No one really ever liked the kitchen tiles. My wife, Lisa, and I learned this a couple of days ago when my mother stopped by the house and we began talking about our on-again, off-again effort to fix up the house.

    We had painters taking care of a few rooms earlier in the year, but work stopped when we got tired of having to follow them around pointing out places they had missed. Then, too, trying to figure out what color to paint the kitchen cabinets was nearly impossible — the rectangular early 1960s red quarry tile with white grout made everything look wrong.

    Mom supplied the background details. When she and my father had the house built, she had wanted real bricks on the kitchen floor but was told she couldn’t because they would be too difficult to keep clean. Instead, they settled on brick-like tile, which she did not care for early on, and her opinion never really improved.

    Tile being essentially indestructible, the stuff has lasted for some 50 years. It would have had its fleeting moment of fame when the house was used as a location for the lobster scenes in Woody Allen’s 1977 “Annie Hall,” but the director had a white plywood floor put down so the scuttling creatures would stand out on the screen.

    Complicating things now is that our oldest child believes that any color is right for interiors so long as it is white. Adelia has strong opinions, and she insists that she will not allow friends over until the kitchen is up to her standards. Lisa and I are still considering our options. She briefly took an interest in dying the grout a darker color, but Adelia said she would move out if she did.

    As for me, I see how these things go. Next thing we know, we will be pulling out all of the kitchen cabinets, laying down a real wood floor, buying new appliances, and ordering new cabinets. It’s a slippery slope, and we’ve got the kids’ college funds to think about.

    Woody may have had the right idea.

    “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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    On the same course as last week, I’d like to think that not thinking is the goal when it comes to doing something athletic, tennis in my case, which is why I thought a couple of months ago that it would be good to attend East Hampton Indoor’s weekly “stroke of the week” clinics, so I could think about what I was doing wrong and could take heedless satisfaction in what I was doing right.

    In tennis there are many mnemonics; if it were not so, I would have told you. Think of sliding your racket along the seat of a chair when striking a backhand volley, for instance. It’s A-C-E when serving, which is to stay toss the ball away from the body, keep the chin up, and extend through the ball, snapping the wrist downward with authority.

    Just as it’s head up when serving, it’s head down when hitting groundstrokes. Turn the shoulder, bend the knees, bring the hips around if it’s a forehand, following through up and over the opposite shoulder.

    If yours is a one-hand backhand, follow through high, flipping the lead wrist at the end to impart topspin. Chin up when hitting overheads. Step in to the volleys. And, rather than “bounce-hit,” say “one” when the opponent strikes the ball, “two” as you take up a position arm and racket’s length away from the ball, and “three” as you make contact. . . .

    Much to reflect on, you’ll agree, but when these truths of tennis are transformed into pure reaction, into beauty, as it were, then thought and sensation are transmuted into transcendence.

    Timing is beauty, beauty timing. And that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

    Of course, if you jerk your head up when it should be down, or jerk it down when it should be up, or forget to bend the knees or turn the shoulder, or get too close to the ball, or swing late, and thus mess up, there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth and things will go south.

    But that, too, is part of the game, part of the hacker’s game, whose best moments bid fair to be even more golden than those of the elite given the base metals from which they come.

    All by way of saying I’ve thought enough for now. It’s time to play. And, oh yes, keep your eye on the ball.

    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.

    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.

    Today . . .     Mostly sunny, though clouded conditions resulting from a high-pleasure system that moved through the region late may take a while to clear. By noon, however, one ought to be able to face the day, even though temperatures will continue to be unseasonably cold. By midafternoon undifferentiated thoughts of escape can be expected to arrive from the south-southwest, though the disturbance may be of short duration given that everything’s booked anywhere warm.

    Tonight . . . Dreary with snow late, following a broad depression caused by newly mailed episodes of “Breaking Bad,” a mood only slightly elevated by a half pitcher of margaritas and our wishes that Walter White had been our chemistry teacher in high school, for then we might have a better handle on things by now. 

    This new storm system, moving from the Midwest to the Northeast, will bring plenty of recriminations, coarse language, and gnashing of teeth, causing even more trips to the dentist, provided the roads have been plowed and the potholes filled in. Snowfall could accumulate a total of 1 to 3 inches, or, in some areas along the South Shore, as much as 10. The prospect will likely bring with it fitful dreams of impotence and of polyurethane fumes seeping down the hall from the recently redone room, though by midmorning the snow is expected to change to drizzle. (Happy Days!)

    Tomorrow . . . A bit of . . . what? Yes, yet another disturbance moving across the region in the early hours, which promises to bring with it a strong urge, as the skies slowly lighten, to remain under the covers forever.

    Thursday, Friday . . .  A chance for a bit of a blizzard Thursday, though don’t get hot under the collar, you can always play Gin Rummy. Friday may be a much milder day for struggling against entropy, though if Johnna calls from San Diego, don’t pick up the phone.

