Toys and toothbrushes may be turning up in peculiar places, but I wouldn’t trade this month for anything. It is said that grandparents have all the fun when it comes to child-care, but none of the responsibility, and I say, “Hurray.” I suppose that for those grandparents who are charged with caring full time for grandchildren, the fun can wear thin, but there’s no sign of that at our house, even though two of my grandkids are now into the third week of a monthlong stay.

We are also thoroughly enjoying that special prerogative of grandparents: bragging. 

Nettie and Teddy are 7 and 4. They have grown a lot and learned a lot since the last time we were together, at Thanksgiving. We applaud wildly when Nettie gets into a yoga bridge from a handstand. We knew she was good at drawing, and that she loved art, but we were particularly thrilled with a portrait she did of Chris. A pencil drawing, it has a word-cloud reading “Okay” (something he says constantly), and there is a cellphone at his ear (also ubiquitous); these are truly characteristic, as is the big open mouth she gave him (about which I will make no comment). 

We knew that Teddy was good at putting things together, like the bits and pieces of Lego, and that he had learned perhaps too much about manipulating video games. (He and his sister are allowed only two hours of video games a week, but recently he somehow managed to purchase for himself a game app called “Contract Killer 2,” much to his parents’ horror and amusement.) But we were delighted to discover how well he knows his letters and numbers, and charmed that he likes to sit quietly doing very important “homework” in a kindergarten “Star Wars Mathematics” workbook. Nettie has read a book to me, and Teddy has a way of playing funny tricks on us.

Obviously, we are indulgent grandparents. We smile at the kids when they open our bedroom door and wake us early in the morning. Today, when they actually found me up and about — but Chris still under the covers — they insisted that I wake him because they had a surprise for us. It turned out that the surprise was in the kitchen, where we found they had made breakfast: Shredded Wheat for Chris, Honey Nut Cheerios for me. They had also put an egg in a pot of cold water on the stove for their mother. Teddy brought us spoons; Nettie poured in the milk. Who could ask for anything more?

Because we all work, and because Chris and I are indeed getting older, I must admit it is something of a relief that they are attending day camp during the week. A yellow school bus picks them up and delivers them home, and they seem very excited about going on their big adventure every day. From a grandparent’s point of view, they also look completely adorable as they march off, struggling under the burden of colorful backpacks and cute matching lunch bags.

My daughter will be driving to Maine to catch a ferry back to their home in Nova Scotia when the time comes for their visit to end in early August, and she was surprised when I offered to go along for the ride. 

“Why would you do that? Won’t you have seen enough of them?” she asked.    My answer? “No way.”

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

Two stories in the May 23 Gazette could have been set here. In one, residents were outraged at the quality of the material placed to replenish an eroded beach. The Town of Oak Bluffs will remove an unspecified quantity of dredging spoils, presumably as nasty as they sound, from two locations.

Though protesters have not taken to the streets here, as they did on the Vineyard, it has been noted that the fill passing for sand at Georgica and at Montauk’s downtown beaches is less than ideal. As here, the Vineyard spoils met state standards for purity, which, according to the descriptions in the Gazette, are far from the cleanest, best sand. “Sludge,” some picketers at Inkwell Beach called it.

Elsewhere on the same page of the paper, there was a story about the Tisbury selectmen reducing the length of time that visiting boaters can anchor off Vineyard Haven out of concern about water pollution.

Two pages on was a discussion of whether the Vineyard’s five school districts should be combined. With a sole superintendent, that island is already a step ahead of the South Fork, where each district not only has an administrative head but most have at least one principal.

As here, the districts all send their older students to a single high school. Past opposition has included fear of losing local control, but variances among the offerings at the Vineyard’s lower schools has meant that some kids are better prepared than others, depending on where they come from. Standardizing elementary education might come with advantages, the idea’s backers said.

Here, as there, it is difficult to say how the school consolidation debate will play out. James Weiss, the Vineyard’s superintendent, told a recent meeting of that island’s League of Women Voters, “We have an outstanding school system. If we could do it better and more efficiently, we should do it.” That sentiment, and the Vineyard’s progress on this and other questions, are worth watching.

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

Consider that your first/original house (inherited, bachelor digs, divorce gift) no longer works for you, but you are used to it and you love the location. You know where the sun comes up and what you would want to look at if only the windows were wider, taller, or moved a foot to the left or right.

So call this future renovation the not-quite-second house because half of it you learned from and the other half you have no clue about.

