Because I have been a writer, editor, and eventually publisher for The Star over the course of more than 50 years, hundreds and hundreds of obituaries have crossed my desk. Sometimes, naturally, they have been obituaries of relatives or friends.

    John de Poo, whose obituary is in the paper today, was a friend — and one of those rare people whose joy in life is truly infectious. No one I have ever known has had his gift for bringing laughter into the room. He told invariably hilarious stories of his colorful life in great detail, adding, I am sure, a little imaginative embellishment from time to time. He had a way of cementing friendships with kindness or unexpected gifts. The iron tines of an old eel spear, a beautiful half-model of a boat, and an original painting by a local artist were among gifts we received.

    But John was perhaps most famous (or infamous, perhaps) in our circle for staging practical jokes. They were always very funny, and never meanspirited. I remember two in particular.

    One summer day, a bunch of us were gathered for a picnic at Little Albert’s Beach in Amagansett. Among the group was a Swedish woman who had never been in East Hampton before: She had been an overnight guest of one of the couples, and had been encouraged to extend her stay so she could spend the afternoon on the beach. All was peaceful . . . when someone noticed something, something black and soft-looking, bobbing in the water offshore. It looked ominous. Before anyone realized that John had something up his sleeve, he went out — on his windsurfer, I think; he was an early adopter — to investigate.

    When John brought ashore the mysterious floating flotsam, it turned out to be a beautiful bouquet of flowers wrapped inside a couple of black garbage bags. He opened them with a flourish, revealing the contents and a big sign that read, “Welcome Hjorbis.” Just when he learned her name and how much thought and time went into his putting this together is lost to memory, but I am sure she never forgot it.

    Then there was the time when we were on the beach in front of the Rattray house on Gardiner’s Bay on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. John was there, too, and at one point asked if we ever dug clams there. I remember answering that on occasion the kids would find a hard clam or two offshore with their toes, but that there just weren’t enough around to bother with. I should have known John was up to something when he went for a swim with a Boogie board under his arm. Before long he was reaching down and then diving — and bringing up clams, one right after another, until he had a fine mess of them on top of the board.

    I was absolutely fooled. I told the assembled we hadn’t realized there were so many calms nearby! But when I tried to lay claim to them I was rebuffed: They were his, he informed me, because he had dug them at Napeague Harbor, dragged them over on his windsurfer, and dumped them in the water before anyone was around. We roared with laughter.    

    John’s wife, Lauren, confirmed this week that John enjoyed taking people by surprise. Noting that he liked to dance, too, she said he enjoyed dancing in unusual places. Not long ago, she said, he had enticed her to dance with him in the aisles of Home Depot and King Kullen. I am sure I am not alone in wishing I had been there.

    When I go, I’d like to go, as Montaigne said, “planting my cabbages,” which is to say either swept away by the one I love or, that failing, by the sure knowledge that I have swept away the opposition in a last rally at East Hampton Indoor.

    Death is kinder, Montaigne says, if it creeps up on one, so that by the end it’s just a half of a man or a quarter of a man that dies, something, he likens to a rotted tooth finally falling out, having reached, without effort or anguish, the natural terminus of its time. I, though, am not as philosophic: When part of a filling fell out the other night, the first thing I did the next morning was call Perry Silver’s office.

    The intimations of mortality didn’t last long. I was taken in posthaste. We’ve become good friends, the dentist and I, though he does most of the talking. And soon, I was ready to resume the struggle against entropy by ordering a cup of coffee and a French cruller — at half price because I’d arrived at lunchtime — at the Sag Town coffee shop in Sag Harbor.

    And there I read in The Express what I would say was the greatest obit ever written, about John De Poo, a man so talented and so screamingly funny that in thinking of him my eyes welled up.

    Soon after, at The Express office, I was telling them De Poo stories, beginning with the one about how he’d gotten the word around that the Carriage Trade Garden Patio restaurant in Key West, where he’d been working, had asked for a permit to feature nude waiters — news that led to a Miami Herald interview in which he told a reporter that while he didn’t object to the change, he wondered where he’d put his pencil.

