I have a nose, but it doesn’t work. Actually, my nose works; it’s my brain that doesn’t. Nine years ago, visiting my sister-in-law in rural Pennsylvania, I fell down a flight of stone steps to the cement floor of her basement. A six-pack of Rolling Rock cushioned my fall. When I picture how it must have looked, I see a hilarious pratfall. But to my wife, son, in-laws, and nephews looking on, it wasn’t funny.

    I woke up a few hours later in a room at Hershey Medical Center. I had suffered a concussion, a subdural hematoma, a broken foot, and a few bruises. I smelled of beer. The paramedics who had rushed me to the hospital assumed a drunken stupor was responsible for my mishap.

    We drove back to East Hampton after I was released the following day. Aside from soreness and a bit of a headache, I felt well enough to take the wheel at the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, since Christa is reluctant to drive in, through, or anywhere near New York City.

    The headaches persisted for severaldays, but by the third or fourth day, weaned from Vicodin, I felt well enough to celebrate. I uncorked a bottle of good white burgundy, poured two glasses, twirled the wine, and zeroed in for a sniff.

    “What’s wrong?” Christa asked when she saw my puzzled expression.

    “This wine has no nose.”

    She inhaled from her glass and told me I was crazy.

    I sipped the wine. It had some taste, but lacked the depth and complexity I expected. And no aroma at all! I went to the refrigerator and removed a piece of Roquefort. Nothing. Almost immediately, a family activity was born. Who could rustle up the most malodorous article in order to confirm my curious condition? Ammonia got the prize, though a windows-down drive past the sewage disposal facility on a sultry summer day was a close second.

    It didn’t take a medical degree to assume a connection between my concussion and my anosmia. My doctor agreed, but couldn’t tell me if or when my sense of smell would return. Before I get to the lawsuit, I should explain something. My brother and sister-in-law admitted that the storm door to the basement was, in their own words, “an accident waiting to happen.” It was really two wooden doors that sat flush with the floor in the middle of the mud room. Late one afternoon, I went out to my car to get my glasses. During the 20 seconds I was gone, my sister-in-law went to the basement and left the doors open. When I returned, I wasn’t looking straight ahead, but rather at my family off to the left in the kitchen. Down the rabbit hole I went!

    After the accident, my brother-in-law, an expert at all forms of home repair, unhinged the two doors and shifted them 90 degrees so that when opened, one of the doors would block the hole in the floor from anyone entering the room. Nearly undone by guilt, my sister-in-law urged me to sue them. I was initially disinclined, but after visiting the Taste and Smell Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania, where after a day of testing I was told the damage was most likely permanent, I reconsidered.

    My local attorneys didn’t handle such cases but recommended a lawyer  who did. When I met with him and expressed my ambivalence about suing family members, he told me that homeowners insurance was the most profitable kind, since almost everybody carried it but relatively few people ever made claims. My action wouldn’t negatively impact my relatives, and he was confident the insurance company would be willing to settle.

    After many months, the company did, indeed, make an offer, which was well shy of the six figures I had come to anticipate. By the time I reimbursed myself for medical expenses and the attorney took his 33 percent, there would be almost no compensation for my diminished quality of life.

    “Let’s take them to court,” I said.

    “Not so fast,” he replied. “Your sister-in-law lives in Lancaster, where the case will be tried. I don’t think you’ll get much sympathy from Amish farmers just because you can no longer appreciate fine wines.” 

    I realized he was right. I had never thought of my anosmia as a significant disablement, but once he had told me I was entitled to a settlement and that the insurance companies were rolling in profits, I began to picture a college fund for my kids and an early retirement for me. In the end, we settled, and I realized the compensation was appropriate.

    There are many obvious things I will never smell again — flowers, wood smoke, pine forests, perfume, barbecue, to name just a few. There are also occasional dangers. Once, at an art gallery opening lit entirely by candles, Christa’s dress caught fire, and I was the only person who didn’t smell the smoke and come to her rescue.

