Who: You and all of the various stakeholders in the health care delivery, consumer, and insurance fields are impacted by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All of us will continue to be affected by this law, whether through changes in the way you purchase health insurance or in the many new reports required of your employer by the Department of Labor. Individuals, employers of all sizes, insurance companies, your family doctor, and every single department of your local and regional hospitals from recordkeeping to patient protocol are changing to meet the requirements of this act.

    When: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a United States statute signed into law by President Obama in March 2010. We have, in fact, been living with the Affordable Care Act as the law of the land for over three years now. The state exchanges, or health insurance marketplaces, are just one of the many components of the law that will go into effect on Jan. 1. They are unquestionably the most visible and the law’s primary mechanism to enroll the nation’s uninsured. Open enrollment for New York State’s health plan marketplace is scheduled to begin on Oct. 1, for the effective date of Jan. 1.

    Action Item: At this time, the only mandate is for individuals who do not currently have health insurance. If you are an early retiree and not eligible for Medicare, an employee not eligible for your company’s group health plan, or an unemployed person with no health insurance, for instance, you are now required to purchase health insurance. The fine for not purchasing coverage is the greater of $95 or 1 percent of your family’s annual income. The dollar amounts and percentages are scheduled to increase quickly over the next three years. There is a grace period until March 1 to buy coverage in this first year of enrollment.

    Where: The Web. Nystateofhealth.ny.gov is the address of the Web site set up by the New York State Department of Health. This is the official site for the state’s health plan marketplace, with its newly branded name of “NY State of Health.” (And is that not a perfect segue for a Billy Joel ad campaign?)

    Your Current Insurance Broker. New York, in particular, is committed to allowing you to use your current health insurance broker when buying plans on the state marketplace. There is no added cost in using your current representative, but you must make sure that he or she is certified with whichever of the two exchanges you will be enrolled in.

    Suffolk County Navigators. In Suffolk County there are three officially deemed state health care exchange navigators. These navigators are charged with providing advice and assistance to consumers who are interested in learning more about the New York’s insurance marketplace. While these navigators are unlicensed and prohibited from recommending particular plans or companies, they may serve an important educational role in shepherding uninsured people toward the marketplace. The Nassau-Suffolk Hospital Council, the Community Service Society of New York, and Public Health Solutions are Suffolk County’s three navigators.

    Whether you choose to access the Web site, an agent certified in the New York exchanges, or a health care navigator, it is imperative that you assess the accuracy of the information that is being shared as well as its current validity. Timelines and specific components of the legislation such as the “employer mandate” are being delayed or amended on a weekly basis. The political climate is unsettled and the potential for further changes is strong. Make sure you take your time and be as mindful with this purchase as you would with any other high-dollar purchase.

    What: The Affordable Care Act requires states to create exchanges, a competitive marketplace for individuals and small businesses to buy health insurance. Exchanges, which must be operating in states by Jan. 1, will be the main way that people gain coverage under the act. It’s estimated that by 2019 exchanges will serve as a gateway for an estimated 29 million people to find their insurance — 1.1 million in New York State alone. While the exchanges will be a major way people get insurance, the majority of people over all will continue to get coverage from their employers, just as they do now.

    The New York State exchanges will offer plans based on four tiers, or “metallic” levels, i.e., Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, and a Catastrophic Plan, that are expected to cover costs at approximately 90 percent, 80 percent, 70 percent, and 60 percent, respectively. The prices for these plans have been released but not the supporting plans of benefits or physician-hospital network descriptions.

    On the individual exchange there will be a vast array of plans from which to pick. The choices will include well-known insurers such as Oxford and Empire Blue Cross-Blue Shield. There will also be never-before-seen entities like Oscar, which is an all-online health plan started by three young New York City hedge fund managers.

    At present, the only insurer who will be offering plans on the SHOP, or Small Business Health Options Program — created for businesses of 50 employees or fewer — will be Oxford Health Plans. Again, we have the prices, but the supporting coverage has not yet been released by the New York State Department of Financial Services and the Department of Health.

    How: In my opinion, seeking out the advice of an expert in this ever-changing field is critical. Health insurance brokers, consultants, attorneys, and certified public accountants can either provide advice or direct you to one of their trusted resources for current information. Be wary of those who purport to be experts in an attempt to capitalize on the sense of panic that is beginning to typify the workplace.

    If you offer your employees health coverage through the small-business marketplace, you may be able to use the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit. As of 2014, NY State of Health will be the only place you will be able to access this tax credit. Your C.P.A. is the only person certified to provide you with tax advice, while your broker can assist with resources to address this as well.

    Conclusion: As I sit and type this it is difficult for me to fathom that this will all be up and running in a week, but this is the intention of New York State and its 49 counterparts. In the absence of further delays or changes, the majority of us are going to be impacted in some way by the launch of the health care exchanges next week. Stay tuned to sources of local news and your trusted advisers as this historic public policy is implemented, and you should be well prepared for the coming changes.

