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.

   One of the things they don’t tell you about being a parent of small children is that time, as you once may have known it, ceases to exist. This came to mind over the weekend when I was finally able to start some house chores that had been postponed by the birth of our youngest, Ellis, over three years ago.

    Parents look at one another knowingly when the childless complain about being oh-so busy; there’s busy, then there’s chasing-after-a-toddler and minding-a-pre-teen busy. Getting to tasks around the house or even having friends over for dinner? They can fall by the wayside — for years.

    Part of the problem at the Rattray household is that I am what you might call a compulsive do-it-yourselfer. There is hardly a job that I do not want to tackle myself, which means that projects are inevitably delayed. I’m big on getting a coat of primer on something, for example, and then not circling back to the top coat for months.

    Ellis probably takes after me: He insists on helping the minute he sees a hammer and nails come out. With his lending a hand, the work is more about watching that he doesn’t wallop the dining room table, for example, than actually getting anything done.

    My wife, Lisa, and I ultimately struck on what appears to be a good solution now that the indoor season is upon us, and we desperately want to have people over again. My best hours for housework are in the morning, in that period between the second cup of coffee and an early lunch. So, with our eldest child at a Friday night sleepover in Bridgehampton, Lisa sent the two younger ones to spend the night at her parents’ house.

    The difference was remarkable. By 9 a.m. Saturday I had retiled two sections of floor. At 11 I was moving dressers around and washing a couch slipcover. By 1 p.m. I had sanded and primed a rusted baseboard radiator cover. And at 2 I started cleaning the basement.

    Some couples set up date nights to keep the candle-flame going. For Lisa and me, at least for now, the goal is to have chore days. The dates can come later.

   One of my granddaughters had some sushi in hand when she arrived at my house after school the other day. The other granddaughter checked out the freezer and asked me to make her chicken fingers another day.

    I can’t imagine either of them wanting what I used to make for myself after school: lettuce and tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread. We lived in New Jersey, and I was brought up to believe that Jersey tomatoes were the finest kind, but I am pretty sure those after-school tomatoes were the tasteless store-bought kind. I think it was mostly the Hellmann’s that I liked. 

     Because my family moved from one neighborhood to another when I was in middle school, there was a time when, instead of going home for lunch, I went to my Tanta Laka’s house, which was nearer school. She served me the same thing every time: two scrambled eggs with bread and grape jelly on the side, and a 7-Up. (Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it was her fault that I was hungry after school.)

    Sometimes, when Uncle Chiel was home, I would find him sitting at the lunch table eating strange things. It took a while for me to get over the fact that he was eating calf’s brains one day. Let’s just say it was instructive. They kept a kosher house, and, thinking back, I wonder what Tanta Laka used to scramble those eggs. It probably was chicken fat — schmaltz — which was a standard in the households of recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. But times were changing.

    On Friday afternoons, I would sometimes have lunch at my cousin Marilyn’s house instead. One day, she got up from the table and went into the kitchen. I heard Marilyn tell her mother, my Aunt Kate, that she couldn’t give me any bacon for lunch because my family was kosher. Don’t worry, her mother said. “Just tell her it’s fish.” I’m not sure we thought that was funny at the time, but we’ve laughed about it since.

    We never had bacon at home, but we didn’t use schmaltz either. My mother favored margarine. But then my parents gave up being kosher when I was about my older granddaughter’s age.

    But back to the granddaughters, I’m relieved that I don’t have to worry about what they should have for lunch. They are fortunate to live in a time and at a place and with a family where food is not only bountiful but awfully good.  Not only at home, but at the Ross elementary school, they have been treated to ample and healthy lunches, which are likely to be delicious. At least I thought the meal I had there once was. Now, as the girls get closer to being teenagers, I am at a loss about what to stock for those occasions when they come over after school and I’m relieved that I don’t have to worry about what they want for lunch. Tomato and lettuce sandwiches heavy on the mayonnaise probably aren’t a good idea, but you never know.

    Did Job ever get chiggers?     

