A so-called big birthday is looming and, as it approaches, I can’t help but notice augurs of change. I’m not superstitious, honestly, but some days it feels like the gods are dropping hints about aging — or, at least, like there is a clock ticking rather too loudly over my head.

    Take the yoga class I’ve been part of for some 11 years at the home of friends: It is coming to an end, as our priorities begin to realign and our small group breaks up. Meanwhile, the interminable winter broke the rhythm of a regular, healthy walk that I’ve taken for years now with a buddy — and somehow we just haven’t been able to get back to it, now that the weather’s turned. I’ve done yoga long enough to be able do it on my own; and I certainly know how to lace up my walking shoes and head outdoors without company. But, well, it isn’t easy to teach an old dog new tricks.

    Right around the time I will be celebrating my big birthday, a different kind of change will occur. The East Hampton Historical Society is going to take apart the old Edwards family barn behind my house, move all the old beams and boards across Main Street to the Mulford Farm, and reconstruct and restore it. We’re all pleased and grateful that the barn will be preserved and available for public use, but the lane I have lived on for decades is certainly never going to be the same. The illusion that we live in a rural place becomes harder and harder to maintain.

    Change isn’t easy even when it has been chosen. Some might think that accepting change would come easier as we move along life’s trajectory, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    I was taken somewhat aback when a longtime friend whom I hadn’t seen in a more than a year, dropped by the office to ask for help recently. The effects of age notwithstanding, she is a beautiful woman, but I couldn’t help noticing how different she looks these days than she does in my mind’s eye. Proust explained my thoughts on seeing her after such a long time better than I could: “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.” (Proust himself didn’t get close to the age I will be on that big birthday, so you might say he was prematurely wise.)

    Ah, well. Instead of dwelling on the numbers, or obsessively observing the passage of personal time, my plan is to enjoy the distraction of the summer holidays as the season rolls along. First will come Memorial Day, with its traditional, simple parade on Main Street, and then Fourth of July, with fireworks and a picnic on the beach — both timeless rituals that we all love. Thank heavens some things never change.

    A friend in the real estate business told me the other day that the secret to showing a house on a north-facing beach here was to do it in the summer. “Try to show it when the wind is blowing, and you’re stuck. Do it when it’s summer, and they’ll think it’s the most beautiful place on earth,” he said. In a way, he was summing up the whole winter-summer, hard-soft thing on the East End.

    Funny, though, as he said this, I realized I was already lamenting the end of the cold months. Every year as the buds on the trees finally swell and open, I get a little sinking feeling that the seasonal crowds are nearly upon us. I knew what my friend was talking about and did not wish his business ill, but still.

    During the winter just past, as I killed time several nights during the week waiting for my daughter to finish her dance lessons, I got to know the scene at a couple of Bridgehampton and Water Mill restaurants. Most of the time, except at Christmas, maybe, there would be just a few other patrons and the ones I quietly shared the evening with were often people I knew by name, or at least had seen around.

    Now, the familiar faces are fewer, replaced by others I don’t recognize who are here for the season or new in town. It’s the same thing out on the street. I have to admit that I join those who have spent the cold months here wondering to ourselves, “Just who are all these people, exactly? Where do they come from, and what is it that they are doing?”

    This week, as it turned out, my real estate friend and his wife were at my usual Tuesday restaurant when I arrived. I wasn’t sure if that proved my point or contradicted it, but after they had finished their dinner and joined me at the bar I enjoyed their company either way.

    I’m sure our high school baseball team would rather be 13-1 now rather than 1-13, but I wonder, in light of this past week’s wonderful 3-2 win here over Mount Sinai by virtue of a flurry of hits in the bottom of the seventh, if it won’t become all the more memorable for those who played, and treasured all the more because of its singularity.

    It was the last home game of the season, the last game of their careers here for the five seniors, it broke a season-long league losing streak, and to attain it skill and will came together in such alchemic proportions as to produce a golden, transcendent moment when the horsecollars came off and possibility reigned.

