On Monday this week I awoke — I won’t say like Ebenezer Scrooge — to the awareness that the year was rushing to an end. Two and a half weeks till a new year. . . . And so I hurriedly began getting ready for it.

    The calendar imposes its will. I found myself trying to tie up every possible loose end, from the old white tablecloths and dinner napkins still to be put away after Thanksgiving, to the piles of papers on my desks at home and in the office, to the annual bills to be paid, to (not to mention) the gifts to be purchased and, in some cases, wrapped and carried to the post office before next week. Maybe if I let the more dreary chores go I will have time to get to the cheery ones.

    Last weekend was the climax of what is for me a busy Choral Society season, culminating in an annual brunch and holiday concert. The Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church was packed, as usual, and I can attest to the joy of those of us who took part as performers. This year we played host to three instrumentalists, two French horn players and a violinist, here to augment the South Fork Chamber Orchestra, and the pleasure they take in music infused and elevated our conversations.

    Now I am excited about going first to Nova Scotia to spend Christmas with my daughter and her family, then to hop down to Boston to herald the new year with my husband’s son and his. I am sorry that I will miss the company of my East Hampton and New York City grandchildren at Christmas, but I am lucky to be able to see two of them in dance and theater performances this weekend — one taking the role of Clara in a version of “The Nutracker” and another the fairy godmother in “Cinderella” — and to know we are all headed toward 2014 in good health.

    On Jan. 14, it will be 34 years since Ev Rattray, the father of my children, died, having written that he would leave life with few regrets, one being not living long enough to know grandchildren. Every year I think of our last New Year’s Eve together, when I made him a martini and we tried to celebrate. “It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things,” Dickens wrote, “that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”

    It wasn’t an easy season for me then, and it hasn’t been easy since, but I’ve discovered something about Christmas. I have until recently been among the rare number of singers I know who really do not enjoy carols. I would tell anyone who might happen to ask that this was because I grew up thinking that Christmas was for someone else, not for me.

    Now, though, I’ve come around. Seeking “peace on earth and good will toward men,” which the carols do, is surely a universal sentiment, and I am looking forward to going caroling on the quiet streets of a small Nova Scotia fishing town on Christmas Eve. “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future,” Dickens had his Scrooge say. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

    Little did I know all these months that the school lunch that I was making for one of my daughters was actually feeding someone else’s kid. Not every day, mind you. This has only occurred on those mornings when I felt inspired at the crack of dawn to boil up a pot of penne, toss it with pesto, and spoon it carefully into a Thermos. And, I only learned about it when my daughter  mentioned in passing that her friend had asked why she had stopped bringing in her favorite pasta.

    “You don’t eat your lunch?” I asked.

    “No, well, Liv likes it,” she said.

    There is much that parents cannot know about their kids’ days. This is one of those things. We make the lunches as the sun comes over the morning horizon, then, if we actually remember to grab them from the kitchen counter and we pack the kids off to school, what happens next is largely a mystery.

    I doubt very much that my daughter’s friend’s folks know that I have been occasionally supplementing their daughter’s lunch, and, similarly, I have no clue whose bag my own child is raiding. It is a suitable metaphor for their gradual climb toward adulthood, getting us as parents ready perhaps for the larger separations to come.

    Adelia tells me that most kids don’t care for the cafeteria food at the East Hampton Middle School. On Tuesday, after making her the pasta pesto and then forgetting to put it in the car, I had to go buy something for her and bring it to the front desk.

    I was not alone; there were a half-dozen similar lunches arrayed there by the time I was buzzed in, and a couple of people were coming in with more as I headed back to my truck. When I was a student there in the mid-1970s, I don’t recall that parents ever came with lunches. Of course, back then we walked to school uphill both ways. In the snow. Barefoot.

    In Nelson Mandela and, closer to home, in Lee Hayes we have examples of moral authority, a persistent strength in the face of injustice, made all the more notable for their refusals to succumb to bitterness.

    There are very few humans who exhibit that charity, that superior strength, which can come out of suffering, but which, in many more instances, can result in resignation or a lust for vengeance.

    Mr. Hayes, when I interviewed him years ago, acknowledged that racism had denied him work, following World War II, in the aviation industry, work for which he was impeccably suited, having been a Tuskegee Airman (bombardier, navigator, pilot).