    However, there are as many foul smells as there are enchanting ones. Imagine all the vile scents I’ll never have to experience! I realize that if you have to lose a sense, the best one to kiss goodbye is the sense of smell. I am now the go-to guy for cleaning up after our pets. Christa tells me my cooking has improved, as I have learned to season more generously in order to taste what I’m making. There are also potential employment opportunities. Somebody has to remove long-dead animals from attics, not to mention decomposing bodies from crime scenes. These are just a few of anosmia’s many silver linings.

    Mark Segal is a writer at The Star.

    My friend A.J. has a mission. As a leader of an organization called Solar Cookers International, which encourages the use of solar thermal cooking in sunny parts of the world, she has proposed that the United Nations make solar cooking — as a  “renewable, freely replaceable fuel for the daily preparation of food and safe water, without contaminating the environment” — a basic human right. “All people should have access to that right,” a document she recently submitted to the U.N. states.

    The point is made that simple solar thermal cookers, which are not photo-voltaic, are cheap, portable, and able to benefit a third of the world’s people, largely the poorest, who now rely on low-grade organic fuels, such as wood or dung, or fossil fuels, which are polluting.

    At an anniversary party at A.J.’s house not long ago, a small solar cooker was set on top of the grand piano, obviously not to be used that day. But this week, she sent out a short video showing a woman outside Boulder, Colo., who made an entire Thanksgiving dinner last year on three solar cookers.

    The sun must be strong up there in the Colorado mountains at Thanksgiving time (although the temperature the day the video was made was cold enough for dinner guests to be bundled in winter coats). The cookers were of various sizes, and the biggest, which held a good-sized uncooked turkey, had an oven thermometer in it reading 325 degrees.

    A few minutes later, you get to see the bird being carved, and the chef, Patty Rogers, announcing to the guests, with a broad smile, that the whole shebang was done in solar ovens: stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and apple pies. . . . An off-screen quip is heard: “And the salad.” And then the background music turns to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”  (What else?)

    The document A.J. submitted to the U.N. has been accepted for discussion in connection with the organization’s global post-2015 development goals. It describes the whys and hows of solar thermal cooking. Solar Cookers International, which can be found at solarcookers.org, offers resources, education, and training on the technology, which it says is now accessible and affordable.

    To quote one salient paragraph: “Examples of effective deployment of solar cooking today . . . are sanitizing hospital instruments in Nepal, cooking for schools and villages in India, running bakeries in Latin America, and the deployment of more than 12,000 cookers currently at use feeding refugees from Darfur in a camp in Chad. Local manufacture is encouraged and increased and numerous designs are now available as prototypes.”

    A.J. hopes to see solar thermal cooking make the world a better place. I do, too.

    Shortly before last week’s issue went to press, something came in over the transom that transformed an ordinary pre-election week into a full-blown, viral Internet frenzy.

    A call came at about lunchtime on Oct. 30 about our placing something in the paper from Laurie Anderson about the death on the previous Sunday of her husband, the rock mold-breaker Lou Reed. Eventually, we received an e-mail, and I also fielded phone calls, one from Ms. Anderson, several more from a friend of hers, about whether we would put the statement in the paper.

    After learning of his death at home in Springs, I had wondered about whether we would run his obituary. It is longstanding Star policy to write obituaries for all residents of our coverage area; Mr. Reed certainly fit the definition. But the question was what we could say that had not already been well reported elsewhere.

    What Ms. Anderson sent us, elegantly describing Mr. Reed’s last living moments, was by no means a traditional birth-to-death obituary. Rather, it was a picture of a moment in time, describing a life’s end — at home, at peace, looking at trees — of the sort perhaps many readers would wish for themselves. It appeared in print, boxed off as if it were an advertisement, distinct from the obituaries our reporters prepared.

    On Thursday afternoon, after the print edition was in the mail and on the newsstands, it occurred to me that our Twitter and Facebook followers might want to see Ms. Anderson’s letter, in effect a letter to her neighbors, so I made a page for it on our Web site, then linked to it from social media.

    Within an hour, the phone rang. It was Steve, the guy who manages our remote Web server. “What’s up?” I asked.

    “Lou Reed,” Steve said.

