Perhaps the dumbest thing I heard back when I was covering the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals came to mind this week as I watched a heavy northeast storm roll in. I cannot recall now what the application was for or where the property was or even who the lawyer was, but I remember blanching when a representative of the owner said the sand on the beach comes and goes and that the sea wall he was advocating would be soon covered and out of sight.

It was the late 1990s, during a relative lull in terms of hurricanes and bad cold-season storms, so maybe the guy could be forgiven. Maybe he believed what he said. What is clear is that he was mostly wrong. If not allowed to migrate naturally beaches tend to go away, and at just about the same rate at which people forget that fact.

There is an abandoned house at the end of a road at Lazy Point that stands dramatically on tall pilings a good 75 feet out into Gardiner’s Bay. To observers today, it looks like a poster image for climate change and sea level rise. The thing is, not so long ago it was inland of a first threatened house, one that the East Hampton Town Board ordered demolished, with the mess hauled away at its owner’s expense.

Years ago, Tony Minardi, teaching science at East Hampton High School, managed an ongoing project to measure the ocean beaches’ movement in relation to records of the height and direction of waves. I was among those providing the labor, walking off readings from which Mr. Minardi developed profiles, portraits of the width and angle of the sand from dune to water’s edge.

If Mr. Minardi had one point to impart to us kids it was that the sand mostly goes. Anything that holds a dune in place, like a building stuck on top of it, will almost always result in the narrowing of the beach. On balance, the majority of the movement of sand is from east to west on Long Island, and when the eastern sources are blocked, as by ill-thought-out seawalls, the western beaches suffer.

It was obvious then, and it is obvious now, that the places for which seawalls are sought will be the places where the beach will disappear. It’s that simple, whether the vested interests want to believe it or not.

Of all the unlikely places, it was at a wake this week that I found myself talking about births and the fact that this newspaper publishes many fewer notices of them than it used to.

The wake was for Ed Hannibal, whom a crowd and then some was there to mourn and remember, and I ended up chatting in the back of the room with Eileen Myles, a poet I had long admired and who was Ed’s stepsister, something I had known at one time but nearly forgot.

Eileen asked how the paper was doing and said it was important for members of a community, any community, to feel connected to one another. I agreed. Then it dawned on me as I was speaking that people these days seem to do so much of their connecting on Facebook and on other online sites that perhaps the now-rare announcements of births in print have also taken to the web. Weddings and engagements, though we welcome them, have dwindled somewhat, too.

At the other end of life’s arc, obituaries carry on at much the same rate as they always have. Finality still requires hard copy, or so it would appear.

At Ed’s funeral on Monday at East Hampton’s Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, his son Jack talked about something his father had always said to his kids while dropping them off at school or somewhere. “Remember who you are and what you stand for,” Ed would say — a bit of heavyweight existentialism to drop on a third-grader, Jack said.

It had been a while since I had been at a Mass, though we mention them nearly every week on the obituary page. And though I am not the churchgoing type, it was impossible not to feel like I was part of something bigger just by being there.

At that moment in the service when the priest asked us to turn to those nearby and offer them a word of peace, Horty Carpentier, whom I’ve known for many years, reached over the pews and offered me her hands. “You could use some peace,” she said. “We all could,” I said, half to myself.

“Remember who you are and what you stand for,” Ed said, and fine advice it is.   

“Where’s the brief?” I asked Mary after we’d seen a somewhat long film about Stephen Hawking, who wrote “A Brief History of Time,” which I’ve taken the time to peruse again in an effort to constantly expand my consciousness, just like the universe.

“You see,” I said when asked what I’d learned, “there could have been this singularity, which they’ve called the Big Bang,” I said with a wink, “from which the universe was formed, but the discovery of black holes may posit a Big Crunch as well, not a pleasant thought. Or . . . or there may never have been a singularity, which would mean the universe would have had no beginning nor would it have an end, which would leave a Creator out of the equation.”

Cutting to the chase, she said she thought the actor who played Stephen Hawking had a wonderful twinkle in his eye, and I said that the actress who played Jane, his first-wife-to-be, was quite fetching.

As for the whys and wherefores of the universe, I said, “All I think we can say with any certainty is, ‘It is,’ to which I’d add that, while I’m not very intelligent, I know, thanks to you, what love is, and that that’s the most important thing, the Grand Unified Theory as far as I’m concerned. Tennis is a distant second.”

As for life, now that the subject had come up, I said I wish at times it were simpler — so much of it is so much of an ado about nothing — and that there were some certainties as to its whys and wherefores and hereafter.