    Let’s go to the book, Jerome. . . .

    Yes! In fact, it’s the first plague to have been visited upon him by the Lord.

    “. . . So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot [check] to the crown of his head [check — well, shoulder in my case]. Job took a potsherd [there being no cortisone cream in those days] with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.”

    Well, there you have it. My case doesn’t quite measure up; there is shit and then there is deep doo-doo, as I said last week. But, whether chiggers or tick larvae, this latest attack ranks high on the scale of torturous annoyance.

    I was prescribed a dermatologic cream and a low short-term dose of prednisone, which had Mary scouring health Web sites for the side effects, which, in some cases, she reported, were dire.

    When, in reviewing that long list she mentioned “unwarranted happiness,” I said that didn’t sound so bad to me. And, as for skin easily subject to bruises, I already knew I was thin-skinned.

    A subsequent, albeit unscientific, poll I conducted, however, tended to support her view, and I resolved to stay off the prednisone if I could.

    Meanwhile, a co-worker, alarmed at my announcement, advised an application of Rid to be followed 10 minutes later (once it was washed off) with an application of clear nail polish over each bite. As we talked, the infernal itching rose to such a high level that I leaped up from my seat and, barely excusing myself, ran the 440-some yards from the office to White’s pharmacy in what I think was record time for a 73-year-old.

    Last night, at around 12:30, when the itching around my ankles became so insistent that I knew I — a heavy sleeper normally — wouldn’t sleep otherwise, I downed half a pill with a banana and went back to bed, hoping that I wouldn’t find myself blind on awakening.

    It’s morning, and as far as I can tell I’m on the mend and inclining in the general direction of unwarranted happiness. So, for now, I’ll spare the Lord a remonstration.

    We were gathered on a backyard deck. The light was failing and a chill was coming on. We had been asked to share something we had written, preferably poetry, with a small group of friends, a “read-in,” if you will. There were only a few poets among us, however. After listening to several short and sassy poems, we were treated to an unfinished memoir that the group agreed was a novel waiting to happen. Then, a United States District Court judge and law professor took out a manuscript and read what might be called a playlet. It went like this:

    The year is 2014. Netanyahu and Obama are in conversation. Iran has dropped a nuclear bomb on Israel, and the country is largely destroyed. Netanyahu tells Obama that Israel is going to retaliate. Obama argues against it. Netanyahu says Israel has no choice. Obama begs him not to do so. He suggests that a place can be found where the Jewish people can be resettled. Netanyahu stands his ground. There is nothing Obama can do.

    We were silent when the reading was over. Eagerly, the assembled, a dozen and a half of us, moved indoors, as much, I am sure, to avoid commenting on what we had just heard as for warmth and light.

    Two days later, I was brought up short by another dark work of the imagination. A friend sent a link to a YouTube video: “Help Kickstart World War III.” Created by the Second City Network, which produces all kinds of satiric, and supposedly funny, videos — which I guess are modeled on the skits on “Saturday Night Live” — the World War III video stars a series of young adults who announce that they are supporting President Obama because they promised to do so in 2008 and he is “right all the time.” They ask viewers to contribute to the $1.6 trillion needed for World War III, which will be “social-media focused,” using “organic, grass-fed bombs,” and fought on “99 percent of the world.” Maybe it’s because I have already lived through a world war, but I wasn’t laughing. Could the video really have been viewed 2,472,204 times? Or is that part of the joke?

    My copy of the latest New Yorker magazine, with a Louis Menand book review calculated to cause alarm, arrived the same day. Mr. Menand, a Harvard English professor who is a brilliant contributor to The New Yorker, praises Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control,” calling it a “miracle of information management . . . covering more than 50 years of scientific and political change.”

    In detail after detail, the book proves, Mr. Menand writes, that “most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence, with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, computers miscalculating, and people jumping to the wrong conclusion.” The title of the article, “Nukes of Hazard,” playing on the television series “Dukes of Hazzard,” was the only thing slightly amusing about the review.

