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.

       We tried, but, as usual, failed to escape Thanksgiving.

       “Let’s go to Sam’s,” I said to Mary when the subject came up, “and have a large pizza with cranberry topping.”

       It’s not that we are antisocial — we do care for our relatives, but when they’re foregathered all at once it can be overwhelming, especially if you are — as Mary often is — the designated cook. (I, being the designated joyful one, have an equally arduous task.)

       She was let off the hook somewhat this Thanksgiving, having only to make three shepherd pies and turkey soup for 14 for the day after.

       Somewhere she heard that roasted turkey might turn out better if cut up a bit. The butcher advised against it — with reason as it turned out, for the various parts ended up unevenly cooked, some hardly at all. Which got her to worrying so about salmonella that she was ready to chuck everything and start anew with a whole new one.

       “See, I told you I didn’t think I’d be very good company this Thanksgiving,” she imagined herself saying to her siblings as reports of salmonella poisoning began to come in.

       “Salmonella Mary. . . . It has a nice ring to it,” I said. “And you alone will be left to inherit your mother’s estate.”

       Gavin, our son-in-law, a chef, among other things, who, even though he was still in mourning for the Broncos’ recent last-minute loss to the Patriots, rallied to reassure her that everything would be all right.

       “See,” I said to Mary this morning. “I ate a turkey sandwich last night, and I’m still . . . aaargh, aaargh, gasp, gasp, oh, Jesus, oh my God! Still . . . still. . . .”

       I quickly got up from the floor because I didn’t want to overdo it. “Still here!”

       “Okay, you can taste the soup now,” she said a while later. “And tell me if it needs salt.”

       I dipped the spoon in — gingerly, eyeing her carefully, inasmuch as I was reluctant to take leave of my that it was very savory as it was. As was she.

       “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said brightly.

       I, of course, was happy in the knowledge that she still likes having me around. . . . At least I think she does . . . for most of the time . . . for much of the time, anyway . . . in small cathartic doses then; let’s leave it at that.

     There are Hamptoners who only use their houses here one week a year. I know this because two years ago I worked as a sous chef for such a family. Headed by one of the biggest Wall Street whales, they only inhabit their Water Mill House during Thanksgiving week, the rest of the year being spent in the city, Florida, England, France, and probably more places to which I’m not privy.

       With its team of gardeners planting all sorts of autumnal foliage around the vast bay-touched property, its cozy fireplace-lit rooms, and its barn with indoor squash court and bowling alley, the compound is an idyllic spot in which to celebrate bounty. They have much to be thankful for.

       I received a call a few days before Thanksgiving from the estate manager. I had known her when she was the private chef of now-divorced friends, a Wall Street pasha and his wife who had a house on the ocean near the Maidstone Club. She knew that I cheffed on occasion. Could I start Monday? There were three days of prep work before the extended family of roughly 30 would gather on Thursday.

       I had never been a sous chef. I had worked the line at a restaurant once, had been a cook at two top Los Angeles caterers, had a couple of catering companies of my own, and had been a “private chef” for several clients from L.A. to Connecticut.

       I would be working under the clients’ French chef, who followed them to their various residences.

       “How’s your knife work?” she asked. Not great, was the truth. Knife work? This had never been important to me. Then again, I never worked for clients who cared if a carrot was properly julienned or a leaf chiffonaded. It’s not that I don’t know how to properly slice and dice, it’s just — like penmanship — I’d never mastered it. I’m a very fast cook, preferring to rely on the various blades of the food processor. But that, I knew, would not please a classically trained French chef. 

       I consider myself a creative chef. My formal training is limited. In my 20s my neighbor in the city, Peter Kump, founder of the James Beard House, inveigled me to attend the first class of his cooking school. Today it is the widely respected Institute of Culinary Education. I already knew what I was doing, having fooled around in the kitchen since I was 15. My first meal: Chicken Kiev from “The New York Times Cookbook.” Yes, the melted butter spurted. I was hooked.

       I loved Peter’s school, learned a lot, but found I preferred my usual method of immersing myself in cookbooks (always piled high on my nightstand), then using recipes as veering off points from which to experiment with my own versions. Like covering songs. A few years later, while living in London, I took a few classes at the Cordon Bleu, but found its methods dated. In one of the classes a dour woman demonstrated how to prepare a marrow squash, basically a large tasteless zucchini. I reverted to the books of Elizabeth David and Madhur Jaffrey, going through a stage where I cooked only Indian food, seduced by the exotic aroma of toasting spices. 

