Ever since I joined the staff of The Star decades ago, I have adhered to the old-fashioned journalists’ prohibition against public expressions of support for one political position or another: I do not sign petitions, attend meetings to either advocate for or oppose matters of controversy, and I do not usually participate in polls. This week, however, I broke with the last of these standards.

    As we know, polls have had an increasingly powerful effect on legislative decisions; this is especially true at the federal level, but more and more often at the local level, too. The media treat poll results as news. We have gotten so used to this adjunct of the democratic process that there seems little debate about how seriously the results of polls should be taken.

    In a recent essay for the Neiman Journalism Lab, an affiliate of Harvard, Herbert J. Gans, a sociologist, expressed doubt about how well polls truly reflect the will of the people. He pointed out that news reports on polls almost never describe the specific questions that had been asked and do not generally include figures to account for respondents who didn’t have opinions on the matter or were unsure of their answer. For that reason, Mr. Gans said, poll results are often not an adequate measure of majority opinion.

    Obviously, the answer we give to a pollster is very much affected by the way a question has been framed. The wording, as I have learned, is often anything but neutral, but instead engineered to garner one result or another.

     The telephone rang this week on Edwards Lane, and the person on the other end indicated that she was seeking opinions on a proposed zoning law in the Town of East Hampton (a law that will, as a matter of fact, be subject to public hearing tonight and happens to be the subject of an editorial today). All the caller would say when I asked her to describe the proposed law was that it would become clear as we went along.

    At first, the questions were as wholesome and straightforward as motherhood and apple pie. Did I approve of maintaining East Hampton’s rural or semi-rural character, protecting hamlets, neighborhoods, landscapes, scenic vistas, and historic buildings? Of course I did.

    As the questioning progressed, however, the queries became astoundingly biased. They were rigged in such a way that if those who answered wanted to be counted as in favor of the proposed new zoning law, they would find themselves approving something that was going to have dire, damaging effects on the community.

    I was told that if the law were approved it would become extremely inconvenient for residents to buy necessities such as milk — and was I in favor of its passage? Then I was told that if the law were passed it would cause the community to suffer economic loss, because there would be fewer jobs — and did I support that?

    (I wish I had been sitting at my computer at the time of the call so I could have taken more precise notes, but you get the gist.)

    At the hearing tonight, some will no doubt argue that local government has no right to restrict commerce. Others may say that although the goals of the law are reasonable, its restrictions go too far.

    It’s likely, someone will come waving the results of the poll in his or her hand, as “proof” of the public’s wishes. Frankly, I would be delighted if they do, because perhaps then we will learn which individual, organization, or corporation paid for this sham.

    The house we live in, built for my parents more than 50 years ago, is a little tight for a family of five that includes a 4-year-old with an ample supply of Legos and dinosaur toys, as well as two dogs and a pet pig. We need more closet space. The upstairs wood floors are due to be redone. The kitchen cabinets haven’t been painted in 20 years.

    It’s not like we haven’t tried. A plumber we met with about getting better heat in a chilly bedroom has gone missing. The painting contractor we used most recently appeared to have an eyesight-challenged crew, if the sloppy job they did on the interior trim is any indication. And I’ve tried to institute a no-new-objects rule for everyone in the family to minimize clutter, to little avail.

    The problem with any house-renewal effort, as many of you will agree, is mission creep. When we had a problem deciding on paint colors for the kitchen, our attention became focused on the outdated red tile on the floor. We are now investigating options, including laying a high-tech “floating” surface on top of it, but this may involve a visit to the manufacturer’s Manhattan office.

    Selecting tile for the kids’ shower became a conflict when one of our daughters announced she simply had to have a pricey, bubble-like style we saw in a Wainscott showroom. The debate about whether to put the new television over the fireplace or next to it nearly brought the family to blows. Both these conflicts were resolved (we agreed on a more sensible tile; the TV is next to the fireplace), but it wasn’t easy.

    Warm weather, when we will open the doors and windows and spend more time outdoors, can’t come soon enough. That will take the pressure off calling in a bulldozer for this old house. At least until the fall when we all move back inside once again.  

    Is it possible that as we age, and become ever more aware of life’s horrors, that we are, perhaps in like manner, ever more stimulated by its beauties and wonders?

    I looked at the grass this morning, though it is not grass, it is an infinity of, to use Mary’s word, species (overlaid by crystallized snow this morning) that, even with Larry Penny at hand, would require endless study to catalog.