    Thanks to the Web, traffic to our site had soared. Where normally a single story might get a couple dozen hits an hour, this one was drawing hundreds, then thousands. It threatened to take down our site as well as the others housed on the same server. Steve had to do something.

    Skipping the technical details, his quick fix meant that he or I had to manually reset the site as often as we could to keep the Lou Reed page visible. We did not finally solve the underlying problem until Monday.

    In the meantime, traffic to the site continued to grow, especially after music blogs, then the Huffington Post, People, and Rolling Stone, to name a few, as well as sites overseas began linking to us. As of early this week, the page had 190,000 views; our second most-viewed page had had 1,100.

    Because of the frequent cycle of crashes and resets, a number of sites simply copied Ms. Anderson’s letter whole. Only one, the Huffington Post, phoned to check if that was okay. Had our Web site been able to handle the traffic, there is no telling how high the number of visits might have climbed.

    By the beginning of this week, the site’s numbers had begun to return to normal. Then Gawker linked to it in a funny compendium of our 2013 police reports. That is a story for another day

    “I hadn’t known there were real people in Palm Springs,” I said to Mary after we’d seen the Hampton Theatre Company’s riveting production of “Other Desert Cities.”

    There’s still much to learn no matter how old you get.

    I say “riveting” not only because the play is riveting, but also because we’ve seen nothing on or off or off off Broadway in the past 30 years. Thus everything this ambitious theater company does — and it does everything pretty well — is new to us. Though if you go to the ladies’ room at the intermission you may run the risk of having endings spoiled by the cognoscenti.

    One of this play’s points, as Mary pointed out to me, is that conservatives — the alleged hardheaded, realistic ones — can be very loving, and that liberals — the alleged compassionate handwringers — can be hardhearted. And so it probably goes with all convenient generalizations.

    “Other Desert Cities” is set during Christmas, which is at its hokiest in Palm Springs (I know because we were there once trying to escape the gay, ghastly holiday only to be clasped all the more in its gift-wrapped embrace — Christmas trees and decorations were everywhere).

    At any rate, the time of year serves as an interesting backdrop because the play’s tidings are not ones of comfort and joy.

    The truth (drawn out by forceps in “Other Desert Cities”) will not, as I think the playwright Jon Robin Baitz implies, always make you free. In fact, it can be problematic, making things better in some respects and making them worse in others. And so a midnight clear is clouded over.

    You live and learn then, and we have the playwright to thank for that, belatedly in our case because we rarely have the time or money to see shows in the city. (I could say the same about most of the movies or documentaries I’ve wanted to see. They rarely come out here.)

    The Hampton Theatre Company, then, is the best thing for those of us locals who, while in or nearing their dotage, remain babes in the woods culturally.

    Also, while at the Quogue Community House last Sunday afternoon where the play was put on, I was reminded of what Emily Dickinson said about poetry, to wit, that she knew it when she felt as if the top of her head were taken off.

    “Other Desert Cities” was kind of like that.

    This time, despite not one but two unscheduled stops on the Expressway, the Jitney arrives right on time. I alight and walk in the sunshine toward the meeting place, just as on the previous Saturday.

    The November afternoon is surprisingly, wonderfully warm, and at Park Avenue I turn south. It was a good idea to leave the jacket behind, unburdened by the unnecessary, the better to roam freely.

    Back on my feet again / I’m back on the street again / I’m back on the top again.

    As often happens, I’ve become obsessed with a particular recording, at present Van Morrison’s 1999 album, “Back on Top.” With titles like “Golden Autumn Day” and “When the Leaves Come Falling Down,” the at-turns swinging and meditative collection is the perfect autumn soundtrack, and in my not-so-humble opinion his finest since the 1970s.

    And I’m taking in the Indian Summer / And I’m soaking it up in my mind / And I’m pretending that it’s paradise / On a golden autumn day.

    Just before 34th Street, the sun disappears behind No. 3 Park Avenue, a huge and hideously ugly structure that obliterated the river view when I lived, for a year, across the street. In its absence, the temperature perceptibly falls and a brisk wind blows across the deep canyon of Park Avenue.