       As I was buzzed through the security gate, I was anxious about what the chef would think of my skills. Never mind my years of cooking untold dinner parties for friends, not to mention cooking three meals a day for myself. (For today’s lunch, just a regular weekday meal, I stuffed a poussin with dried fruits and threw some vegetables into the roasting pan. It took me the same time as making a sandwich, not including cooking time.) The first day went well. We mostly made menus and lists of ingredients, which we gave to another kitchen helper whose only job was to shop.

       That night the estate manager suggested we go out for dinner, an opportunity to bond. She chose Bobby Van’s. Since we were on Long Island, I suggested fluke. When the chef took a bite I could see it was not up to his standards. Then I tried it. Strangely cardboardish. I sent mine back. He didn’t, but he didn’t eat his either. I later found out this had scored against me. But I’d be damned if I’d pay $35 for an inedible fish.

       The next day the prep work began. Two housekeepers and the Water Mill and New York butlers bustled about on the perimeter. The chef eyed me suspiciously, but didn’t find much to complain about. I kept my eye on three kitchen maids who grabbed my chopping block to clean whenever I wasn’t looking. We endlessly peeled and chopped and, as there was not enough room in the three kitchen refrigerators, it was my job to find space in the pool house refrigerators, and its outside closet that stored cushions, but was cold enough to keep vegetables safely. For the next few days I made the trek between the pool house and kitchen dozens of times, carrying boxes of produce through where dozens of clumps of helenium were being planted, and wondered what it would be like to be so rich. I felt like I’d landed on Planet Billionaire: 10 or so acres of privilege and excess.

       On Wednesday, a team of seven tabletop designers spent 12 hours arranging foliage and owl and turkey candles and sculptures spilling a cornucopia of fruit and nuts, as anticipation built. When the head butler, a Brit who spent a lot of time making himself tea and eating jelly sandwiches, rushed through the house calling “Wheels up!” all hell broke loose. Everyone scurried about to ensure all was in order before our lords and masters descended upon the household. If I were rich, I wondered, would I have servants unscrew my Perrier cap as did the lady of the house?

       We made lunch for six. As we lined up platters of sea bass, lobster, and salads (lentil, Caesar, arugula — each one fiddled with by the chef with the precision of a diamond cutter), the missus sent word through her New York butler, Anthony, for us to prepare sandwiches. Back to the pool house with the uneaten food, no one daring to tell the boss that there’d been a communication breakdown. The bill from the Clamman alone was $700. When the chef saw the sandwiches I’d prepared he had a minor freakout. I had to start again and cut the crusts off the bread just so.

       On Thursday a half-dozen freelance butlers arrived (one told me he was paid $1,000). Glorified waiters, it was their job to set the tables and serve the food, but mostly to stand around and look servile. It upset me that we went through miles of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, but there was nothing I could do. It was clear the chef had no respect for Americans’ traditional holiday fare, boiling to death huge pots of vegetables and Frenchifying them with lots of butter and cream. Didn’t that go out in the ’70s with Cuisine Minceur?

       Service went smoothly. The chef had me put beads of Sevruga from a large tin on boring white crackers. Only two were eaten. I didn’t amputate any fingers, didn’t elicit much ire from the chef. But since he never had the opportunity to taste any of my food, I knew he didn’t respect me. I learned many lessons, most notably: Cooking is something I love, so I now I reserve it as a gift for the people I love.

—

       Debra Scott is a real estate columnist at The Star.

    Today, you’d think, as in Keats’s ode, the warm days would never cease, and yet the autumnal sighing — a melancholy beauty — has begun.

    Here’s to the soft-dying day, and to gathering what buddies ye may, for Old Time’s a-flying.

    Enough: “Don’t stop,” Andy Neid­nig, the lifelong runner who was celebrated in a Sag Harbor race Saturday, told me on the occasion of his 90th birthday. “Nature takes care of that. Meanwhile, don’t think about it.”

    Okay, Andy, I won’t, I won’t.

    I do hope a place is found for his medals and trophies and awards that were left behind when his Glover Street house was sold, as is only fitting for the man whom John Conner — another competitor with notable credentials — has called “the best runner ever to come out of the East End.”

