Cold weather has put an end to what perhaps was a fool’s errand on my part. Sometime in mid-fall on a balmy weekend afternoon, I decided to start restoring our distinctly mid-century, divided-light casement windows.

    My attention turned first to the sets along the walk from our driveway. To describe the paint as peeling would be generous; only paint and glazing putty remained in some places. It had been a score of years or more since the windows had seen any attention, and when we had the house reshingled and the trim redone a while ago, the painters did not bother with the windows, assuming, as their foreman told me, that we planned to replace them.

    But, with three kids and plenty of other things to spend money on, the windows lagged. Moisture crept in, and it lingered between the divided lights and the interior storm panel. The insulating capacity was near to nil when a wind came up. And just as bad, they looked like hell, greeting visitors with a disheveled hello.

    One of these days, we hope to start on a major renovation, perhaps changing the interior layout of the house, maybe even moving the master bedroom, opening up the kitchen, and during the process, replacing the windows. Until then, I figured, it did not make much sense other than to try to get them back in shape.

    As it turned out, there is not much to it other than time. First, the sashes have to be taken out of the jambs, and the jambs primed, filled, and painted. Unlike the spongy junk that passes for wood these days, the frames and muntins are still sound. They respond well to sanding and painting and look terrific when this is done.

    The thing is that because of other responsibilities, like running a newspaper and driving kids around, I only work on one or two at a time. But now cold has set in, and the project may have to go into hibernation until spring. No matter, I enjoy the work, though at this rate, I should have all the windows done sometime in 2015, just in time for the renovation to begin, I suspect.

    There are some days when you feel that you’re up to anything, at the top of your game.

    Is it the coffee? I would say yes. I feel confident despite having no particular success to point to — all the leaves I raked and hauled last week are back again. And I know I have yet to achieve a state of grace, all the more marked because I forgot once everyone had come out onto the street following a performance in a Manhattan church last weekend of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Noye’s Fludde,” based on a 15th-century miracle play about Noah’s Ark, to ask where God was so that I could get His autograph.

    Had I the nerve, I would have asked Him also about His promise to Noah that there would be no more floods.

    The opera was performed by an admirable cast most of whose singers, including my 8-year-old granddaughter, were blind. Blessed with perfect pitch, it’s also evident she has a theatric sense inasmuch as she, though one of the mice, commandeered the most prominent position in the prow of the ark on the altar stage.

    Many of the singers were led up the aisle by sighted partners, to applause, for their courage and for their refusal to remain on the sidelines in this game of life, a stance with which we know Maya is fully in accord.

    Her younger sister, Zora, radiates joy, which is said to be a fleeting thing in this world, though it seems to be pretty much of a constant with her. I hope it always will be, and I imagine the music Maya may make now and in the future will bring joy not only to her but to others, to wit, that because of her courage she will triumph.

    “Making music in community is a powerful way that we are formed as human beings,” the organist, Paul Vasile, said in the program. “Through the experience of participating in a band or orchestra, through choral or chamber music, we are invited into a heightened awareness of others, to deeper listening, to be fully present to the possibility of the moment.”

    To be fully present to the possibility of the moment, to listen so well, could well be a precursor to joy, which perhaps is more fully expressed in concert with one another, as the organist said, rather than limited to the confines of one’s caffeinated self.

    Joy can be experienced rather frequently, I think, in those moments when you’re of a generous spirit and not weighed down by overweening pride — when you feel both bold and connected. I wish courage and joy, then, for both girls, since coffee cannot be depended on in every instance.

    They say as a woman ages the first thing to go is her body. With me, though, it was my teeth; the body went second. For the past few years my teeth have been breaking down and falling out. But my smile, and it’s a big one, has been beautifully restored thanks to my new dentist in Southampton. I’ll be offering my thanks to him tomorrow when I chomp down on that traditional turkey dinner, celery and all.

    Except for the fact that I’m white and not as funny, I was beginning to look like Moms Mabley, the comedian who used her toothless smile as part of her act. My smile has a life of its own. Under the worst circumstances my teeth would just burst forth and make their presence known, sometimes in a very inappropriate manner.

    I believe the condition of your teeth is a genetic trait, which didn’t bode well for me. Both my grandmothers, grandfather, my aunt, and some cousins all had false teeth. Mind you, my new teeth are not false; they’ve been restored. If my choice was to get false teeth I think I would have chosen to look more like Moms. My grandfather used to make us kids laugh like crazy when he took his teeth out and made jokes or chased us around chomping his toothless gums. But it was really creepy going into my grandparents’ bathroom and seeing their teeth in a jar. I tried to avoid looking at them for fear that they’d start chatting away with me while I was doing my business.