    A few minutes after 2, Lucy appears, radiant in the autumn sunshine, distant across Herald Square as all of humanity seems to charge in every direction, all colors shapes heights, faces exuberant and weary and confident and anguished and the thought returns that we are all born to die and that the time will surely come sooner than we wish and knowing this how can you be cold or disrespectful toward any person? Can you not have an open heart again? Did you ever?

    This, our third meeting in a week, is the least awkward as we grow familiar. Like my former wife, Lucy (not her real name) is foreign. Like mine before it, her marriage lies in smoldering ruin. It’s all over but the paperwork.

    Yet she is still married, and that mildly reckless feature of the budding relationship lends a trace of danger, a thrilling tension. It is foolish, or I am.

    We sit on the trodden brown-green grass in Central Park, couples and families and groups camped around us on this golden autumn day.

    “I have to tell you something.”

    “Mm-hmm.”

    “This is the last time I can see you.”

    (Silence)

    “Until this is finished. I have to get a divorce, have to move on. I want to be happy again.”

    I saw you standing with the wind and the rain in your face / And you were thinking ’bout the wisdom of the leaves and their grace / When the leaves come falling down.

    We meander through the park and, with the first drops of rain falling from the fast-graying sky, escape to wander the Time Warner Center. Later, the packed 1 train spits us out in the Village and as night falls we are dining at the bar of a noisy Japanese restaurant, the mostly college-age patrons abuzz in anticipation of Saturday night’s carouse.

    And then we are at another crowded bar, and then another, and then it is too late to make the journey to our respective joyless homes.

    Up in the morning, out on the road / And my head is aching and my hands are cold.

    Daylight saving time has concluded and a shaft of egregiously early-morning sunlight, between the curtain and the window frame in an otherwise unlit room along the Expressway, shines upon us.

    We had dressed only for that golden autumn day, and now it is so very cold, and we huddle in the lobby until a car arrives to deliver us back to Manhattan and a breakfast, in Chinatown, of scalding tea and noodle soup. A furtive hug and I step into the chilly autumn sunshine, blinking and bleary-eyed, and fade into the crowd.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

    Let’s hear it for longevity. I’ve been at The Star for more than 50 years. Yikes. At least I haven’t been at the same desk or even in the same room in the building all these years. And, of course, we work differently now.

    In the old days stories were typed on yellow paper rolled into manual typewriters, and we edited with pencils, although they weren’t necessarily blue. We cut and pasted, and it meant exactly that. Blades were involved. I probably cut and pasted more than others, because I’ve always been the sort of editor that juggles thoughts — paragraphs, quotes.

    (Although they aren’t needed any longer during the paste-up process, I still keep handy the Hoffritz scissors I bought in the 1960s at White’s Pharmacy in East Hampton, and worry when they go missing. No one misses rubber cement, which we all gave up a long time ago.)

    Longevity was in the air when Larry Cantwell, who will be elected supervisor of East Hampton Town on Tuesday, dropped in last week —  even though he is running unopposed — to talk about his vision for the town. A handful of staff members were sitting in an informal semicircle when he looked in my direction and laughed softly, almost to himself.

    “It’s a Yogi Berra thing,” he said.

    I didn’t know what he was referring to, exactly, but I knew just what he meant: We have both been there and done that before. What came to Larry’s mind, he told me later, was one of Yogi’s tortured statements that has become part of the American lexicon: “It’s deju vu all over again.”

    Although Larry’s career and mine have followed different paths, parallel rather than intersecting, we both could certainly be considered veterans. I’m still toiling away in the name of independent journalism while Larry, who was elected an East Hampton bay constable in 1975 (at the age of 25), has never stopped being a public servant: He was a town councilman from 1976 to 1982, and the East Hampton Village administrator from 1982 until recently; he also has served on the town’s housing authority and planning board.

    One of the attributes that Larry will bring to his new office in January is his knowledge of what went before. I am confident that having been witness to past controversies, and knowing whether and how they were resolved, will serve him well. He will have archival, and institutional, memories to call upon.

