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.

    Midnight was the first. He was a big, tough tom, jet-black with just a couple of white hairs on his throat, a “witches cat.”

    We did not adopt him; he adopted us. I was 3 or 4. We were living in West Hempstead. My mother went into my parents’ bedroom. There was a black sweater on the bed that began moving. My mother screamed. Knowing Midnight, he probably didn’t even blink.

    My parents put him outside; he came back in. He quickly became a McMorrow.

    With me being about 4, and my sister Beth being 6, there was a certain amount of teasing that took place, but only a certain amount. Midnight had claws, and he knew how to use them. If he was particularly unhappy with something you did, he would chase you.

    He was always an outdoor cat, even when we moved into an apartment in Forest Hills Gardens. He was a terror for the birds, particularly in his younger, West Hempstead days. A neighbor complained to my parents about his killing birds, as if there was anything they could do about it.

    He lived a long life. I was a teenager when he died. He just fell down one day and went into convulsions. My friend gave me a lift in his Camaro to the vet, who told me the animal had to be put to sleep. I watched him stick the needle in. The animal’s quivering stopped. He was dead.

    The body wrapped in a blanket, we got into the Camaro, and went back to the apartment. It was dead of winter. The ground in the backyard was frozen, except by the window to the boiler room. I dug a hole, lined it with pine branches, and placed Midnight inside.

    At the vet clinic, they had made a plastic identity card for Midnight. They card said that he was a female. Since it was a one-time visit, I didn’t care, until I buried him.

    I looked at the card. It said female, but it also said his name, all caps, raised plastic letters. “MIDNIGHT.” The card went into the ground with the cat.

    Before Midnight died, I’d gotten into the habit of bringing strays home. Usually kittens others didn’t want.

    Two were males, Skeezix and Camilo. Both of them died the same death. My parents had them put to sleep because they both suffered from blockages of the urethra. It happens sometimes to male cats. After neutering, crystals in the urine clog up the canal. It can be treated, but it also can become chronic, as it did in both cats.

    Since then, I have always delayed castrating male cats, as long as possible. I don’t know if it is scientifically true, but I’d rather err on the side of caution.

    Skeezix and Camilo were not buried. They just never came back from the hospital.

    Layla was the runt of a litter. Jet black, and tiny. As with all our other cats in Forest Hills, she would go outside. We had a first-floor apartment, and the cats would get to the backyard by jumping out onto a small roof that led to stairs to the yard.

    One day, Layla came back pregnant. She had one kitten. It was born blind. It was put to sleep and Layla was spayed. She ended up living first with Beth, then with my other sister, Cathy.

    Pooh, an orange cat in a tabby pattern, was next. He followed me home one night, and ended up with Cathy in her 91st Street apartment in the city, until she moved to Arizona, when Pooh moved in with me in my apartment on 19th Street.

    He was the exact opposite of Midnight. Exceedingly docile, he loved to be handled. I could pick him up and drape him around my neck like a collar and he would purr.

    When my wife, Carole, moved in with me, she was an actress, working steadily in musicals. She would put a show tune on the stereo and begin to sing. Pooh would race around the apartment in a kind of gleeful frenzy.

    He lived a long life. The end came in about 1989. I was working as a manager at Bouley. Carole went home to Michigan to visit her family. Pooh suddenly became ill. I took him to the vet. It was a sort of overall organ failure. He still was functioning, but barely. They gave me drugs to give him, which I did.

    The animal was barely moving, except to occasionally drink from a water bowl I’d placed next to him.

    He would stare at me with that peaceful, dopey stare cats have.

    Bouley was a tough job, long hours. I gave the cat his drugs in the morning, and went to work. In the evening, I would come home. The cat hadn’t moved. A couple of days of that and I decided, after leaving the cat alone one morning, that I was going to take him to the vet that evening and have him put to sleep.

    I never made that trip. Pooh was dead when I came home. I put his body in a towel, at the bottom of a canvas tote bag, along with a trowel and his toys. I took the subway to 96th Street, and walked into Central Park. It was a nice evening, and even the Uptown part of the park was busy.

    I found a secluded spot, dug a hole by a bench, buried him with his toys, and took the subway home.

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

    The conventional wisdom, as usual, is right: Being a grandparent really is wonderful.

    Almost nothing could have pleas­ed me more as the holidays came on than to see several of my grandchildren in performances. So far we have enjoyed two onstage, and two in make-believe shows at home. My husband and I have 12 grandchildren between us, but because they don’t all live nearby, we look forward to trips hither and yon for catching up.

