Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who wrote “One of Ours,” the longest-standing personal column ever to run in The Star, used to say “the world comes to our door.” That was eons and eons ago (or at least it feels like it to me). Would she still say that — that the world comes to our door? I think she might not. These days, the world is already here . . . if perhaps only on weekends.

    Artists and writers, celebrities of stage and screen, politicians, and other assorted boldface names have been visiting or vacationing here since the 19th century, of course, and I would venture that today the ratio of famous-to-anonymous citizens is greater here than even in New York City. But it is not just celebrities and/or those with millions of followers on Twitter of whom I am thinking when I muse on how worldly we have become: I am thinking of wealth and real estate.

    I read The New York Times Real Estate section on Sundays and The East Hampton Star’s real estate column on Thursdays. They offer can-you-top-this reports of astronomical prices for houses and estates here, as well as apartments in the city. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the South Fork of Long Island has surpassed the island of Manhattan as far as snazzy amenities go.

    How many of even the most lavish New York apartments boast squash or basketball courts? Some duplexes or penthouses may come with their own interior elevators, but I don’t think you will find a single one that comes equipped with an electrical lift for multiple cars.

    What bugs me most about these manifestations of excess is that we have come to take most of them for granted. No longer do double swimming pools — one indoor, one outdoor — seem notable. Private home movie theaters no longer raise eyebrows. Wine cellars, multiple kitchens, and tennis courts are a dime a dozen.

    Despite all this conspicuous consumption, the demographic differences between the city and what used to be called the country remain profound, however. It is said that New York City is inexorably becoming home to only the rich and the poor. Here, we certainly have the rich and the richer than rich, but there is still a large and thriving middle class community. The middle class is reportedly being driven out of the city by the gentrification of manufacturing neighborhoods and old working class neighborhoods — even in the outer boroughs — and by an expanding number of condos with prices starting in eight figures.

    I guess that in some ways, at least comparatively, we are still country. Country and proud, as the honky-tonk singers might say. When second-home owners and local residents, way back at the end of the 20th century, joined together to fight against overdevelopment and for the environment, they preserved hundreds and hundreds of acres for us all. So today, if you squint, you can still enjoy the vista of a farm field here and there. Our beaches still look exactly as they did before the original colonists arrived (if you go there at dawn, anyway, before the party buses disgorge their drunken marauders).

    When my kids were little and we hit the Long Island Expressway for a rare family trip into the city, they would hold their noses and breathe through their mouths as the station wagon emerged from the Midtown Tunnel, loudly insisting that all the garbage on the streets made the place stink. The city has cleaned up its act since the 1970s, but East Hampton still has infinitely better air. Spring will be here soon, and when the lilacs come, I will breathe in their scent and pretend I’ve never seen a McMansion with a turret, pretend the world is still a world away.

    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.

    No more whistling in the dark, the winter’s over. I’ve decreed it. Nothing but blue skies from now on.

    There will be a medal-conferring ceremony at Hook Mill for all those who stayed, the date and time to be announced.

    Saturday morning I went about singing, “I feel worthy, oh so worthy / I feel worthy and nervy and wry / And I pity / Anybody who hasn’t suffered as have I.”

    “Isn’t it a wonderful day?” everyone was saying, no matter if you knew them or not. We had awakened, finally, and the hope for better things — less snow, more light being high on the list — was in the air.

    All of a sudden, it seemed as if the sun and we again were in sync, that all would be well. You could feel it at the ice rink, you could feel it at the beach, wherever you went.

    And perhaps it was fitting too, in my case, that I had a few days before finished “The Divine Comedy,” which I’d put down weeks before, midway through Paradise.

    “So what happened?” said Mary.

    “He saw God, the light,” I said. “And, the great thing, it made sense! It’s too bad it doesn’t altogether make sense for us. . . .”

    “But you’ve always said we’re moving toward the light, remember, like the plants. So, we’ll just have to continue carrying on.”

    “Carrying on — a capital idea. Margaritas tonight!”

    In addition to the sun and the beauty that surrounds us — yes, even when it’s snowing again and we’re leaning in toward the fire — there is also the sense that here we’re blessed — even though we know that the gift of life is mixed, that there’s suffering and beauty, anguish and grace, sorrow and joy, debasement and transcendence.

    So, let’s hear it for spring. May there be a spring in your step. And may there be charity toward all.

    (Of course, if it’s snowing today, I take it all back.)

    I played lacrosse when sticks were made of wood, gut, and rawhide. During the three years I played for Colgate we scrimmaged with Syracuse University several times during the season. We did well against them, although they were in a more challenging league.

