If you had told me last month that I would be missing a 45-pound bundle of muscle and joy, a “hound mix,” according to ARF, I wouldn’t have believed you.

    I’ve always been a “cat person.” Grew up with them. And despite getting cat scratch fever from my mean black-and-white cat, Furble, as a kid, have always had a love affair with them. Where dogs appeared clumsy, cats were graceful. Where dogs were needy and submissive, cats were noble and aloof. You can cuddle cats, hold them in your arms like babies — and yes, they were my baby substitutes — and sleep with them curled into cozy nooks of your body.

    I had friends whose dogs would jump on you as soon as you got out of your car by way of a messy and violent greeting, pawing with mud, ripping through clothes, bruising legs. Cute in their overaffection? Hell no. I always felt that conditional love had more value than unconditional.

    But all this didn’t preclude my appreciating the appeal of dogs. Certain dogs . . . with sweet aspects and curly of tail. I’m not a huge fan of small dogs with their stunted legs and yippy personalities. And big dogs I’m just not drawn to. Who knows why. Genetic disposition? I like my dogs the way I like my men: of medium build, tight and wiry. I envisioned myself walking along the edge of the surf, accompanied by a canine pal.

    A few Sundays ago while at the beach with my best friend and her daughter, dog lovers both, I suggested we stop at ARF on the way home, “just to look.”

    “I doubt I’ll get one,” I forewarned Molly. I knew it would take a very special dog for me to be seduced. As we walked in, a volunteer was cradling a tiny puff of what looked like smoke in her arms, the palest gray miniature poodle. She placed her in my arms, where this helpless, shivering creature dissolved all my prejudices toward small dogs. We took her into a room to “bond,” where she ran around in a frightened whirl.

    I was beginning to have my doubts, but guilt intervened. I’d brought her this far. “I’ll take her,” I said. A few minutes later, when we were informed that I couldn’t take her — she needed to be in a home with another dog — I went through a momentary range of emotions from outrage to relief.

    We were then given a tour of the facility, taken around the back where large dogs ran around in cages, some barking aggressively, others playfully nudging their noses through the grate. Our tour guide explained that the medium dogs were mostly off at an adoptathon. There was one, however, in the sick ward with an ear infection.

    Daisy looked up at me in that Princess Di way: head tilted away while rolling her eyes back at mine. Her body was lean and powerful, her face a countenance of love and joy. We walked her down a wooded path. She was well behaved and gentle. I was hooked.

    I picked her up the next day equipped with a borrowed crate, which I was told would make her feel safe. Feeling guilty about introducing her to my two-cat household, I needn’t have worried. Savannah and Nelson took only a few hours to allow her into their inner sanctum. The four of us took walks together, much to the delight of passers-by, and we all slept peacefully in my bed.

    At first I was put off by certain things about Daisy: her unfamiliar dog smell, slightly gamey, unlike the fresh-baked-batter scent of cats, and her slime factor, most noticeable when she aimed her tongue at my mouth. Walking her was a tangle of fur and leash, with me pirouetting out of makeshift lassos. My extremities sported a patchwork of bruises. Like new lovers, we hadn’t yet discovered each other’s rhythms. The next ARF dog-training session was weeks away.

    Daisy was not housebroken. The shelter personnel guessed that she was about a year old, an age I had mistakenly thought mature. I would walk her and walk her, yet she would wait till we got home to “do her business.” I wasn’t so bothered by the mess as by our lack of communication.

    On her second day, the lawyers who worked in offices downstairs from my apartment complained that “it sounded like a construction site” after I’d leave her in her crate. So, I brought her into work, where she charmed most everyone and lay quietly at my feet.

    Everyone had advice about bringing up Daisy. What to feed her, how much to feed her, what not to feed her. Naturally, the first treat I bought, a nice-looking (if I were a dog) piece of rawhide twisted into a bone shape and stuffed with a smear of meaty goop, was deemed unhealthy.

    Then there were the toys: action toys, distraction toys, comfort toys. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. My cats were perfectly content hunting moles and mice all day. Daisy had to be continually entertained.

    One night, invited to dinner by a friend with a fenced-in yard, I brought along Daisy. She scampered playfully with his dog, the two occasionally entwined like long-lost friends.

