It is a foregone conclusion that East Hampton went to the dogs long ago. Now it is the cats! East Hampton began its meandering path to going to the cats mostly in the modern historical sense of time.

Our family cats began, when I was a little boy, with Black Nose. He was a family pet, yet the only significant memory I have of this cat was wrapping him in a blanket and putting him in the bathroom sink to rest. The cat was not well. Black Nose spent his last days resting in the bathroom sink comfy and dry, wrapped in his small blanket.

The next in line was a black Persian cat born at a neighbor’s house across the street. In the days when East Hampton’s empty fields grew tall with wheat and lawns were left semitended, cats crossed roads and cars stopped, especially if it was a black cat.

Needless to say, the cat picked our home, refusing to be taken back across the street to its birthplace. The neighbor gave up after multiple cat returns. The cat grew stately, with many reigning achievements of local lore at his new home. Once, the cat jumped out of the family car in Bridgehampton and spent a week roaming free until a family friend found it near where it had taken flight.

Not many local cats have caught and released a large live bat into their home. How my dad laughed as my older brother chased this evil-looking bat around the kitchen with a broom. Eventually, the bat exited the back door very much alive, mouth a-snapping, wings a-flap. For morning dramatics circa 1973, my dad would recite Shakespeare in small sonnets to the cat over coffee at 7 a.m. And who could forget the huge bloody jackrabbit the cat brought in alive to run around the ground floor?

Next in the lineage, but not least in any sense, was Marlin the cat. Marlin was born on a smallish, crumpled derelict sailboat that sat aground not far from what is known now as the East Hampton Point restaurant. Marlin, who was named after the Marlin fishing vessels docked at the Montauk docks, without question lived a charmed life.

Marlin’s charm could lead to the demise of any animal smaller than he by way of his terrifying claws. Known as the U.S. Marines of local cats, Marlin assaulted birds, rabbits, mice — oh, those poor mice. That cat was a terror! Having climbed the evergreen tree to eye level out the back kitchen window, Marlin put on a brazen show. As my little sister, Tara, looked on and cried in disbelief, Marlin’s evil little face peered in as he swatted a tiny baby birdie out of its nest. It was awful: My little sister screamed. What a terrible cat!

Dogs were scared of that cat. Those mice, those poor mice, how Marlin would catch them, run around with them in his mouth, toss them up in the air over and over again. The devil himself, that cat was.

On to the present: Putter and Summer, born from underneath a local house, cats as feral as the winter night is long — young, obstinate, and hardly sociable. Putter was uncoordinated, scattered, not predictable. Putter bashed and broke drinking glasses in his mad scramble to avoid nothing. Tripping over his paws, falling from the highest location that a beam could provide, crashing into whatever made itself available.

Any sign of housecleaning drove Putter deep into whatever closet depths, darkest drawer, or smallest space that Houdini himself couldn’t fit into. Putter, an indoor cat, nigh never braved the outdoors. Once having slipped out, Putter’s moans, like shrieks, were a fright. A window and door were left open. Putter came flying through a ground-floor window like something shot from a small cannon. The cat hid for days. The outside world of East Hampton was not worth the venture for Putter the cat.

Putter’s sister Summer: a small, shy female cat, introspective, not friendly. Summer was never much for being handled, had little sense of humor, and did not care much for anyone’s company except my son’s. Summer, when young, didn’t have much of a personality. She was a boring cat.

What happened to Putter and Summer? Today they bound around like circus cats doing all kinds of the silliest things, including cat tricks for children. What possible explanation is there for this butterfly-like transition into super cats?

Summer’s feline personality is developing. It never occurred to anyone that Summer would ride around on people’s shoulders, perched bright, claws drawn in. She drinks milk from a little glass, eats striped bass like a pro, fluke and sardine too. These days Summer goes outside, a few feet away from the house. Her coat is super clean, eyes brightly steady, temperament stealthy. An attractive cat who likes to sleep in the corners.

Putter has clearly outdone himself. Maybe falling and crashing for years teaches a cat a certain mentality of the nine lives. After all, maybe cats are meant to be upside down and airborne for part of their lives. Putter’s coat looks lion-like, shading to other nuances gaining depth — extraordinarily clean, that cat. Rather a comedian of cats, as if he is saying, No one is funnier than I.

From being an unfriendly, mean, uncoordinated cat to allowing my brother’s young son to carry him around in a bear hug for short periods of time, a fine cat if ever there was one. How did it happen? Any rational person might have envisioned doom for that Putter cat upon seeing him years ago.

It has also been discovered recently that both Putter and Summer like the Rolling Stones. Your guess is as good as anyone’s.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

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.

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.

“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.

Taking a swim in the bay on Sunday, I was once again struck by how incredibly beautiful the waters of Gardiner’s Bay are and how lucky our family has been to have a slot on the sands facing them.