    I remember those scrimmages well, mostly because of the Doctors, three brothers from the Onondaga Indian Reservation who dominated much of the Syracuse attack. My father grew up playing lacrosse with Indians from the Onondaga Reservation. The Valley Academy where he attended high school recruited Indians for the lacrosse team and that was in the 1920s. S.U. offered lacrosse scholarships to Onondagas when my dad played midfield for the team in the early ’30s, and continued to recruit them in the late ’60s when I faced the Doctor brothers on the field of play. I still have the stick that a man from the reservation made for my father.

    Although lacrosse is much the same basic game as soccer, it is more warlike, perhaps because the players are wielding sticks and firing hard rubber balls at high, bruising speeds.

    What I remember most about those scrimmages was the sense that to the Doctors, lacrosse was more than a game. For lack of a better word, they were ferocious, excellent stick handlers, and hard hitters. Sadly, their father, who attended every home game and scrimmage, had to be led from the stands on one occasion due to his alcohol-fueled harangue.

    My mother grew up on an apple farm in Nedrow, N.Y., just outside the Onondaga Reservation. As a boy, I passed through it on many occasions. Like most reservations, it was a poor place with problems. But, central to the reservation community was the box lacrosse stadium comprising wooden bleachers from which fans watched the action in the “box,” a small field surrounded by plywood boards like a hockey rink. Box lacrosse is big among Indian tribes in the northern U.S. and Canada, and it’s where kids on the reservations learn their stick-handling skills.

    A front-page story in The Times on Sunday featured the Thompson brothers, Lyle and Miles, who grew up on the Onondaga Reservation. They are breaking N.C.A.A. scoring records while playing for SUNY Albany, and they have sparked a return to the recruitment of Indian players. Last year, in his sophomore season, Lyle Thompson scored 50 goals and had 63 assists. His older brother, Miles, scored 44 goals.

    Such has been the trajectory of modern lacrosse that a Native American has never won the Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse’s Heisman Trophy. Until recently, college play has been dominated by high school players coming out of relatively well-to-do communities on western Long Island, in Baltimore, and from private schools in the Northeast.

    I remember tying feathers onto the rawhide strings that tightened the pocket of our wooden sticks, and I remember it was not comfortable fighting for a loose ball with one of the Doctors. I’m sure our goalie can still feel the impact of their shots. I will never forget their father’s pride, and his humiliation.

    I’m glad I witnessed the warrior roots of the game, and I’m happy the Thompsons are doing the Onondagas proud.

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer for The Star.

    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.

    Here at The Star, we have a rule about using foul language or problematic material in print: It is okay as long as there is solid justification. This means that profanity is justified if, for example, an elected official drops an f-bomb or other offensive term on someone or something in a public meeting. If it were a gratuitous aside that neither advanced the story nor exposed the official’s antagonistic personality, there would be no reason to use it.

    Rules and standards about human behavior are not infallible, however; what may seem like no big thing to one person or editor may appear beyond the pale to another. It is a matter of judgment, perspective, and what may or may not also have been competing for attention at the time. Sometimes things get in the paper that shouldn’t. That’s the nature of a publication such as ours that generates volumes of news and opinion with a small staff.

    This is not to excuse something that appeared in The Star recently, which at least two readers got in touch with me about. They were rightly outraged by a column written by our Montauk correspondent, Janis Hewitt, which appeared to downplay offensive statements by a figure who appears on television’s “Duck Dynasty.” I regret printing the column and apologize for it now.

    In January, the show’s Phil Robertson made overtly racist and homophobic statements in a magazine interview. (For the curious, they appear in a letter from Matthew Belmont in this week’s edition.) The cable network that runs the program briefly suspended him after a public outcry, but the show has now gone on to a fifth season.

    Janis told me that she had not intended to minimize what Mr. Robertson had said and that she was sorry to have given that impression.

    Because I had not actually heard or read Mr. Robertson’s ranting words, the truth is I am not at all sure that I would have noticed how offensive the column might be. One person on our production staff, who was familiar with what he had said, told me after the fact that she had read the column before it was published and was taken aback. She could not say why she had not brought it to my attention, and I asked her to be sure to speak up in the future.

    It’s too bad Southampton turned down our athletic director’s proposal that it and East Hampton combine forces in football. It would have been fun to root for the Marinackers, perhaps under their lights on some Friday or Saturday nights.

    It is said that the Mariners demurred because they didn’t want to lose their identity, nor did they want to move up from Division IV to the more atavistic Division III. East Hampton, faced with fielding a tiny squad of 20, was less narcissistic, more willing to mix with its ancient foes.