    Given the terrorist attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi this week and the continuing Syrian war, there hasn’t been much to smile about in the news. Although we didn’t hear much poetry on the deck the other night, I couldn’t help remembering the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold: “[W]e are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” Written almost 150 years ago, it still strikes home.

   There is a bit of irony in that the weekend I spent touching up our storm windows and getting them in place was followed by a week in which temperatures approached summer-like highs.

    Fall’s fast turn usually catches me somewhat unprepared, and, like Jimmy Carter, I am okay with pulling on a sweater on a cold morning. But the rest of the family howls in protest if the house is too cold for their liking when they arise. So, missing out on what might be considered more enjoyable Saturday and Sunday activities, such as fishing or accompanying the younger kids to the Amagansett School fair, I spent those days scraping, priming, and painting.

    Truth is, I like these chores, especially during transitional weather, though I can never quite keep up. Taking down the screens on our seven double-hung windows and putting up the storms is hardly a bother, and even patching loose spots in the glazing putty has its pleasures, as unseen birds twitter and chatter and chirp in the nearby swamp.

    Our modest garden continues to produce, with miracle kale bought as seedlings in May at Amagansett’s Amber Waves Farm offering up leaves after three cuttings. A fall crop awaits transfer to the ground from its peat-pot nursery. Our 3-year-old’s school-project string bean has flowered anew and put out about a pod a week since the weather cooled. I noticed these things as I waited between coats of paint.

    There are still some squash around, which I intend to put up as pickles. Cranberries must be getting ripe in the bogs, and if there is time, I want to take the kids clamming before it gets too cold. Then there is the trustees’ contest Sunday; can we dig a winner before the deadline?

    This is a funny period — not yet fall, but certainly not summer. The four seasons, the ordinary calendar distinctions, seem inadequate. Words fail. But it is, we know, the best time of the year.

    Ever since the 2004 presidential election, when I went to Florida to try to help legitimate voters avoid being turned away from the polls, it feels like every progressive organization in the country has had me on its radar. Perhaps one gave another its database; I certainly haven’t been signing up myself.

    It’s no secret that the groups targeting me as a potential donor or at least someone who might sign a petition are on the Democratic side of the aisle. I haven’t spent a lot of time pondering the fiasco of the 2004 election, but I can’t help noting today that if Secretary of State John Kerry had won, John Edwards would have been vice president. (Now that s something to set your mind whirling.)

    Although I haven’t contributed anything at all to a political campaign since Barack Obama first ran for the presidency in 2008, the number of groups seeking me out has continued to grow. The good result, although it is rather funny, is that I am now familiar with the names of elected officials from states which I rarely if ever have even visited: There’s Senator Jon Tester of Montana, Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Representative Dave Loebsack of Iowa. . . . 

    Recently, I’ve been asked over and over to chip in $3 to various campaigns.  Yes, exactly $3. The idea seems to be that more people will contribute if they are asked for a small amount rather than a large one, and that this will produce a broad base that will lift the organization to its fund-raising goal on the wings of a million butterflies.

    I’d love to know how $3 became the ubiquitous “ask,” rather than $2 or $4. Has an odd number been proven to appeal in some way to our subconscious? Who started this trend for micro-appeals?

    The number of e-mail asks flooding my in-box was over the  top last week, as the Sept. 30 Federal Election Commission cutoff for quarterly reports from various political committees approached. The appeals all warned that there was a looming fund-raising deadline; on Monday, I kept being told, over and over, that the deadline was midnight. Perhaps someone will explain to me what difference it would make if these organizations received someone’s $3 on Oct. 1 rather than Sept 30. Isn’t it all dedicated to the same end?

    Then — and this really did pique my curiosity — a number of senators suddenly upped the ante. Senators Dick Durbin and Harry Reid each asked for $5. Rob Zerban of Wisconsin, who may run against Paul Ryan for the House of Representatives in 2014, asked for $7. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut asked for $10. Senator Charles Schumer asked for $25. Before I knew it, Vice President Joe Biden and Michelle Obama each asked for $75, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wanted a whopping $80. And so on. . . .

