings in the name of God, that red, white, and blue Americans are fighting and killing in the name of democracy and have subjected suspects to tortures in the war against terror. What hope can there be for animals?

When I got into the office around 8 on Tuesday morning this week, there already was a message on my voice mail. It was from a woman who wanted us to remove the names of her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé from a 2013 letter to the editor that remained on our website.

Their wedding is about to take place and, without getting into the circumstances of the letter that offended the mother of the bride other than to say it involved an Amagansett summer share house, her worry was that some of the hundreds of guests coming to the wedding would turn to the web for information, a gift registry perhaps, and be tempted to read something less than flattering about the couple.

Her request was hardly the first. In recent months, there has been a sharp increase in the number and frequency of pleas from people whose names have appeared in The Star, mostly in connection with driving while intoxicated arrests, to expunge the online record. Our answer is always “no.”

Among these has been a woman who says she was fired from her job and cannot land another because potential employers are put off when they do a web search for her. Another was a man in the real estate business who was arrested on suspected D.W.I. after an accident but who eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. A third has been sending us polite letters, stopping by the office, and even contacted Google to see what could be done.

Perhaps it matters that each of these requests has come from someone who is white and of at least solid middle-class economic status; perhaps not. But it seems notable that not one has come from a person of color or from any of the many dozens of Latinos whom police stop here on a nearly daily basis. To me at least, it is as if a certain sense of privilege is at play in these requests.

Whether white, well-off people feel entitled to have their pasts scrubbed is not really an issue for us. What is important is that we, like other reputable publications, try faithfully to give account of what happens in the area we cover. Letters to the editor, which we view as the readers’ space, are a part of that mission, as is our writing about drug and alcohol-related arrests and other matters of public safety. They go on the website just like everything else as part of our contract with our readers and subscribers.

More so than print editions of the paper, the web is instantly searchable; the past lingers there for everyone, including those with matters that they or their mothers would like to forget. From time to time it may be necessary to correct something on our website, but we will not go back and change history. Nor should any other newspaper worth its salt. Something happened; we reported it, the record stands.

In the case of the couple about to be married, they had phoned separately to complain after the letter to the editor appeared, and each independently, if unknowingly, admitted to having violated the law. I told them that if they wanted to give their side of the story for publication, we were ready. I wasn’t surprised that they declined.