    Kevin A. Luss is the president of the Luss Group, an insurance and financial planning firm in Southampton.

   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.

   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.

   After my daughter was born just over five years ago, when my two nights in the hospital were over and it was time for me to check out, I couldn’t believe that the nurses would trust me enough to let me leave with her. What did I know about taking care of a child? I hadn’t studied enough. Panic!

    As I sent my daughter off to kindergarten last week, I felt almost the opposite. She’s mine now, indoctrinated into our family’s particular way of doing things, a part of our culture, one of us. How can I trust her to someone else?

    For five years I’ve known almost exactly where she was at any point in the day. Even though I work and she’s been in day care since she was just 2 months old, there was always someone I could call or stop in on to check on her. If she had been sad in the morning or looked just a little glassy-eyed, when she was switching from a bottle to solid food, taking her first tentative steps or learning to use the potty, when she was having a hard time saying goodbye and needed a little extra love at day care, I could reach out during the workday and get a Jade update.

    Not so now that she’s in real school for the whole day and parents aren’t supposed to just drop in to say hi to the women at the front desk or call to see if she’s as happy as she thought she’d be wearing the short-sleeve shirt she insisted would be warm enough, or if she’s adjusting okay to the full-day schedule or the after-school program. I’m missing her in ways I didn’t expect.

    This is the beginning of the rest of our lives and I’m not sure I’m ready. But I know that she is. I’m the one who has the hard time with transitions, not her.

    My husband and I call Jade “the mayor,” because she’s such a social little character. She remembers people she’s met all over the place and is quick to call out a hello to them from across the room or across the parking lot, even if they’re referred to only as Joshua’s mom or “karate teacher.” There is almost nowhere we can go in East Hampton without running into someone Jade knows.

    Her outgoing and exuberant friendliness is her great gift. She loves her new teachers and has reveled in her growing independence. “I’m going to talk to my teacher about having a bake sale,” she told me last week, with a voice that sounded so much like my own I had to check my phone for an echo.

    School in these early years is as much a test of the parent as the student. Did we do okay teaching kindness and consideration and good manners? Are we able to get her out the door on time with her hair and teeth brushed, her face washed, clean clothes, and the right shoes for the day ahead? Did we read the notes that came home from school? Did we remember to have her do her “homework”? Did we get her the right school supplies? Have we been good parents?

    We had our first homework assignments of the year over the weekend. I say “we” because it was my job to make sure Jade and Jasper were reminded of them and given ample time to complete them. My husband and I treated them the way we both probably treated our own homework. We got excited about them, got involved in a bunch of other stuff, then realized the weekend was almost over and we hadn’t yet made the time to actually do the assigned projects.

    So that’s why the beach was so empty on Sunday. All the other families were doing their homework. Lesson learned.

    Every single morning is a test, often a pop quiz, and we’ve been studying for the past five years now. Or have we? What if we studied the wrong subject? You know those dreams where you suddenly find yourself back in school right before a final exam? Mine sometimes go like this: Pick a subject, say, physics. It’s the end of the school year, the test is coming up and I realize that not only have I not studied for the test, but I stopped going to class at some point, just plain forgot to go for months and months. Never read the books, never did the homework, and now it’s test day, I know nothing, and I can’t even find my glasses.

    In this school my children are my teachers, also my students, and the only grade I really care about is the one they give me. I hope I pass.

   Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

   I stand naked before you, computerless. Humidity may have been at fault, or ants. I don’t know, but there I was on deadline with no “h,” no “j,” no “g.” It was very disconcerting, especially given the fact that I know my failings when it comes to dust and mold and mustiness in general, i.e., it probably had been because of my neglect that the computer didn’t work.

    Things got worse. The next morning, as I was about to leave for GeekHampton in Sag Harbor and the dump, the trunk packed full with garbage and Henry’s musty bed that Mary had tossed, I discovered that there were two inches of water on the basement floor, the result of the deluges of the day before. I looked in vain for our shop vac, which apparently had been loaned out, and resolved to buy another posthaste.

    On to the dump. Where, on wheeling in, eager to rid myself of the car’s noisome cargo, I saw the gates barred. It was a Wednesday. I still haven’t learned that the dump is always closed that day.

    Farther down the road, I snapped up the last shop vac the Power Equipment Plus store had, saying that I’d be back later to pick it up after having gone to the computer store and having dropped Henry off at The Star.

    Reluctantly, at GeekHampton I agreed to divest myself of the computer, absenting myself from felicity for a few days so they could fix it, and realized on reaching for my credit card, which I needed to pay the deposit, that I’d left it at Power Equipment Plus.

    Of course I got no work, no ostensible work, done.