Naturally, you expect the plan drawer-upper to find certain mistakes in your semi-architectural sketches and notes. (Do not.) You expect the builder-project manager to take you aside and say, “Ya know, if you just thought about having that cellar be a” — read: “trophy” — “basement you would have a lot more space. . . .”

But not everyone tells you stuff in ways you can hear it. We got a cellar and not a “trophy” basement. Twelve years ago, who really knew about the (under)groundswell of the magical third floor that can exist below grade?! But I digress.

We got the house we asked for. Really. But we didn’t get or didn’t really hear the expertise we might have been given. Herewith some of what we learned 12 years after the fact.

We should have:

• Given ourselves a first-floor bedroom with an en-suite bathroom for guests and/or old people with stair issues. (We didn’t do it, and that was a lesson learned too late.)

• Gotten the (trophy) basement with inside stairs. Didn’t, because it ate up too much inside floor space, and I thought basements always had spiders and were basically creepy. In the early 2000s we had never thought about a “third-floor” basement. Amazing, since it’s now such a part of the building vernacular.

• Planned for gutters instead of having to retrofit a few years ago.

• Considered a really big mudroom.

• Known that living here year round we would have seasonal clothes that would not really fit in the summer-house closets.

• Remembered that everyone needs their own room/office/den/cave/space. Sharing is complicated.

• Had the ceilings painted glossy from the start.

One thing we did do: Put the washing machine near where the clothes live (second floor). Lugging laundry is overrated exercise.

The fun/frustrating list is what we would love to change, add, tweak. (Are you listening, New York State Lottery?) I will be leaving “pie in the sky” for another “Relay.” Stay tuned.

Here’s what we were surprised by last year: That the washing machine would wear out (after 12 years). We don’t do that much laundry, really, but apparently they have a built-in obsolescence. Well, replacement wasn’t the worst surprise. The real surprise was that the new washer and dryer (stacking, smallest available) would no longer fit into that little closet we had built to house them. Now they make them deeper to make them narrower. This required an emergency robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution, expanding the closet by diminishing the room behind. You win by loss, sort of. Well, there is no predicting old age, in people or machines, but the mechanical engineers really pulled a fast one.

Last year we were also surprised by a massive leak in the ceiling of the kitchen. The ceiling paint held the leak for a while, but the ballooning ceiling was alarming. “Call the super! Wait, we are the super; this is a house.” When we found a fixer we had to open the roof to find out that our 12-year-old kitchen roof had had a slow leak all along. When the kitchen skylight had to be replaced along with the roof, we learned from the fixer that the flashing at the true top of a skylight is abundant, less so at the bottom edge. The flashing around our kitchen skylight was basically nil. Looking back, we guess the building crew just didn’t realize that top edge of a skylight has more flashing — and when putting them in backwards they cut away the extra flashing at the lower edge. It turns out that all of our skylights are backwards. Big surprise!

Then there are the things you wish someone had pointed out before or during the renovation. These are the things nobody warns you about because they assume you know. To wit, a one-story house sees the side of the garage, a two-story house . . . well, the view is no longer the side of the garage; the view is the roof of the garage. Surprise! You will want a new roof there, too.

Another surprise is ice dams.

Nobody tells you when you become a year-round summer person to get the snow away from your shingles. It’s hard enough to shovel a path on the deck, why would I clear the snow away from the house? Why would I ask someone to do that?

ICEDAMN, or damned ice dam, that’s why.

On the verge of our 12th spring, we were in for yet another little surprise.

During recent winters, snow piled on our nice back deck. We cleared paths to the driveway, but that was all we did. Twelve winters of snow/ice/melting/ freezing and more snow got up and under the lowest shingles at the join with the deck. It snuck into the house and buckled the floor in our pantry along the outside wall. How long did it take? I have no idea. It was only today, when I put a few empty bottles on the floor of the pantry and the bottles fell over, that I came face to face with the result. On my hands and knees (no easy task) I saw that a corner floorboard was heaved and dark with water stain. While the area was free of mold and damp, clearly the floor was compromised. Outside the shingles kiss the deck. My guess, though I cannot yet swear to it, is there is no flashing around our deck. Very likely the building crew/skylight putter-inners, who also built our deck, never flashed where it met the house.

Surprise, house, it is your 12th birthday. Feeling old, are ya?

Rebuilding the deck is not an option right now, when we really need that en-suite bathroom (see above), so shoveling is in my future. Unless you are still listening, Lottery God.

Crap happens in and to your house.