    Though those racist rebuffs obviously stung, he was not deterred, not cowed. “You do what you got to do,” he said. “I tried so many things — ice plant, warehouse, custodial work, carpentry, building, selling life insurance — if I could make a living, I didn’t care what it was.”

    “The timing wasn’t right,” he summed up when I was about to leave. (This was in 1978.) “Black boys and girls now should be prepared . . . I came along too soon.”

    That he was eventually to be celebrated as one of the Tuskegee Airmen — attention that he welcomed, according to his daughter, Karlys, meant, I suppose, that while Lee Hayes may have been born too soon, thankfully he did not die too soon. Justice, long deferred, was accorded him, as it was to Mandela, another dignified man of moral authority who refused to become embittered and who refused to be cowed.

    I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 when the film department there presented a one-week program of the films of Shirley Clarke. Clarke was a well-known independent filmmaker during the 1950s and 1960s, when few women worked in the field. Her first feature, an adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play “The Connection” (1961), won praise for its graphic depiction of drug use, but entangled Clarke in a two-year censorship battle, which she ultimately won.

    Her next film, “The Cool World” (1964), was a film about Harlem teenagers, on which she collaborated with Carl Lee, the African-American star of “The Connection” and Clarke’s long-time partner. Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason” (1967) was a documentary created from a single, 12-hour-long interview with Jason Holliday, a gay African-American hustler and aspiring nightclub performer.

    According to Manohla Dargis, a film critic for The New York Times, “Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.” Clarke was an integral part of the independent film scene then — John Cassavetes borrowed her equipment to shoot “Shadows” and Frederick Wiseman produced “The Cool World” — but while she helped launch the movement in the United States, she has been almost forgotten.

    I met Shirley Clarke because she needed an assistant. Shirley had begun experimenting with video and wanted somebody from the museum to help her set up a live video event for the opening night of the film series. I was acquainted with the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Joan Jonas, who were using video. I had even rented a video recorder and was spellbound by the sight of myself, live, on a television screen — albeit performing mundane household tasks. All of which is to say, I didn’t know much about the medium, but I knew more than anybody else at the museum at that time.

    Shirley was living at the Chelsea Hotel, in a high-ceilinged, triangular aerie that became known among artists as the Tee Pee. I began to visit her there to discuss her performance and how to realize it, and she would often telephone me at home and talk for hours. I remember few specifics except that I mostly listened and she mostly talked. But she was charismatic, accomplished, outspoken, and sexy, sporting a derby hat, suede miniskirt, and tights on a petite frame. I had been drawn into the orbit of somebody famous — and attractive.

    I was only 24 at the time, and she was 51. It never occurred to me this older, much more sophisticated woman would have any interest in me other than as a helper and, as far as I know, she never did. But she kept calling and inviting me over, and my wife at that time wasn’t happy about it.

    Earlier that year, Shirley had been arrested with Viva, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars, for filming an apartment building with a collapsed wall. She used what was a profound innovation at the time, the Sony Portapak, a half-inch reel-to-reel video recorder that could be slung over the shoulder.

    Shirley asked me if I would document her and Viva’s trip to court to contest the trespassing charge. I was very naïve at the time. I sensed it was a great opportunity, and I had a vague ambition to make films myself. Would the next step be an invitation to Warhol’s Factory, perhaps to shoot a video with Edie Sedgwick, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling?

    I met Shirley and Viva at the Chelsea. I put the deck over my shoulder, hoisted the video camera, and began taping outside the hotel, where a limousine was waiting. I climbed in after them and shot the trip from Chelsea to Foley Square, which was uneventful, except for the constant chatter between Viva and Shirley.

    As we were entering the courthouse, a security guard asked me to turn off the recorder. That was when I discovered I had never turned it on! Shirley and Viva disappeared into the building, I left the video equipment with the limo driver and slunk home. My dreams of superstardom were shattered, my days of socializing with celebrities finished. Shirley stopped calling. I did assist at the performance, but after that I never saw her again.

    Milestone Films has established a website, projectshirley.com, that aims to rescue Shirley Clarke from history’s wayside. She deserves rediscovery.

    Mark Segal is a writer at The East Hampton Star.