    You may wonder — I know I do — why I spend so much time reading and dissecting these e-mails. Why don’t I just ditch them into the trash?

    I guess I keep combing through them because they are everyday evidence of how the Internet has changed political campaigning. I hope this is evidence of a new grassroots. Is the $3 donation the answer to the Super PAC?

    There were maybe 30 of us at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor the other night, watching a PowerPoint presentation on how to spot an Internet “phishing” scam.

    Not a virus, not a bug, not a worm, not even the so-called “Nigerian 419” shakedown (419 is the number of the Nigerian Criminal Code section dealing with fraud — thank you, Wikipedia), where somebody in Lagos urgently desires to give you a big chunk of his rich uncle’s money in exchange for a little of yours to bribe it out of the country.

    No, the scams we were learning about are far less obvious and infinitely more devious, and their numbers are exploding.

    Phishermen, we learned, create Web pages that look almost exactly like they come from a real place — PayPal.com, eBay.com, T.J. Maxx, U.P.S., Verizon, iTunes, the state lottery, any and all banks, anything at all, really — hoping to entice us into giving away key personal information: passwords, credit card numbers, bank account details, and the like.

    Did you, for example, get a warning from your “bank” last week about a bounced check? Did it maybe look like this (an actual scam, subject line: Insufficient Funds Notice)?

    Date: September 25, 2013

    Insufficient Funds Notice

    Unfortunately, on 9/25/2013 your available balance in your Wells Fargo account XXXXXX4653 was insufficient to cover one or more of your checks, Debit Card purchases, or other transactions.

    An important notice regarding one or more of your payments is now in your Messages & Alerts inbox. To read the message, click HERE, and first confirm your identity.

    Please make deposits to cover your payments, fees, and any other withdrawals or transactions you have initiated. If you have already taken care of this, please disregard this notice.

    We appreciate your business and thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

    If you have questions after reading the notice in your inbox, please refer to the contact information in the notice. Please do not reply to this automated email.

    Sincerely.

    Wells Fargo Online Customer Service

    wellsfargo.com | Fraud Information Center

    4f57e44c-5d00-4673-8eae-9123909604b6

    “Always look at the return email address,” instructed our friendly geek, Eliot. “If the address looks weird, you may be in the wrong place.”

    wellsfargo.com/za, for example, would mean the e-mail originated in Zambia. Would your bank be writing to you from Zambia? Definitely a wrong place. If the last part of the name makes no sense, he said, read no further, hit the delete button.

    Speaking of look no further:

    From: Internal Revenue Sevice

    Reply-To: [email protected]

    Subject: Refund Notification

    “sevice.com”? Not just one weirdness there. The misspelling is easy to spot; the “com” needs common sense. The e-mail address of the I.R.S. ends in .gov, like all federal government department addresses, not .com.

    Bad spelling, and especially bad English, are dead giveaways that a phisherman is casting out a line. So is a warning of dire consequences. This next one makes it on all three counts:

    UNITED STATES OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY

    MG Timothy J. Lowenberg, Adjutant General and Director State Military Department

    Washington Military Dept., Bldg 1 Camp Murry, Wash 98430-5000

    Attn,

    It has come to our notice that your ATM card to you is still in Georgia because you have refused to comply with the US Customs and Boarder Protection. I wish to remind you the consequences if you fail to comply. With the power invested in me as the Secretary General of the Homeland Security I advise you to comply with the Custom immediately to avoid having your ATM card confiscated and charging you for money laundry.

    However i the agent Mr. Paul Smith will advice you to immediately respond back to my E=mail so that he will help you to obtain the needed certificate the only fees required is $480 after that your ATM card will be released to you unless you have decided to loose your ATM card. Contact information is listed below. . . .

    With, of course, a helpful link.

    How anybody could fall for that one is hard to fathom, but it happens every minute. Unemployed people looking for work are taken in by lottery scams, elderly people put their trust in “Your Social Security Refund,” even supposedly savvy teens click on that treacherous link that promises a free iPod just for submitting a review. Global losses from phishing in 2012 were estimated at $1.5 billion.