Some are things you can live with or fix (leaks, ice dams), and some things you just have to live with no matter what. When your neighbor’s house becomes a monster construction site, their pretty willow tree drops stuff in your gutters, which clog, overflow, and get mildewed on the shady side of your house; when other neighbor’s hedge grows so high and you lose your cutting garden to shade.

Not to worry.

Crap happens.

Take heart, though, because going forward, in this area, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for renovations. Why? Because everything is a teardown. My house, your house, the house down the road. Anything built after 1900 and not considered historic is destined to be rubble as soon as the closing is over.

So, dear future renovators, if you inherit your mom’s house, fix it up for you and your lifestyle. Pay as close attention as you can, but don’t go nuts because the house you are in, when sold, will be razed, and in place will grow a brand-new, trophy-basemented, en-suite-bathroomed, gambrel-roofed, 12-foot-ceil­ing­ed house — built by a guy who still might put the skylights in backwards.

Just remember, when you sell, it will be for the land and the location, so patch what’s broken and get on with your life. No worries, mon.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, loves watching buildings being built because “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

To be sure, I am hardly a gardener, neglectful as I am of almost everything necessary to qualify. I’ve been known to put the wrong plants in the wrong places and then gone on to mourn those that are lost. The deer are responsible for more depredations than I am, though, and I just can’t bring myself to put up fencing. The deer relished the rose bushes, although two or three may survive, and it probably is true that they were put in where there wasn’t enough sun. I’m not sure what eradicated the astilbe, although, like the lilies of the valley, they probably were choked out by a persistent groundcover, which I have failed to get rid of because it is the earliest thing hereabouts to flower.

The irises, a bounty from someone’s effort in times past, are not the only pleasures of the garden this spring. They followed the blooming of four or five varieties of yellow narcissus, with various clutches of petals. And, while it is true that an earlier generation’s tiger lilies in another part of the yard were long since executed by the deer, their places have been taken by batches of white narcissus with a fragrant scent reminiscent of paper whites that are blooming still.

The white narcissus are coinciding now with flowering viburnum bushes, which although misshapen by the deer so that they now branch out into straight shelves some four feet off the ground, are attractive nevertheless. And I shouldn’t ignore the forsythia, which decorated the place earlier in the season.

I don’t think there will be further come-by-chance surprises in the garden this summer. Instead, I will watch over the nepeta and lavender I put in the beds last year, which are said to be deer resistant and may therefore survive.  

Eastern Long Island (the Hamptons, if you insist) is a world of extraordinary gardens, designed by dedicated amateurs and talented professionals and nurtured with love — and lots of work. But there is something to be said about old backyards.

“I play like you work,” I said the other day to Mary, who works very hard, and has precious little time to play, though I am encouraging her to become more like me — minus the neuroses of course.

I am ashamed to admit that my work, by and large, is fun, so, while I would rather say to her, “I work like you play,” it is not so, at least at the moment, though she has been working out weekly with Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy, as I do, and we hit tennis balls whenever we both find ourselves free.

Would it be better somewhere else? We ask that question frequently, but, no matter how idyllic the setting, there always seems to be a worm in the apple. The Golden Years, she was told recently by a Golden Ager, are “a myth.” A way of saying, I guess, that “Shit happens. Always.”

She takes things more seriously than I do, which I sometimes envy, but I’ve also seen the toll it takes. I’d love to say I’m looking at the big picture, but it’s more that I’m afraid to look, and would rather continue on my insouciant, selfish way.

I told her the other night that the secret was to “divest, divest, divest,” but that I hoped, of course, she would not divest herself of me.

There is reason not to reason overmuch, and to try not to let facts get in the way of a good time.

Her 5-year-old granddaughter, Ella, and she had experienced a beautiful moment, Mary reported, on returning home yesterday from Southampton Hospital after having visited with Ella’s newborn brother, Charlie, and with Ella’s parents.

Ella and she, who are very close, have at times labeled one another chatterboxes. “But we didn’t say a thing — we just looked at each other . . . and it was wonderful.”

My present to the baby was a well-wrought church key bought at Hildreth’s.

“Some day, he’ll open these bottles with his teeth, when he’s an offensive lineman at Wesleyan,” I said in sharing a Stella Artois toast to Charlie with Georgie and Gavin, who had both been yearning for a cold beer, and I had been glad to be of help.

I don’t generally drink beer myself, but it sure tasted good.