    “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is an aphorism often heard when government officials are criticized. It wasn’t Yogi Berra, to be sure, who said it, but George Santayana, an American philosopher who lived for almost 100 years from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries — gathering wisdom along the way, no doubt.

    That Larry remembers the history of this place will be an asset for all of us. He is not likely to make the rookie mistake of replicating the actions of previous administrations, if those actions didn’t work out the last time around, for one thing. However, taking a cue again from Yogi Berra, he might — like many of us who have observed the overwhelming changes of the past few decades —  come up hard against the reality that  “the future ain’t what it used to be.”

    From where I sit, something interesting is happening here in terms of political involvement. This week, The Star ran some 74 letters to the editor — plenty but not quite the record. This is astonishing when you consider that there is no contest at the top of the ballot to gin up excitement and that one party’s majority is already assured.

    It would be wrong to ascribe the heavy interest to the ease of submitting e-mails. That’s been true for years now. More, to my mind, the onslaught has its roots in a reaction to East Hampton’s struggles with uncontrolled tourism, weekenders, and the escalation of nightlife — a sense that the town is at an existential crossroads between those who live here and those who hope to cash in.

    Fascinating, too, has been the outpouring of smart and heartfelt support for Kathee Burke-Gonazalez. It was as if Springs rose up in her defense after a spate of caustic letters of opposition. Though she was not unknown to Springs School parents and district taxpayers, thanks to her nine years on the board of education, her emergence on the townwide scene has been quite something. 

    Notable, too, is a repeated sense that during the last four years the town has begun to turn rapidly into a place many residents do not like. In letter after letter, this community has spoken out about loud events, beaches overrun by share house renters, laws ignored and those deemed inadequate, and an airport for the very few that annoys the hell out of the very many. The fight is on, if these missives are any indication.

    Letters to the editor of any publication cannot not be seen as a representative poll. However, the preponderance of different points of view cannot be overlooked. A sizable and vocal proportion of residents think the town has been on the wrong track. Those who stand as winners in Tuesday’s election will do well to keep a close eye on these pages to see just how they are faring. I am sure there will continue to be plenty of voices ready to let them know.  

   That some people find the evidence of tradesmen’s lives in the blue-collar section of town offensive is puzzling.

    We’ll never make Springs Saga­ponack no matter how hard we try, nor should we want to. Uniformity, whether in the form of grandiose mansions or too tidy half-acre lots, seems to me to be the real offense.

    Springs used to be celebrated for its diversity (for its admixture of farmers and clammers and artists). Now apparently it is not, conformity being ever on the march.

    There undoubtedly have been — and are — problems, though it seems to me talking with neighbors ought to be the first recourse. Those who are up in arms may well say that it is not my ox that is being gored, which is true, though it was not long ago that the house next door was overflowing with tenants in the embrace of a gouging landlord, hard workers all, trying to make the best of it.

    It being a case of “there but for fortune . . .” we sympathized, and were friendly. I redoubled my efforts to learn Spanish, and it was I who had to be asked once to please turn the music down.

    A foreclosure sale and an ambitious renovation followed, the tenants scattered to the wind, and what was once a nice-looking house on the outside but not inside is home to a nuclear family from the city.

    All by way of saying that the new town administration ought to be diplomatic when it comes to enforcing laws and codes that present-day reality and cultural differences may have to some extent supervened.

    Yes, it would be good if a balance were struck, but I’ll take a little untidiness, as it were, over a too neat porch.

    With zombies in the movies, zombies on television, and zombies in print, I’m starting to think we should cool it.

    “If you build it, he will come‚” a voice told Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams.” And come they did, strolling out from fields of corn and straw. If we don’t stop being so hospitable toward the zombies, they too might come, and then we’re all goners.

    Zombies, with their filthy hair, bulging eyes, tattered clothes, and bloody scars all over their faces, are very scary. And why do they look so mean all the time? I mean, c’mon, you’re dead, get over it. Go back to where you came from and rest in peace.

