They really have the cleanup thing down pat in Port Jefferson, where I was for two days last week for a newspaper conference. Early Saturday, when I was out looking for a cup of coffee and something to eat instead of the hotel buffet, I noticed that the main route through the business district was littered with castoffs from the previous night. Plastic cups, waxed-paper remnants of late-night pizzas, cigarette butts, empty soda bottles, napkins, and other garbage spread over a two-block stretch.

By the time I finished my coffee, at about 7 a.m., however, a crew of men with leaf-blowers had swept in, sending the debris into the gutter, where a street-sweeper vacuumed it all up and hauled it away. In minutes, really, there was no trace of the previous night’s activities.

In addition to keeping the streets tidy, Port Jeff has much about it that reminds me of some of our South Fork villages, such as Sag Harbor, that try to balance the needs of the people who live there with the interests of those for whom making money is the primary concern. In sum, the basic question for any resort or day-tripper paradise is: How does a community see itself, and whom exactly should its social and governmental entities serve first?

I may have said it before, but from my perspective, residents come first. Policies that benefit those who simply live and work in a place can be a plus for visitors and the enterprises that cater to them as well. Consider East Hampton Village, where, outside of the Main Street and Newtown Lane center, all is orderly, clean, and quiet. As a result, real estate values here are a significant multiple above those seen where the rules are less rigorously enforced.  

In some ways downtown Port Jeff is kind of like Montauk, a place to which people travel to walk around and take in the sights. And the weekend crowds that might seem not quite thick enough for shopkeepers could well feel like way too many for those who call either place home.

There are simply too many animals in our house, and, to be honest, there were too many a month ago before we brought a new pug puppy home. But a surprising, if unlikely, relationship between two of them gives me hope.

By the numbers, Luna the pug did not really skew things all that much. We had promised Evvy, our 10-year-old middle child, that she would be next in line for a dog of her own when our ancient pug, Yum, died. So, when Yum Yom’s time was up, the ticker started toward Evvy’s big day.

Luna, all three or four pounds of her, came to us by way of a breeder in New Hampshire in August. Now that she has topped seven pounds, she is beginning to establish herself as the most dominant of our four-legged pets.

Weasel the Labrador mix with a mysterious black tongue (a shelter dog from down South somewhere) finds Luna annoying at best, and Luna gives Lulu, our other dog, the business when she wants something. But it is with Leo the pig, all 70 pounds of him, that she really shines.

To Luna, Leo is the ultimate pigskin or rawhide chew. A sucker for attention of any kind, all it takes for her to get him to submit is a few tugs on his tail. This is a signal that she is ready to gnaw, and Leo flops onto his side and lies back in anticipation.

As long as Luna does not teethe on the pig’s snout, all is good. The rest — and I mean the rest — of him is fair game: hooves, ears, knees, pork chops, whatever. There ought to be some kind of law against some of the indignities she subjects him to, if you know what I mean.

Leo, who can be annoying as hell when he is not being scratched or fed, is well subdued by the puppy’s attention. In the early morning, before Luna gets up or I have awakened enough to fill Leo’s bowl, he makes his impatience known in the kitchen by knocking the pot lids around on a low shelf or nosing an old sea chest in the entryway so its lid repeatedly falls with a loud crash.

If I don’t have a spray bottle handy to sprits him in the rump roast, he will keep this up until the food arrives or Luna gets up looking for a bite. Thank goodness for her. Now, if I can only teach her to make Leo’s breakfast.

“Let it rain!” I said to the guys who were putting up new seamless gutters whose downspouts and discharge pipes were arranged under our deck in such a way as to inspire hope that the annoyance of periodic basement floods would once and for all be ended.

Haz llover! Let it rain! Open the floodgates of heaven. Well, perhaps not quite so wide, but I do want to see if the new system works, if we’re on our way to, if not bone-dryness, less dankness. Yes, less dankness, fewer spiders, less mold, a little less of the entropy against which we are struggling.

My late stepfather, who was handy, used to say, with a shake of the head, “There’s always something.” I gathered he rather liked having it that way, though. Not being handy, I tend to avert my eyes until the storm of deferred maintenance that has gathered while I slept can no longer be ignored. It is only then that I take interest in stemming the tide.

You’ve noticed perhaps the allusions to Churchill’s writings. I’ve been thinking of him of late and of the Roosevelts, who were the subjects of a fascinating seven-part Ken Burns series recently on Channel 13. All of them did great things. I’m sure, with the Panama Canal, national parks, the Great Depression, wars, imperial and otherwise, and the improvement of society on their minds, they didn’t worry about things like dank basements.

