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.”

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.

The dark comes so early now. I shudder to think of the end of daylight saving time, barely a week away. But Tuesday was so mild and biking up Further Lane after work has become something of a mild exercise habit as I try to hold onto these great outdoors until the frost comes. So it was already getting dark as I pedaled east, then south, then west.

From long driveways, a few landscapers straggled toward home. A lot more deer, stock still, stared quizzically as I pedaled past, laboring on the cheap folding bike. This was Further Lane in the dying of the light in late October.

I stopped several times, to stare back and have a word with the deer, or take a snap of the horizon, pink and dusky gray-blue over blue-gray. Heading toward Old Beach Lane.

The outdated iPhone’s camera never gets it right. It doesn’t come close. The digital snapshot is dull and dark and small. It cannot capture it. But neither can I.

On the sand, a man practiced tai chi and another stood motionless and reverent at water’s edge and an elegant woman gazed at the sea and sky as her cavalier and happy spaniel ran freely. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she exclaimed.

I thought a long moment and said yes, I think I have. “But it’s still magnificent.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said.

I wish I could speak in glorious Technicolor. But no, just black-and-white. “It’s hard to put into words,” I said, and corrected myself. “I can’t put it into words.”

“You can’t put it into words,” she said.

The night before, I’d learned that a young man I knew, just 20 years old, had died unexpectedly. His mother and I are friends, and the shock and sorrow for those who have lost him has made concentration difficult in the hours since. The awful news has also jarred a dark memory of a month and six years ago when my then-wife’s brother had also, at 27, passed away without warning. How is it that I had made it that far, and then so much farther, there on Further Lane?

I thought back to India, its colorful, fanciful gods and the Bhagavad Gita and Sri Krishna’s tender reprimand. “You are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead.”

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”

“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”

The southern sky steeped in deep blues above, a long and delicate brush of powdery pink between, the relentless roll of the ocean below, and we four or five souls, helpless and bewildered on the sand before the terrible beauty at the end of Old Beach Lane. The elegant woman, barefoot, walked east, the galloping little dog charging into the twilight until I couldn’t see them anymore.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.

“Christopher Walsh celebrated his eighth birthday with a party on Saturday at his Cleveland Road home.”

It’s right there in the Sept. 13, 1973, issue of The Star, there in the Montauk notes. You can look it up.

In truth, it was my seventh birthday, and I lived on Hudson Road, just off Cleveland. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to see my name in the newspaper. Imagine my delight, almost 40 years and a thousand or so bylines later, to see it in The Star again, this time as a reporter.

Recently, I found the website of Mitchell’s NY, a company that delivers The Star to subscribers in New York City, after I deliver it there on Thursdays. A name on the contact page struck me, a man named Alan. He had the same name as my best friend at the Acorn School, a neighborhood preschool that I attended at age 4, and maybe 3 as well, when it was on East 20th Street in Manhattan.

It’s a long time ago, but I retain some memories: Alan and I laughing hysterically as we walked to school, my mother a few steps behind. Alan and I playing in the classroom, and in the enclosed playground as mothers gathered beyond the wall, awaiting our dismissal. Miss Cook, the teacher, and her assistant, whose name now escapes me. Twin girls (I think) named Payton and Paxton (I think). A boy who could run very fast, always first to the toys and art supplies.

A couple of weeks ago, Mitchell’s relocated to a nearby facility in Long Island City, and I was having a miserable time finding it. I drove to the old place and was given directions to the new one. But I just can’t figure out Queens.

Fortunately, my cellphone rang. “Hi, Christopher? This is Alan from Mit­chell’s.” He gave me directions, and when I still couldn’t find the place and called him back, he suggested we meet at the old facility, where I could then follow him to the new one.

Back on 32nd Place, Alan stepped out of his car and I was pretty sure it was him. Once at the new facility, he helped me unload the newspapers. “I have to ask you something kind of crazy,” I said. “Are you from New York?”

“I’m from Manhattan,” he said.

“Did you go to the Acorn School?” Alan looked at me as though I were a sorcerer. “You’re scaring me,” he said. “We were best friends,” I said.

Alas, Alan had no recollection of me. But I understand — it had been 43 years, after all, and in my experience most people have little or no recall from that age. I’m kind of a freak about memory.

In the evening, Cathy and I had dinner at Surf Bar in Williamsburg, a restaurant in which surfboards are prominent, clam chowder is plentiful, and the floors are covered with sand. Something like 14 years ago, my friend Larry and I went to the Surf Bar’s progenitor, which I think was called Hurricane Hopeful, a couple of blocks to the east. Hurricane Hopeful was a tiny storefront, an urban chowder shack serving little else but beer. Larry, a surfer who had also grown up in Montauk, and I struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who as I remember it told us that the place was inspired by Ditch Plain, where he used to surf.