    She began to run away. She wasn’t running from me, but rather in hopes of finding me, I guessed, as it happened the only two times in our two weeks together that I left her alone. The first time I met a friend for dinner, down the block at Cittanuova. I was gone only an hour. When I returned, Daisy was gone, though I’d closed all the windows to within three inches. There was seemingly no way she could have escaped. Except . . . out the cat door? Normally only her head could get through. My friend said no, impossible. Thank goodness she was microchipped. I got her back within the hour.

    A few nights later I went out again — this time closing the windows and locking her out of the kitchen and access to the cat door. Upon my return, she was missing again. A second-story window had been chewed, the screen busted through; she had propelled herself out the window. This time I spent the entire night worrying. But the next morning Animal Control called to say she’d been found in Montauk. Montauk!

    Turns out she’d coiled herself up at the bus stop on Newtown Lane, where she’d been rescued by a guy who worked at Waldbaum’s, and taken on the bus to his house, where she’d escaped — without her collar. The police found her within minutes on Old Montauk Highway. I was able to piece this all together when I heard from the very nice landlord of the rescuer, who had spent the night worrying about Daisy too, and had dispatched searchers in the morning. I took Daisy back for a visit and to retrieve her collar. “I’d take her,” he said, “but I’m 89.”

    I thought long and hard about keeping Daisy. I had grown to love her, and her smell. I could get her drugs to stop her separation anxiety. I could get her a trainer. I could get her more toys. But I kept thinking about what she would really want. And I knew what it was. She wanted a big yard and a family with a dog. I returned her to ARF with that proviso. Within two days, they found Daisy such a home. Farewell, my dear Daisy. You are missed.

    Debra Scott is a real estate columnist for The Star.

    The letters to the editor in The East Hampton Star, to me, are the icing on the cake. I was about to say they are the spice in the stew, but stewing is not only a method of getting a batch of foods together and cooking them, but also means fretting or fussing . . . and maybe making a fuss isn’t quite what some letter writers need to be further encouraged to do.

    Be that as it may, I try to read everything in every issue of The Star and leave the icing on the cake for last. Even though I usually have a bit of a head start, by reading the editorials and a number of the news stories before they see print, I don’t always attain that goal. Aside from the obvious fact that there’s always a lot in the paper, I am a slow reader. To be honest, I sort of pride myself on being a slow reader, because I decided some years ago that slow readers make good proofreaders. I like to think I’m good at it.

    A long time ago, in the 1970s to be exact, we had a brilliant young man on the editorial staff who was a terrible proofreader. At first, I thought it was an anomaly, but eventually I decided that the words on a page went from his eye to his brain so fast that he couldn’t register anything but the meaning. He wrote very, very slowly, every word chosen carefully and spelled correctly, but he wasn’t much use when the time came to check letters to the editor for typos and such.

    The late Everett Rattray, who more than 50 years ago established The Star’s policy of printing every letter received (unless obscene or libelous), used to call our letters pages Freedom Hall. The idea of Freedom Hall referred, in part, to his decision to run letters that expressed opinions that some would consider hateful: This country doesn’t need the First Amendment to protect speech that everyone likes; it is the opinions that are out of the mainstream that need protection. (If you think back on the history of the 20th century, and the ways in which nationalism and group-think can run amok, you will understand that this principle is true.) He also agreed that we should print letters that seemed flat-out crazy. Who were we, he asked, to judge?

    Of course, I have to admit that I enjoy it when the print gossip columns and electronic celebrity Web sites pick up something from our letters, as they have since we ran a letter from Alec Baldwin on Oct. 3. But, honestly, it wasn’t Mr. Baldwin who got me thinking about the letters pages but Paul Thorton, the editor of The Los Angeles Times.

    Mr. Thorton has announced that he will no longer publish letters to the editor from climate-change deniers  because their statements are factually inaccurate. This gave me pause. In my opinion, an informed society requires access to what people are thinking, whether right or wrong. If I had Mr. Thorton’s ear, I would suggest that, instead of a ban, an editor’s note pointing to a legitimate scientific source would serve his readers better.

    By the way, Alec Baldwin is in The Star again this week, responding to a letter last week from an East Hampton photographer he had lambasted. There’s no doubt that our letters pages are a continuing and lively community bulletin board, and I am happy to say the digital revolution hasn’t put a damper on it one bit.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    “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.