    “A hard house day,” Mary, who is quite familiar with them, said sympathetically on her return from work at Rogers Memorial Library. She gently stayed my hand as I began to reach into the dryer for the laundry I’d done.

    Later, as I cooked up a savory pork stir-fry, she wondered why she always teared up when the kids’ bicycles in “E.T.” lift off the ground and fly.

    “We cheer and tear up because they’re free of all the shit we call reality,” I said. “Not that what happened today qualifies. There’s shit and then there’s deep doo-doo.”

   School is back in session, which means that once again my wife and I are on the road, going back and forth to Bridgehampton, where two of our three children are enrolled. Lisa took on the first day’s trips Monday; I was able to avoid making a run until midafternoon on Tuesday.

    Last year our middle child was able to get a bus back to East Hampton after school, which was helpful since Lisa and I work there. This year, the bus route has changed, so until we can work up a carpool or another arrangement, one of us has to make the trek.

    I find that the rides are never dull; it is always interesting to see what new visual indignities the Wainscott strip businesses have heaped upon the roadside. Then there are the real dopes — the drivers on cellphones.

    Tuesday’s run was an inauspicious start to the commute. As a long line of vehicles worked its way past the Bridgehampton School, the sound of a siren could be heard. The East Hampton dispatchers had issued two calls that I heard before I left my office, one a possible stroke, the other someone with severe abdominal pain. One of them was likely to be aboard the ambulance, which was moving fast.

    I began to move to the shoulder, but, as I watched in my rear-view mirror, I grew concerned about a woman driving a minivan immediately behind me. She was talking on a cellphone and making as if she were going to go around my truck and continue on. I jerked the wheel and leaned on my horn to get her attention. It worked, and she put down the phone and pulled onto the shoulder as the ambulance raced past.

    From what I hear, this kind of encounter between ambulances and oblivious drivers is commonplace. It is worse for volunteer emergency medical technicians and firefighters, whose flashing dash or grille lights are easy to miss — especially by those not following the old drivers-ed rule about frequently checking the mirrors.

    There’s not much any of us can do other than stay alert. Please.

   It took a lot of self-convincing to get me out to pick beach plums by myself last weekend. I had been hearing how plentiful they were at Maidstone Park for about two weeks, but I was reluctant to go out alone, I guess, because berry-picking has, for me, always been a communal activity. (Beach plums fit into the berrying category, right?)

    The hilly pastures on the farm in the Catskills where I spent my childhood summers had been left to go back to nature: There was only one cow around, and blueberry bushes proliferated. As kids, we picked as many berries as we could, eating them along the way, as our parents warned us against stomach­aches. My grandmother would make a deep-dish sponge cake with blueberries at bottom, which she nonchalantly called a pie. There were so many berries on the hills that my grandfather would fill a big pail of them occasionally and walk the four miles or so to sell them to the nearest hotel.

    When I came to live here, my husband took me to a place at the intersection of Side Hill and Deep Lanes in Amagansett where he knew there were blackberry bushes. East Hamptoners, he told me, had made an adventure of going on Montauk for blackberries — as well as grapes — in years gone by, and he remembered doing so with his grandfather. I haven’t looked for blackberry bushes in a long time, nor have I seen local blackberry jam in the farmers markets, but I imagine Montaukers still find them in favorite, or perhaps secret, places.

    After we built a house in Amagansett, cranberries became the target. It was, after all, on Cranberry Hole Road. I remember exulting in beautiful fall days when we went across the surprising dunescape to the cranberry bogs, with wild mushrooms, bearberry, and prickly pear cactus along the way. I would plunk right down in the wet, boggy ground to make the job easier.

   In those days, old-timers were at it, too. And we would sometimes come across men and women from Eastern Europe who were knowledgeable, and brave, enough to go out among the straggling pines to collect mushrooms. My husband’s Aunt Phyllis was known to wear a whistle around her neck when she went to gather cranberries by herself — just in case anything unfortunate befell her.

    This was in the early 1960s. We had been given an old, small cranberry rake —   a piece of a checkerboard wood with jagged teeth cut along one end and a muslin cover at the other — as a housewarming present, but treated it as a valuable antique rather than a practical tool.

    Although I loved to gather beach plums, I never took to the process of making jelly. I left that to others. We sent a homemade jar of cranberry jelly to our congressman in Washington once, Representative Stuyvesant Wainwright, with a message about why the property the fruit had come from should become a national park. Eventually the state agreed, and much of it became Napeague State Park.

    I didn’t wear a whistle around my neck when I went to get beach plums at Maidstone Park last weekend. The bushes are close to the road, and, having been told that ticks didn’t seem to be in abundance, the only thing I worried about was poison ivy, which, as you no doubt know, is an absolute scourge along the bay beaches. I went out covered neck to toe.