    Andy could be heard sighing at times too. “He was such a sweetheart,” Howard Lebwith recalls, “but he was also such a kvetch — always complaining about some nagging injury at the starting line. Then he’d go out and leave you in the dust! When he broke the record at the New York marathon he just kept running — he didn’t know how to get home on the subway.”

    He just kept running. . . .

    That’s as good advice as any, it strikes me. Good for the body, for we are meant to move, good for the mind, for it needs some rest, and good for the spirit, for it needs to take wing.

    One thing is clear about the East Hampton Town Trustees’ Largest Clam Contest: They are going to need a bigger boat if it gets any more popular. Well, at least a larger place to hold the thing.

    Sunday was the day of judgment, the moment in which the largest single Mercenaria mercenaria, or quahog, of the year would be crowned at the trustees’ office on Bluff Road in Amagansett. And while the biggest bivalve might well have been an attraction, the raw bar drew the longest queue. Had I noticed an unused clam knife, I might have jumped in to lend a hand; it was good that there was not, however, as I spent most of the time chasing our 3-year-old, Ellis, around the crowd.

    Ellis and a house guest and I had done a little last-minute clamming the previous afternoon. It had been a warm day with almost-still air. We did very well.

    Ellis, still too small to work a clam rake, found a live quahog exposed and on its side in the water. He picked it up and added it to our basket. On Sunday, we rushed to get to the contest early enough to enter it (or at least the one we thought it was) and another that I had dug. He was disappointed that he didn’t win, having up to that point only been at events where everybody is a winner. Mine never stood a chance, either. The top clams were hulking behemoths bigger than two of my fists placed together.

    If the raw bar and Fred Overton’s clam chowder kept the adults busy, the draw for the younger set was a display of live bug scallops in the trustees’ meeting room. Ellis and his sister Evvy and a scrum of other kids packed tight around the tank, scooping them up and peering close to see their pearly blue eyes.

    Evvy was disappointed that her guess of 400 tiny clams in a beaker at the town shellfish hatchery’s table was incorrect. There were more than 500. But she was consoled by a bright-orange “wanted” T-shirt with an image on it of a big quahog.

    As for me, the memory of the day was reward enough. That and the half bushel of clams in the refrigerator, several nights’ dinners a-promising.

    My first job after moving to Springs in 1985 was as a freelance copy editor, which made sense after years of writing. My second job, taken in 1986, was as prep cook at Bruce’s restaurant in Wainscott, which made sense only because I liked to cook. I had never worked in a restaurant or cooked professionally. Even in my home kitchen, performance anxiety was part of every undertaking. But my idea of prep work was what I did before cooking a meal at home — chopping vegetables, washing salad greens, peeling potatoes. How hard could it be?

    Bruce Weed seemed a straight-shooter. As he handed me an apron, he said previous experience was no guarantee of success in the kitchen. The fundamental tools of the job were the prep list and a loose-leaf notebook of recipes. The daily routine began around 7 a.m., when I would open the building and consult the prep list to see which tasks had to be completed before dinner service.

    When Christa would drop me off, she would wait in the parking lot for a declaration of how the day was shaping up. From the open kitchen door she was likely to hear, “Brunch potatoes again! Kill me!” or “Arrrgh! Another batch of clam chowder! I’ll be here till midnight!” As the day wore on and I crossed off item after item, my mood would lighten — unless I found myself sitting outside in the dark on an upturned five-gallon container, hoping to finish debearding 30 pounds of mussels before service was to begin.

    One Sunday morning the door was ajar and a pane of glass had been shattered. I stepped cautiously into the kitchen. Since I wasn’t cursing about cheesecake or garlic sausages, Christa drove away. I selected a 12-inch chef’s knife and began to creep through the kitchen and into the restaurant proper. Then I pictured getting hoisted on my own petard, and wisely reconsidered.

    There was nobody else in the building, so I returned with relief to the kitchen, where a man was reaching through the window pane. I picked up the phone, dialed 911, and told the intruder I was calling the police. He didn’t seem to care, but slowly, reluctantly almost, shuffled off. The police picked him up a few minutes later staggering down Town Line Road. He was drunk, having consumed a considerable amount of alcohol while inside but taken nothing.