But then what Bob Schaeffer often says came to mind, to wit, that “the hours have passed, and, before you know it, it’s time for ‘Jeopardy!’ ”  

Good grief, Christopher Walsh! Let go of the past, already!

You’ve gone far in a few short years. It wasn’t so long ago that, desperate for any merriment at all, you dragged a sad little Charlie Brown-caliber pine tree up the 75 steps and into your decrepit Brooklyn apartment, decorated it with a handful of dull ornaments and semi-functioning light sets, and . . . and then sat alone reading “The Catcher in the Rye” for perhaps the 15th time.

But today, you live, once again, in the blissful beauty of the South Fork. You love your work. You’ve got a cozy little apartment and a car, and best of all, a woman who loves you. Last week, the two of you bought bright new ornaments and lights, and later you returned to the old Hrens nursery, site of so many long-ago Christmas tree acquisitions, and carefully selected the perfect tree for that cozy apartment. Later, when she arrived home from work, you lovingly decorated the tree together and, sitting before your accomplishment, shared a fine Cotes du Rhone as Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Kay Starr sang sweet Christmas melodies from long ago.

You don’t feel like Charlie Brown anymore, sitting at the outdoor psychiatrist’s office of Lucy van Pelt and complaining of an ill-defined melancholy. “Instead of feeling happy,” he sighed, “I feel sort of let down.”

I don’t, and why would I? Amagansett is done up so prettily, decorated trees, wreaths, and lights everywhere, and, while Santa was nowhere to be found when we made it to the square on Saturday in the early afternoon — contrary to the promise of so many communiqués — spirits were bright after an Irish coffee served up by our friend Tom at the Meeting House.

A DVD of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” featuring the late Vince Guaraldi’s sublime jazz soundtrack, sat for a week on my desk at home. I have seen it dozens of times, owned the soundtrack for decades, and often attempt, with little success, to replicate it on the piano.

I finally persuaded Cathy to watch it with me. She liked it well enough, but was soon reading, and then dozing, while I shattered the silent night with ham-fisted renditions of “Linus and Lucy” and “Christmas Time Is Here” from the soundtrack. It’s always so much fun.

Long overdue, and even longer past Holden Caulfield’s age, my aversion to letting go of childhood is finally diminishing. I well remember class trips to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where “everything always stayed right where it was” behind the glass. “The only thing that would be different,” he recalled, “would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all.”

But it’s okay — it’s only natural — that I, that everything, would be different. “Everything changes, nothing remains without change,” said Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Buddha, the awakened one. One hundred miles and so many light years removed from that sad December in Brooklyn, Christmas may still provoke that regression to a time, as Van Morrison sang, when the world made more sense. But the past is history, the future is a mystery, and there is only now, which, as someone pointed out, is called the present. And what a glorious gift it is.

“Life is about working things out,” Cathy said in her adorable French accent. “You are not meant to be a little child. You are meant to be grown up by now.”

She’s right, of course.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

According to a 2011 report from Chorus America, an organization that promotes and supports choral singing, 42.6 million people sing in more than 270,000 choruses across the nation. The organization admitted that there was something a bit wonky about those figures: If the survey were correct, it would mean an extraordinary average of more than 157 people per singing group — but, still, it said emphatically that more Americans sing in organized groups “than engage in football, baseball, tennis, even Greco-Roman wrest­ling.” (Fantasy football, they conceded, has been estimated to attract an amazing 27 million participants.)

As a member of the Choral Society of the Hamptons, I am delighted to be part of such a large musical community. Two performances of our annual holiday concert were presented at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church on Sunday, which allows me to write this week about the joy many of us take in choral singing in general and, in specific, the pleasure of  this concert of music by Bach and Mendelssohn. (I avoided using this space to tout the concert beforehand, knowing that it would have its own advance publicity and not wanting to become boring on the subject. But today, with a laudatory review in a prominent place in our arts section, I am home free to gush.)

A few weeks ago, Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, had gotten me thinking about my own early singing experiences. My mother, I told her, realized by the time I turned 13 that I wasn’t going to be another Shirley Temple, and decided instead that I should take voice ed instead that I should take voice lessons. We would ride a bus from Bayonne, N.J., to Journal Square in Jersey City once a week, and it was there that I was introduced to beautiful soprano arias. I can remember to this day how one, an aria from Handel’s opera “Rinaldo,” began: The words are “Lascia ch’io pianga / mia cruda sorte” (let me weep / my cruel fate). 