    If federal sharpshooters show up here and pick off some deer, they won’t be acting on my behalf even though a resident deer family devoured the Christmas cactuses that were outside for the summer. The cactuses had gone out and in for years, flowering for Christmas, so I’m particularly aware of their loss this week. If I had known how hungry the deer were going to be, I might have been more watchful. Four small cactuses of the variety that blooms nearer Thanksgiving have taken their place, but they’re scanty substitutes.

    East Hamptoners of a certain age remember the large south-facing window  full of blooming cactuses at the Star Cleaners on Newtown Lane, where the James Perse men’s shop is today. The cleaners was not connected to this newspaper (except, come to think of it, it was run by family cousins), although we latched onto the metal outdoor letters spelling STAR when it went out of business. Our cactuses were never as gorgeous. I suppose the dining room, where they sat on a wide shelf under the windows, couldn’t compete in hours of sunlight, or in humidity.

    Not only did the deer lay waste to the cactuses, they also went after the rose bushes scattered about — the shipwreck rose, the David Austin, and the Bonica. It’s my own fault for failing to surround them with chicken wire. I mean, if you need to gird your roses with a protective screen, what’s the point?

    But the deer left me one consolation: They didn’t touch the huge jade that goes into the yard every summer and, this year,  is flowering. This plant, which has borne many offspring, must be at least 40 years old. It is an offshoot itself of a jade that continues to thrive in the Amagansett Rattray household. It grew too large for the sun porch here in the house, so I gave it a place of honor in one of the Star’s front windows. Now decorated with iridescent ornamental balls, it looks lovely and waits to catch the sun.

    A wildlife ecologist with the Humane Society of the United States, Laura Simon, was quoted in a story in The Star on Dec. 5 predicting that culling the deer population would be ineffective. She cited what she called a “bounceback effect” — an increase in fertility following population decrease.

    “Deer will have twins and triplets after their numbers have been reduced . . . and then their numbers will pop right back up.” She also said it was false hope to think eliminating some of the population would help decrease the incidence of Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses.

    “This is a multi-host tick. It’s on birds, small mammals, large mammals.” Mice and chipmunks, Ms. Simon said, are the primary hosts of larval ticks. “We’re not seeing this as an effective tactic anywhere, unless Long Island is planning to kill all its songbirds, raccoons, shrews, even salamanders. Unless they’re going to declare war on all wildlife, you’re not going to see a result from killing deer. It’s deceiving to people.”

    This comes as something of a revelation, I think, after all these years of blaming the deer.

    By the way, if anyone is interested, I’ve asked Santa to bring me some new Christmas cactuses, with the promise that I’ll protect them next year. I’d like them to live long enough to be handed down to the next generation, as mine were.

    If all went well, we’re in San Pancho, Mexico, now, having escaped Christmas, for the first time ever.

    She remonstrated a bit when I told her a few days before we left that I’d gotten her a present (a gold hummingbird pin). I had seen it advertised in The New Yorker after we’d seen a jaw-dropping documentary on these extraordinary birds.

    I wasn’t supposed to do that, she said; our trip was to serve as our Christmas present to each other. And indeed it has, though I told her (with tongue in cheek, of course) that I considered as her gift to me the fact that she’d footed the bill for my root canal.

    I doubt, though, that you can ever escape Christmas — the message, of course, to wit, that a miraculously conceived baby was sent to save us is wonderful, but that consolatory vision (even though we know it ends badly) has long ago given way to the demands of modern-day consumerism, mandatory cheer, and to, perhaps in some instances, momentary cease-fires from wars whose killing will begin again in earnest on the morrow.

    “All you need is love,” the Beatles said. “All there is is love,” Virgil, and Dante, whom he guided, said, pointing out that everything good as well as everything bad stem from love (the bad things stemming from its misapplications).

    The general idea being that it is better to live temperately and contemplatively rather than to be enslaved by one’s appetites, and better to love others than to wish evil upon them or to actually do them evil.

    Not that any of us pay any attention (nor did they much in Dante’s time either). Though if you wanted to trim Christmas’s “message” down to temperance and compassion, that would, it seems to me, serve pretty well.

    But that wouldn’t be life as we know (and certainly to some extent enjoy) it.

    Give me the variety, but not the carnage. That would be my Christmas wish.

    And speaking of violence (only the vicarious kind, of course), we won’t miss any big football games while escaping from Christmas, will we?   