    When we were younger, my sister and I were the only ones who had to drink milk at the beach to protect our teeth, according to our mother. While everyone else was sipping bubbly soda, we were spitting out warm milk into the salty water. We’re probably the cause of the polluted water in the Long Island Sound off City Island in the Bronx where we grew up.

    It’s odd that our teeth are so troublesome. My mother was very conscious of taking us to our dentist, who lived over an hour away from us and practiced from his home office in a beautiful area of Westchester County. He was a nice man but a torturer. Even though we let her know how much he hurt us and how much we hated him for that, she still piled us into the car for our monthly (sometimes weekly) trips to the good ol’ torturer.

    Putting it in perspective, I think maybe she had a crush on him. While we were shaking with fear in the examination room, she was probably flashing some leg to him in the waiting room. And she was a professional dancer so she had good legs. My mother’s legs and God knows what else probably distracted him while he was working on us. She was a flirt, my Mom. That’s the only reason I can think of for the pain this nice man inflicted on us adorable little children.

    Because of his painful treatments, we resisted going to the dentist in our adult years and of course we’re paying for it now, literally. No matter how expensive your clothes or how beautiful you might be, if you have bad teeth, nothing else matters. But the beauty here is that I’ve found a fairly young and very advanced dentist who does it all — root canals, extractions — and except for the initial numbing injections, the work was pain-free.

    I got very good at smiling with my mouth closed because I was so embarrassed when my teeth started going. But that was really hard because I do have a big smile and I can’t always control it. I came up with all kinds of tactics to hide my teeth, including wrapping my scarves higher on my neck to cover my mouth in case I met someone I had to talk to. But no more. I’m giddy with my restored teeth. And the timing is perfect as Thanksgiving is a time to spend with others. I’ll not only be smiling, I’ll be drinking bubby soda. Hell, it’s a holiday, I might even be drinking a bubbly beer and eating a crusty wing, my favorite part of the turkey!

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

    The talk of Montauk last week was that Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News political commentator and best-selling author, had come to town. Not only was it news that he had bought a spectacular property on the oceanfront, but that he had torn down two small houses that longtime Montaukers considered part of the community’s heritage.

    The first of the two houses was a summer bungalow built by James and Kathryn Abbe during World War II, using traditional materials — in amounts limited by wartime rationing — supplemented by beams and flooring scavenged from old East End buildings that were being taken down at the time, including the house of East Hampton’s famous early American craftsmen, the Dominys. (The second of the Abbes’ tiny houses was put up for their children in 1957.)

    Theresa Eurell of Town & Country Real Estate had the exclusive $8.5 million listing when the property, on a 42-foot-high bluff, was advertised for sale in the spring. Mr. O’Reilly was reported to have been looking only for a summer rental when it caught his eye. A Montauker herself, Ms. Eurell said she tried to enlist the Montauk Historical Society or another organization to save the houses when she learned they would be razed. It wasn’t to be.

    Tear-downs have been commonplace over the last few decades, often to the annoyance of near neighbors, but sometimes — when the building was of historic or sentimental interest, or a neighborhood landmark — they provoke deeper emotions, real sadness or anger, from the community at large. This was one of those times.

    The Abbes were well-known professional magazine photographers, and Mr. Abbe had started selling fine antiques when they decided to build in Montauk back in the 1940s. According to a feature in an East Hampton Star Home Book supplement in 2008, the materials in the 16-by-20-foot house cost $700. It had built-in bunks modeled after quarters in the Charles Morgan, a whaling ship preserved at Mystic Seaport. The furnishings (homespun coverlets, antique chairs, a highboy) were spare. Plumbing and electricity were put in after the war, and a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom added.

    Word of Mr. O’Reilly’s arrival on the scene put me in mind of Teddy Roosevelt. Is Mr. O’Reilly as famous an American today as Colonel Roosevelt was in 1898, when he brought his Spanish-American War troops to Montauk for rest and recovery? There is certainly rich irony in this whole affair, and also room for some amusing riffs on Rough Riders: Is Mr. O’Reilly in for a rough ride here? Is he riding rough­shod?

    It will be some time before Mr. O’Reilly’s new house is completed, but it is highly likely it will be shingled, it will be large, and materials will cost a lot more than $700: He has hired the Farrell Building Company to do the construction. Surely you recognize the name? It is the Bridgehampton firm that tore down the Elaine Benson Gallery and was the subject of a New York Times profile this summer with the memorable title “Hamptons McMansions Herald a Return of Excess.”

    Forget about turkey, this is the time of the year that our thoughts turn to shellfish. That is, if you are inclined, as I am, toward such things and did not get quite enough of the fall striper run.