Teddy was an intriguing cross between Genghis Khan and Eugene Debs. The Roosevelts were energetic, intelligent, and brave. They all struggled very well against entropy. Not a whiner among them.

Without drawing a direct parallel, I think I can say, without fearing contradiction itself, that the foundation of our society — as is the case with our basement — could stand some improvement, and that the sense of fairness that was so evident in Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor (especially in her, though not exclusively) is sorely missed.

It has become a tradition, six years running, for my family to meet up with a crew of other families from nearby and spend a September weekend camping at Hither Hills in Montauk. When the weather cooperates, and even when it doesn’t, these are my favorite days of the year.

My daughter was not quite 2 months old the first time we went, and our poorly chosen site left our tent in the middle of a moat the first morning of our stay. Our friends’ twins were just 4. Both families literally decamped to points west until the skies cleared, then returned by the next afternoon to enjoy a dry night under the stars by a warm campfire.

By the next year, my son was on the way, Jade was 1, but not walking, and the twins had graduated from scooters to bikes and skateboards. The year after that, another family joined us, my daughter was on a trike, and my son, then 4 months old, would sit happily in his Bumbo seat watching all the action. We’ve welcomed a new family and added a cool piece of camping gear every year since, getting a little better each time at maximizing fun and making it all work smoothly.

This year, there were eight families we knew. We had 11 kids under 18, along with friends brought from home or met at the campground, milling about on bikes and trikes and scooters and skateboards with sidewalk chalk or glow sticks in hand, depending on the time of day. Even the youngest were free to roam a certain distance alone, and they blossomed in their new independence.

Most of us shared dinner together near the fire each night, then talked and laughed and made up games around the firepit. We stayed up too late and woke up too early. The kids, ever in motion, wore themselves out from so much riding and running and sunshine. There were way too many marshmallows, and for some, too much good drink, but there was the ocean right over the dunes to make the morning better. The waves were perfect and we had three days of great weather after the initial rain that kept all but one family at home for Thursday night. It’s not always like that.

In six years, many of our camping neighbors have become familiar faces. If they weren’t “home” we recognized the names and hometowns on the cute family signs many people post at their sites. People return to the same camp neighborhood at the same time year after year, just like we do. While it’s close quarters at Hither Hills and there’s not much privacy between sites, people seem to sense when you want your space and when you want to make friends.

Many conversations start with a question about another camper’s gear or someone’s clever solution for common camping problems like finding shade or shelter or a way to keep your tent clean or your food cold or your path lighted. If there’s a problem out there, you can be sure that a camper or outdoor outfitter has figured out a way to solve it. And the die-hards who have been doing it for years revel in the chance to share their innovations, to talk out the pros and cons of one sort of camp vehicle versus another, or rate a firepit or portable grill.

I love checking out other people’s campsites to see what they’ve come up with. For me, camping is filled with aha moments that begin with “there must be a way to . . .” I love finding workarounds and ways to use one thing for more than one purpose, having invention forced upon me. I love it when a bin holding sleeping bags and blankets becomes a side table in a tent, when a cardboard six-pack box becomes a spice-and-condiment carrier, when a washing machine drum is retooled into a raised fire container. Ingenious! Look up “camping hacks” on Pinterest and you’ll find all sorts of great ideas for living the good life in the great outdoors. Sometimes I want to go camping just so I can try them out.

In a world of more, more, more and faster, faster, faster, it’s great to do more with less, to slow down enough to watch the stars move across the sky, to turn off my iPhone and spend the weekend in touch with the people who are close enough to actually touch.

To me, that feels like home.

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, is still unpacking from her weekend “away.”

It was the early 1980s and everyone at The Star was fed up with the pigeons that perched and nested and chattered on the ledge that runs above the plate-glass windows at the front of the building. The pigeons made a lot of noise and left droppings all over the sidewalk (and, sometimes, all over the heads of customers). They were such a nuisance that we wanted to rid ourselves of them about as much as some people, these days, want to be rid of deer. 

Where have all the East Hampton pigeons gone? No one seems to remember quite when they left. One day they were just gone, and we hardly noticed.

My son Dave reminds me that, back in the day, the pigeons sometimes were poked at with long bamboo sticks, in an attempt to annoy them from their roost, but it didn’t go any good. We hung a fake owl above the ledge, to scare them, but they paid it no mind. I remember someone (I can’t remember who) got so irritated that he climbed up and snatched a pigeon nest from one of the ledge’s corners, mumbling he was going to transfer it to safety elsewhere. 

Robbing birds’ nests is hardly a civilized pastime. But the mess the pigeons made — not only on the sidewalk in front of the building but on the tiled outdoor step into it — was really a problem. I knew I would be held responsible if someone slipped and fell.