I didn’t have the kind of life experience necessary for the sad emotions expressed in the aria, but, looking back, I apparently had an okay voice (as well as a precocious taste for tragic melodies). “Rinaldo” is not very well known, but anyone interested can find the aria, of course, on YouTube. It’s sad and lovely. 

As the years went on, I sang at high school assemblies, although I can’t remember what the songs may have been, and I soon became enamored of the sound of blended voices. I was a member of the New Jersey All State and Rutgers University choruses and, later, as a young woman in New York City, of such prestigious groups as the Dessoff Choir. When I came to East Hampton I am ashamed to say I was rather snotty about the prospect of joining the chorus here; but then I actually joined and quickly noticed that Dinwiddie Smith, who had been in a group I sang with at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, was a member. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me.

That was a long time ago and, except for a period in the 1980s when I gave music up entirely, I’ve been at it ever since. I’ve grown to have great respect for our not-so-small-town chorus and everyone who makes an effort to hold it to a high standard.

This week, Carissa, who attended Sunday’s concert with her husband and 4 and 6-year-old children, sent me an email. I hope she doesn’t mind my sharing it. “Bravo! We all loved it,” it read. “When the chorus first sang, it was so beautiful it gave me chills. Well done to all involved. It was just lovely.” I like to think this is one of the main reasons choral singing is so popular in America: See how amply we are rewarded?

’Twas a week before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even the dog. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a vision of Jesus sketched into my morning peanut butter toast.

He wore not a red suit but a ragged white robe, and wore not a silly hat but a crown full of thorns. His belly was slim, not jiggling with jelly, and He didn’t look jolly but solemn and troubled.

He left me a message each day for a week and said he’s dismayed at the havoc we’ve wreaked.

I dared not eat eggs for the mess He might make, but He said it’s a mess that we’ve made on our own. He said we were fighting in wars that should end, and that the Kardashians should be set out to sea in a storm. He’ll greet them with glee and rid them of vanity and teach humility. Celebrity nonsense is one He not likes and He said we’re all one and must share all alike.

The rich are too rich and the poor are too poor, so it’s time we all group as one like before. If good deeds are performed, then happiness follows. It’s in our best interest to all get along.

Warriors, He said, should lay down their weapons to find peace without sorrow at least for a day. The wars being fought are all wrong, He did say, for no matter what He’s called, He is one for us all.

The scripture He wrote each day was fine; you could tell He had plenty of stuff on His mind. And what did He write on my toast you may ask, oh plenty of stuff; He took us to task.

Our fingers were not made to tap on a screen, but for tilling the soil to nurture ourselves. He never looked down, his eyes glued on mine, and channeled a message that He wanted to spread. Our clothing is silly and costs far too much, a waste of good money that will soon turn to dust. Our smiles to each other, not perfect and pure, but a gesture that should not be ignored.

The greed all around us should end right away, or a flood just like Noah’s will soon fill the land. The earth it is warming and not just a hoax, for what He created is not going as planned. Soon He’ll determine what happens next, but another chance He’ll give us to fix what is wrong.

At Christmas it’s time to reach out to each other and share all good things, no matter how precious. And finally He wrote on my toast yesterday, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good day.”

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

The death of a friend is dreadful. A gathering of friends who come together to show how much they cared about the one who is gone and to support a family in their grief is, on the other hand, a lesson in living. 

So it was this week when a large crowd of people whose lives had been touched by Ed Hannibal visited the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton, and so it was at the funeral Mass the next day at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton, where the liturgy and a moving eulogy reminded all there of what a fine man he had been.

Ed was 78 when he died on Dec. 6. He had five children and seven grandchildren and friends and associates from many different walks of life. It was not surprising that the assembled were numerous and ranged in age from 4 to the mid-80s. So many wanted to express their sorrow and speak with members of the family. One woman told me later she had stood in line for almost two hours. 

I was one of Ed’s generation and I know that others, like me, could not help but feel the absences of those who had died before. Other fathers and husbands, other mothers and wives. Nor could we help but recognize how much we all had aged, especially if we hadn’t seen each other in a long time.

We reminisced. We spoke about, or tried to remember, how we first met. We brought up riotous occasions that we had shared in the good old days, when this was more of a small town, and said we were sorry to have missed so much of each other’s families in the intervening years after some had moved away, and after the South Fork had boomed into something else.  

We made light of the fact that some of us were not as tall as we used to be. I admitted to having lost two inches, while a friend said he had refused to believe it when his doctor told him he was four inches shorter than before. That is, he refused to believe it until he realized for the first time that his wife was taller than he was.