    Mount Sinai’s pitcher, who had laid down the law (heh-heh) theretofore, had a no-hitter going into the bottom of the seventh, and the score was 2-0 then. I was getting ready to be disappointed again, as I had been on other occasions this spring.

    But the players had different thoughts. A leadoff hit, a hard shot up the middle, and another one through the hole between third and short on an 0-2 pitch, after which the runners alertly move up to third and second. Then a grounder to the third baseman, who hesitates, wondering whether to go home with the ball, but decides instead to go to first. But the throw is high and pulls the first baseman off the bag as Kyle McKee crosses it.

    It’s 2-1, runners are at the corners, and everyone’s cheering, urging on the sixth man in our batting order, Jack Abrams-Dyer, as he steps to the plate with a determined look.

    Their pitcher slips in a strike. But Abrams-Dyer lines the next one into right-center field. The bench empties as the runners dash over the plate. Everyone’s going crazy, hooting, jumping up and down. Abrams-Dyer, the man who brought Mount Sinai low, is hoisted aloft. What a win! What a way to end the season here, to end the shoulder-shrugging, watchagonnado thinking. What a breakthrough. Life can really be fun!

    I read a story this week about scientists reviving the stem cells in old mice with the blood of young ones. Of course it led to ghoulish thoughts. But as long as the Bonackers give me a win like the one the other day, I’ll not be needing any transfusions.

    On Saturday morning, I accompanied our son, Ellis, to a soccer get-together at a house not all that far from ours in Amagansett. While he and the other 4-year-olds kicked the ball around, the parents relaxed on a screened porch, eating muffins, drinking espresso, and feeling for the world as if we were in a stadium skybox writ small.

    The hosts were a couple I had not met before, and, as things go around here, talk turned quickly to houses, architects, and how long it takes to get things done.

     I was particularly struck by the hosts’ vegetable garden, which was inside a veritable deer and rabbit-proof wire-mesh fortress. Raised beds circled the interior perimeter; a center island of rich, dark soil awaited spring planting. By midsummer, I was told, the cage-like space would be dripping with tomatoes, herbs, kale, and flowers.

    Growing things out this way has become an exercise in exclusion. Deer will leap over anything less than a head-high fence or push down whatever they can to get to young sprouts. Three apple trees I planted at my mother’s place behind the Star office have been pruned sharply and repeatedly by their hungry mouths despite the wire barrier I put around them.

    Down at our place, my two garden beds have been ringed with a three-foot wire fence topped by bamboo since last year. After several growing seasons in which there was little to show, my fortress worked, keeping deer out and the plants safe.

    The trick for those of us with jobs and children is finding the time to actually get things growing. One of our soccer hosts, a doctor who practices two days a week in the city, pointed out several pots of ornamentals she intended to get in the ground but had not gotten to yet. A lingering chill in the air gave us an excuse, I said, mentioning six sugar pea seedlings I had yet to deal with.

    By the standards of some years, though, I am ahead. Both beds have been turned, the wire patched, and hoses and compost laid down. I have successfully gotten a few green things, like kale and collards, going from seed; I’ll pick out other seedlings at sales here and there.

    The East End, or at least the South Fork half of it, is like a sponge filling up with more and more people and events every year. Sometime in the almost forgotten long ago, the sponge would begin expanding on Memorial Day and shrink again come Labor Day. Nowadays, the sponge gets heavier and heavier earlier and earlier in the season and, while it does begin to slim down in September, it doesn’t really resume its normal shape until after Thanksgiving.

    They say children are overscheduled in this day and age, but what about us?

    In early May — for example, the weekend of May 9 to 11 — there were so many things possible in this “best of all possible worlds” (to quote from “Candide”) that deciding what to do became a matter of ruthlessly sorting priorities. This is a perfect time of year for lingering and browsing outdoors, and if you were so inclined on Saturday, there was a community yard sale and a community flea market. On the way, you could have stopped at a couple of plant sales or a free family day at one of East Hampton’s  showplaces.