At the time, pigeons were all over the village business district. One shop owner had installed a fearfully loud, automatic clapper device on the roof of a Newtown Lane building to chase them away. I think it might have been Parsons Electric (headquartered where Scoop is today). At any rate, I decided to get a clapper for The Star, too. 

The noise of this electric clapper — and its intermittent timing — drove everyone in the neighborhood nuts. We had no year-round neighbors, but we got complaints. And it didn’t even work.

Thinking of our onetime pigeon problem, and the mystery of the birds’ curious disappearance, I went up to the attic this morning to see if I could unearth the famous clapper, but it was nowhere to be found. The man from Riverhead who installed it probably took it back when we and our neighbors had had enough. 

Looking for answers, I phoned Larry Penny, our nature writer, who has an encyclopedic mind when it comes to the flora and fauna of Long Island. Uncharacteristically, he was stymied for a while. Then, he called back with a theory. A Southern crow, the fish crow, which is a bit smaller than the indigenous American crow, has established itself here, especially in the village, “in a big way,” he said. And, he added, “They are nest-stealers.”

Hm. Wouldn’t it be nice — after all the sturm und drang about contraception, and culling, and spaying — if our problem deer would just quietly disappear into the night like the pigeons? I wonder what nonindigenous and less-troublesome animal we might import to nest in their place? Do llamas eat garden flowers? Do koalas carry ticks?

Were victory and defeat becoming the imposters they are, I wondered the other morning as I told Mary how I’d perhaps arrived at long last at the threshold of wisdom, to wit, that being calm was the key to winning tennis, if not to life itself.

“That’s why meditation’s so big, why yoga’s so big — everyone wants to be calm — mental toughness is simply to be calm,” I said, recalling that I had been cast out of the only meditation session I’d ever attended because I couldn’t sit still.

Lately (and armed with new knees) I’ve begun playing singles tennis again, thanks to workouts with Rob Balnis of East End Physical Therapy, though the first time out in Monday’s B league at East Hampton Indoor — the first time as a singles player in eight years — I was decidedly not calm, and thus rather quickly proceeded to self-destruct, abetted as time went on by my energetic opponent, who almost fully overcame a 5-0 first-set deficit before taking me apart in the second.

Kevin McConville, the head pro at Buckskill, set me straight. Don’t try to be a world-beater, forget about hitting winners, simply play well enough to win, and don’t muff the serve returns.

That advice, plus a two-hand backhand lesson — I asked him if he thought it were too late in life for me to learn it, and he said not at all — set me on a better path.

Forget world domination, become one with everything and you’ve won, the wins would come. And the losses too, presumably, but in the past two weeks I’ve not faced defeat. It will be interesting to see how the calmer me handles it. Will I treat it as the imposter it is, or will I continue to use the Synthroid defense to excuse my embarrassingly ill temper as the Prince Shark racquet with the compound fracture in the office reminds me I have habitually done. And, by the way, it’s not easy cracking the frame of a racquet on Har-Tru surfaces.

Calm, calm, Jack. Or, as I hear them say at the men’s soccer games, “Tranquilo, tranquilo!”

It’s the key to tennis, it’s the key to life. 

An Aging Tennis Player’s Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the shots I cannot get; the ability to return the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household. 

Heaven knows the South Fork is a great place to get up early on a Saturday and go scouting for things you want, need, or are just crazy about. But our family, you could say, specializes in old things — I suspect some of the Rattray clan started yard sale-ing and thrifting even before the terms came into common usage — and our house is stuffed to the gills already. I myself gave up going to such sales a long time ago. Instead of dreaming of the next great find, I’ve dreamed of the great unload.

At Village Hall, the application you fill out reads “Garage Sale.” We don’t seem to have any of those these days; I don’t remember seeing a classified advertisement for one in The Star for years, and we are the prime source for such ads. In point of fact, the sale isn’t going to be in our yard, exactly. Instead, it will be in front of the 18th century barn on the lot adjoining our house. And that brings me to the real reason we are finally having our yard sale.

If all goes as planned, the East Hampton Historical Society will be taking the barn apart this spring, moving it to the Mulford Farm, across Main Street, and restoring whatever needs restoring. Robert Hefner, the village preservation consultant, told me it was the last untouched old barn in the village.

Word got out about the barn a couple of years ago, and the historical society has found a heritage-minded donor who will make it all possible.

We will be very sad to see the old barn gone, but — after years of wondering if we should convert it to a house, and many discussions of how we might shore it up, if we didn’t — the time has come for it (and us) to move on. It’s wonderful to know the barn will be seen and appreciated by the public for years to come.