    “But, look,” he said as we neared the end of a conversation at the Durhams’ in Amagansett in 1973, “don’t forget to put in that my philosophy is: ‘Somehow the woods are more beautiful for my having passed by.’ ”

    Indeed they were, and are.

    Thus fortified by thoughts of the life-loving De Poo, I asked our 90-year-old dog if he wanted to take a walk, and, wonderful to tell, he assented. We walked from the office all the way to the bank’s extension, he, smiling all the way, taking the lead at the end, just in case I’d forgotten the goal was biscuits.

    “A big withdrawal,” I said to the tellers as I reached for three — two for Henry’s having gotten that far and one for good measure. Because it was a beautiful day and because it bore with it fond memories.

    I’ve become the absentminded reporter these days. And with St. Patty’s Day being celebrated in Montauk this weekend — the unofficial harbinger of the season out here — I’m not counting on Mother Nature to allow me to get my bearings.

    A few weeks ago I found myself thumbing through the dictionary while looking up a telephone number. Two weeks ago I had all my gear ready to go and take pictures of the annual St. Baldrick’s Day that is celebrated at St. Therese of Lisieux. I cover it each year to see the brave men and women who shave their heads in allegiance with children with cancer. I wish I could say I was one of the noble, but as much as I hate battling my hair into submission each day, I am not ready to part with it.

    So I got to the church, and of course found a spot right outside, when I realized my camera was not with me. I tore the Jeep apart because I knew I had it with my stuff, but then remembered I had changed my scarf near the front door, a good five miles from the church, and must have put it down. My parking spot was filled.

    I sped home and, sure enough, found it on the little table near the front door that collects gloves, phone chargers, etc. And since I live very close to the Montauk Lighthouse it wasn’t a short trek. I am one of the last houses on Long Island. Does that make me special or weird? Weird is good; I came from a family of weirdos and married into a family of weirdos. I’m just thankful that my husband and I didn’t have little weirdo babies. But our poor children, they had reason to roll their eyes at us over the years.

    I always thought what my parents did for a living (they were both in the entertainment business) was kind of cool and I learned that kids like weirdo parents. I was even classified by some of my children’s friends as the “cool” Mom; I’ve always wondered if that was a cool thing or a bad thing. When I hear someone’s the cool parent, I automatically question his or her judgment. Not to worry, no drinking or smoking by children was ever allowed at our house. The parents, however, were another story. And that’s another column.

    At home, in City Island in the Bronx, we often had late afternoons that turned into music sessions. If a musical instrument wasn’t available, the kitchen pots and pans would do. And they did; if you have rhythm you can play on anything.

    My father played saxophone and drums, and two brothers played guitar and sang. The meeting of the Hewitts and the Fosters was a perfect storm. The Fosters were musical buffs that performed all over in clubs and at other events, and the Hewitts owned the venue — and a float.

    So on my first St. Patrick’s Day in Montauk as a year-rounder (I would never say local; 41 years later I still don’t consider myself local. A warning to those who spend one winter out here: You, too, might not want to toss that word around too casually) I honestly didn’t know what to expect from my family. Would they be playing pots and pans, using spoons as drumsticks, and cupping their hands to magnify their voices, or would they make me proud of them?

    They came through. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of them. The snow was falling and the Montauk wind was doing its thing, but the family brought out the good stuff, the guitars, a drum set, and somehow even managed an amplifier. When they turned onto Main Street that year, the cheers for them were deafening. They rocked that crowd, which, remember, was half or even less than what it is these years.

    I hope my little bit of nostalgia hasn’t bored you, and if it did just drive out to Montauk this weekend. I promise you it will not be boring.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

    “Word has been received from Mr. and Mrs. D.W. Johns, who are touring the world. They were in India and write that they think and speak of Amagansett every day.” So reported The Star on this day in 1914.