     The thing about Bruce is that he was a locavore before the term existed. He grew his own tomatoes, lettuces, zucchini, eggplant, and herbs, and what he didn’t grow came, during the appropriate season, from Kenny Schwenk’s farm next door. I remember picking green beans, tomatoes, and lettuces during the summer, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts in the fall. During the winter, the eggs served at brunch came from Bruce’s chickens. His menu, hand-written each week, listed his suppliers. Moreover, almost everything was made from scratch — sausage, pasta, ice cream, chicken stock, sourdough rolls — the list went on and on. Bruce even made his own mozzarella.

    The restaurant was a big success. On weekend evenings and for Sunday brunch, the cars were lined up on Town Line Road halfway to the beach.

    In 1988, Nick and Toni’s opened on North Main in East Hampton where Ma Bergmann’s had been, and Pino Luongo’s Sapore di Mare appeared in Wainscott, and the East End restaurant scene began to evolve into something with a higher profile.

    I had to leave Bruce’s in 1989 in search of a 9-to-5 job with paid benefits. I would never again have to fill in for the missing dishwasher after a nine-hour day shift, or struggle with recalcitrant sausage casings, or work New Year’s Eve, or arrive home fragrant of chicken stock and cooking oil, perhaps garnished with a few wayward fish scales.

    But I learned enough about cooking that I became relaxed in my own kitchen, and enough about running a restaurant to know you have to be a little bit crazy and have a wicked sense of humor — which Bruce did — to do it. Bruce eventually sold the restaurant, which today, after several iterations, houses Town Line Barbecue, and today he owns Bruce Weed Computers. 

    Mark Segal is a writer at The East Hampton Star.

   Some of the most enduring images of the days following Hurricane Sandy have been of citizen volunteers helping victims in the Rockaways, along the Jersey Shore, and elsewhere. On the other hand, the picture has been one of failure by the institutions in which many trusted. The Long Island Power Authority, for example, and nearly every level of authority were unprepared for the scale of devastation and disruption of normal, day-to-day life.

    Neither government nor the Red Cross nor any semi-official group was ready for this disaster. Perhaps none could be, given a crimped economy and too much of the nation’s wealth spent on the military rather than on the welfare of its people. Perhaps in Sandy we have seen the outer, frayed edges of a free-market system, where, when it gets down to it, it is everyone for him or herself — except for the kindness of strangers.

    Even here, so far from the hurricane’s highest surges and fiercest gusts, town officials appeared to falter. Not so with the Amagansett, East Hampton, and Montauk Libraries, which served as essential community centers for many, many residents left in the dark or without heat. That the humble libraries — and ordinary people with huge hearts — filled needs that were not to be provided by government is eye-opening. The libraries are for the most part taxpayer-funded, and their administrators are glad to do what is helpful. But it is surprising that there were no other places for people, at least in the Town of East Hampton, to pursue their everyday lives, to find working toilets, to connect to the Internet, or get a jug of water.

    It is wonderful that these institutions were able to provide this service. Thank goodness they could keep the lights on, so to speak. But by itself that is not reassuring. The post-storm needs of residents must be more fully addressed by those we elect to lead us, not simply fobbed off to citizen heroes or libraries willing to fill the gaps left by officials who have been painfully bereft of foresight.

    I’m in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell now, with the falsifiers. Today it would probably not be so populous a place, for relatively few of us moderns can claim to know the truth (thus how could we falsify it) enveloped as we are in cosmic molasses.

    Speaking of cosmic molasses, I was glad to see the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter W. Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson is named, does not use a cellphone or a computer — a laudable but perhaps inevitably doomed attempt by the so-called God particle’s discoverer to remain disconnected from the madding crowd.

    If eschewing a cellphone and computer is a sign of genius, which I think it is, I — a computer user but still cellphone celibate — can only lay claim to sub-genius status, which is proper, I suppose, for one who, despite today’s concern for concussions, remains a fan of pro football and of boxing (until the first real punch lands, then I’m for stopping the fight).

    The violent in the Inferno are sunk in a river (the Phlegethon) of their own blood. (I would argue that the vicariously violent, rather than full immersion, ought to be allowed to merely slog along in Phlegethon’s estuaries.)

    Dante, like Aristotle, “affirmed that the particular goal of mankind as a whole [was] to realize to the fullest all the potentialities of intellect.”

    When you read stories about scientists like Dr. Higgs and his fellow Nobelist, Dr. Francois Englert, you think we are doing just that.