I rather hoped the historical society would call it the Edwards barn, but history is history: Experts in local lore call it the Hedges barn because when it was built it was an outbuilding to the Hedges house, which once stood where the East Hampton Library’s north wing is now. (In our family, the Hedges house was known as “the purple house,” and Jeannette Edwards Rattray was born there. It now forms part of the East Hampton Town Hall complex.) 

At any rate, instead of a yard sale I suppose we could legitimately say we are having a barn sale, which somehow sounds a bit more alluring. Some of what will be offered are objects that family members, and friends of cousins, and friends of cousins’ friends have stored there and forgotten about. (Does anyone windsurf anymore? Croquet, anyone?)

Judging by the many ads in The Star, yard sales, tag sales, moving sales, and estate sales are practically an economy in and of themselves out here, with so many being held on autumn weekends. Perhaps calling ours a barn sale will make it stand out as a tad more unique.

The bad news is that it is approaching much too quickly for comfort, on the weekend of Oct. 18. We have a lot of sorting, hauling, and lifting — and, no doubt, bickering — to accomplish before we open the cash box. We will, of course, advertise in The Star and welcome all comers. No early birds, please!

The holidays aren’t here yet, not by a long shot, but my mailbox is already stuffed with letters seeking big and small gifts. Many of the requests come from institutions I am familiar with and wish I could do more to support, but I also seem to have gotten on the mailing lists of tons of organizations that I know little or nothing about. I guess donor lists are shared and shared again, until your address has been reproduced exponentially. 

I don’t remember ever communicating in any way with the New York Public Library, for example (although in years gone by I sat on the steps between the lions at the main branch on sunny afternoons). Nevertheless, in today’s mail the library addressed me as “Dear Friend” and asked me to make a donation from $25 to $1,500. There is, the solicitation reads, greater demand for the library’s resources and services and consistently less public funding.

The library does sound like a good cause, I’ll admit. I also was asked to help Long Island Cares, which operates the Harry Chapin Food Bank; it is seeking contributions to provide more than “6 million meals to 320,000 hungry Long Islanders.” That’s a vital cause, I agree again.

So how do you choose whom to give to? 

My rule of thumb, in general, is to donate as close to home as possible. There are food banks here in East Hampton that do a great public service, especially as the weather turns cold and seasonal workers find less work. Another really true-blue hometown organization that needs assistance is the East Hampton Fire Department. In addition to putting out fires, attending accidents, and saving lives, the Fire Department showers the community with a great big fireworks show every summer (and to me that’s no small public service). Arriving on my desk this morning, the Fire Department’s appeal says that calls have increased but “donations have dropped by half.” 

Another fine organization from which I receive pleas, both electronically and by snail mail, is much further afield: Doctors Without Borders (a k a Medecins Sans Frontieres). I was first drawn to its fight against childhood malnutrition in impoverished parts of the world. And, of course, today it is among those leading the charge against the horrendous Ebola epidemic. This week, The New York Times said it “has heroically provided much, if not most, of the care in the stricken countries.”

On a lighter note, I’ve been bombarded electronically with pleas from Democrats on behalf of men and women running for election or re-election to the Senate. I can’t help feeling like a bit beleaguered as Election Day approaches and the volume of these pleas increases. There must be people out there who understand why these candidate requests are for $3 sometimes or $80 at other times; these seem like curious numbers. I guess algorithms are involved. Whatever those are. (I just had to look up how to spell the word.)

It turns out that America ranked first among 153 countries in a new global survey of philanthropy. That’s great news, but I would feel a lot better about it if I knew that donations to political action committees were not included in that tally.

With the film festival in town last week and into this, an unusual number of people walked back and forth in front of our office. I counted myself among them, as a late addition to the festival’s documentary jury, which meant, among other things, that I spent quite a considerable bit of time on foot between the office and town, as we call it, and then hustling back south to Guild Hall, and back again.

One thing was clear from this: I don’t walk enough. Credit is due to Jack Graves, The Star’s eminence grise and sportswriter, who makes his way into town rather regularly. My father, who ran this paper until his death in 1980, was a walker, too, as was his brother, David.

David Rattray the elder, with whom I share a name, was not quite the equal of the legendary Stephen Talkhouse as a walker, but remarkable nonetheless. He, like my father, is gone now, but before his illness, he would take epic hikes, perhaps from Amagansett to East Hampton along the beach in the depths of winter.

