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.

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.

“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.

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.

They go for Christmas in a big way in Palm Springs, where we’ll be at the end of the month, with lights and ornaments all around. Yet even if I weren’t jaded when it comes to the mandatory bonhomie of the season, it seems all the more ludicrous to submit this year given the recent baffling refusals of grand juries in Missouri and New York to try police officers who killed unarmed citizens, one who had been told to get up on the sidewalk and another who was placed in an outlawed, and fatal, choke hold for selling single cigarettes.

Hardly tidings of comfort and joy for a nation that purports to value fairness and has declared its citizens to be free and equal. What lives were protected, what property, by these deaths?

We’re always lowering flags to half-staff, and for good reason, though one wonders if they oughtn’t to have been lowered for the nation in the wake of these cases, so that people could reflect on what we’ve become — a house gravely divided, with liberty and justice for some.

“We’re the good guys,” a local policeman said to my wife, after she’d gone some time ago to investigate the source of raised voices she’d heard on a street at the boundary of our property, as if she, who was simply wondering what all the shouting was about — it was a traffic stop — needed reminding.

And, by and large, the police here have been good guys, wielding power with restraint and responding admirably to crises whenever they arise, which I guess is pretty much daily. I would like to think that here a certain equanimity exists that might not be found in other places, where mutual distrust reigns rather than fellow feeling. But that may be a rose-colored view.

All I know is, power’s a heady thing, especially if firepower underwrites it.

I’ve read that the greatest Christmas gift is the knowledge that one is blessed, and I know that that is not a frequent occurrence.

It happened to me the other day, though, a few weeks before Christmas, when I finally persuaded my wife to come see me play tennis — singles, not doubles, which I’ve played pretty much exclusively for the past eight years, having come to the conclusion at the age of 66 that singles had passed me by. And, besides, I, being a crazy lefty with a spin serve and quick hands at the net, have always been a better doubles player.

And that’s still true, though this fall, having nothing left to lose, I decided to get back into the game, enrolling in East Hampton Indoor’s least demanding singles league. And, at the same time, to work out once a week with Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy so that I could strengthen my left shoulder, and to religiously attend the once-a-week stroke-of-the-week clinics at E.H.I.T. that Lisa Jones gives.

And, surprise, with practice I’ve begun to improve! Who would have thought it pushing 75.

Interestingly, I won matches from the start (fueled by desperation more than anything), but it wasn’t until I lost two straight for the first time in the eighth week, to a younger and better player, that I had fun, my wins notwithstanding. He had beat me, but it had been a good match, which, when my better angel has my ear, is what I say we all want.

Actually, what I came to want was my wife’s blessing. She has tended to demur when at times I’ve asked her to come see me play, not being all that eager, I suppose, to watch an old coot alternately preen, pout, and shout.

But, as I say, the other night she did come, and, aside from a few glances her way, I concentrated on the task at hand and kept quiet. Again, it was a good match, one that could have gone either way, and I did win, but it was the knowledge that I was beginning to develop a somewhat effective style of play — one that I hope will finally lead to the putting away of childish things — and that she was there to see I was (thanks to Lisa and Robbie) improving that was buoying. We smiled at each other as I came off the court, and I knew I had her blessing, which was all that I wanted for Christmas.

So what has happened with that good old-fashioned word “it”? You would think that so useful a word would not go out of style or be forgotten. But, if listening to such well-regarded sources as National Public Radio news is any illustration, it has been almost fully supplanted by “they.”

I blame the Supreme Court, in part. In its (notice that?) Citizens United decision, the justices all but handed full personhood to corporations back in 2010. The trickle-down has been significant and to some ears, mine included, extremely annoying. Everything from multinational manufacturers to federal agencies are referred to as “they” when they, by all rights, should always be “it.”

In its proper usage, they is the third person plural pronoun “used to represent persons or things last mentioned or implied” or “unspecified persons or people in general,” in a lovely old American Heritage dictionary that I keep in my office.

It seems to me to be crossing a line for organizations like NPR’s news programs, for example, to subtly side with the court in helping to support the concept that corporations and giant bureaucracies are people, too.