    Ninety-five years later, facing certain death on the road to Manali, I thought of Montauk and mumbled a prayer to Sri Krishna that I might swim in the mighty North Atlantic again.

    “Dead,” the Tibetan driver said, so matter-of-factly I was sure I’d misheard him.

    “Huh?”

    “Dead. The child died of exposure.”

    It was then, around 6 a.m., some three hours after the jeep had stopped cold in its snowy tracks, that I became concerned.

    Moments earlier, a distraught woman had carried what looked to be a child, wrapped in a blanket, past the jeep in which I huddled. A man followed, a whimpering child, maybe 10 years old, on his back, arms wrapped feebly around the man’s neck.

    We’d arranged for a vehicle to take us to Manali — said to be an 18-hour drive — to spend a half-day there before going on to Dharamsala.

    Two hours in, the trip was, to my amazement, proceeding swimmingly, despite the roads often turning to rock and mud and, later, snow and ice, enormous icicles shooting down the mountainside toward the single-lane road, beyond which was a steep drop of a hundred feet, at least.

    Of course, it was not to last. In front of us, on a curve in the narrow lane that had somehow been carved into the mountainside, a “goods carrier” sat immobilized, its front axle so badly broken as to perfectly prevent anything from passing in either direction. The army had been notified and dispatched to tow it, we were told. They would come in 12 hours, perhaps, or 24. Or 72. So there we sat, in subfreezing temperatures, in the darkness, and then in the delicate light of dawn.

    At 7:30, I took a handful of butter cookies and a juice box and, delirium taking hold, stepped out of the jeep for perhaps the fourth time. “Well [expletive] me,” I yelled, through a mouthful of cookies, to no one, “for thinking one could make an overland trip in this country without a complete [expletive] disaster ensuing.”

    Around 8 a.m., some five hours after the expedition had been halted and seven hours since we’d departed Choglamsar, I prevailed upon the party to turn back. But the vehicle would have to make a 180-degree turn, a near impossibility on this single-lane road blanketed in snow and ice, the hundred-foot drop looming. There was literally no room for error.

    I’d seen a driver do it just two hours earlier, when a vehicle was commandeered from some unfortunate travelers to transport the young corpse, the sick-but-still-breathing child, and the grieving parents back to civilization.

    But as a passenger in a vehicle attempting the feat, it was terrifying. During the scariest moment, the jeep perpendicular to the road, the driver still needing to accelerate before he could reverse, inches from catastrophe, I had the brief but certain notion that “this is how I die,” never to know that blue ocean again.

    But by Sri Krishna’s grace, I did not die.

    I awoke, much later, in Paris, and was soon slicing through green, rolling hills on a high-speed train to Lyon, destined for fine seafood in St. Etienne and jazz at Vienne, copious Rhone wines and crates of beer.

    And then I was back in Brooklyn, despondent and craving adventure. Old D.W. and his wife know what I’m talking about.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

    That said, he hopes to grow the economy from day one. At the end of the day, it’s gaining traction and — going forward — some people will be pleased. Others? Not so much.

    The paragraph above contains seven of the many jargon-y turns of phrase that get my dander up. I’m proud of being a stick-in-the-mud where American English is concerned. I’m not entirely sure what my problem is, but I simply loathe trendy, overused words and phrases.

    Who is responsible for the fact that the trendspeak verb “to gift” has been replacing “to give,” in relation to gifts and free loot? As in: “The Academy gifted nominees with expensive bags of swag” (another annoyingly overused word, pronounced, also annoyingly, as  “shwag” for reasons I cannot understand).

    I remember being surprised and slightly irritated back in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton used the phrase  “grow the economy.” Couldn’t he have just said  “improve the economy” or “help the economy grow”?

    Perhaps not coincidentally, I think Hillary Clinton was the first person I heard talk about the amazing things she would do on “day one” of her hoped-for presidency. That’s a lot more succinct than saying “on the first day in office,”  granted, but I don’t like it anyway.