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

“Buy it now cuz it will all be gone by nightfall!” I said to Mayra and Russ once the relative paradise of The Star was regained, adding that the volume of Milton’s poetry I had bought at BookHampton weighed almost as much as the broccoli rabe, onions, garlic, lemons, smoked prosciutto, and avocados I’d bought at Citarella. All but the avocados are to go into the orecchiette I’m making to feed the 5,000 (not really that many) at a family gathering/baby shower tomorrow.

Of course I won’t eat it, being on a low-cholesterol diet, which is to say primarily hummus, yogurt, and oatmeal. Mary force-fed me some chocolate ice cream last night, but otherwise I’ve been clean these past few weeks. I’ve not given up drinking though. In fact I told Mary recently that were I to attend an A.A. meeting, I’d get up and say, “My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks,” which is not quite true, but almost.

Another week and I am not yet saved, though I know everything is saved on my computer, which is good news. I no longer get so tense wondering whether what I’ve written will ever reappear, as if on a page.

Frankly, I had second thoughts about toting to The Star Milton’s complete poetic works, for, as I learned, in thumbing through it, it wasn’t a poem I’d been looking for after all, but a prose work, “Areopagitica,” that might help me better to understand Blake, whom I’m reading about now.

“Oh, I’m reading Milton too!” a woman next to me at the counter said. “Is ‘Paradise Lost’ in it?”

“You want it?” I said, half-seriously, resisting the urge to make an analogy to the Hamptons.

“Actually,” I said to Bill. “I think I’m trying to redeem my failed college education — I’m reading all these poets I was supposed to have read 50 years ago. And now I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

I asked him if he’d seen, by the way, the article on time in this week’s New Yorker.

“Mary wants very much to read it,” I said, “but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to find the time to!” And with that I was off, with plenty of food and with plenty of food for thought.

The Shelter Island 10K is, and was especially this year, a living symbol of all that is right with America, a country that is not without its faults, but which at its best remains as inspiring as it ever was.

To begin with, there was Meb Kef­lezighi, the first American to have won the Boston Marathon in more than 30 years, a native-born Eritrean whose father brought his children here from that Red Sea country so that they might escape the maw of endless war, so that they would have a chance to be — as Keflezighi told young runners at the Shelter Island School the day before the race — the best they could be.

His dream became reality the day he won Boston, said the very personable champion, who by winning overcame the inevitable restraint of age — he was a 38-year-old up against younger men who had run faster times — and who, by winning there, where deathly bombs had gone off the year before, said in effect that the hope liberty confers cannot be hacked apart by those who hate.

Incredibly, some questioned afterward whether he really were an American, when, in fact, Meb, as he is known, who has been a United States citizen since 1998, is what I would like to think of as quintessentially American, as ambitious for others as for himself, a supreme competitor and uniter.

I see this in Cliff Clark too, the Shelter Island 10K’s founder. A great competitor himself, he understands that ultimately it is both striving and sharing that matter, that we are, indeed, all in this together, and that if this country deteriorates — as, indeed, it sometimes seems to me — into everyone for himself, it will be the end of the game, the end of the dream.

Remember the dead — as Shelter Island did the other day, mourning again a young man, First Lt. Joe Theinert, struck down in Afghanistan four years ago — remember the living, remember and care for one another, and run the good race.

That at its best is America, and that is what I would like to think Meb was thinking as he entered Fiske Field, on his 4 minute and 53 second marathon pace, waving the American flag.

The tale is an infamous one, shared between my family and our oldest, best family friends, the Scrudatos. “The time Thea and Bella ran away at the beach” is what our parents call it; however, I remember the purpose of that unauthorized beach adventure to be something other than an attempted escape out from under our beach umbrellas.

In fact, Thea and I had confirmed with each other that we both would be able to remember which umbrella was ours on the return trip. Such planning and mutual agreement was only too typical for Thea and me, only 5 years old at the time, but long since burgeoned partners in crime.

The event occurred 14 years ago at Atlantic Avenue Beach, at some point in between trips to the “Snack Shack” for Baby Bottle Pops and French fries. I still remember our 5-year-old logic clearly, perhaps because of how much we had to explain ourselves after the fact: We had wanted just to go on a walk. We could not have been running away because we planned on coming back.

There were moments, though, when I was unsure of the walk. When we were moving away from the umbrella, I recall looking back and becoming aware that all the umbrellas actually did look very similar despite what Thea and I had said.

We had gotten far along the beach. All the families’ beach encampments, including ours (the location of which was long forgotten), were dots in the distance behind us. There was just the occasional passer-by, probably skeptical of our parents’ parenting abilities. I vaguely remember someone flying a kite and asking us something, and knowing that we were not supposed to be talking to strangers.