    Here at home, Adelia had a star turn as Claire — otherwise known as Clara — in “Mixed Nuts,” the Studio 3 version of “The Nutcracker”; Evvy was a splendid Fairy Godmother in “Cinderella” at school. In Nova Scotia, where we are spending Christmas, Teddy and Nettie modeled their incredible collection of costumes as they put on a living-room performance for us, taking the parts of bad pirate (armed with cutlass) and regal princess (armed with concealed Nerf gun) in an improvised melodrama. Nettie and Teddy also treated us last night to sing-along renditions, in the sweetest voices a grandparent could hope for, of Christmas classics: “Oh, Christmas Tree,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “The Huron Carol.”

    Nettie also sang along with bouncy spirit to an oddly entertaining YouTube animated video call­ed “The Duck Story.” Now, I don’t think every grandparent or parent would care about this silly ditty, but I have to admit I loved it: An impertinent duck walks up to a lemonade stand and asks for grapes (“Got any grapes?” a refrain made more charming by Nettie’s slight lisp), then waddles away . . . over and over. The conventional wisdom is that being around the young keeps you young, so maybe that is why I was almost as taken with this repetitive little bit of nonsense as my 6-year-old granddaughter. Hurray for kids who like to sing!

    Of course, the holidays are about your friends’ families, too. One of our oldest and dearest revived her annual Christmas party this month after a two-year hiatus, and it was like an early Christmas present to us all. When my own kids were young, we saw this family all the time, for beach picnics and winter holidays and kids’ pool parties, and we share deep memories of Christmases spent together over the years. What a delight to meet again the host’s nearly grown (and very charming) grandchildren and learn where their young lives have led them so far, to college and other adventures.

    We are headed back to the States in a few days to share New Year’s near Boston with another branch of the family. Seeing our two Massachusetts grandchildren will cap off the season. The conventional wisdom, once again, is that aging isn’t for sissies, but this time I think there is something better to say: Aging can be a time of joy.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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?   

    Dear Santa,

    Please say it isn’t true. Assure us that you and your reindeer-driven sleigh will not be replaced by octocoptor drones dropping packages down our chimneys. We’d miss your rosy red cheeks, long white beard, and belly that shakes when you laugh like a bowl full of jelly. Will we soon have to leave batteries out for you instead of cookies on Christmas Eve?

    Something must be done to stop these computer geeks who keep coming up with the technical ideas that are slowly ruining the human race and pushing us out of jobs. When Jeff Bozo, I mean Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon, announced the company’s latest plan to make more money by creating flying drones that could deliver packages, I couldn’t help but wonder if these uber-rich 1-percenters of the human population realize what they’re doing to us by replacing jobs done by real people with their latest toys.

    But then I realized, Santa, that you, too, could soon be a goner. And that was thelast straw. I realized it was time for me to get up on my bully pulpit.

    So what, now we’ll have no more U.P.S. guys? C’mon, some of them with their cute little shorts are a welcoming knock on the door. Checkout people in quite a few of the big stores are already gone, replaced by computerized scanners, and though some of them weren’t the nicest people, it was still better than trying to swipe a code that is often hard to find. And the poor bookstore owners. Well, they’ve been dropping like drones for the last few years anyway.

    Though I love my little computer, its family members have been wreaking havoc on the entire world. The post office is suffering, banks are closing, and television viewing is costing as much as a mortgage payment. And the powers that be are wondering why we haven’t come out of the recession. There’s hardly any jobs left for real people to do, that’s why.

    Boy, did the creator of “The Jetsons” have foresight or what? Can you imagine how many accidents will be caused by drones flying through the air? At times, highly trained air-traffic controllers can’t even keep everything straight. And then there are the crazies who will think it’s funny to shoot at the flying drones, which will also make perfect target practice. We’ll have shotgun blasts coming from every which way.

    I’m sure robots will be the next big thing. They’ll clean our houses, stock store shelves, walk up to our tables in restaurants, menus posted on their bellies, and we’ll have to punch in what we want to order. Once restaurant workers are no longer needed, then the economy will really nosedive.

    And when the robot malfunctions, then what? There’ll be no waitstaff, and the restaurants will have to close. We’ll all be digging through Dumpsters searching for a meal. Well, not all of us, the 1-percenters will be the only ones with enough money to buy real food.

    And so, Santa, I’m asking for your help. My wish for Christmas is for those in the tech world to take a minute and realize what they’re doing to us. All I’m asking for, Santa, is for you to help save the human race; some of us are really worth saving.

    And while you’re still around a little cash in my stocking would be nice too.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.