To be honest, my swim was more of a paddle, and by paddle I certainly don’t mean S.U.P. but a belly-down flop on a boogie board. The tide was relatively low, the water as clear as I ever remember, and there were no hazards lurking, like jellyfish or overactive crabs.  

My son and two of my grandchildren were taking it easy on the beach, although the youngest, 6-year-old Ellis, managed to forget about Pokémon for a while and went kicking vigorously on another board in shallow water in both directions regardless of the tide, which tried to send me eastward. His sister Evvy was immersed in the fourth Harry Potter novel.

We had built our house on Gardiner’s Bay in the early ’60s and it is still a paradise to me. I’m not sure if the lack of many shells along the beach was good or bad news, however. A few small oyster shells dotted the sand, as did a few conchs, and one fat mussel had been devoured. There were a handful of clamshells, to be sure, but not as many as I expected. And in years gone by there would have been jingle shells and quarterdecks in rows, at least that’s how I remember them. Not a scallop shell was to be found, but a couple of clumps of Sputnik grass, the tubular, slimy seaweed that put in its first appearance here in the 1950s at around the time the Russians put a satellite of that name in orbit, reminded me of old times.

When we built our house on Cranberry Hole Road, it was the only winterized one between the Devon Yacht Club and the Smith Meal fish factory. Worried about winter’s northeast storms, we forwent big windows with wide water views. Since that time, houses have gone up on both sides of the road, and although they have big wide windows and undoubtedly have insulation and heating, they are empty more often than not come cold weather.

And if the bay and the bay beach have remained wonders of nature, so too has the land there. Years ago, without prompting, Larry Penny, then the East Hampton Town natural resources director, explained its topography, writing:

“The water table is only a few feet below and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in the little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dunes plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe all of America.”

Imagine that — the only one of its kind in the state! I hope the new homeowners in the area understand what Larry had to say about the land on which they were able to build. The community preservation fund does what it was meant to do here, and I wish it could do more.

We pulled the car into the driveway the other night, Lisa, two of the children, and I, coming back from picking up a takeout dinner in Montauk. It was a dark night, no moon, no haze to catch the reflected light from the ground. Lisa hustled the youngest one inside to get him ready for bed. But, looking up, I told the other child to stop. “There’s the Milky Way,” I said.

“Where? Oh, yeah,” she said.

A clear band of dusty white hung from above the horizon to the south, all the way to straight overhead.

“Is that our universe?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s just our galaxy. There are millions of galaxies, each one of them with millions of stars. It’s so big out there, you can hardly imagine.”

We talked for a while longer, about stars, aliens, and distant civilizations. I told her about something I had heard on the radio, that some scientists are looking for signs of atmospheric pollution from intelligent life on remote planets.

Her take was that it was obvious we are not alone in the vastness. “Anybody who thinks there are no aliens is wrong,” she said with conviction. Looking up at the sparkling stars, we considered what aliens might look like, and agreed they might not be made of the same stuff as we. She seemed all right with that idea.

We are lucky that there are still night skies here, like where we live, left unspoiled by light pouring from ill-designed fixtures. But these days, the dark places are the exception, and with a touch of haze in the air, an unnatural creeping orange spreads from the commercial centers.

East Hampton Town has reasonable rules about light pollution, although they may be less ambitious than they should be and, for the most part, unenforced. An on-again, off-again debate about giving the regulations more teeth has been under way for at least a decade. I hope it succeeds.

“I like talking about space with you,” my daughter said as we got ready to go indoors. Without a silky black sky to project our thoughts onto, I wonder if she and I would even have had the conversation.

After all these years I still don’t know the rules of anything really, and was somewhat tongue in cheek taken to task by a doubles opponent this past week for having served out of turn during a tiebreaker.

I pleaded ignorance, which is one of my strong suits. I’m always pleading ignorance and it’s served — ha-ha — me well by and large, though slowly, ever so slowly I am being led by the hand into the technological age, out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of clarity. Clarity is not one of my strong suits, though I do rather like claret. Maybe that explains it.

We’ll be drinking some soon, at Estia’s Little Kitchen, celebrating our 29th wedding anniversary. Can you believe it? Twenty-nine years. Time has been kind.

“Two happy lovers make one bread / a single moon drop in the grass. / Walking, they cast two shadows that flow together, / waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed. . . .”

That’s from Neruda, from one of his 100 love sonnets.

It sounds even better in Spanish: “Dos amantes dichosos hacen un solo pan, / una sola gota de luna en la hierba, / dejan andando dos sombras que se reunen, / dejan un solo sol vacio en una cama. . . .”

I sense too that there’s been a sacredness attending us, even when we are, as is frequently the case now, gripped by the mundane, the fundamentals if you will, as our dog Henry’s energy wanes.

Interestingly, when I asked the other night who invented us, Ella, our 5-year-old granddaughter, said, “The ground.”