Perhaps he was pointing out our parents to us, because then mine and Thea’s were all out sprinting down the sand and toward us. Maybe the man’s proximity was their specific cause for the running; I believe my parents asked whether I had been speaking to him and I felt some I-should-know-better guilt.

There are two other feelings that I remember having during the “reunion.” While my parents hugged me and expressed mainly just relief, Thea’s parents had already initiated the reprimanding phase. I am sure my parents saw to that as well, but interestingly I do not seem to remember. Anyway, I felt the disciplinary imbalance between Thea and me in that moment, but did not feel bad for her so much as I was nervous to have found that parental panic can sometimes take the form of yelling.

The other thing I remember is wanting to laugh at the fact that there I had been, strolling and appreciating the seaside, at peace, when all of a sudden my parents, in an opposite mental state, emotionally tormented, had come stampeding down the coast like they were storming the Normandy beaches.

Going somewhere without adult supervision, with a friend, is one of the first great privileges that many children experience. It seems that Thea and I believed we were a strong, functional enough unit to bypass our parents’ authority (and inevitable negation), and to decide for ourselves that, yeah, we definitely deserve that privilege, right now. This was not typical behavior for either of us. We did not constantly usurp our parents’ authority. I can think of a few times that we chose not to do something alternative because we anticipated repercussions. Though, according to Thea’s dad, we were and still are “twits.”

Now, it is clear to me that our misjudged decision to take the beach walk was kindled by our desire to spend time together. To each other, we were the person with whom we could imagine going off into the world (the unexplored half of Atlantic Avenue Beach), with whom we could be self-sufficient, and sort of like adults, or at least people with free beach-walking privileges. That is to say, our unorthodox departure from our families’ beach nest was admittedly too soon, but for the record, it felt right because it was with the right person with whom to branch out.

When we got older, we would inform the parents (the “parental unit,” or “P.U.” as ordained by Thea) that we were going on a “lifeguard walk,” which meant that we would walk in between the lifeguard chairs. We took the new stipulations of our walks well, and I remember being monumentally happy to walk with Thea, flop around in the warm sand up by the dunes, and wrap our towels around our heads.

Thea and I met in preschool, when we were 2, and on all accounts, we were inseparable. One particular account, my preschool report, read, “Bella has a special friend with whom she likes to chat and sit on the plastic couch during cleanup, instead of helping out.” Thea’s family received a copy-and-paste of the same statement with her name in place of mine.

The next day at drop-off, our parents found each other in the hall: “Are you the parent of the special friend?” Little did they know, their designated lost-child story to be told and retold would be one that they shared. Little did we know that as Thea left the cafe in which we would say our going-to-college goodbye, she would cock her head and say with, as usual, excellent comedic timing, “Hey, you’ll always be my special friend.”

And even littler did Thea and I know that, as a matter of fact, we were not adult humans during the summers we traipsed about Atlantic Avenue. Rather, we made each other feel that way, as if we were set for life. Thea was the first person who was to me, my partner. We spent only a year together at the same preschool, and have gone to different schools since then. We’ve accrued some more partners along the way, accrued and then let go of others, and still more we’ve accrued, but not really accrued.

It is our special-first-love partnership, however, that is an untouchable accrual, sealed forever, spanning from days when we would write cards to the parental unit as a tactic to secure a sleepover that night, to now, when we text each other to make plans, without consulting the P.U. at all.

Bella Lewis is an intern at The Star this summer.

My daughter, who is also an editor, is always chiming in from the peanut gallery to tell me that my column is best when I resist my natural inclination toward sententious themes of doom and gloom. She likes to warn me, only half-joshing, not to allow my column to become a “Whine of the Week,” and perhaps she is right. But today’s sky is awfully gray, and it looks like it’s going to rain for the next two or three days . . . and this somehow is giving me license to write about what I am going to write about (rather than foraging for a sunny topic, which I might feel more compelled to do if the forecast called for balmy weather all week). In any case, my husband absolutely insists that I use this space to draw whatever attention I can to a report from the Federation of American Scientists called  “A Scenario for Jihadist Nuclear Revenge.” 

The report was sent to us by a lifelong friend, Edward A. Friedman, who wrote it with Roger K. Lewis. They are working to inform the public and our national leaders — and to promote academic discussion — about what they say is the greatest threat to this country if not to, well, civilization itself. The report is long and detailed and includes technological analyses, which I do not pretend to understand. But the crux of the message is powerful, to say the least.