Webster’s dictionary takes a decent crack at the they/it collective noun conundrum: “It is treated as singular when the collective is thought of as a whole and as plural when the individual members are thought of as acting separately.” So, following that rule, most of the time singular entities like the Ford Motor Company or the Food and Drug Administration should be referred to as “it” for short. Human beings acting in some fashion within each organization would be referred to as they.

Here is one recent example from “All Things Considered” that I remembered from a drive-time listening session and looked up once I got back to the office: “Analysts had been expecting the Fed to signal it would hike rates around the middle of next year by removing from their statement language suggesting they would hold rates near zero. . . .” The reporter for the story, John Ydstie, managed to get it both right and wrong all in the same sentence.

Language changes, of course, and this is one curmudgeons like me cannot hope to win — especially when the highest court in the land disagrees and Facebook constantly reminds us that a friend has a birthday: “Wish them a happy birthday today.”

The clamor among some Democrats, those who used to be known as liberal but now prefer to be called progressive, for Elizabeth Warren to run for president makes for fascinating politics. Like Barack Obama when he took on his first successful presidential campaign, she is a freshman senator. 

It might be said that the trajectory of candidates for our highest political office has, like everything else in our developed world, speeded up. Before 2008, few of us would have thought a first-term senator could resign before even that first term was over to run for president (much less win). 

According to credible exit polls, Mr. Obama’s first victory depended in large part on those younger than 30 who gave him 66 percent of their vote. It’s fair to say that in the most recent election this mass of youthful supporters stayed home, no doubt because many had become disillusioned. 

No longer do the words on the most famous of the Obama posters, “hope,” “change,” and “progress,” seem to hold much political potency. Even ardent Obama fans have had a hard time keeping the fires of hope stoked during the virulent factionalism battles in Washington over the last six years. Cynics have been made of many naïve or idealistic voters, and the pendulum has been given a hard swing to the right.

Depending on your point of view, it’s easy either to love or to hate Elizabeth Warren. Her intensity in speaking out about the corrupting influence of big banks and her courage in doing so are remarkable. Even so, it’s hard to imagine that she, or anyone else, could wear the kind of national-savior mantle that supporters draped over Mr. Obama. (There were many, to be sure, who always thought he was the emperor with no clothes.) 

Hillary Clinton is supported by 53 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, according to a recent Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll. That’s roughly five times more than those who support Ms. Warren. 

Some political theorists say the organizations urging Ms. Warren to come forward as a presidential candidate — MoveOn, Democracy for America, Emily’s List — have an unstated agenda, which is to press Mrs. Clinton, the only viable candidate in the field so far, to prove her own willingness to take on Wall Street and to adopt at least some of what they describe positively as Ms. Warren’s economic populism.

Ms. Warren has said she is not seeking the nomination; if that holds true, it may turn out to be good for the Democratic Party. Who knows what the future holds for her? My guess is that she has already taken heed of what Charles Krauthammer, the ultraconservative columnist, has said about her: “I’d love to see her run,” Mr. Krauthammer said. “It would be a festival if you’re a conservative or a Republican. We put up anybody sentient on the other side it’ll be a good night on election night.”

We will have returned from Palm Springs by now. When last we were there, at this time two years ago, I described it as heavenly inasmuch as we’d been able “to take delight in each other and to remember why we were magnetized from the start.”

“. . . It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind. Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.”

I suppose you can’t go to heaven again, but I would like to think, this being written 10 days before our departure, that you can. We’ll see. . . .

My late stepmother said she always had to have a reason to go somewhere, she didn’t just go somewhere to go somewhere. We do have a reason — there’s family out there. There’s a daughter and son-in-law, a first cousin and his wife, with a newborn, and, and . . . tennis courts! All kinds of tennis courts, grass, clay, Har-Tru, and hard, at one of the Courtyard Marriots in Palm Desert, about a half-hour distant.

The only thing is everybody out there plays golf, a game I’ve never cottoned to because it requires that you be calm and mature, not so anxious, as I am, about making mistakes, which, when you obsess over them, makes everything even worse. A sports psychologist told me that once. Maybe when I’m 80.

The universe seems closer there. Here the trees get in the way. So, if I can’t find anyone to play with, I’ll wander back to the Jacuzzi and continue to wonder, as “Concierto de Aranjuez” plays, what it’s all about.