    It was Peter Matthiessen, I think, who said that we should consider ourselves lucky if we were awake five minutes a day. 

    “To see eternity in a grain of sand,” I said (in somewhat garbled fashion) to myself on the way to the compost heap.

    And then, of course, one must get ready for work.

    Though not without thinking how much joy remains to be had in loving, so much more than I, a typical American male I would say (and thus perfectly suited to sportswriting) would have expected.

    That I continue to be surprised by this — though not so much anymore by the seemingly limitless cruelty that lies within us — is a wonder to be cherished in my 70s, knowing that I’ve done nothing to merit it. It’s just dumb but marvelous luck.

    The secret, as Andy Neidnig said, is to keep moving. I was about to say that the more you move the less time you have to fret — about the future, about the past. About sins of commission and — perhaps more germane in my case — of omission.

    To reflect in that manner, then, would not be to be awake. I think the idea is to look at things whole for at least five minutes a day — to take it all in, calmly, the sorrow, the ugliness, the joy, and the beauty. For it’s not only beauty that is true, Mary said.

    And, keeping all that in mind, to raise a glass to what we know and to what we do not know, and to moving, and seeing, and feeling.

    Down the street from where we live is an arid wasteland of a building site, stripped bare not only of the modest house that was once home to a pair of gentleman gardeners but also of the profusion of flowers, shrubs, even trees (the ultimate insult) that they had so carefully tended. There is nothing left but 20-foot mountains of dirt, a broken-down shed off in a brambly corner, whose survival may have been an oversight, and a waiting construction trailer.  

    The site has been like this since last summer. I’m sure I’m not the only one on the street who turns to look whenever I drive by, waiting for signs of movement even as I dread the colossus that is all too likely to follow.

    When I say nothing is left, I mean nothing between the house and the old post-and-rail fence out front. If they’d torn the place down just a little sooner than they did, say in the month of March, they’d have noticed green blades coming up beyond that fence — on the grassy strip beween the fence and the road which, so far as I know, is rightfully town land but is viewed by many homeowners as part of their property — and probably smushed them, along with all the other growing things.

    There ought to be a word for that strip. Right-of-way? Homeowners all over town appropriate it for their own uses, usually though not always to good effect. Forsythia is particularly popular; so is ivy and impatiens, planted around the street trees. But then there are the people who space big rocks a few feet apart on the grass, or stick sticks in the ground with lights on top that glow red at night. They may say they’re there to protect their fences from wayward cars, but I think what they’re really doing is marking their territory. 

    Anyway, those green blades beyond the onetime house with its falling-down fence are now daffodils. Hundreds at least, maybe 1,000, all sizes, all colors, yellow, white, yellow and white, yellow and orange, orange and red, red and white and apricot and pink. From March to May, for more than 100 running feet along the grass, daffodils bloom and fade and others come along, and they all just keep increasing every year.

    For as long as I can remember, and we have lived on this same street for 45 years, those two men, both dead now, could be seen out front every autumn shoehorning new bulbs into the ground. They transformed that grassy strip into a springtime showstopper, and I know I was not the only neighbor who would purposely walk on that side of the street to gawk. Because of them I became something of a daffodil fanatic myself, sending off to Wisconsin or Oregon for unusual varieties, even once entering the Garden Club of Shelter Island’s biennial show.

    Daffodils have been aptly called the self-cleaning ovens of the gardening world; with little or no care, they do what’s expected. They’re doing it again down the street this spring, but I am not, and that’s really what this is all about. I still walk over there most days, but now, instead of stopping and ogling and walking on, I cut a bunch of flowers and take them back home, or to work.

    Is this stealing?

    No one lives there anymore, and there are so many drifts of daffs that you couldn’t possibly tell the difference, and yet I find myself hoping no car will pass by and see me — catch me? — in the act. But why? The new owners, probably a corporation, clearly couldn’t care less about plants, and the plantsmen, given the situation, might actually approve. Or so I tell myself.

    I was putting some really spectacular Albert Einsteins in a Tropicana juice container the other day when a neighbor — a woman whom I happen to know is a fervent proponent of private property rights — walked by on the other side of the street and shot me a dirty look. I stood up and went home, thinking that after all this was thievery, and the next day I asked someone at work about it.