    Who is responsible for spreading these words and phrases among us? I have to blame television for interjecting them into spoken, and then written, language. First we heard them among news-hour pundits, then among reality-television contestants, and now we hear and read them every day.

    Now, I have to admit, it is clear that I myself am perfectly willing to use phrases that are honest-to-goodness clichés . . . as long as they’ve been around a long time.

    According to a Yahoo site called Voices, the first reference to “get your dander up” (see above) can be found in an April 1853 edition of The Wisconsin Tribune: “ ‘Well, gosh-all Jerusalem, what of it now?’ yelled the downeaster, getting his dandruff up.” It is also reported that Samuel Goldwyn, of Hollywood studio fame, has sometimes been credited with inaugurating the phrase, but he wasn’t born until 1897.

    The origins of the noun stick-in-the-mud are a little obscure, in part because the phrase has two meanings. Way back in the early 18th century, I’m told, a stick-in-the-mud was someone who wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of an abject condition. More recently, it means a person who avoids new activities, ideas, or attitudes — an old fogy.

    Well. While I don’t mind thinking of myself as a curmudgeon, I draw the line at “fogy.” I declare here that I positively enjoy new, trendy words and phrases when they serve to make the language more specific or more colorful (instead of duller and more generic).

    Did you read that the 2013 Oxford English Dictionary word of the year — a category that has included 2011’s  “truthiness,” 2009’s “app,” and 2003’s  “metrosexual” — was the humble “because,” when used to introduce a single noun or adjective?

    Why do I hate homogenizing trendspeak so? Because reasons.

    This week the South Fork experienced an abrupt return to bitter weather of the sort that characterized the winter just ended. A sharp downturn in the thermometer was often accompanied by snow and wind, followed by a brief warm-up, then cold again.

    What was odd about the frigid weeks was that our household did few or none of the normal winter things children enjoy. We went sledding but once, pond skating not at all. The kids’ schedules certainly had something to do with this, but then, too, it often was just too brutal outside to interest them in much more than bundling up in blankets on weekends to watch TV.

    As for myself, I don’t mind winter, but I, too, did not find it possible to take advantage of it. The single solitary time I managed to get the ice boat out of the barn and set it up at Mecox, the wind did not cooperate, and I spent the day standing around answering sightseers’ questions. I didn’t dig at my usual cold-month clam flat, and I put away my surfboard and wetsuits in November and did not think about them again until just this week.

    When there wasn’t a hard freeze, I managed to get a jump on a couple of spring chores, edging the brick path in the yard and trimming overhanging limbs in the driveway. Not eager to have to rebuild the stairs leading to the beach yet again after winter’s storms, I removed the lower steps to allow the bay to race underneath unimpeded. They will have to go back shortly, but that is a minor matter.

    I wonder, too, about the outdoor creatures. Will there be fewer ticks, thanks to the cold? And what about all the birds that have already returned from the South and seem ready to breed. How do they manage when it suddenly falls below freezing?

    Over on Deerfield Road in Water Mill I saw my first osprey about a week ago on a utility pole’s crossbars. It had evidently been flying back and forth for some time, carrying sticks with which it hoped to build a nest. Late afternoon traffic repeatedly disturbed it, and each time it flew away, the wind swept the most recent stick or twig onto the ground.

    When I checked back later, at around dusk, the osprey was still at it, forgetting about winter and getting ready for spring.

    Because the winter past was particularly dreary, any sign of respite has been welcome; a little sun is all I ask, that and the crack of a bat and a head-first slide into second, or a deft pass for a one-touch score from the corner of the crease.

    The inevitability of spring is enough to brighten one’s mood, but, for me, who must cover them, interesting teams further lighten the step. Last spring was dreary that way, though I sense this April and May will be different, that there will be more things to enthuse about than to commiserate over.