    Feb. 2, 2014, Ditch Plain, Montauk: The voice rings out, “Lads, paddle, a set is coming.” Four men on surfboards ranging from 9 to 10 feet paddle 30 yards farther seaward to wait, positioning themselves for the four-foot winter set.

    Three of the men had been talking, light Irish brogues distinct, pleasant enough topics, not much at all, prior to the sighting of the three-wave set, clearly visible 250 yards offshore. The fourth surfer had mentioned to one of the three Irish guys, “You need a hood.”

    The man has hair long enough to more than cover his head and ears, yet it is February in Montauk. No hood in Montauk in February, even with a mild across-the-board temperature of 45 degrees water and air, is a stretch. The man with no hood shrugged, spoke about industrious work completed earlier in the day, and then was out on the water, indifferent to wearing a hood.

    The set arrives, glassy, cement-like, smooth, as very cold water seems. The four men paddle, catch, stand up Waikiki-style, surfing shoreward. Possibly three are actually standing, yet for the sake of the tale, let’s make it four. The sun, a hallowed gray sun from west to north, blankets the surf spot in more than adequate light.

    Waikiki-style is arms spread out, cruising gracefully toward land, smiling, without a care in the world.

    Dec. 27, 2013, Ditch Plain, Montauk: John, one of the local Ditch Plain prophets of the summer past, roams the parking lot, not thinking much, just on a surf check. He had had responsibilities to attend to in New York City the past week. A surfer walks up to him fully suited and says, “Stay away from people who drive expensive white luxury cars.”

    John looks quizzical, wondering what that means.

    The suited surfer mentions “not the ones with the white trucks, no. People who have white trucks are actively employed doing something honest enough.” The surfer continues, “John, stay away from people with cars like this.” The surfer points to an expensive swayback S.U.V., a brand-new white Range Rover with all the newest and greatest surfboard rack apparel adorning.

    The wetsuit-clad surfer says, “John, it’s pretty obvious that they could be involved in, you know, shady business.” The surfer continues, “I have a distant uncle who says that anyone who buys or rents a fancy white car is involved in . . . one of two occupations. This is a family beach; I’ll tell you later.”

    He continues, “No one goofs around more than us, or has as much fun, yet those people could give the sport a bad name.”

    John muses, thinks blissfully about sitting in his beach chair near his older-model Chevy truck during Labor Day weekend past. What fun that was, how he loves Ditch Plain on the holidays: What a celebration! John thinks about the attractive lady he was sitting with Labor Day past — she was sipping a Budweiser bottle of beer, gracefully.

    John snaps out of his daydream, laughing about the fancy white car with all the surf trimmings, and says, “That’s hilarious.” John walks back to his Chevy truck, smiling.

    Sept. 28, 2010, Radar Base, Montauk: Left-breaking five-foot waves crease laterally across the western rock shelf a hundred yards offshore connecting to a sandbar closer to shore. Surfers ride the waves moving and bending, tucking into the cylindrical formation waves make known as the tube.

    Birders, bird-watchers, ornithologists, with scopes, just a few, are positioned on the bluffs, intent on their excursion. Not more than 160 yards offshore to the southwest, a small charter boat of approximately 38 feet in length drifts quietly with 10 people aboard. The sun glimmers as only during New England fall.

    A five-wave set blankets the late-afternoon rock reef. Surfers, not many, slide across the overhead walls of water. Simultaneously, pow, pow, pow, the sound of shotguns resounds from the small boat drifting directly off the surf break. The lightest scent of cigar smoke drifts inward. The afternoon winds are beginning to shift from offshore to onshore.

    Pow, pow, pow, pow, poof, boom. Maybe someone on the duck-shoot charter is carrying some black powder high-gauge gun. The birders are moving like squirrels along the Montauk bluff cliffs, in clear view of the gunners. The bird enthusiasts’ scopes glint as the instruments cross paths with the southwestern afternoon sun.

    Two small groups of bird-watchers move along the cliffs. The shooting boat drifts in close enough, after a volley, to give the air a hint of gunpowder. The slightest trail of white smoke bursts from their guns after each volley. One can almost imagine a silver-inlayed shotgun, family heirloom, no doubt, a family flask silvered to match.

    An intoxicating scene, in the sense of: This has taken place before, long years before, this surf session in late September. The waves break in patterns of five, every 17 to 20 minutes, generated by an offshore tropical depression. The birders watch, the surfers surf, the duck boat shoots, all drifting together like a symbiotic painting of lore.

    Passports to the Island of Montauk are currently being issued for the summer and fall of 2014. If you are not in possession of a legitimate 2014 passport by May 14 you will be required to leave the island by 8:30 p.m. or sunset. The families, as they exist on Montauk, need peace and quiet, at least at nighttime.

    Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.