    If you were interested in picking up a real neighborhood bargain or two, the classifieds in The Star’s Thursday edition and on its website were enticing: Some 14 private-residence yard, tag, and estate sales were advertised, with goods from vintage designer clothing to carpenter’s tools, as well as the usual cast-off kitchen gadgets, toys, and patio furniture. Fiestaware, anyone? Frette linens?

    Jack Graves’s weekly lineup noted eight local sporting events you could watch or take part in, starting on Friday night — from tennis tournaments to paddleboard races — and that didn’t even include the more low-key neighborhood games and the physical programs at the Montauk Playhouse.

    Not being particularly drawn to bargain-hunting or athletics myself, I narrowed down my choices by focusing on the arts. Nevertheless, I had to pass up some events I would have really liked to attend; there were just too many possibilities. My dance card contained opera live from the Met in HD at Guild Hall; a panel celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Fridays at Five series of book lectures at the Hampton Library; an evening of readings by the poets Grace Schulman and Toi Derricotte; Richard Barons’s talk on local quilts at Clinton Academy, and the final program in the Parlor Jazz series, with the acclaimed Houston Person on sax.

    I didn’t even consider going to Southampton or Shelter Island for two other concerts, or to a number of intriguing lectures at other museums. Forget the art gallery openings that beckoned. Never mind the nature walks and outings with grandkids.

    How many guided walks, recitals, marathons, open houses, live broadcasts, puppet shows, charitable teas, craft fairs, kiddie carnivals, book signings, eco-symposiums, club breakfasts, lectures, lessons, tutorials, sing-alongs, and potato-sack races can we absorb?

    Clearly, our population has boomed and boomed again if there are enough customers and partiers around to support all of this. I am sure I am not the only one who pines for the days when you went to an art opening or music night and waved  hello  to three-quarters of the people in the room.

    A gentle breezed wafted — that’s what breezes, or rather, gentle breezes, do, don’t they — over the athletic fields at East Hampton High School last Thursday afternoon.

    Over the green expanses of the fields and the orange infields. No one was on them, however, all, however beautiful, was silent. I, for one, was ready for things to begin — the weather had finally come around. Yet the season was over.

    None of East Hampton’s teams had made the playoffs, leaving this opaque sportswriter a little bit at loose ends. I decided to search out our boys lacrosse coach to commiserate with him about the previous day’s loss, and Amanda Calabrese, who, as a member of the girls track team, still had some competitions ahead of her this week, and perhaps beyond, led me to him, down the labyrinthine passageways to the science wing.

    I said as I tried to keep up with her brisk pace, that the high school reminded me of an airport where, after running down a long hall, you’re told the gate’s been changed, and that you’ve got to run back a quarter-mile the other way, with the clock ticking.

    Ticks, by the way, have been out in numbers. Russell Bennett, my co-worker, told me he’d heard it was because the omnipresent snow nurtured massive gestation.

    “Not with a bang, but with a whimper . . . with a tick bite,” I said to him, holding up my legs so he could see my black pants enclosed in white athletic socks, and volunteering the information that my cousin from Vermont had just undergone a radical treatment for chronic Lyme disease in Arizona.

    The mention of insidious (I went down on that word in the Western Pennsylvania Spelling Bee of 1952, finishing fifth, but was applauded in the press the next day for my insouciance) reminded me that my father had always said I should stay away from the Far East, that there were a lot of insidious diseases there. And he had a liver fluke from World War II to prove it.

    “But he didn’t die of that,” I said. “He died on a weekend in a hospital in Bayonne when all the doctors and nurses were partying.”

    That reminded Russell of the scores of old people who died in a heat wave in Paris when the city was otherwise deserted and silent, it being August.

    “Ces’t la vie!” I said, with a shrug of the shoulders on my way up the stairs. “C’est la mort!”