    Several weeks ago, right before Montauk’s fall festival, I noticed some of these creeps hanging around street corners in the downtown area. Wondering why, I considered that they might be here to enjoy the autumn festivities. Or could they be casing our little seaside hamlet, where it would be very easy to dump a tattered body under the cover of darkness on a remote beach?

    While using my investigative reporting skills, I found that they were actually invited by Montauk Youth to scare things up out here. What, are they crazy? Don’t they know it’s Halloween and that zombies come to life on that day?

    Now it’s unavoidable; they’re here already and have been eyeing us for weeks, looking for the fat, chubby ones to munch on. They’ve probably already chosen their prey, so lock your doors and windows, folks.

    Zombies are wily creatures and can disguise themselves as princesses, pirates, superheroes, and even Barbie dolls, so some of them might not seem so frightening. But they all have scary faces and bulging eyes, something to look out for.

    I don’t think anyone’s been feeding our visitors, so tonight, when their limbs start moving and they climb down from their posts, anyone who crosses their path could become a meal.

    I happen to be a scaredy-cat. I can’t watch scary movies or read scary books. I like life to be about puppies, kittens, babies, and flowers. When I was a very impressionable teenager I saw “The Exorcist” and I’ve not been the same since. When my son was christened he wore a little red jumpsuit under his white lacy christening gown. While performing the ceremony, the priest happened to point out that he was wearing red, the color of the devil. I almost ran out of the church, leaving my little baby boy to fend for himself over the christening font.

    Today it’s going to be tough for us to decipher neighborhood children dressed in costume from the real zombies. I suggest giving the good stuff to anyone who remotely resembles a zombie. So as not to piss them off. Because you never know what trick might be up their tattered sleeves. And make sure someone is with you at all times when that knock comes to your door. Be afraid, be very afraid!

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

    At first blush, it was hard to understand why Southampton Town officials would fight a lawsuit brought by a group of churchgoers who claimed their civil rights were violated when they went to Southampton Town Hall on July 26, 2011, to protest against same-sex marriages on the first day such marriages became legal in New York State.

    It has been widely reported that police refused to allow them to remain on the steps of Town Hall because the building had been declared a “Bias Free Zone” in 2008, with a sign posted to that effect.

    The group, which the Web-based Religion News Service called the Southampton Six, was comprised of the Rev. Donald Havrilla of the Southampton First Gospel Church and five congregants of his and other churches. They alleged their freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, equal access, equal protection, and right of due process had been violated.

    The town, of course, had no choice but to respond to the suit, brought in Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York, and an attorney for the town said it had moved “as expeditiously as necessary” to settle the case after Judge Joseph Bianco refused to dismiss it,  finding a potential civil rights issue. As might be expected, settlement took a long time.

    The irony is that signs designating public places Bias-Free Zones were initiated by the town’s Anti-Bias Task Force, whose intent was to promote civility rather than to “impede upon anyone’s first amendment rights,” as Town Councilwoman Bridget Fleming said last week after some of the terms agreed to were reported.

    In a press release last week, the town said it would pay the plaintiffs’ attorney $40,000; that it had rescinded the 2008 resolution, and authorized that new, more carefully worded, signs go up soon “to reinforce the town’s commitment to ensuring that all citizens that the town interacts with will be treated in a bias-free manner.”

    In the court of public opinion, it seemed the protesters had won, but the suit never went to trial and the facts about exactly what happened that day in July are in dispute. “We gave some, and they gave some,” Ms. Fleming said, adding that she could not elaborate.

    The plaintiffs alleged that they were forced to move from the steps to an area flanked by seven-foot-tall bushes, and that this effectively kept them from interacting with others.  Attorneys for the town, however, indicated more was involved, only hinting — because the agreement had not yet been filed with the court and therefore was not official — that protesters may have headed inside the building to the town clerk’s office, where they may have intended to interrupt things. 

    “Local public officials do not have the constitutional authority to relegate people to the back of the bus in the public forum because of their religious views,”  the protesters’ attorney told the Religious News Service. I don’t know whether this is a fair or exaggerated reflection about what happened, but the essence of it is a principle on which all sides are likely to agree.