While the media, the government, and the public concentrate on those nations with which we are at odds that have nuclear capability (Iran and North Korea in particular), the report summarizes the history of nuclear weaponry and makes it evident that the knowledge and equipment necessary to fabricate simpler bombs than those dropped at Nagasaki and Hiroshima is widespread and likely to be accessible.

The authors of the report say it is entirely possible that those who have a religious mission to destroy the “decadent” United States or want to exact revenge for anti-Islamism or the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, could deliver to a busy American port “a crate holding a lead-shielded, 12-foot-long artillery gun,” as used to set off the Hiroshima bomb, that would be both “effective and deadly.” They name Al Qaeda, as well as terrorists from the Northern Caucasus, a Japanese cult, and ordinary homegrown American sociopaths as possible perpetrators.

The report notes that President Obama has said nuclear terrorism is an “immediate and extreme threat” and that the Federal Emergency Management Administration is quietly engaged in trying to develop emergency responses to an attack with a nuclear weapon of the intensity of the one dropped on Hiroshima — but the authors aren’t sanguine about the plans so far to derail any such attack. They point to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, which they say has kept the world safe from nuclear holocaust for the 69 years since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is no longer a safeguard because it cannot deter non-state entities. 

They remind those reading the report of the 82-year-old nun who with two others got into the “inner sanctum” of what was supposed to be the most secure nuclear facility in the country, at Oak Ridge, Tenn., to spray-paint the walls with graffiti; they speculate on how easy it might be to infiltrate facilities in Pakistan, North Korea, or China, which have huge stockpiles of enriched uranium, or to get into relatively unguarded places in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, obtaining uranium from which hundreds of bombs could be fabricated. 

A longtime professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., Dr. Friedman has bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University. He was instrumental in developing a college of engineering in Afghanistan in the early 1970s, was a founder and senior vice president of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, and has taught a graduate course on nuclear weapons. Richard K. Lewis is an architect and planner who has written a column for many years for The Washington Post. If you would like to read more about the alarm they are ringing, all you need do is go to the Federation of American Scientists website.

White Boots, our 8-year-old cat, is 3 feet long. At least that’s how long he looked the other day when I picked him up from the living room floor to move him away from a visitor who is allergic to cats: Stretched out toe to toe, white boots and white belly presenting, he was practically the size of a porpoise.

White Boots is supposed to belong to one of my granddaughters. She fell in love with him on her 5th birthday, when she was taken for a visit to the shelter run by the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons.

Her mom is allergic, too, and my granddaughter was devastated not to be allowed to bring him home. Naturally, I volunteered to foster him. She named him White Boots, and it was apparent very quickly that he had come to my house to stay.

Some of White Boots’s antics are typical cat stuff. (We think it’s cute when he jumps into the kitchen sink or the old clawfoot bathtub to beg for water, for instance.) But a few of the things he does are singular. 

I was showering last week when I noticed the bottom of the shower curtain beginning to bulge strangely. It took me a minute to figure out that White Boots was pushing against it. Thinking this behavior weird, I scolded and shooed him away, but he didn’t retreat. As soon as I stepped out of the shower, he let up and started licking its edge. Then he jumped  inside the enclosure and starting licking the shower floor. I was not only startled but alarmed. Eight isn’t that old for a cat, but I nevertheless feared that he was showing signs of kitty-cat dementia. Then logic prevailed: I had just used for the first time a bar of soap made in Nova Scotia that had been a Christmas present. Was something in it catnip for him? Fish oil? An indigenous herb? The next time I showered I was glad he was outdoors.

Outdoor cats have bad reputations, but I’ve been unable over the years to keep him inside. Generally speaking, he goes out after an evening meal and comes back in to sleep. Lately, however, with summer weather, he’s been spending more and more time in the yard. He will sit sentinel near the front steps or crouch near a hole in one of the flower beds waiting for a chipmunk to emerge. He hangs out around the barn, and that’s where he apparently befriended a raccoon.

Because my husband and I were out of town last weekend, we missed this latest caper. On Saturday night, my son Dan heard him meowing near the sunporch door and went to open it for him. It turned out that White Boots wasn’t the only creature peering in through the sunporch’s windows: A raccoon waited alongside. Now, I’m generally soft-hearted where indigenous animals are concerned (including deer), so I hadn’t blinked when someone told me a few weeks ago that he had seen a raccoon in the barn’s rafters.

Maybe it’s all right for White Boots to try to lap up the residue of Nova Scotia soap from the shower floor, but inviting a raccoon in for a play date is taking eccentricity too far.