Estia it is then, a restaurant named after the Greek goddess of the hearth whose sacred fire was tended at Delphi, the center of the earth, its navel, the omphalos.

“It is Hestia’s glory that, alone of the great Olympians, she never takes part in wars or disputes,” Robert Graves says in his “Greek Myths.”

Estia it is then — the perfect place to celebrate an anniversary.

If tourists didn’t want to be picked on then they shouldn’t give us so much material to work with. This summer out here in Montauk was a horror, and I do not exaggerate!

A perfect example is of a young woman last week who was standing in front of the 7-Eleven smoking a cigarette. Not only did she throw it on the ground to put it out, but then coughed up a wad of phlegm and spit it out on the sidewalk, where quite a few people still walk barefoot. That was the closest I’ve been to having words with a tourist, but I knew better. She’d probably beat the hell out of me or cough up some more yucky stuff and aim it at me. She looked like a tough broad.

I don’t know how bad it was in other parts of town since I dared not venture out of Montauk. One day in July I had to see my doctor in East Hampton, and I found the Napeague stretch gridlocked. I’ve been living out here for over 40 years and have never seen it like that.

Our little hamlet was saturated with all types of people, making me wonder at what point we reach full capacity. And how will that be regulated or enforced? Will the fire marshals be posted near the pond in East Hampton counting cars? I’m pretty sure they have other things to do.

I’ve come up with a few ideas for regulation, one of which is to require those who visit in summer spend a winter here before they are issued a summer pass. The cold weather, closed restaurants, and endless gloomy gray days should be a nice deterrent. Only the strongest of us survive when the winter days grow darker and quieter.

Spending the winter would also require them to put on more clothes. I’ve never seen women parade Main Street in the tiniest of bikinis like I did this summer. What ever happened to cover-ups? Even when I had the body, I didn’t show it off any place but at the beach. But then again, I’m Catholic and was taught that patent leather shoes reflect up our dresses. Back then we all wore cotton granny panties so there really wasn’t much to see anyway.

Women who are flashing all their bits and pieces are ruining it for the rest of us. Such little dress allows it all to hang out, some of it real but a lot of it fake. It also takes all the mystery from a woman’s body, a body that most of us were smart enough to use as our secret weapon. You want to see something, treat me to a nice meal or concert with really good seats and you might get to first base afterward. Now, first base — and sometimes second and third — are hanging out for all to see.

Men weren’t much better this summer. Earlier in the season, a local girl posted pictures on Facebook of a few really buff males walking the beach at Nick’s with just a sock-like contraption covering their main piece, not even the bits. And though I hate to sound like my mother, I must admit she was right when she warned, why buy the cow when the milk is free?

The days of sweaters will soon be upon us. We’ll turn on the ovens and cook a nice roast, and fire up the wood stove. Halloween will see little tykes dressed in costume begging for candy. My only hope is they don’t dress like the girls and guys of summer.

Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star and The Star’s Montauk correspondent.

It’s been at least 10 years since people started asking me if I had retired. Even habitual readers seem surprised when I tell them I work a whole lot, and that the boss, my son David, finds plenty of jobs to assign me. I guess my title of publisher doesn’t make that clear.

What I love most is editing (whether it’s called copyediting, or line editing, or what have you). Editors here are responsible for the whole shebang: the structure and clarity of a story as well as the finer points of grammar and text style. Carissa Katz, our managing editor, and Baylis Greene, an associate editor, are at it full time, although they also write interviews and features whenever they can and Carissa edits the photos. Irene Silverman, editor at large, and I edit part time.

What I tell my questioners when they wonder if I have retired — after I’ve explained that, no, I’m still going strong — is that I am really not cut out to run the show in the very changed world of the 21st century. My time was the 1980s and the early ’90s. Today, the responsibilities of the editor in chief have grown exponentially, not just as the community has grown radically but as technology has taken over the world. Me? I don’t even remember how to follow someone on Twitter. Forget Instagram.

These days, not only is the boss thoroughly tuned in to the digital world, but we now have a digital-products editor here at The Star. Together, David Rattray and Taylor Vecsey (who also finds time to report and write, especially about the work of the East End’s volunteer first responders) are making our website the place to go for breaking news and colorful features. Even if you, like me, are generally more comfortable reading a printed page, The Star’s easy-to-find online version is compelling. We don’t always have space in print for everything of interest, but the vastness of the Internet leaves room for it all.

The truth is, I am becoming addicted. I take a look when I go to the computer in the morning, and I check it out before this column goes to bed — that is, as the presses are about to roll. This morning, I saw four news stories that had been posted the previous day, and a batch of news and features about events that occurred after last week’s print edition went to bed. 

There’s no getting away from the speed with which everything moves now, and The Star is meeting the challenge of being there when it happens. Among other things, the online edition gives readers (lookers?) the opportunity to enjoy a slew of photographs that can’t make it into print, from images of fires and accidents to snaps of Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton making the scene. Try it, you’ll like it.