Around the time of that birthday note in The Star, I used to go to the beach at Ditch Plain, when not at the ocean at the bottom of Cleveland Road. I haven’t been there in a long time, but on Labor Day I drove home from the office and biked to Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. It was after 5 and people were beginning to trudge through the sand to the parking lot, perhaps for the last time, as, immersed in the rejuvenating sea, a familiar jumble of gratitude and melancholy washed over me. Summer is over, I’m another year older.

Lying on the sand, the waves rolled in, one after another after another, and I was back in my bed on Hudson Road, listening to far-off waves through open windows as I drifted into blissful slumber on breezy, long-ago summer nights.

Another byline for Christopher Walsh, who is a reporter at The Star.

Summer does not so much make a light escape here as a noisy one, so that we, the birds who stay, and who indeed will shiver, rejoice.

Thus the seasons are for us rearranged, and the waning of summer, what for many is a signal of decline, brings promise here.

A photographer friend, who has been shuffling all summer to the numbing rhythms of real estate interests, has been saying for the past three months that he can’t wait for summer to end and for fall to begin, so that he can be freed, somewhat, from exigency, and participate again in the dance of life. That’s why I made note of the high school teams’ first scrimmages and games at the end of this week in my calendar, which ordinarily I would stop at Wednesday.

Soon we will be caught up in so much activity — but of a much more joyful kind than we’ve known of late — that we’ll be able to delight, if not forever, at least for some months to come, in the present.

A Terrible Duty

His world was narrowing, Mary said, and ours was too. He was almost there when he went, at our hands — a terrible duty that this terrible beauty exacts.

The last time at Louse Point, in the golden light, he tugged gently at the leash at the water’s edge, and I wouldn’t let him go, not wanting to be possibly inconvenienced, though I said to myself and others, who could see that he was old, that it was for his own good.

I should have let him, I should have let him go. Forgive me, Henry.

Everything’s so clean and neat now.

And silent.

And empty.

The kitchen floor is bare.

Your eyes were so beautiful, though I hadn’t realized eternity was in them until the day we let you go.

A friend sent an email to me and a slew of others this week, using Gmail, that warned against opening any email that might arrive from her Hotmail account, which had been hacked. I don’t know what can happen if you open a hacked email, and I don’t plan to find out, but I do know something about my friend that she hadn’t intended: the email addresses — and many of the names — of her friends, acquaintances, and business connections, some 350 of them. 

I’d been thinking about the information that is sometimes divulged unintentionally by email since June, when other friends invited me to their anniversary party. They didn’t realize, I am sure, that the names and addresses of everyone they were including arrived along with the invitation. There they were, on the “CC” line of the Apple Mail program.

Most of the guests were people I was delighted to see, and I already had some of their addresses. I thought about saving those I didn’t have, as potentially useful future contacts, but then reconsidered. What would Miss Manners say about taking advantage of someone else’s privacy goof? Of course, all these contacts are probably still floating around in my computer somewhere (and I just don’t know enough about technology to tap into them).

I do know enough about technology to have grasped the use of the “BCC” line, but just how you would BCC some 350 names and addresses boggles my mind a bit. I guess if someone held a gun to my head I’d be able to create a “group” in my Gmail address book, and use that, but so far I haven’t had the occasion.

Sometimes at The Star, I’ve received electronic press releases showing the name and address of every person or news outlet to which it was sent — quite a bonanza, when celebrities, moguls, and editors across the country were on the list. My journalistic curiosity is piqued, and I find myself examining these lists like Miss Marple. I admit I once forwarded a long media list received that way to the person responsible for sending out releases for the Choral Society of the Hamptons, of which I am a member. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. 

Then there was the party to which the hosts intentionally sent out five separate email invitations. Actually, the first and second were identical, one having been pasted into an email and the other sent through Paperless Post. But the third through fifth were unique, containing updates and tips, telling us what games were going to be played (golf), what to wear, that there were going to be two D.J.s, and adding a link to a hangover cure (Sprite) and others to taxi transportation. Each used assorted sizes and styles of type in coordinated shades of blue and turquoise. Talk about email virtuosity! 

To be frank, Chris and I were only on that guest list because the bash was going to be a noisy affair and, well, our property backs up on theirs. We laughed at the obvious fact that we had raised the median age of the invitees, but we went nevertheless and had a swell time. Naturally, these young party-throwers were computer whizzes, and the names and addresses of everyone else invited were nowhere to be seen.

An erupting fight over the former East Deck Motel property in Montauk has pitted a wealthy new property owner against scores of residents and visitors who would like to see Ditch Plain Beach remain the way it was for so long. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition opposing J. Darius Bikoff’s plan to convert the iconic motel into a private surf club, of sorts.