What remained unsaid was that there is no choice but to accept the fact that, having been lucky enough to survive for so many decades, we, too, are moving on, that some of us will live to mourn the others. 

One of the lessons that came clear is that friendship and expressions of affection matter, that kindness shown makes our own lives worth living. Ed had shown an awful lot. And that — the rare goodness of the life just ended — left us with more than memories. It was a promise to be the best we can.  

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.”

Christa and I made a quick trip to New York recently. As we turned east on 34th Street after emerging from the Midtown Tunnel, we saw at least 50 Santas heading west toward Herald Square to take part in SantaCon. I noticed that every costume was the same, down to the cheap black plastic belt, the white faux-fur trim, and the ludicrous beard. And I recalled my own experiences, many years ago, as a St. Nick imposter.

In 1989, when I was working at Guild Hall, the staff was planning to march in the East Hampton Santa parade. None of us owned tractors or trucks, nor did we have the wherewithal to build a float. Somebody had the idea that one of us should dress as Santa Claus. Except for the security and maintenance people, who had to work on Saturday, I was the only male on the staff.

So as we paraded down Newtown Lane, I tossed candy canes left and right, blissfully unaware that at the end of the parade was the “real” Santa Claus. I wonder how many kids asked their parents why there were two Santas. And how many parents cursed the sham St. Nick for subverting their children’s fantasies.

(Then again, I can only imagine the confusion of city children watching on television as hundreds of Santas rampaged through New York in various stages of inebriation and disorderliness.)

Starting when my daughter, Kate, was 3 years old, and my son, Devin, was 1, every Christmas their playgroup -— kids and parents -— would celebrate with a party. Since I had the Santa costume in my closet, I volunteered to make a surprise visit as Father Christmas.

I tromped down the stairs carrying a pillowcase full of toys, ho-ho-ho-ing as authentically as I could, and solicited the kids’ Christmas wishes while they took turns on my lap. I was astonished that none of the kids, including my own, recognized me. This charade continued for at least four more years. I remember playing Kris Kringle in Devin’s kindergarten class at the Springs School without his realizing who I was.

Finally, when Kate was 7, she noticed that Santa had a Band-Aid on the same finger as her father. The jig was up. A different challenge posed itself. Since they knew Santa wasn’t coming down the chimney, what could we do to retain some holiday magic?

I had always awoken at 4 a.m. to stuff the presents beneath the tree. One year the big present was an outdoor, 15-foot-diameter trampoline. The only way to make it a surprise was to assemble it in the backyard before the kids woke up Christmas morning, directions and parts illuminated by a single floodlight. It’s a Festivus miracle it didn’t collapse when they started bouncing.

Another year they opened envelopes Christmas morning that held tickets to London, where we flew the following day. With the exception of a bomb scare at the Tate Modern, being locked inside Kensington Gardens, and a trip to Legoland, where Devin insisted I accompany him on a water ride in 30-degree weather, it was a splendid trip.

The surprises peaked when Devin was in seventh grade. Several of his friends had dirt bikes -— motorcycles, not bicycles -— that they rode on the trails in Springs. I don’t know if he has ever wanted anything more than he wanted a dirt bike, but I told him it was out of the question. Nonetheless, I visited the showroom in Southampton out of curiosity, blanched when I heard what the machines cost, then fell, not for the first time, for the offer of an extended payment plan.

The salesman delivered the bike the day before Christmas while the kids were in school, and I rolled it into our storage shed. Even today, the memory of Devin’s face when I opened the door to the shed brings tears to my eyes. As did the sight of my son taking off on the bike, shifting gears, and disappearing from sight. (I never mastered the machine. I stopped trying after I popped a wheelie and almost drove into Charlie Marder’s back porch.)

The bikes weren’t street-legal, but the kids chose trails and side streets over main roads. However, about six months later the police busted Devin and a couple of his friends as they emerged from a trail onto one of the streets off Gardiner Avenue in Springs. After I bailed out the bike and managed to get it home in the back of my minivan, it wound up where it started: in the shed.

Sometimes when I think about Christmas, I’m ashamed at how each year, despite my resolutions to the contrary, I have capitulated to the idea that more is more, not for me but for my kids. And I still do. Except now it’s not toys but clothing, kitchenware, and other things they can’t afford while working for nonprofits and paying Brooklyn rents. So my conscience is relatively clear, and I tell myself I’m doing my bit for the supposed economic recovery.

Mark Segal is a writer at The Star.

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.”