Flash News: Incorporated Village of East Hampton, N.Y., U.S.A. — East Hampton Village leaders, in response to its citizens’ requests, recommendations, and common sense propositions, implement four new provisionary laws effective henceforth, quid pro . . . immediately.

First order effective immediately: Every day in East Hampton Village, year round, is now Senior Day. If you are over 80 years of age, you will be allowed to cut all lines to the front of the line, inclusive of CVS convenience store, Waldbaum’s supermarket, and all village wine retailers.

Younger people at the front of the line will be instructed by store managers that people over 80 will be allowed to cut longer lines and shop first. Young people will smile and say, “You first, please. How nice you look today.”

Second order effective immediately: Fines for dogs on the beach will be lowered to $30 and will be enforced in extreme situations only, or warnings will be issued. The dogs-on-the-beach rules are being obeyed to a T — why waste a T.C.O.’s or a policeman’s or a police lady’s time?

A lone dog on the beach by mistake, bothering no one, will be allowed to run back to its home. The partially disabled or disabled accompanied by nice dogs are now allowed to wander with their dogs, on or off the leash, at the beach or head-of-beach parking lots. Dog lovers are to inquire if those individuals need any assistance with their dogs. That means you run and fetch his or her dog if it runs off chasing a seagull.

Third order effective immediately: Tres cher, nouveau racing bikes that are less than 10 years old will be banned from East Hampton Village streets — Mill Hill, Dunemere Lane, David’s Lane, Georgica Road, Lily Pond Lane, and Buell Lane. Anyone saying “click click” while passing, wearing silly biking clothes, teeth shoes, ski goggles, stealth fighter suits, or doing any of that bike racing stuff will be rounded up and taken to the East Hampton Town or Southampton Town line and told to ride east or west.

Those racing bikes are such a nuisance! Bike talk, fast paces, lines of 10 humans on wheels zooming by when any normal person is half asleep are not tolerable! What is wrong with those people? They race along side streets as home delivery boys are tossing newspapers in driveways at dawn. One of those lunatic bikers could run you over on any morning while you are on the roadside picking up your paper. Those sleek riders of super-expensive bikes do not read newspapers, they read happy racing bike magazines and gloat over their skintight bike suits.

They kinda slipper together in their nylons, like, wow — I’m so cool. Keep those terrifying-looking bikes and their masters off the East Hampton Village residential roads. What if your 95-year-old granny goes out for a walk and forgets it’s summer? She could be struck by a zoopedup.com racing bike rider wearing a bizarre special galactic zoom bike suit.

Fourth order effective immediately: Everyone will be polite to the librarians at the East Hampton Library. No more grumbling like you’re in a Madrid subway while smoking a Gitanes cigarette. No more frump work clothes and filthy work boots — pull yourselves together. This is a library, not an Alaskan beer and whiskey bodega. If you’re a manual-working type, excuse yourself and explain you did not have time to change your clothes. The librarians will love you forever.

Also, once in a blue moon, someone please bring the librarians flowers. They like that! And librarians’ sick days will from now on be obligatory. You know they never take them — they are all so healthy. All librarians will have two beach days during the summer on top of their sick days. That order has been confirmed by the library big shots!

These official East Hampton Village orders will be immediately implemented henceforth, quid pro . . . and cherries on top.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

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?

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!’ ”  

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.  

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.”

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.”

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.