    And more, I hope, to come. Though not this season.

    A pity. The fields look so ready.

    P.S. Mary, who can bring me back to earth when I get carried away, reminded that if a 74-year-old were to be cast as Hamlet, as I suggested in a recent column, Gertrude and Claudius would probably have to be well into their 90s.

    Or maybe I’m just ahead of my time.

    Jimmy Fallon of “The Tonight Show” got up on the stage at the Montauket on Saturday night to sing “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors with the Blue Collar Band. It was a great start to the season. And if it’s any indication of how the summer’s going to be, we’re going to have, according to Jimmy, a good time!

    I love the flock of seasonal visitors each year because it allows me to indulge my favorite pastime, people-watching. It’s quite the scene. But we do have standards, and women in spike heels and men in brand-new shorts with dolphins or sailboats on them traipsing the beach through a bunch of bleached-out, rugged surfers just doesn’t cut it.

    We’re wiseguys in Montauk, and when I say we, I mean those of us who really live here year round and put in our time during the winter months, when barely a tourist can be seen. But we’re also smart and know that visitors are necessary to our economy, so we don’t often cross the line into rudeness, but when we do it’s the ault of those who act like a touron, a phrase we use to describe a tourist who acts like a moron. If you do, you’ll find we’re really good at rolling our eyes, a stupid local trick that we’ve had plenty of reasons to perfect over the years.

    Some of our visitors, especially foreigners, think we all dress like the celebrities they see in American magazines. No, we don’t show heavy cleavage during the day, or even the night. And if we walked around with the tousled and messy hair that’s in fashion right now, we’d be told, as I have been, to go home and brush our hair.

    “What’s up with the do?” a local complete stranger asked me one day. It was a stinging barb that made me realize early on what these locals are capable of.

    The only accessories we carry are our dogs, and they’re usually big and burly, not quivering in our handbags. You can leave the new “It” bag at home; we’re not impressed that you spent almost $4,000 on a purse. In fact, most of us, and I’ve learned this firsthand, wouldn’t even recognize a designer’s logo. If you happen to find yourself in some weird situation, say, on a sinking boat, we’re more likely to save our dogs than your designer purse.

    Can you imagine the looks we’d get if we went to the I.G.A. wearing high heels and head-to-toe designer garb in the dead of winter when some of us are counting change from our wallets to pay for our food? A pricey designer item would just look foolish.

    The only scent we wear in summer is sunscreen. Some of us leave a waft of eau de dead fish in our wake, and that red blotch on our pant leg is probably fish blood, not a jean designer’s carefully distressed design. Perfume attracts bugs, but so does the smell of dead fish, so you’re on your own figuring that out.

    We’re a rugged bunch. We have to be to survive the harsh, cold winters. Oh, and that’s another thing, we command respect in our little hamlet. Those of us who make it through are the ones who make the rules, and, trust me, if you break them, we will get you and level fines until you conform. It’s not fun spending a beautiful summer day in court. And we’re never wrong, so you will pay.

    Sometimes you can buy fish off a local boat at the docks, but you have to dress accordingly. That is, in T-shirts and naturally distressed jeans, although cleavage might help you get the best price, so maybe I’m wrong on that. Our shrimp is not fresh because it’s not in our waters, so don’t ask dumb questions in restaurants. Ask for the bluefish, it’s always good and there’s always plenty of fresh bluefish.

    And if we use plastic utensils, use the plastic utensils, otherwise we’ll talk about you and you don’t want to ruin a beautiful summer day with a loud ringing in your ears or an eye roll tossed your way.