    When, in 1967, the Bonackers came back to town after a rare win over Southampton, the streets, Charlie Whitmore remembers, were lined with cheering well-wishers, hailing the conquering heroes.

    “. . . Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our clamdigger dead!”

    That may be overstating the case just a bit, but still, like Harvard and Yale (my late stepfather periodically recalled, his brow knitting, as if it were exceedingly painful for him to remember, that I had been one of those who had lost in the 1962 Harvard-Yale squash match that Harvard had won 5-4), Michigan and Ohio State, Army and Navy, and — in fond bygone years — the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the South­ampton-East Hampton football rivalry, dating to 1923, is venerable in its antipathy.

    This was a chance to show the world, to light a candle in the darkness. If East Hampton and South­ampton were to have beaten their swords into plowshares, perhaps it would have led to similar detentes elsewhere, even to universal disarmament ultimately. Who knows?

    Having been told a few days before the official announcement that varsity football here was no more — at least for a while — I typed up what I intended to be a rough draft of the story, in anticipation of the news, a draft that I intended to peruse on paper following Monday’s meeting with our A.D., only to find on my return to the office Monday morning that — zap! — it had been put up as it was on our website for all the world to see. You can’t be too careful these days. Next time I have something I write printed out in the production room, I’ll append a caveat urging restraint until I sign off.

    What would have happened if, on my arrival at the high school’s athletic office, Joe Vas had said, “It’s a miracle! After thinking it over some more, Southampton has decided to combine with us!”

    I would have egg on my face then.

    But it would have been great news.

    The summer of 1966, after my sophomore year in college, I went to Europe for 10 weeks. I had read “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Moveable Feast.” My brother, who was seven years my senior, had hitchhiked across the U.S. when he was 19, spent a year in Greece when he was 21, and was working as a journalist in Tokyo in 1966. He was a more proximate role model than Hemingway, but both inspired me to go abroad for the first time. After all, I had inchoate ambitions to be a writer, and I knew writers needed to gather experiences by living fully, even recklessly, if they wanted to amount to anything.  

    Would I run with the bulls in Pamplona? Discuss aesthetics with artists and writers at Cafe Deux Magots? Live La Dolce Vita in Rome? Would I be smart enough to keep my copy of “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” hidden in my suitcase so as not to be “made” as a tourist?

    In the novel “The Ugly American,” which was set in Southeast Asia, aBurmese journalist says, “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious.” The last thing I wanted was to be perceived as an entitled American, especially on a continent only 20 years removed from the devastation of World War II.

    I wanted to blend in, and on my first day in Paris I raised inconspicuousness to an art. I arrived by boat train from London at the Gare du Nord and walked the three miles to the hotel whose name and address my brother had written on a scrap of paper. I had no idea how the Metro worked and wasn’t about to ask. It was a hot day in late June, and I was sheathed in perspiration by the time I arrived at the Hotel Marignan in the Latin Quarter.

    The hotel was full. I asked if I could leave my suitcase behind the desk while I looked for other lodging and, after receiving a grudging yes, I realized I hadn’t eaten since a cold and dispiriting breakfast on the ferry from Folkstone. It was late afternoon. I had taken three years of French in high school and two more in college, and I could read it reasonably well. But suddenly, in Paris, I was afraid to speak the language for fear of making mistakes of grammar and vocabulary that would expose me as a foreigner.

    Finally, footsore after another hour of pounding the pavements of the Latin Quarter, I forced myself to enter a small bar-tabac. A cluster of men in work clothes were drinking pastis and arguing. I summoned my courage and uttered the words I had been rehearsing: “Un sandwich jambon, s’il vous plait.”

    “Pardon?” said the proprietor. I had barely breached a whisper.

    Too self-conscious to wedge myself next to the men at the bar, I took the sandwich with me and was speed-eating it as I walked down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, passing lively cafes and restaurants where Parisians were talking, eating, and drinking. It was a master class in joie de vivre, and I was failing it. Instead I was a voyeur taking furtive bites of a sad and somewhat stale ham sandwich. And suddenly it was there, across the boulevard — Cafe Deux Magots.

    I tossed what was left of my sandwich into a trashcan and crossed the street. To my utter disbelief, I saw Samuel Beckett listening to a bespectacled, gesticulating figure I recognized as Jean-Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir was sullenly smoking a cigarette. I took out my own packet of Gauloises, lit up, and sidled over to their table, cigarette dangling Belmondo-like from my lips. Sartre paused in mid-sentence. De Beauvoir looked me over approvingly. Beckett motioned for me to join them.

    Did I have you for an instant? I doubt it. The fact is, I hurried past the cafe as I hurried past everything, my reflection barely registering in the shop windows. By the time I slunk back to the Hotel Marignan, I was fully aware that I was not and never would be Hemingway, that I would never cut a swath across the continent, leaving beautiful women reeling in my wake, that I would never be the person my brother was.