    “Would you go cut somebody else’s flowers, even if they didn’t even live there yet?”

    “Of course not,” she replied, then paused. “Only if they were lilacs.”

    Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large at the moment in Amagansett.

    One of the biggest hurdles in running a newspaper these days comes from online searches and social media, sources that many in the industry should view as more of a threat than a ally.

    In the world of print, if one publication copies another’s original content, and reruns it with its own advertising, it is considered intellectual property theft. But when Google, Facebook, and other big websites do it, wrapping pieces of others’ stories with their own ads, the old media companies, which paid to create the content in the first place, are expected to be thankful for the traffic.

    In my opinion, this is upside down. It seems to me that the poaching sites should share some of the money they get by selling ads next to and above fragments of what others produce with those who produce it. Without the writers, editors, and publishers of the world, Google and the rest might well be selling nothing more than access to inane commentary, corporate pitches, and the work of unhinged bloggers.

    Making matters all the more inequitable, if a content producer signs up with Google’s Ad words program, which sends some of its advertising to others, or one of its rivals, the content producer can enjoy the ignominy of its own potential advertising accounts getting equal exposure for far less money than they would if they bought advertising on the originating site directly. 

    This has the additional effect of making ad rates for the web artificially low — and why not, since Google, for one, does not have to pay anyone to provide content for it. It is little wonder that these giant aggregation and social network sites have so much cash on hand; they are selling advertising contracts to material they bore no expense in creating.

    I am hardly alone in looking dimly on the digital age’s freeloaders. Broadcasters arguing in the Su­preme Court on Tuesday in the case of Aereo, a low-cost cable television alternative, said Aereo’s business model was “premised on massive and unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works.”

    Aereo is a little different than Google and the like in that it allows subscribers to view entire programs while side-stepping expensive monthly cable fees. Yet the concept is the same: It should compensate those who actually create the work it resells.

    Make no mistake, website traffic is important. The Star website’s top referrer is Google, followed by Facebook. But that still does not make what these companies do right or ethical. If these firms are making billions selling access to our content in the aggregate, the least they can do is kick a few pennies our way. It’s only fair. Without those who actually do the work, they would have very, very little left to sell.

    After I buried Pooh in Central Park, I wanted nothing more to do with felines, at least not for a while. I was in mourning for my little friend, and mourning takes time. My wife, however, had other ideas and a team of accomplices pitted against me.

    We lived on West 19th Street in Chelsea at the time, and a Dominican couple with four daughters had moved from the South Bronx into the building next door a few weeks earlier.

    The apartment Carole and I had was essentially a two-room studio, and we learned that their apartment had the same setup, cramped quarters for a family that large. When I came home from work I would see the girls on the street in front of the buildings, and would stop to talk with them. The oldest, about 7, was their spokesperson. She would tell me about everything that had happened in the building and on the block that day.

    One evening, soon after Pooh’s demise, there was a knock on the door. It was the little spokesperson. “Your cat is dead. Do you want our cat?” she asked. I said no, although I told her it was a very kind offer.

    The next evening, there was another knock on the door. “He’s a very nice cat. His name is Garfield,” she said.

    “Shouldn’t we at least take a look?” Carole asked after the disappointed neighbor left.

    “It’s too soon,” I said.

    The next night, another knock. This time my little friend had her three sisters with her, as well as Garfield, cradled in her arms. He looked to be no longer a kitten, but was not full grown. He also looked strikingly like the dear departed Pooh.

    Their mother had said Garfield had to go, she explained. After I sent them away disappointed again, my wife stared daggers at me. It was very quiet around the dinner table that night.

    The next evening, the now-ritual knock was heard again. It was the four girls and the cat, now wrapped in a large towel. They had washed him. I looked at the wet animal. I looked at my wife. I looked at those four pairs of dark eyes, which seemed to be looking back imploringly as they waited for my answer. “Okay,” I said.

    And that is how the cat whom we rechristened Bunky came into our lives. He was a close companion for the next 20-odd years.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The Star.­

    Why is it so hard for me to give things away? My friend Myrna says it’s because, like her, I was a Depression baby. Our parents held on to worn-out, broken, or tattered things, believing they could never be replaced. Balls of string in her parents’  case, Myrna said; old screws and nails in mine. Who really needs a drawerful of cheesecloth and canning-jar wax that predates the Vietnam War?