    We want our visitors to have a good time but we also practice beach etiquette. When we’re sitting in a secluded spot on the beach, it’s because we have a little time off from our jobs of feeding and entertaining you and are seeking quiet. Please don’t sit so close to us, blasting your music or throwing a boccie ball over our heads. It’s a wide of span of beach on the South Fork, and we’re boring. So find another spot, and hey, you might just find yourself sitting next to Jimmy Fallon.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

    Thanks to a spring that has seemed somewhat cooler than usual, the grass, weeds, and fallen twigs that are our lawn have been slow to get going. This meant that I was able to put off taking the rusty old lawn mower out of storage until Sunday.

    Not being one to put such things away properly for the winter, getting the old mower, which is not much to look at, going again each year involves a few first steps. A short length of wood takes the place of a start-stop cable long since rusted away, but, after an oil change, fresh gasoline, quick blade-sharpening, and a check of the spark plug and carburetor, it started on the third pull.

    The cold months had not affected the resident backyard annoyances in any meaningful way that I could discern. In fact, it appeared that both were thriving. The tri-lobed leaves of poison ivy, red at this time of year, have climbed around the dog fence and into the trees, and their fragments spun out into the air as the mower went past.

    Ticks of at least three varieties found their way on board as I went around the yard and driveway margins. It was not until later that evening when I was, appropriately enough, at the movie theater with one of our kids watching “Spider-Man 2” that I found the last of them crawling across my skin. Under the light from my cellphone, my daughter Evvy and I had a moment of panic as it fell out of sight, re-emerging on her hand before we dashed for the lobby to deal with it.

    It has been bad so far this year for the dogs. One was treated for Lyme disease a couple of weeks ago and the other was similarly diagnosed just this week after she  became listless and stopped eating. And Lyme is hardly the only tick-borne problem we have to contend with.

    A number of other diseases, such as babesiosis, are transmitted by these relentless pests. And three members of my extended family (including me) have the red-meat allergy associated with the bite of the lone star tick.

    Keeping lawns mowed short is one method the experts advise to limit one’s chances of tick bites. Unfortunately for those who do the mowing, this simple chore puts us right in harm’s way.

You really have to see the Taj Mahal in person to appreciate it. I don’t know if that’s a cliché — it probably is, but then, I’m not much of a world traveler. Still, a few years back I did catch a morning train from Jaipur to visit Shah Jahan’s “ultimate monument to love,” the mausoleum and funerary garden honoring his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

My then-brother-in-law and I stood on line for an hour, at least, before finally entering the grounds where, in the distance, the glorious structure rose from the earth, all white marble and sandstone and symmetry. A Mughal poet is said to have written that, in the mausoleum, “the whiteness of the true dawn is reflected, causing the viewer to forget his desire to move towards the highest heaven.” Sublime beauty, all around.

Until, I regret to report, while circumambulating the magnificent edifice, I came across a girl of, I guessed, 12 or 13. The girl, an Indian, apparently found it all somewhat less impressive than did the thousands of other visitors that day. At least, that was my inescapable conclusion as I watched her engrave her initials, with a stone, into a wall of the Taj Mahal. I sighed, heavily.

I was thinking of that girl on Saturday night, leaning against the bar at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett as Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, a legendary blues musician who goes by the name Taj Mahal, delivered a solo performance as sublimely beautiful as his namesake.

I’d seen Taj Mahal in New York a couple times — once at the late, great Tramps, and once, 15 years ago, in Central Park, when Sheryl Crow played a free concert with some very high-profile guests. I’ll never forget the reaction of Keith Richards, elegantly wasted, as he turned around to realize he was sharing the stage with Taj Mahal, who had performed ahead of Mr. Richards’s band in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” back in 1968.

But this was a solo show, just Taj and a guitar. Strong and spirited at 72, he kept a full house spellbound with playful, masterful performances of his easygoing country blues. “Corrina” and “Fishin’ Blues,” to name a couple, never sounded so cool.

“Here’s a little tip that I would like to relate: Many fish bites if ya’ got good bait,” he sang. “I’m a-goin’ fishin’, yes I’m goin’ fishin’, and my baby goin’ fishin’ too.” Here was wisdom, dispensed with a song and a most infectious smile.