    Leo the pig has hit what appears to be his adolescence — constantly leaving a mess on the floor and trying to carve out a little space of his own just to be left alone.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the story of our pet house-pig, let me explain that he joined our family over my most strident objections. My wife, Lisa, and elder daughter, Adelia, had fallen for what appeared to be an online con, a Texas breeder who claimed that it would weigh no more than 10 pounds as an adult. Don’t ask how much he cost us or to ship by air.

    More than once I said if we got a pig, I would move out to the shed.

    “Fine,” Lisa and Adelia said.

    Oh, he was cute when he arrived, all pink and tiny and seeking warmth under our chins. I said they were crazy and warned that he would ultimately be about the size of our Lab mix dog, albeit with stubbier legs. Now, at about 2 years old, he weighs more than 30 pounds — all muscle and determination — and he still wants to cuddle up under our chins.

    As such things often go, Leo has become more or less my pet, or to be more precise, my problem. Lisa wanted to send him back for a refund; Adelia is entirely indifferent. I find him interesting and amusing.

    Since I get up well before the rest of the household, it is I who puts him out in the morning, and it is I who makes his breakfast while fending off his aggressive nuzzling of my ankles. If I am not fast enough, he makes his displeasure known by knocking over the antique kitchen chairs; already one has been taken away for repair. He is not much put off by shots from a spray-bottle, which we keep handy. Often my first words of the day are, “Leo, cut it.” Well, perhaps with a bit more profanity.

    Just this week, the beast took to tearing up The Sunday Times with his hooves, then pushing the shreds into his dog bed by the radiator and nestling down amid it all. Midday on Monday, my wife sent a phone photo; Leo had curled up for a nap inside his recently cleaned litter box.

    Shortly thereafter, Lisa was headed for Bridgehampton. I said she should get him a room of his own, or at least swing by Agway to look for a nicer bed.

    As it neared 8:30 p.m. on a recent Sunday night, Mary and I, as is our wont these days, talked of the time that remains to us, and she wondered, in that connection, what places I might really like to see and what things I might really want to do.

    “What do I really want to do now? Or in the future?” I said.

    “Both,” she said, “but let’s begin with now.”

    “As for now, rather than look at the big picture, I’d really like to watch the Steelers game!” I said.

    I don’t think it was quite the answer she’d expected, but, without a moment’s hesitation, she said — cheerily, I might add — “Let’s watch the Steelers game then.”

    And so we did — she intermittently, I transfixedly — and it was wonderful. Before the first quarter was over, the Steelers led 21-0, if memory serves, the most points the Bengals had given up in a quarter since Ought 5, or something like that.

    Really, if it weren’t for a couple of plays gone awry this season, the Steelers would be in contention for the Super Bowl again, though perhaps it’s good not to get fat and happy fan-wise, immune to the vagaries of life, whether of the sporting or of the real variety.

    One should remain on one’s toes, on the edge of one’s seat, as a poet said recently on these pages. Pretty soon it’ll be over and you won’t have seen Paree. Not to mention Mastic.

    “Well, I would like to go to Florence and stay in the inn they’ve made of Guido Cavalcanti’s home up on the hill, the Tower of the Beautiful View,” I said.

    “And Mom always said I should see Venice,” said Mary.

    Mention of Venice got me to thinking of the  root canal I’d just undergone. And of life’s exigencies. And so I assured her we’d go to Venice soon, but added that for now the only place I really wanted to go — since it was halftime and I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer —  was to bed.

    Air travel is a conundrum, at once wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful to travel so far so quickly, but terrible to have to leap over all the hurdles it throws in your way.

    (By the way, if our family friend Maria Matthiessen is reading this, I warn her that she should stop right here: I’m about to engage in a binge of what she calls “route talk.” And if you don’t get that reference, I refer you to a recent episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” about the five topics that without fail make conversations boring.)

    After Christmas in Nova Scotia, my husband and I hopped, skipped, and jumped down to Massachusetts for New Year’s. Although we encountered no ice storms, no canceled flights, and no geese on the runway, we almost missed our connection in Toronto. I don’t think we would have made it to Boston at all if my husband hadn’t used a wheelchair when we transferred planes.

