ACT ONE: Boy Meets Candy

fade in: Popcorn, large

cut to: Milk Duds, box

slo-mo: misshapen spheres

cascade onto buttery maize

intimations of endless bounty

hand disappears into bag (MOS)

scoops up a lovely melange

dark balls and white fluff

sweet chocolate and salty corn

match made in casting kitchen

VO: “The journey has begun —

as American as Shinnecocks

as rich as Milton Hershey

as suspenseful as a Damon

and/or Affleck spy thriller.”

ergo: born to be a cash cow

open wide and say moo-lahhh

ACT TWO: Boy Loses Candy

rack focus: one odd Milk Dud

neither caramel nor gooey

but hard and malty and round

freeze frame: it’s a Whopper!

guest cameo or McGuffin?

halfway through the bag

inciting insight is cited:

you are halfway through the bag!

VO: “Nothing lasts forever.”

tears appear in blue eyes

one tear breaks loose, rolls

ECU: price tag — $2.50

reverse angle: bottle of water

Clint squint foreshadows violence

swish pan: dream sequence

Chekhov’s gun in Bunuel’s eye

man on iPhone shot thru head

ACT THREE: Boy Gets Candy

angle on: a fistful of Popcorn

cue Ennio Morricone sound track

VO: “In a world of salt and

unpopped kernels, every man

searches for the last Milk Dud.”

montage: paper bag. beating heart.

great plains. German shepherd.

cymbals crash as the last Milk Dud

is found in the bag’s darkest corner

EXT: dissolve to mouth.

INT: dissolve in mouth. le fin.

closing credits roll:

special thanks to Hershey, PepsiCo

Syd Field, Anton Chekhov, Malpaso

Ennio Morricone, George Wallace

Hitch, Luis Bunuel, 2 Weinsteins

Voice-over by Don LaFontaine

    Written on location, Bridgehampton, New York.

    No candy was harmed during the making of this poem.

   “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.   

   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.

    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.

   When The New York Times reported last week, on the front page, that a major lobbying effort was being made to reinstate a proposed cut in payments to dialysis centers, and that 205 members of Congress had asked that the cut be eliminated, my attention was riveted. Ev Rattray, the editor and publisher of this newspaper and my husband, who died more than 32 years ago, was a dialysis patient in the last years of his life, after cancer claimed both his kidneys. That was a long time ago. Although I knew there were clinics now much closer than Bay Shore, to which he traveled three times a week until we were able to do dialysis at home, I somehow wasn’t entirely aware that profit-making centers had sprung up around the country over the passing years.

    End-stage kidney disease is the only chronic disease whose treatment is paid for by the United States government. The reason is simple: Dialysis, or kidney transplants, are necessary if patients are to live. That clinics had become a  “multibillion-dollar industry” came as a shock, however. The thrusts of the Times story was how hard it is for the government to do something about an expense even if it is found to be “stark” waste, and that, if the payments to dialysis centers were continued as before, it would be the result of excessive lobbying by the profit-making industry rather than new medical information.

    The cut proposed in this case is in the $500 million annual cost of providing patients with an anti-anemia drug, one element of the overall $32.9 billion government expense for the dialysis program. The Medicare Division of the Department of Health and Human Services had found that the drug was being overused, and it recommended that Congress approve a cut of $29.52 from the $246 per visit reimbursement planned for next year. Officials are now re-examining that cut, with a decision expected before the end of the year.

    If I was surprised that private corporations had taken over a government health program, I was dismayed by the Times report that the chief executive of one of the larger companies, DaVita Healthcare Partners of Denver, earned $26.8 million last year (a 53-percent jump since 2011), and that Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, had moved to buy a larger share of the company. If you are among those who bristle at reports of the multimillion-dollar salaries that the heads of large financial corporations command, you may join me in concern that someone in charge of health care, and vital health care at that, is the recipient of such largesse. DaVita and other corporations are reported to be spending millions on lobbying efforts to protect their profits. The Times said DaVita alone had generated more than 80,000 letters and signatures from patients pleading with their representatives to eliminate the cut.

    Less prominent in the story in The Times was word that the proposed cut would hurt clinics in rural areas or in poor sections of large cities hardest, given that dialysis providers in those areas are apt to be nonprofit organizations or those with narrow profit margins. The story quoted a C.E.O. of one nonprofit chain saying she was afraid that some of its clinics would have to close if the cut went through. “Part of me is afraid until patients start dying, no one is going to believe that we can’t make it on this amount of money,” she said.

    It seems unconscionable, but par for the course, that corporations would prey on patients’ fears in order to maintain profitability, but the money-saving proposal also seems to point to government’s failure to concern itself with the poor — or with studies showing a relationship between anemia and the race or ethnicity of dialysis patients. If the muscle exerted by dialysis corporations is successful in getting the payment reinstated, the irony may be that it will turn out not only to help their bottom lines but those patients who need the anti-anemia drug most.

   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. 

   If I remember correctly, I had told Eileen Roaman that she was crazy when she told me she had been asked to take a position on the East Hampton Town Planning Board and was thinking of saying yes.

    She did not listen to me as far as I could tell. Few of those who confide in me do, though later, after they have had a taste of the process, they will invariably tell me that I had been right.

    Eileen died last week at 54, a victim of cancer. During her packed funeral Thursday at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, I recalled her frequent phone calls to the office on one subject or another, which I always welcomed.

    What Eileen had from early on during her planning board time was both a very jaundiced eye and the willingness to speak her mind. This was during a time that the town had begun to go easy on the larger, better-connected projects. Eileen was having none of it and was all too happy to let us in on what she knew.

    Time and again, watching recorded planning board meetings on the computer from the safety of my second-floor office, it was Eileen who asked the hard questions, who was ready to say “whoa” when something did not seem quite right. She cared about where she lived and thought people in power should as well.

    Around the office, we talk about some of our regular tipsters as 50-percenters, that is, they turn out to be right about half the time. It is easy the closer you get to town government to see a conspiracy behind every favor done for someone, and to find career professionals being told what to do by elected officials. Eileen, as it turned out, was a good bit better than a 50-percenter, connected as she was to a large network of sources.

    Because she seemed to know everyone, and because people confided in her, I always thought Eileen would have been a good reporter. But, truth is, she just wasn’t crazy enough.

    At her funeral, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz, a friend, said that Eileen was either the first of her kind — or the last. Whichever it may be, she was, as they say, a piece of work in the best sense of those words. East Hampton is diminished by her absence.

   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.