If real estate outfits were likely to make new year’s resolutions, I would want them to try to hew more closely to the traditional, if fuzzy, lines of delineation among place names. It is a pipe dream, of course, but it would be nice.

Around The Star, we spend countless hours trying to figure out where things are. Questions like which side of Abraham’s Path is East Hampton and which is Amagansett, or whether Maidstone Park is in Springs rather than East Hampton, occupy more minutes than I can estimate. When does Bridgehampton turn into Water Mill, we ask. And does Sag Harbor extend all the way to the Morton Wildlife Refuge? No, but you get the point.

Fault lies with the United States Postal Service, which handed out ZIP codes, and with real estate people, for whom payoffs can depend on perceived locations. Thrown into the mix are school districts, which have their own, sometimes baffling borders, and fire districts, which appear to have been drawn based on who knows what.

Wainscott is perhaps foremost among those places that just get bigger and bigger. Time was, the hamlet was a stretch of farmhouses and fields south of the Montauk Highway and west of Georgica Pond. Today, it has absorbed the East Hampton Airport, pushed all the way east to the Sag Harbor Road and northwest to gobble up the Ross School as it toodles all the way to the Sag Harbor Village line. That Forbes had Wainscott among its top 50 most expensive ZIP codes last year is not missed by those who write descriptions for real estate listings.

Lost in all this are many of the old place names, some going back to the 18th century or earlier, in which can be heard the echoes and stories of long-ago times. Hayground, Hardscrabble, Cedar Bush, Freetown, Pots and Kettles, Miller’s Ground, and Indian Field are among the names of places here that are all but forgotten.

Regular readers might recall that I have been on a mission to correct online maps concerning Gardiner’s Bay. From what I can tell, victory is near; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is waiting for a final word on where to put the dividing line between Gardiner’s and encroaching Napeague Bay, relegating it to the east of Lazy Point and Hicks Island, where it belongs.

Just the other day I was looking at Google Maps online and noticed that it has the Peconic River, which by all rights terminates at Riverhead, coursing east past Sag Harbor and out toward the Cedar Point Lighthouse. Expect to see that in the real estate vernacular soon.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Even if you’re not a kid, snow days are a welcome respite, not from school but from the getting and spending with which most of us fill our days. It was Tuesday afternoon when I wrote this. As I sat at my computer, which is in a corner of the bedroom, I watched the snow veer horizontally, rising high enough to cover the seat of the swing in the yard and making a graceful mound of the car.

From The Star’s website, I learned that only a few households here had lost power. For everyone save the crews at work on the roads and the volunteers in the emergency services, the big snow provided a chance to stay home, warm and cozy — and cruise Facebook.

On Facebook I was surprised to notice a remark by a friend who had a totally different take on this day off: She said it gave people a chance to do chores they had put off for a long time, like cleaning the basement. Better her than me. There are plenty of tasks I’ve put off, but that’s not my idea of how to bask in a snow day. As far as I’m concerned, a snow day is an excuse to, for once, do just about nothing.

Other Facebook warriors recorded their outdoor adventures — shoveling, taking photographs, digging out their vehicles, even snowshoeing. I felt a bit jealous, but not jealous enough to bundle up and go out. “Take heart,” my husband said. “There are advantages to being a senior citizen, and not being expected to venture out in 18-to-24-inch-deep snow is one of them.”

My niece Janet, out in sunny California, posted photographs of a scene from Golden Gate Park, where calla lilies are blooming and Muscovy ducks paddle about like it was already spring. The Facebook “wall” of Pat Mundus — who has been sailing in far off, tropical waters — featured shots of a visit to Mayan ruins in Belize. Now that’s something I dream about.

Usually, on a non-snow day, I start my morning perusing the woeful headlines of the world in the pages of The New York Times, which has been delivered to our driveway for decades. Today, I took a vacation from the bad news: My copy never made it up our snowbound lane. In snow-day mode, I didn’t even look up the headlines online.

But despite my best efforts to simply daydream, all warm and cozy, Facebook managed to intrude on my peace.

I have “liked” Doctors Without Borders (or have I “friended” the organization? I’m not sure which) and it posted its own version of a snow-shoveling photo today, this one from Lebanon. A Syrian refugee is seen shoveling outside his tent in a makeshift settlement in the Bekaa Valley. “Snow and freezing temperatures are bringing misery to many of the 400,000 Syrians who have taken shelter in substandard conditions in the area. Today, the conflict in Syria is seen as the world’s most grave humanitarian disaster,” the accompanying text read.

Even on a snow day, there is no respite from the problems of the world.

From an upstairs window Tuesday, as snow continued to fall fast, I could see a dozen sea ducks riding it out on the bay in front of our house. Seagulls of some sort flew on the driving wind above the water’s edge as a flood tide pushed and clawed at the dune.

The beach is almost dead flat and rocky at this time of year, and the gulls swoop down and pick up any edible thing dug loose from the bottom by the waves. It is one hard way to make a living, though if the cold does not bother them all that much the easy pickings make good sense. On the other hand, the ducks, surf scoters, I believe, have carved out a niche that I find difficult to understand.

Of all the parts of Gardiner’s Bay where they could hole up, our southeastern reach would have to be about the toughest. Rollers propelled by the strong north wind tumble and break above the shallows here. Even in the warm months, there has never been a boat I owned or had anything to do with that did not break loose or drag anchor over the flats.

Watching with an old pair of Navy binoculars, I wondered why the scoters did not find a gentle lee instead. They are sea ducks, however, and to them, the bay may well be a refuge from the day’s ocean turmoil. These birds’ hardiness is something worthy of marvel, an astonishing shell of feathers covering thick down. Their uncovered feet work constantly to keep their beaks pointed in the direction of the oncoming waves.

It appeared that the scotors were not feeding. Rather, they just swam, nearly in place, disappearing and appearing again as the waves came and went underneath them. That they could be doing this for the duration of this stretch of weather is something to think about.

People who live in Florida or anyplace else warm probably think those of us sitting out this blizzard are the crazy ones. And we, warm in the house, look out at the birds and think the same thing.

“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.