The scale and “screw you” message of the proposal brings to mind the epic battle here in the 1980s and early ’90s over Barcelona Neck, some 341 acres then owned by Ben Heller, which eventually was bought by the State of New York for $40 million in 1992. It also seems an echo of the plans for a luxury development on 99 oceanfront acres in Montauk known as Shadmoor, which the town, county, and state bought for $17.3 million in 1999 from Robert Bear and Peter Schub.

Every few years, another bete noire emerges to energize preservationists. Mr. Bikoff would seem to be bidding to try on this ignominious mantle if he persists in seeking approval for the East Deck makeover — effectively privatizing a shoreline considered in short supply.

The town alone or in concert with other levels of government could make a bid to buy the site from him and his unnamed partners in the limited liability corporation called ED40 that bought the place. In hindsight, the $15 million they paid to the Houseknecht family while making flimsy promises about respecting the integrity of the place looks like a bargain — and perhaps the biggest single missed opportunity on the land-buying front of the previous town administration.

Mr. Bikoff has touched off what will surely be a long and bitter confrontation. It would be a terrific turn of events if he would work with local officials on a public deal to preserve the site. The price would be steep, I suspect, but as with Shadmoor and Barcelona before it, time has proven that those involved did the right thing.

As I walked to The Star’s kitchen the other day with Henry’s empty dish, not needing it anymore, I saw a piece of plywood barring the editor’s door, about baby gate-high, and looked in, and there was a puppy nibbling at his shoelaces. I wasn’t overly sad, for that’s the way it is: Life goes on.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been paying more attention lately: to a small gold leaf that twirled downward as I was taking a shower outdoors yesterday morning, to a bug barely the size of a comma, walking briskly over his kingdom, words that I have been trying with some difficulty to understand, to two fawns who’ve been welcomed at the corner, feeding on our neighbors’ lawn at dusk, to our brightly painted wooden fish — which reminds we two should be at peace — that fell from its perch over our sink just as a catbird stumbled in through the open slider door, its heart beating hard as it pressed up against the large windowpane.

“Un parajo a dentro,” I said, with some excitement, as the cleaning women entered, and went to get garden gloves to take hold of it. As it hunkered down in the sink, not knowing what was coming next, I grabbed and squeezed a bit, though not too tightly, and as it protested I let it go, almost in one motion, delighted as it flew off — to where I don’t know, happy that it wasn’t sick.

“Everything is holy,” Blake said, and while I still can’t quite say I believe it, I am finding it is truer than I thought. He would say, I suppose, that I hadn’t thought it through enough, that we were all one at one point, in the Eternity that preceded the Creation/Fall, before unity gave way to division — division so painfully evident on this day of all days, division which, because of its great enormities, may lead us to treasure unity and life all the more.

You hear from time to time how tight East Hampton Town is when it comes to handing out construction permits. “You can’t get anything approved around here,” the complaint goes. Well, that is not really the case. Although the paperwork may mound up and the review process be painfully slow, you can generally get what you want.

During a late-August getaway, I visited a California community that was really restrictive and puts East Hampton’s supposedly hard-nosed preservationism into sharp perspective.

Bolinas, a town of about 1,500 residents on the Pacific Coast in Marin County, decided about 40 years ago to simply stop time. No, they said, to the California suburban sprawl creeping over Mount Tam from Interstate Highway 101. And it worked. There are no chain-type convenience stores, no obvious mansions belonging to the new San Francisco tech elite, and nothing to tell you that it’s not, say, 1971, other than the Honda Priuses parked along the road to the beach.

Chief among the tools that Bolinas pushed to limit growth was an absolute cap on the number of water meters. It is today, as it was when Johnson was in the White House, a hippie-surfer paradise, and it is likely to stay that way.

That the place could have remained unchanged is all the more astounding when you consider that it is but a one-hour drive from the new-money capital of the United States. Like Montauk, for example, Bolinas is flanked by preserved land and the sea. It, too, was once envisioned as the home of a massive resort project, including, in its case, a four-lane highway and marina for luxury yachts.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, activists began to build a metaphorical wall between themselves and the ravages of the time.

Visitors will find no sign on the main road indicating the Bolinas turnoff. Residents supposedly stole it so many times the authorities just decided to forget about another replacement. Montauk, on the other hand, and the rest of the Hamptons — well, we know all too well what has happened here.

Several times during my weekend there with an old friend, we passed a person dancing in the street in full shaman regalia — a cape, staff, beads, and, dangling from his decorated hat, a talisman that reached between his eyes to the end of his nose.

Okay, so Bolinas is definitely not East Hampton Village, where a shaman might be urged to go along. But it is interesting to consider what we might have looked like had we really held back East Coast excess and powerful real estate interests to make sure our policies lived up to their perception.

In East Hampton, officials and most residents just shrug, believing there is nothing they can do in the face of all that New York money. But it is illustrative to see just how far one community managed to go to keep its identity, and it is sad to realize the extent to which we’ve blown it here