About that rapt audience, though: As is so often the case, more than a few Talkhouse patrons, who had paid $150 or more to attend, seemed blissfully unaware that a concert was in progress, an intimate solo performance at that. Standing directly in front of my date and me, a woman spent about half of the show peering into her smartphone, furiously sending and receiving text messages. The other half of the show? That was occupied by the reading back of the correspondence, aloud, to her companion. I sighed, heavily, again.

I guess it doesn’t matter what side of the world you are on, or if it’s Taj Mahal or the Taj Mahal. Nothing, truly nothing, is sacred. Was it always this way?

We left and walked home, a splendid time had, but a nagging annoyance hanging overhead. Up Main Street, a line from Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” replayed in my mind: “I’m nothing but a stranger in this world.”

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star and a musician himself. 

    Complaining to a colleague, as I am wont to do, about my difficulties hitting upon a subject for this column every week, she asked when I first began to write it. It turns out — and I had to pull out a folder from a crammed old filing cabinet to be sure — that the first “Connections” appeared in The East Hampton Star on April 28, 1977, which means it passed the 37-year mark a few weeks ago. (Even I, a hater of unnecessary exclamation points, want to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.)

    Looking through the somewhat yellowed clippings, I laughed out loud at something I reported on May 19, 1977. Members of the East Hampton senior citizens nutrition program, which met in the middle school, had recently “set up a table of snacks for sale at lunch time.” The idea was that “some students needed to eat more than the school lunch offered,” while other students — truly picky eaters — needed something to fill their stomachs when their refusal of the regular cafeteria goods had left them hungry. So what snacks did the senior-citizens group offer to the kids? I quote:  “The snacks were a collection of forbidden fruits like Yankee Doodles, Ring Dings, and Yodels.” 

    Can you imagine? In that column, I went on to — also somewhat amusingly, with a few decades’ perspective — muse about how, while we all loved the rural nature of our East End, it had to be admitted that suburban communities had certain advantages we missed. The example I cited was to contrast the Ring Dings and Yodels of the East Hampton Middle School with the good works of an UpIsland organization called CRUNCH  (Concerned Residents Upholding Nutrition’s Contribution to Health), which, through a Food Day event at the Smith Haven Mall of all places, was agitating to get schools to stop serving junk food or allowing it in vending machines.

    Thirty-seven years later, I am sure a group of concerned volunteers here in East Hampton would offer something quite different if called upon to supplement students’ cafeteria choices. Greek yogurt and organic bananas? Whole-grain flagels? Kale chips?

     I don’t actually know what the lunch programs are like at the South Fork’s public schools these days, although I have to hope that the campaign Mi­chelle Obama launched about four years ago to promote healthy eating and more physical activity among children has had some effect. Everywhere I go nowadays, adults are talking about changing their diets, eating more vegetables and fruits, canonizing the notion of farm to table, cutting down on sweets and certain, if not all, carbohydrates.

    In April, The Star reported that the Ross School had been ranked at number four among schools throughout the entire United States by a culinary website called the Daily Meal, which cited Ross’s locally sourced and healthy menus. The food director at Ross, Liz Dobbs, even sounded a bit apologetic for serving white rather than brown rice at dinnertime, explaining that it was a comfort food for its many boarding students who are far from home.

    Perhaps the Ross School, which years ago brought in the famous food activist Alice Waters from California to help design wholesome meals for its students, has had a good influence on our local discussion, at large. We have come a long way since the days of meatball subs and gallon cans of pudding.

    What does it say, though, that the children of 30 and 40 years ago — despite the prehistoric, processed food choices available during the school day — were less inclined to be obese than today’s children, who dine on organic root vegetables and sushi? I’m not concerned about the sophisticated kids who get to eat sushi, but the evidence, reported by the Centers for Disease Control, is that while the increase in childhood obesity crosses economic and social lines, the children of low income families are more likely to be obese than others.