    Shellfish news from local waters has been mixed. Most disturbing was a report this week that the East Hampton Town Trustees’ scallop sanctuary in Napeague Harbor was illegally dredged and sustained considerable damage to its eelgrass beds. One of the trustees filed a police report; there is no word on suspects.

    Separately, just over a week back, the state expanded its seasonal ban on shellfishing in the northernmost part of Accabonac Creek, citing fecal coliform trends. The trustees bridled at this, concerned that the state was doing too little testing to be sure one way or the other about the safety of the creek.

    Such seasonal closures have a silver lining: I can’t see the sense in clamming during the warm months anyway, when waterfront houses here are full — and an unknown number are leaching household waste into the water. Then too, I can go dig at my semi-secret spots in late fall and winter without worrying that high-season weekend warriors will catch on and clam them out.

    Clams had a brief flurry of international attention last week when scientists reported that a quahog relative dug off Iceland was 507 years old, making it the most-aged animal known. Ming, as they named it, had first been pegged at just over 400, but another counting of its annual rings revised the estimate upward.

    Our local clams can run old, but not that old — up to 100, I read somewhere. One clamshell, which I keep on my office windowsill, measures about four inches at its widest and appears to have roughly 30 annual rings — not quite so old to preclude its contribution to a pot of chowder.

    I am reassured that the winning clams in the town trustees’ annual contest, each as big as a man’s fists held together, are thrown back to survive another day. Heaven knows just how old those beasts really are.

    The house at the end of the block, where Madeline Bastis, a Zen priest, once told me that when it came to reporting on the New York marathon, I should write about all the finishers from here, not just the top ones — to wit, that attention should be paid — is being torn down.

    At first I thought how sad, but now, having got out her file and reading through it a bit, I imagine her saying, in Zen fashion, “Let it go, Jack, let it go.”

    We’re all tear-downs in the end after all. And presumably Zen practitioners go far toward tearing their clamorous egos down long before they take leave of this life.

    Speaking of leaves, you can take mine. As the sun began to go down yesterday — well, it really doesn’t go down, but anyway — I thought, after having transferred a metric ton of leaves from our lawn to a still-vacant (but not much longer) lot nearby, “I’m either Hercules or Syphilis . . . er, Sisyphus.” A flat-lander Sisyphus, of course. (It’s all what you think about as you drag the tarp back across the road.)

    Perhaps I’m a little bit of both. I forget the nature of Hercules’s labors, but removing the leaves from our lawn might qualify as a modern-day alternative to the Augean stables. (I am picking up after Henry these days, by the way.)

    Ou sont les leaf suckers d’autant? Perhaps Larry Cantwell will bring them back. He can’t? Well . . . I wish he would.

    Especially considering that this fall may be the last in which I can transport them across the street. (Many probably are blown back by the north wind over the course of the winter, but for the moment we’ve got that curried look the middle class adores so. Cleanliness is next to Godlessness here, you know.)

    I guess it’s because we want others to think we’ve got it together, that we’re people of substance rather than of substance abuse. Neat and tidy, not for tearing down.

    Yet if everything’s to be torn down in the end, why go to any effort to make improvements a potential buyer might like if it’s all to be reduced to rubble?

    I guess you might say the same of ourselves. But one wants to do one’s best, to put one’s best foot forward, to spring ahead rather than fall back, even though we know we’re tear-downs in the end, which is why I bought a new pair of sneakers today, formal New Balance black ones, and got a haircut (ears and nose primarily) and am wearing jeans that Mary says do justice to my butt, rather than the baggy khakis so many old men wear, to their detriment she says.

    But there’s that ego again. I must tear it down and haul it over to the vacant lot where it will stay, until the north wind begins to blow.

    It is too late to stop: The top-secret project is under way. A group of East Hampton residents ages 11 to 17 are cloning the mayor of East Hampton Village located in the State of New York, United States of America.

    At some unknown point in the last three to four years, somewhere in their trajectory from Club Penguin to more advanced computer games, a group of East Hampton children decided they were going to make a lifelike, completely functional clone of the current mayor. One teacher in the East Hampton Middle School heard a rumor about the project. Some 11-year-old student told him, “Say anything and we also have a device that if we point it at your laptop, it will play reruns of ‘The Muppet Show’ for two weeks and then your computer will go blank.”

    He, or she, whatever teacher it may be, has chosen to remain silent. Of course, the project is all completely legal, aboveboard, and in the best interest of East Hampton Village residents.

    The kids involved, boys and girls, saw the mayor, or heard about it through their younger friends — the mayor was spotted riding a Jet Ski at a Santa parade one of the last few years. The kids started sending one another coded top-secret messages by e-mail, eventually switching to scraps of paper for communication.