    It’s not all about winning, which, while nice from a sportswriter’s point of view, takes a back seat to enthusiastic engagement.

    This, then, is my pep talk, kids: No crowing, nor hanging of heads, please. Treat victory and defeat as the impostors Kipling said they were, and smile, don’t forget to smile. (After removing your mouth guards.) It’s fun, you should be happy just to play.

    And remember to forget yourself. Don’t think when you’re playing, it should be a time for reaction rather than reflection. You can reflect all you want when the game is over, thinking on those things you ought to have done and of those things you ought not to have done, resolving, of course, to do better next time.

    Life’s a marathon, they say — at least for most, so, for most, there will be plenty of time for reflection, for an examined life. But that shouldn’t lead you to be complacent. Marathoners sprint too, they do interval work at times.

     Somebody on the radio the other day said he sang every song as if he were living his last moments on the planet. Good advice for all of us, though especially for athletes when fully engaged, joyful, free of anticipation and regret.

    The softball team is very young. Lou Reale, the coach, said that at one point during a scrimmage this week he counted six freshmen and two eighth graders on the field. They’re beguiling in their eagerness and attentiveness, but they think too much, he said, and thus their moves, because they’re reflecting more than acting, haven’t acquired the fluidity yet that’s required for such a bang-bang game.

    But he knows this in-the-moment state, this joy, will come. He sees the improvement every day, he says. And, consequently, this crusty old coach’s mood is bright.

    A story in The New York Times on March 3 brought into more vivid focus all the news these days about the Affordable Care Act. At least for me, it reverberated more strongly than all the statistics about those who remain uninsured.

    Tara Parker-Pope, in a “Well” column, reported on a significant racial gap in breast-cancer mortality rates that has been revealed by the compilation and analysis of deaths caused by the disease in 41 American cities from 1990 through 2009. The data showed that, beginning in 1990, the risk of mortality for white women fell dramatically in many of these cities — as might have been expected given the advances in treatment since then — but that the number of deaths dropped very little among black women.

    Disparaging the notion that the gap might be the result of genetics, the article was unequivocal about the reasons for this grim disparity: Black women were more likely to die of breast cancer, it said, because of “lower-quality screening, less access to treatment, and lower-quality treatment.” On average, Ms. Parker-Pope reported, 40 percent more blacks than whites were likely to die of the disease in the years studied.

    Boston, Chicago, and Dallas were among those cities with the largest disparities. So was Los Angeles, where about 70 percent more black women than white women died of the disease during the research period. Isn’t that a shocking figure?

    New York City, I was somehow pleased to learn, had a comparatively small racial gap. This, apparently, has been attributed to the city’s public-hospital system as well as readily available public transportation (eye-opening, I thought, as we don’t usually think of subway and bus service as a health advantage).

    Steve Whitman, director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute, one of two agencies that conducted the research, called the results “startling and very dismal because there is hardly any health measure in the United States that hasn’t improved in the last 20 years.”  

    Dr. Whitman called the disparity “systemic racism.”

    We should not be surprised. “The system is arranged in such a way that it’s allowing white women access to the important gains we’ve made since 1990 in terms of breast health, and black women have not been able to gain access to these advances,” he said.

    The study has hardly set off media shockwaves. The Times ran the story on an inside page, on a Monday.

    I am one of myriad women who have had a malignancy removed from a breast surgically, but I was among those fortunate enough to have had a kind of cancer (ductal in situ) that is non-invasive and highly treatable. Unlike the women cited in the column in The Times, I also was lucky because I am white and had a primary-care physician at the time who was one of New York City’s finest.    It can often be hard for many of us in the Caucasian majority to grasp the concept of  white privilege, but I think anyone who reads these numbers will get it.

    So by now we all know about the soccer mom. Allow me to introduce the ballet dad.

    Ballet dads, of which I am one, are hardly a demographic that politicians are going to be chasing in the next national election, and of course there are as many ballet moms as fathers. Allow me to tell you what it’s like.