    Clearly, I have a  problem with giving away anything that is halfway okay, but part of me, I have to admit, secretly revels in this seeming flaw: We live, after all, in a disposable age, in which culture (and marketing) promotes shiny new things, and I don’t at all mind counting myself among those who resist this urge toward wastefulness.

    Another problem is that once you’ve finally ripped off the Band-Aid and decided to give something away, you have to find someone who will take it. And that isn’t as easy around here as you might think.

    I was delighted this week to learn that as a benefit for the Synchro Swans, the water-ballet team at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter, clothing and households groups will be collected at the Springs Presbyterian Church on May 3 and 4 for sale to a nonprofit charity. I ran straight to my closet to see what I could unearth.

    There are clothes in the deepest depths of this closet that I haven’t worn in decades, and I don’t mean that figuratively. For example, an intensely colored Marimekko top, shortened unsuccessfully from a floor-length muumuu that I bought in the 1960s. (The fabrics Mari­mekko used then were of real quality, everlasting as iron.) I guess I kept the Marimekko piece as a memento of times gone by . . . just as my mother preserved a tiny tap-dancing costume I wore for a performance when I was about 4. My preschool tap outfit can be found in a drawer nearby.

    Like all parents and grandparents these days, I am strangely disheartened whenever I look over into the corner of my yard that is inhabited by a herd of big, plastic toys — sad, cast-aside ride-ons that the kids have outgrown. My herd includes a four-wheeled Jeep-like vehicle, inflatable and hard-plastic horses to sit or bounce on, a rocket ship. . . . You get the picture.

    The Synchro Swans people don’t want my sad toys, it turns out. They won’t take any toys for the rummage sale unless they fit inside a 24-by-24-inch box. Sigh. The Ladies Village Improvement Society doesn’t want them, either. And the place we called Caldor East, at the East Hampton Town dump — where you could once drop off serviceable household discards for others to pick up — was shut down by a previous town administration and, most unfortunately, hasn’t reopened.

    This week I added to my giveaway troubles when I offered to figure out how to pass on a well-made Victorian couch that my son and daughter-in-law no longer want. The L.V.I.S. may or may not accept it for its furniture barn, I would have to hire someone to get it there to find out.

    Is this, or is this not, a signal that our society is drowning in too much stuff?

    Old clothes, at least, have an upside if you hang onto them long enough: Eventually — the circular rhythm of fashion being what it has become — they rotate back into style, and if they still fit, you get to feel clever and vain besides.

    With all those household objects gathering dust, your only hope is that they become “collectibles.” I’ve got an Art Deco toaster, for example, and a popcorn-maker that should be in the Smithsonian. I have a hamper full of material, including some from curtains made for the Amagansett house 40 years ago; I have my mother’s china, which I never liked the look of, and a couple of generations of cookbooks (though my daughter would murder me if I gave those away).

    Personally, I say the best way for all of us to cope with our excess can be found right here in the pages of The Star each week: Throw a yard sale! Family members just laugh when I announce I’m going to have one. I’ve been hanging onto that delusion for decades, too.

    As it happened the other day, I was in that recently relocated Amagansett store that sells little more than vinyl records, talking to my friend Carlos Lama, who works there, when a woman walked in with a surprised look on her face.

    “People still listen to these?” she asked with a wide grin.

    “Yes, they sure do,” the ever-polite Carlos replied. Then under his breath, and to me alone, he whispered, “They all say that.”

    Innersleeve Records, as the place is called, appears to be doing solid business. Most of the time when I pass by it appears a couple of people are browsing inside, which is a lot more than you might be able to say about the lonely shops nearby that sell hipster duds or decorative doodads.

    Hanging around the store a bit, it seems that the other thing people say a lot is that they had once had a large collection of LPs, but had recently sold them or given them away. As for me, I never divested, but rather stuck most of my collection in the attic, pulling down a few selections, like a favorite Rahsaan Roland Kirk, when I had a turntable up and running.

    I’m not going to get all choked up here about how vinyl played on a proper stereo has more soul than compact discs or the dreadful digital formats. I think it sounds better, but for me, truth be told, I think it is more about the fetishistic aspect to handling one’s music more than anything else.

    If you think about it, vinyl has a more direct connection with performers anyway, which seems really apparent if you, like me, happen to have an old 78-r.p.m. player. If, for example, we listen to an Enrico Caruso recording, the vibrations in the air that carry the sound of his voice are made as the thin, steel needle rides in the grooves of the disc, which were cut from a master that came from a source that was animated by the singer’s own breath itself.