    The scraps of paper are small and have lists of incomprehensible numbers and symbols in sequence. The parents in East Hampton have been finding them around their houses — the parents are clueless. These lengthy sequential numbers are the computer formulas the children have devised to clone the current mayor, as he is right now in the year 2013. The clone will have all the thinking capacity of the current mayor, plus all kinds of future updates to take care of anything that might happen for the next 50 years.

    They have a program that is not finished that will allow the mayor to stand in one of the antique rescue boats stored at the East Hampton Village Public Works facility on Accabonac Road. The cloned mayor will order the boat to the parades and stand astride it like a bayman. They secretly videotaped some kid’s father who is still working the bays and ocean, put the video into a transcriber, and produced a program that will allow the cloned mayor to be at his finest even if there are high winds and snow during the parade.

    Every other year, the cloned mayor will order the Jet Ski to ride in so he seems modern. One of the kids videotaped his dad operating a Jet Ski at Main Beach. Of course, none of these parents have any idea that they were videotaped and then transcribed to the programs that will run the cloned mayor.

    One of the kids has a famous parent, a sculptor of Italian heritage. Said sculptor is the only other adult besides the middle school teacher who knows about this. The sculptor is almost finished with a perfect lightweight titanium replica of the mayor. The sculptor has been strictly sworn to secrecy. He is a little odd, an artist, you know — who would believe him anyway?

    Why are the kids doing this? The answer is rather elementary, simple, straightforward, rational in substance. The kids want no more change! They want life as it is, in their village, to remain as it is. They like their mayor because he is a caricature of a small New England village mayor. He waves at them in the parades and then doesn’t bother them.

    The kids clearly have the technology. They are doing this. Their plan is rather devious! When the current mayor decides not to be mayor anymore, the kids and all their friends will be of voting age. What do you think they are going to do? They are going to elect the replica clone with extraordinary programming and updatable software to be the mayor of the Village of East Hampton.

    They need a master painter to paint all the lifelike features onto the titanium figure, but that is a bit later. That artist will be contacted in complete secrecy by a kid wearing a hat with a picture of the mayor on it on Main Street at some point in the next three years. This is not a rumor or hearsay.

    Morgan McGivern is a staff photographer at The Star.

    Going to Buffalo, of all places, wasn’t my idea. But my husband’s notion of trying to see every house Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed is infectious. Chris had learned that Buffalo was the site of a number of Wright houses and other buildings, so going there had been in the cards for some time. It turned out to be a fascinating few days.

    I have sometimes cast a gimlet eye on pieces sent to The Star as “Guestwords” by travelers who write, as if with authority, about places with which they have only a nodding acquaintance. But, if you’ll excuse me, here I go.

    Buffalo was once the eighth largest city in the United States, a thriving industrial metropolis. Today it is unsettling proof of what happens when time — and industry — march on. Miles of deteriorating factories and derelict grain elevators line the Lake Erie shore, and many of the neighborhoods we drove through looked worse for wear.

    The census counted about a quarter of a million people living in Buffalo in 2012. The unemployment rate is high, despite the fact that there are several colleges as well as the highly regarded State University at Buffalo in the city, and despite the fact that the public school system is said to be noteworthy (for all the right reasons, not the wrong). Here’s a stark fact: The median value of houses or condos in Buffalo was $67,000 in 2011, compared to $285,300 in the rest of New York State. In the same year the poverty level was 26.6 percents.

    But Buffalo is home to many architectural treasures from the turn of the 20th century, many of which are national landmarks or on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s probably just as well that the architecture guide we ordered from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology didn’t arrive till after we got home; otherwise, we might have missed our plane back.

    We took a very windy morning’s look at one of downtown Buffalo’s most astonishing office buildings. Designed by Louis Sullivan, and constructed in 1895 and ’96, the Prudential (or Guaranty) “skyscraper” has a “ruddy terra-cotta facade . . . embellished with . . . rich foliate and geometric ornament,” to borrow a description from the book from M.I.T. We only had time to drive by the Art Deco City Hall and another “skyscraper,” this one an octagon known as the General Electric Tower, which is faced with white terra cotta.

    After a bit of misguided wandering about, following the instructions of a robotic Siri — reminder! paper-and-ink maps are still best — we found a boathouse Wright designed in 1926. We searched in vain for his filling station, which is apparently entombed in the city’s Pierce-Arrow Museum.