    It turned out a room at the hotel had become vacant. The young man behind the desk at that hour looked to be my age and spoke perfect English. He was an American, fluent in French, and living close by. When he finished his shift we went to dinner at a cheap restaurant called the Balkan. A couple of American girls who were staying at the hotel soon joined us.

    My month in Paris turned out to be memorable, and my French improved. The rest of the summer had its ups and downs, but I visited the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, Chartres, the Roman Forum — all the places tourists visited, except for the Eiffel Tower, which my brother had years before dismissed as an architectural monstrosity and a cliché.

    Did I have the kind of experiences that summer on which I could build a career as a writer? Let’s put it this way. My senior year, enrolled in a writing workshop, I set my first story in Brittany, where I had hitchhiked after my four weeks in Paris. But the story wasn’t about hitchhiking, or drinking and carousing in the fleshpots of St. Malo, or haunting the ramparts of that old city like a latter-day Chateaubriand. It was, rather, about an insecure 19-year-old and the web of rationalizations he wove to avoid introducing himself to the pretty French girl he saw every day, by herself, at the beach.

    Mark Segal is a writer for The Star.

    Almost by chance, but aware that it was Black History Month, my husband and I went to Shelter Island on Friday night for a program on the history of slavery sponsored by the Shelter Island Library and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. We had been primed by Mac Griswold’s penetrating book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.”

    The Shelter Island Library is small, and the event had not been widely publicized. Nevertheless, it drew an overflowing — and, I must add, multiracial — crowd. We had come to see “Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North,” a film about the slave trade, and to hear a conversation about it.

    The film is relevant to Sylvester Manor (which was farmed by slaves in the colonial era and beyond), but it also underscores something most of us don’t much think about: the complicity of Northerners in the perpetuation of slavery. We tend to forget that Abolitionists were a minority here in the North, and that the good citizens of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states not only dominated the American slave trade but also owned slaves well into the 19th century. Many fine old families made their fortunes on the backs of slaves.

    The film is about the DeWolf family, illustrious and wealthy merchants of Bristol, R.I., who are said to have run the largest slave-trading company in United States history. Katrina Browne, a seventh-generation descendant, was born in Philadelphia, but her background in cultural anthropology and theology drew her to explore the personal as well as national consequences of America’s “peculiar institution.” She directed and wrote the film on a mission to find out, for herself and others, how so many otherwise decent people and respectable organizations either actively participated in the abominable institution of slavery, or looked the other way.

    The film was eight years in the making. Along the way it took the filmmaker and nine other DeWolf descendants to Ghana in West Africa, where they visited dungeons in which those to be sold as chattel were imprisoned, and to Cuba, where the DeWolfs both sold slaves and held many captive on their five plantations at great profit.

    The Triangular Trade, in which the Sylvester family of Sylvester Manor also took part, involved the cultivation of sugar for rum, which was used as currency (with other material goods) to buy Africans, and transport them in horrific conditions through the Middle Passage to the West. As is noted in the documentary, some 11 million people made the passage, a million dying along the way.

    For Ms. Browne, who spoke after the screening, awareness was the first step toward uncovering hidden personal ideas about race and challenging herself and as many others as possible to open their eyes to our shared cultural legacy and begin a process of healing and reconciliation. “I was shocked . . . when I realized that instead of being the exception, the DeWolf family was just the tip of the iceberg of the vast complicity to slavery in New England,” she said in an interview.

    Joining Ms. Browne in the conversation that followed the screening were her brother, Whitney Browne, Georgette Grief-Key, executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society, Peggy King Forde, former director of the New York City African Burial Ground Project, and Sandra Arnold, who, under the auspices of Fordham University, is developing the National Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans. The audience was clearly moved.

    First screened at the Sundance Film Festival, “Traces of the Trade” is available from the Tracing Center, an educational organization pursuing Ms. Browne’s mission.

     There are lessons in this history for all of us. One of the DeWolf descendants makes a particularly insightful remark in the film, saying that he left for the trip to West Africa believing that his ancestors engaged in the slave trade centuries ago simply because that was the way things were done at the time — but that he returned home understanding that they “knew it was evil, but did it anyway.”

    I think Ms. Browne’s idea of challenging ourselves to more frankly acknowledge our nation’s racist history is one all thoughtful people should embrace. And I wonder: Will our own descendants question our own complaisance? Will they wonder at our passive acceptance of today’s lingering, institutionalized racism, and the social injustice that still walks with it hand in hand?

    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.