He was foremost a poet, among his many other talents, including the ability to read and translate a host of languages and play concert-level piano. I read from one of his poems at a New York City tribute to him a couple of years ago. “West From Napeague” speaks of three figures afoot in the distance on the beach: himself, my father, and my aunt, Mary Rattray, who lives in Springs and in her time was as much of a walker as her brothers, I think.

Someone, Kierkegaard, perhaps, wrote that he walked himself into his best ideas. I have always liked that notion and tended to agree. Some walks are better than others, of course. On Main Street, East Hampton, I am as likely now to be buttonholed by a reader about something or other or just distracted by a loud truck going by.

And yet, we get a feel for a place while on foot that is like none other. A California writer whom I met recently has said that in walking we take measure of the earth. I plan to do a lot more measuring, then, now that fall has come.

Bunky was a real writer’s cat. When I would sit down at my laptop, he would jump onto the desk and circle around my workspace. He was of the belief that the keyboard was the perfect resting place. I would gently dissuade him from lying on the keys. He would eventually give in, moving to the side or the back of my laptop, and lie down. Sometimes he would watch me, and sometimes he would sleep.

He was scrappy. Having spent his kitten months in a small apartment full of aggressive children, he was wary of being handled. In particular, you could never touch his tail.

When Carole and I first got him, he wasn’t quite fully grown. I announced that there would be no need to castrate him. His moniker was, after all, my cousin’s nickname. A few weeks later, Bunky began having howling spells. He also decided that clawing his way up the window shades was a good thing to do. Still, I was adamant. No castration.

One day, I came home from work. In the corner of the apartment was my beloved black leather jacket, in a heap on the floor. On top of it was a yellow pool. A quick trip to the vet, and Bunky was a castrato.

We decided to move him out to Montauk when I found that I was doing most of my work out there. We had a rental in Ditch Plain (yes, there once were year-round rentals in Ditch, and year-round residents, as well).

In our garden, we had an area fenced with chicken wire where, supposedly, we were going to grow vegetables. We used it to acclimate Bunky to the outdoors. After a while, he began going in and out of the house on his own.

He was a big tom. He would get into occasional fights, but he always could handle himself. The yard, and the immediate woods east of the house, were his domain.

Opening the door for him when he wanted out, every morning and every evening, was fun. Each time, he would shoot down the porch steps, and break into a full sprint. Sometimes, he would head right, toward the big tree in the corner of the yard, climbing halfway up the trunk in a couple of seconds. Other times he would turn left, sprinting up the hill toward the woods.

Any direction he took, he would freeze after about 20 yards. Up the hill or on the tree, motionless, he would survey his world.

The tree was his scratching post, of course, and his jungle gym. He rarely went all the way up.

Of course, as with all cats, one time he went too far, finding himself the proverbial cat stuck out on a limb. He began crying, unsure how to get down. I got the ladder out, went up and got him, getting a couple of claw marks as a thank-you.

He was, for most of his life, a great mouser and quite proud of himself. He would catch mice in the woods, almost daily, and bring them back to us, a nice little gift, although Carole, in particular, did not share his enthusiasm.

Sometimes, instead of bringing his catch of the day up the steps, he would eat it in the backyard. Then, one day, he became violently ill. He hid under a bed for several days. When he emerged, his mouse diet was over, though he continued to bring his trophies back to us.

Tiger-striped, orange and white, he was impossible to see when he was in the shade.

It had been a warm winter when the end came. In the fall, he had gotten into a howling fight with a neighboring black-and-white, and he lost his enthusiasm for extended forays outside. He was becoming visibly weaker. Suddenly, he could barely walk. We took him to Dr. Turetsky’s office. He was seen by Dr. Katz. She told us what we already knew, that Bunky was, at roughly 20 years of age, old. He had several issues, the treatment of which would be very invasive, without any real recovery.

If he was dying, which I believed he was, I planned on burying him in the yard he loved so much. There was a winter storm on the way. It was supposed to dive down from the 50s to the lower teens. I took a shovel and dug a hole I wished I would never have to fill.

We brought him home and gave him his drugs, but he was weak and listless.

The next day, as the temperature dropped, an amazing thing happened. It was as if Bunky was reborn. He had energy, and while he was clearly an old cat, he was a happy one.

That burst of life was short-lived. The following morning, he was barely able to move. He grew weaker through the day, picking himself up only to collapse to the floor.

I wrapped him in a towel the following morning. He was practically lifeless. It began to snow as we made the long drive from Ditch to Goodfriend Drive. I held Bunky while Dr. Katz inserted the needle.

I buried him in the yard as the snow fell, under the now frozen dirt.

Years have passed, and life moves on. But, every once in a while, I turn a corner in my mind, and there is Bunky.

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star and a self-described “cat man.”