    But the question remains: Will we achieve the concord toward which full knowledge aims before we blow ourselves up?

    Meanwhile, I want to e-mail Dr. Higgs and ask him if we should worship the Higgs boson as the Primum Mobile.

    Ah, but he doesn’t have a computer!

    I’ll ask Mary then.

    The restaurant economies of Bridgehampton, and to a lesser extent Water Mill, have benefited, albeit ever so slightly, from our eldest daughter’s taking to ballet and other forms of dance in a big way. The greenhouse effect, on the other hand, gives me room for pause.

    Lisa and I decided to lease a fuel-efficient vehicle a few months ago, but the way things worked out, it became my wife’s daily drive, and I was left with the Tundra. It’s old and generally filled with fishing gear or surfboards or things destined for the dump. I worry that it may mortify Adelia when I pick her up at school, but it is what I have for now.

    Due to the way my wife’s and my schedules work, I have become the designated driver for Adelia’s practices. Three evenings a week, I am killing time in Bridgehampton, and one night a week, in Water Mill. I have so far been able to evade a Saturday Bridgehampton run to practices in advance of a December performance of “The Nutcracker.”

    With little else to do during these times, I am eating my way around both hamlets’ restaurants and scoping out the best wireless Internet hot spots. There’s a sweet taco deal on Tuesdays at one place, I learned, and a really odd and lonely bar crowd at another.

    Between Adelia’s after-school pick-me-ups at Starbucks and my dinners out, the food budget has taken a turn toward the extravagant. It’s a good thing I started bringing my lunch to work after Bucket’s closed last year, I suppose.

    At the same time, I try not to think about the hole in the ozone or global warming my Toyota pickup is contributing to, but every time I fill up the tank, the sharp, stabbing pain in the wallet reminds me. That is, if I forget about how much the dance classes themselves are running us.

    All the money and idle hours are well worth it, however. Adelia loves dance, and I like the time to do nothing much at all other than eat around.   

    With Halloween upon us, a ghost story would seem appropriate, and, as it happens, there is a tale of Congress Hall to be told.

    The house, which stands on Main Street overlooking the East Hampton Village Green, is ancient and storied. It was in the Mulford family from when it was built, sometime after 1680, until 1976.

    Congress Hall got its name somewhat cynically during the mid-19th century to note that it was where many of the men of the village would gather to talk, welcomed by their bachelor host, David Mulford.

    A descendant, David E. Mulford, sent me an excerpt from a family history he wrote that described the place, from which I learned much about the house and its inhabitants. The story was told, he wrote, that around 1805, the family added an extra room for their “slave girls.”

    Mr. Mulford related that the house was rented to summer tenants beginning in the 1870s and that the painter Thomas Moran, who later built a house and studio just up the street, was the first tenant. Another was Gen. Nelson A. Miles, a one-time commanding general of the United States Army.

    Round about 1885, the town trustees ordered that Buell Lane be widened, and over the protest of the then owner, David G. Mulford, the work required that a triangular section of the house be removed. It was.

    Mr. Mulford described his earliest memories of Congress Hall, which date to the early 1930s — how warm the massive central fireplace kept it and the sound of a Dominy tall clock ticking in the front hall. In summers until 1975, the house was rented to others, but that year, the family realized they could no longer maintain it.

    Still, ties were strong, and they and friends decided to spend one last summer there. It was a glorious time, Mr. Mulford recalled, sprucing up the place and inviting friends for visits. Hurricane Belle struck in August, scattering tree limbs, but doing no particular damage to Congress Hall.

    Several experiences that summer, however, Mr. Mulford wrote, suggested that the ancestors might not have approved of the decision to sell. He described a chill wind passing through the dining room on an otherwise close and sultry night. A fruit bowl set on a table cascaded into several pieces on its own. Another time, a glass hurricane lamp cracked, its fragments falling suspiciously neatly. A clock that had not run for years was discovered wound and running one morning; no one of this world claimed responsibility.

    “I couldn’t help but think that perhaps some earlier generations of Mulfords were trying to discourage us from having the house leave the family, or at least get our attention,” he wrote.

    Congress Hall today has new owners once again, who have set about restoring it. Bill Hugo, their contractor, took me around the place the other day, showing me the corner where the building was sliced away to make room for the road.

    We saw no ghosts. But there is no saying whether or not they were there watching  . . . us.