    “It’s going to get harder to figure out who’s going to screw you over, so just trust your gut,” Eliot concluded. “Common sense is the best way to stay safe, in the real world and on the Internet.”

    We were getting our stuff together, ready to leave, when someone’s cellphone rang, and rang, and didn’t stop ringing.

    “Could you help me?” came a voice from the back. “I don’t know how to turn this off.”

    Better never turn it on, or your computer either, is my advice.

    Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor-at-large. She is at large in East Hampton at the moment.

    Getting a call back from East Hampton Town Hall is a hit-or-miss proposition for the news media these days, which is why a flurry of responses to an editorial that appeared on this page last week was a surprise.

    We had said the public interest would be better served if town board meeting agendas, as well as those of several other boards, were available with more lead time. Among the responses this engendered was an e-mail from Richard Myers, a member of the architectural review board, who mused, wrongly, that I did not consult The Star’s government calendar. As it turns out, I am the one who prepares that particular set of weekly listings, and as such, have been intimately aware of the deficit.

    A.R.B. agendas are posted on Thursdays, a week before its meetings take place, which is too late for them to be included in East Hampton Town’s official newspaper until the day of the meeting itself. This is clearly too late for all but the die-hard government watchers, and utterly useless for our many subscribers who get their papers in New York City or beyond, and who learn of the agenda only after the meeting is over.

    The reply from town officials, when I broached this in previous years, was that setting agendas any earlier would be unfair to applicants. Of course, the net effect is to shut the public out of the process, but that apparently does not matter. (I am loathe to say it may be something they prefer.)

     To his credit, Fred Overton, the town clerk, who is running for a seat on the town board, was the first to phone, making the point that we incorrectly blamed him for the town board’s logjam. He then wrote a letter to the editor explaining how, from his perspective, things could be better. His ideas, which can be read in the pages that follow, can be summed up this way: The supervisor and members of the town board should have everything to the town clerk by the Friday before the following Thursday’s formal meeting so agendas can be posted on the town’s townclerk.com Web page.

    From where I sit, the schedule Mr. Overton supports is a huge improvement on the status-quo information blackout. But it still makes it tough for the town’s print publications to announce what is to be under consideration with enough time for residents to be part of the process.

   “I’ve only gotten to the second circle of Hell,” I said to my daughter Johnna in an e-mail the other day, “but I like it.”

    My father, who used to teach humanities, said Dante had to be taught, though I’ve found an edition that has plenty of explanatory notes. Somebody ought to try a modern version of “The Inferno.” It would probably sell like hotcakes.

    The fence-sitters, by the way, weren’t even allowed into Hell, being neither sinners nor virtuous.

    “Heaven, to keep its beauty, cast them out / but even Hell itself would not receive them / for fear the damned might glory over them. . . . The world will not record their having been there; Heaven’s mercy and its justice turn from them / Let’s not discuss them; look and pass them by.”

    So much for those who said, when my late Franco-American stepbrother during a cross-country trip asked for their opinions, “Well, the polls say. . . .”

    He did not care what the polls said, he said. He wasn’t interested in phlegmatic hemming and hawing. What was it they thought, he wanted to know — so he could refute them!

    Of course, one can be forgiven for not even picking up the phone when the pollsters call. One such did the other night, five or six times between the hours of 6 and 10 p.m., which usually is after my bedtime (even when the Steelers are playing these days, alas), and when that last call came Mary picked up the receiver and gave Key Research, or whoever it was, a piece of her mind, her opinion being that they had been goddamned annoying.

    Knowing now the bitter lamentations that await should I not take stands has had a salutary effect: I’ll stick to my last and bear it out even to the edge of doom, as does Mary, who wrote a number of e-mails to the president in recent weeks, urging him to hold off on the bombing of Syria. Cynically, I said there was no need since the N.S.A. already knew the gist of her thinking, but, to her credit, she persisted.

    As we all must.