    At no point in the process was “E Lucevan le Stelle” converted into digital zeroes and ones, as with an MP3 file or CD. Even though there are scratches and pops in my old records, I can feel as if the great tenor is there with me. And in a sense, he is.

    Do people still listen to these? Yes, they sure do.

    So, they say Edward Snowden is a traitor and yet they give those who reported on his public service work the Pulitzer Prize.

    The Obama administration admits that it has overstepped when it comes to its spying on all of us, and yet if Snowden returns to this country, they will leap upon him and prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

    And there were Mark Shields and David Brooks the other night, brows furrowed, tut-tutted, trying to reconcile the reporters’ prizes with the alleged infamy of what the source of the story did. But do they understand? They would probably not even be talking about this universal listening-in, which would still be going merrily on unbeknownst to us, had it not been for Snowden.

    Who cares? you may say. Obviously, we must give up some of our privacy in order for the state to do what it must do to protect us from those who intend us harm. When, though, does it get to the point — not that I’m saying it has as of yet — when those who are charged with looking after our best interests transmogrify into our betes-noires.

    It’s something to keep in mind. Blake said there are two sorts — tyrants and the acquiescent victims of tyrants. No, no, we don’t practice tyranny here, at least overtly. The income gap widens, ever widens, and yet we acquiesce in it. It’s not tyranny, it’s just the way things are in our democracy, you might say, where everyone has an equal say, as in one man, one woman, one vote. 

    Do we need a subversive Snowden to point out this subversion of system? He might risk jail time.

    As I was writing this, I discovered in the Sunday Times business section that there indeed is such a fellow, Thomas Piketty, who recently co-wrote a best seller that “debunks the idea that wealth raises all boats.” But he’s French.

    The Times followed up three days later with a front-page piece headlined “U.S. Middle Class Is No Longer World’s Richest.” While our richest still remain the richest, it said, our middle (I wonder if there still is one) class and poor have been outstripped by their counterparts in Canada and Western Europe.

    Oligarchs now reign in the land of the free. I think Aristotle said mob rule comes next.

    Even though it has been a long time since I saw the Japanese film “Rashomon,” I can remember the profound impression it made. “Rashomon” introduced Japanese cinema to this country, and its director, Akira Kurosawa, went on to become one of the most influential in American filmmaking.

    “Rashomon” is about a man’s murder and the rape of his wife, as described by four people who testify very differently about what happened. That witnesses may, and in some cases do, see important or powerful events from wholly different perspectives is a valuable lesson for anyone who ever thinks about truth and justice. Not only beauty but guilt and innocence can be in the eye of the beholder. And that also is a touchstone for journalists.

    Thirty or so years ago, when Dan Rattiner of Dan’s Papers and I met for dinner at East Hampton’s original Laundry restaurant, we seemed to have a lot in common. Over the years, some people confused our last names. We both grew up in New Jersey and we both began our newspaper careers in the town of East Hampton in 1960. But we knew we looked at the world through different lenses.

    I have never forgotten the day when Dan, just starting out, came into The Star office and asked if he could run our publisher’s column, “Looking Them Over.” What chutz­pah! Or was it flattery?

    At dinner, Dan explained his professional philosophy. He had realized (perhaps in high school) that there was no such thing as real truth so he decided early on that he was free to tell the news any way he fancied. Sometimes he took that idea to extremes, startling readers with elaborate and hilarious hoaxes. I, on the other hand, I had come to East Hampton by way of the Columbia University School of Journalism, where one of the basic rules was to strive for objectivity. The Star was more likely to run “on-one-hand, and-on-the-other” accounts of events than hoaxes.

    I am reminded of the famous Robert Frost poem that begins: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. . . .” It seems that Dan, a pioneer in personal journalism, “took the one less traveled by,” while those of us at The Star followed a traditional path. That I recited that poem at my eighth-grade graduation is one of life’s little ironies.

    Speaking of truth, or at least accuracy, in journalism, I was wrong last week when I announced there was to be a big rummage sale at the Springs Presbyterian Church this weekend on behalf of the Synchro Swans, the water-ballet team at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter. Clothes and household goods are being collected there tomorrow and Saturday, but they will be distributed to the needy by a charitable organization.