    The highlight of the trip was touring the Darwin D. Martin complex and Graycliff, Mrs. Martin’s summer estate on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie. The complex includes a two-story principal residence, which exemplifies Wright’s prairie houses; a smaller house, which was built first as a “test”; a gardener’s cottage, and a garage and stable — all of which have been restored at a cost of about $50 million after years of neglect and an earlier renovation.

    The Martin complex main residence is one of only three Wright designed for which there was no budget at all. The sky was the limit. It was reported to have cost $178,000 by the time it was finished in 1906. I don’t know what that translates to in 2013 dollars, but . . . can you imagine? Both opulent and reflective of nature, the house has 394 iridized “tree of life” windows, made with 750 pieces of glass; a 180-foot-long pergola and a conservatory, ruled at one end by a 9-foot, 3-inch statue of Nike, and a fireplace in a reception room, which has bronze powder in some of its mortar.

    It was wonderful to see preservation in action, and it was wonderful to be surprised by the reminder that there are still amazing places out there to discover. Buffalo was more captivating than we expected. And we didn’t even eat any wings.

    As I have admitted before in these pages, I have found it difficult to open my wallet for weekday lunch ever since Bucket’s Deli closed and the Griffiths moved away.

    The reluctance was not entirely about money, but an awareness of the couple of dollars’ difference between what Bucket’s would have run me for a sandwich and a drink and what the rest of the options in the village ask. This came up Tuesday as I waited at the North Main Street I.G.A. deli counter for some cold cuts. Beverly Bond, one of our regular letters-to-the-editor writers, said hello, and we talked for a few minutes about the high cost of eating out here.

    As it turned out, I had had nearly the same conversation with Brian Halweil, who runs Edible East End, while we were in the Sag Harbor Police Department’s waiting room earlier in the day. Brian told me about a $16 bay scallop special he had heard about, the catch being that it was at a restaurant on the North Fork.

    I related this information to Beverly, who nodded knowingly, then told me about a $14.50 hamburger her husband had the other day during a basic lunch here in the village that ran them more than $40.

    Of course, by Hamptons measures, that hamburger was a relative bargain. The tavern burger at the 1770 house just a couple of doors down from the Star office is $22, for one. But then, we have nothing to complain about relative to a place like DB Bistro Moderne in New York City, for example, which serves up a seasonal truffled burger for $140.

    Still, the $10 or more most lunches cost around here has got me to making my own lunch in our office’s upstairs kitchen. One day, it might be tuna on rye, another day, some leftovers from the kids’ dinner.

    With the money I save, I told Beverly really only half in jest, I can justify going out every now and then with my wife for dinner — if we could only find a babysitter.

    I’ve just been afforded a welcome opportunity to listen to a concerned, and perceptive, citizen regarding the recent election — he making a good case that one-party rule, whether Democrat or Republican, often doesn’t make for good governance.

    After he’d delivered himself of his considered opinions, I suggested he put himself up for office some day, but he, as I thought he would, demurred. He was retired, he said, and therefore doing only things he wanted to do. Being baited by the opposition at town board meetings, I gathered, wasn’t one of them.

    At any rate, it’s nice to know that he’s paying attention, and that, in Larry Cantwell, we have a cool and cogent head at the helm, a metaphor that is apt considering that Larry’s father was a commercial fisherman and that he began his political career here at the age of 25 as a bay constable.

    I began an interview I did with him then, in March of 1976, thus: “Put off by the numbers of people who came to East Hampton between 1969 and 1973, Larry Cant­well worked summers in his brother John’s garage, and then, with a knapsack on his back, would go ‘on the road,’ looking for an alternative place to live.”

    “But finally, he decided that East Hampton, despite the influx, still offered enough of what he had always liked to do — one could still hunt and fish and be outdoors. . . . ‘So,’ said Mr. Cantwell one day recently, his left hand cupping a pipe, his right on the wheel of an East Hampton Town Bay Constable car, ‘I decided to stay, and decided that if I stayed, I would help the cause as much as I could.’ ”

    “. . . The last time he knew of that a Democrat had been Bay Constable was 42 years ago. . . .”

    And now that almost another 40 years have passed, the political landscape has been altered to such an extent that, despite their gross fiscal mismanagement of not so long ago, the Democrats reign and Mr. Cantwell has been swept into the supervisor’s seat unopposed . . . from clams to acclaim!

    “When it comes to local politics,” my sage friend said, “the focus here oughtn’t to be the Democrat or the Republican party line, but East Hampton.”

    He was hopeful, he added, an utterly unanimous board — dangerous to his mind, as aforesaid — having been avoided with the election of Fred Overton, and given Mr. Cantwell’s reputation for his thoughtful approach to issues, that things could go well.

    If not, he said, “three Democratic seats will be up for election in two years.”