    Disappointed at first that the bushes seemed thoroughly picked over, I persevered until I found some high bushes with branches full of clusters. Two men with unrecognizable accents came along, headed for the beach, and asked what I was doing. I explained; their interest was obviously piqued, so I warned them severely about the poison ivy. When I got home, I set down the basket without touching its bottom, which must have brushed the ivy, kicked off my shoes, got out of my clothes quickly, and scrubbed my hands with brown soap. (Miracle of miracles, I escaped without infection.)

    The beach plums — about four quarts of them — went to a friend who has made myriad jars of jelly over the years but hadn’t felt up to doing any picking lately. It had been a beautiful afternoon. I’d recommend the pursuit of wild berries to anyone. But don’t ask me where my secret cranberry bog is, because I won’t tell.

    So I got a ticket. Not a speeding ticket, a parking ticket. At Trout Pond. Wrong place, wrong time. Guilty.

    But. . . . What went through my mind was this:

    This doesn’t apply to me, because I was working.

    I didn’t see the sign.

    I didn’t look for a sign.

    I wouldn’t have read the sign if I had been looking for it or if I had seen it because:

    I was working.

    It was a weekday.

    It’s just a parking lot near a pond.

    I just wanted to see if there were any good pictures to take.

    I was just looking around.

    I wasn’t there long.

    I was working.

    Oh my God! One hundred dollars!

    But I was working.

    I just walked around the pond.

    I wasn’t using the park, I was taking pictures.

    This is so mean.

    Can I protest that I was working?

    Why is it so expensive anyway? After all, I was working.

    I only took four pictures.

    I saw a sign, but I didn’t read the sign. The sign didn’t apply to me, because . . . I was working.

    I didn’t even see the ticket on the windshield until a breeze flapped it.

    W.T.F?

    Then I noticed the sign (and even read it), but it did not compute.

    How could they give me a ticket?

    I was working!

    Rules are for other people, not for me, because they just shouldn’t be for me. (Mini tantrum, alone in the parking lot at Trout Pond.) And besides . . . I was working.

    And now this is where this them and me thing comes in. This is me thinking, “I live here; I shouldn’t get a ticket.” Crazy, right?

    I see people flaunt the rules all the time and I am always thinking they are not from here, they are unworthy and absolutely deserve to be posted on that douche spotter Facebook page. The U-turners, the speeders, the blockers of aisles, the sloppy parkers, they feel so entitled. . . . Oops.

    There I was, ticket in hand, still thinking, “Do those rules apply to me? I am working. Of course not, those rules are for other people.”

    The ticket has these little boxes that are checked. My ticket might have had a little box called “reality check.”

    Did I break a rule and did I deserve that ticket? Absolutely. (But I was working.) Did I imagine that I might ever be breaking a rule? No. Even if there was a rule I might have been breaking, that rule wouldn’t really be applying to me anyway, because, after all (all together now), I was working.

    Delusional, hoity-toity, totally wrong! Guilty on so many levels.

    Did I pay the ticket? Of course. Did I deserve it? Of course. Could I afford it? Not really.

    Do posted signs apply to everyone? Yes. That’s why they are there.

    Did I learn my lesson? I’ll tell you later. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do. Oops.

   Durell Godfrey, now short $100, is a contributing photographer for The Star.

   Not long ago, I mentioned some ways in which the freedom of which we often prate is constrained; it’s not only limited by the certainties of death and taxes, but by myths we adore, hatreds that seethe, failures of the heart, and such.

    One thing we must know by now is that we cannot control the world, cannot bend it to our will, and that while the world is anything but what it should be — violent, bloody, self-serving, irrational  — there is little that one nation, no matter how powerful, can do to make it right if there is lacking a consensus as to what is the right thing to do in the face of pervading evil.

    Surely, these decisions ought not to be left in our hands alone, for our unilateral acts have made bloody messes of it in the past which cannot be papered over with patriotic pieties, the latest bloody mistake, of course, being the cause of “the caldron of madness” that the Middle East has become.

    Yes, the recent use of chemical weapons in Syria (presumably by the government, though as of this writing it’s yet to be absolutely proved) was heinous, though, as one letter writer to The Times asked today, why ought the huge Syrian death toll thus far be considered with no less revulsion for its having been caused by “plain old bullets and bombs.”

    Several of the writers today — just about all of whom urged caution when it comes to this nation’s response — called for some kind of collective action, humanitarian and diplomatic, to bring an end to the killings.

    “Let [them] cease,” said N. Narayan Kutty of Mansfield Center, Conn. “The massacre of more than 100,000 men, women, and children is already an indelible stain on the soul of the 21st century.”

    Just one of many stains.

    And they won’t wash off entirely, not even in our marvelous modern washing machines that assure us the whitest of whites.

    The stains remain for all to see. It is hard to avert your eyes from such evil, whatever the intentions, and perhaps fixing our collective gaze upon them may lead to some good.