    Forget about work for a minute; my real job, it seems, is driving. The oldest of our three children attends evening dance classes three times a week in Bridgehampton, one night a week in Water Mill, and often on Saturdays too. Because of my wife’s work schedule, I play taxi and find myself with hours to kill. I am not alone in this.

    At the King Kullen supermarket, I see them, other dance moms and dads moving slowly along the aisles. A certain less than urgent step gives us away. Want to linger over the packages of chow mein noodles? Well, that’s okay!

    For a while, I found the freedom exciting and hit a different restaurant every night, but I’ve grown bored of that. There’s something uncomfortable about being the only person at the bar on a howling January night, making small talk with the staff when you would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else.

    Eventually, I simply started to sit in my truck listening to the radio, starting the engine every now and then so I did not freeze. Around Christmas, friends gave me a key to their nearby shop so I could use the couch in the back room to just nap.

    Tuesdays, I have two and a half hours to fill. Since I drive a gas-guzzling truck, I am hesitant to head back to the office, plus it is taco night at one place more or less around the corner from the dance studio. Sometimes I invite friends; other times, at the end of a full day at the office, I want to sit and stare at my phone or at the bottles lining the back wall.

    They know me by name there now, and do not hurry me along. I’ve become a regular, a ballet dad with nowhere else to go.

    It almost always feels like spring will never come, that the daffodils or forsythia are late, that the osprey have missed their return date, that the robins surely should have started their nest-building and infernal crack-of-dawn window-striking already.

    Despite the chill in the air, the ice crystals on the ground, or the occasional snow stubbornly remaining in the forecast, my unscientific study of spring’s arrival tells me this: It’s the length of the day more than its temperature that forces the season to shift. I could Google that, but I don’t want to.

    The tulips tend to open the same week of the year that they always do, regardless of the cold. Ditto the forsythia. The buds grow fat on the maple right on schedule and around mid-April the magnolia on the corner of Methodist Lane that I pass every day on my way to work will be blooming. It hardly seems possible now because I want it so badly. That’s how it is with this season.

    Among the hats I wear here at The Star is that of photo editor, and often by the end of March/early April I can see the photographers’ weariness with the season in the sameness of their photos. How much can you do with browns, blues, and white? Enter the cat, the yawning cat, dog on bed, dog at beach. Lovely silhouette of leafless trees? Did it in December. Snow? Please no.

    There are fewer photographs because there is less to be inspired by, and sometimes while I’m looking for a photo pairing for our letters pages or a shot for our editorial page I find myself looking in desperation into the photos folders from previous years. If I need, say, a picture of skunk cabbage for Larry Penny’s “Nature Notes” column, I might search nine years of Marches to find one.

    I notice through the pictures that almost every first week of April, give or take a few days, the same varieties of bulbs are pushing their way toward the sunlight. Forsythia? I find it in full flower on April 20 one year, April 27 another. Magnolias appear as early as April 13, cherry blossoms one April 19, lilacs on April 26.

    I warn myself that it’s been known to snow as late as April 15. I remember covering the groundbreaking on the Accabonac Apartments in my early years at The Star as snow piled up around the base of already blooming daffodils. And there were odd warm years, like 2007, when January was balmy enough to force the buds on a row of cherry trees on Pantigo Road, or 2012, when I could pick broccoli at Quail Hill all winter long.

    Spring is a fickle tease. It plays hard to get so we love it even more when we’ve finally got it. One day it’s 60 and sunny and you smell earth in the rain, the next it’s 32 and the sky looks like snow.

    I’ve seen the robins massing in the yard. There’s that one again, the one I curse at all spring, eyeing the spot above my bedroom window for his nest. Soon he will start battling his reflection for control of the turf. No matter what I hang in the window to let him know it’s a window, he’ll wake me up every morning when the sun is barely up, just to let me know that, yes, spring has finally arrived.

    Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.