    The modern airport can be like an obstacle course you’d see in a movie about military training, can’t it? It really isn’t a user-friendly space. Not everyone is able-bodied enough to hike the long distances between gates and security checkpoints; and not all airports have people-mover conveyer belts or carts to take the tired, the lame, or the aged from one holding pen or line to another. Airport navigation is about the only circumstance I can think of that can make a person feel grateful for being reliant on a wheelchair (though I guess athletes who participate in wheelchair races probably consider that sport to be another upside).

    As is so often the case, our flight was a half hour late arriving from Halifax into Toronto, and after we landed — “deplaned,” to use the lingo — we had to move like Ethiopian middle-distance runners to catch the connecting leg to Boston. Three different airline assistants moved us to the front of lines when we went through security (for the second time that day) and then United States customs.

    We arrived at the departure gate with frazzled smiles on our faces, just as boarding was announced for “those traveling with children or needing assistance.” Since there were only a few daily scheduled flights that would have gotten us down to New England on Canada Air, I felt certain the wheelchair had spared us a night in Toronto.

    Some time ago, a woman of a certain age whom I barely know confessed that she was in the habit of requesting a wheelchair in airports even though she didn’t really need one. Perhaps guilt loosened her tongue, but who knows? Maybe she was bragging about her wiles. I myself shoot dark looks at those drivers I sometimes see parking in places reserved for the handicapped, ever watchful because my husband has, and needs, a handicapped tag. I don’t believe in taking advantage of it when I am alone in the car.

    Our trip from Nova Scotia to Boston took 14 and a half hours, a little longer than a nonstop to Beijing or Dubai. Looking at a map, I think we might have rowed the 300 or so miles across the Gulf of Maine in better time.

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, all is forgiven!

    This strange sequence of words was like a whisper in my ear as I trudged along the partially plowed sidewalk on Main Street ’round about midnight on Saturday, still blissfully unaware of the incoming polar vortex and its ruthlessly frigid Arctic air. A whisper, or perhaps the wind. Come back, Stephen Talkhouse.

    The Talkhouse — the establishment, not the man — where I spent an awful lot of hours (and a couple awful hours) over the last 12 months — for professional reasons, of course, mostly — is closed until March. As some of its principals and crew headed to Florida for a Soldier Ride benefit, the nearest watering hole/concert hall/community house to my little apartment was suddenly inoperative. The long holiday season is over, the wind whispered, and the deep freeze is on. Get out while you can.

    I still remember the feeling when Labor Day came to Montauk, and the lines at Gosman’s Clam Bar, where I worked many a summer, grew shorter with the daylight. I remember the subtly shifting hues of the September sky and sea. I can still recall the yearning in a local man’s voice as he noted, almost 30 years ago, the mass exodus from the South Fork at summer’s end. “Back to the city,” he said wistfully. “And you wish you could go with them.”

    After childhood as a year-round resident of Montauk, I used to do just that, clearing out well ahead of Columbus Day. Then I lived in the city year round, and as time passed spent less and less time here. From the outset, the summers in New York were horrible, intolerable, and eventually I couldn’t bear the thought of another, and here I am again.

    Into a second winter in Amagansett, I’ve experienced two summers of the Fabulous Hamptons like I’d never known them before. We all know of the crowds, the traffic. Surely we can all recount all-too-true tales of rude and ostentatious behavior, inconceivable self-regard. Noise, litter, and nowhere to park. Much like New York. . . .

    Yeah, it’s a lot nicer here without all that. The Reutershan parking lot is more accommodating without the Ferrari positioned, by design, to occupy two parking spaces. But these are the desolate days, and April seems a long way from here.

    At the Talkhouse, there was live music. There was recorded music. There were familiar faces, friends, and fun. And now there isn’t.

    So I had to stop in on Saturday. I had to get one more impression, one that would have to last a while.

    It had been a good year at the Talkhouse. I’d seen and heard plenty of great artists, and met and interviewed quite a few of them too. I was recruited to work the merchandise table for a couple acts and made a few extra dollars in the process. I’d performed there a few times with my band, the Hot Pockets, and introduced the indescribably perfect tribute band Lez Zeppelin at their second show of the summer.

    And on Aug. 15, ’–round about midnight, ragged from multiple jobs and just back from an East-Hampton-to-Queens-to-East-Hampton sprint in The Star’s embattled van, I’d had a brief but exhilarating chat with Sir Paul McCartney, as Jimmy Buffett and Angelica Huston stood nearby. How often does that happen?

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, wherever you are.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.