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.

    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.

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 have undergone a month of guests, and though they’re closely related, and thus conjure good feelings, I’ll be happy to have Mary all to myself again.

    It is enough to be able to talk to her, about any old thing, though inevitably, because she’s more generous of herself than anyone I know, we’ve rarely had the time to “hang out,” as they say, in the past few weeks.

    Which was why, I suppose, that, uncharacteristically, she said she wanted to come along with me to Ellen’s Run, the 5-kilometer road race in Southampton this past Sunday. I was more than happy that she accompany me, though I told her I’d be working, which is to say listening to others for the most part — something she’s not used to at home — and taking down as best I could what they said. And taking photos, of course. That’s always part of it.

    She was quite happy there, in that crowd of 1,000 or more. Everyone’s in great spirits at these sporting events I write about (there were about the same number the day before at the Artists-Writers Game in East Hampton), which obviously is to my liking — I’ve only been on this beat for 34 years. You can have the contention and antipathy and the sour humor of board meetings and such. I don’t look for unanimity of thought at the races and games I cover, but for reasons to continue to be hopeful about humanity. And, to my delight, they’re always readily at hand.

    At Ellen’s, Mary struck up a conversation with Cliff Clark, the South Ferry’s owner and running coach, who had brought three of his trainees with him — one of whom, as it turned out, won — and was impressed by his generous spirit, as she was by that of Julie Ratner, the race’s founder, the 44 breast cancer survivors who were competing, and by Bella, the Jack Russell, who ran all the way with Evie Purcell.

    Her goal would be to do this race next year, she said as we began to leave, with her granddaughter, Ella, who, although only 4 now, can seemingly run forever.

    Every now and then I become a bit exhausted on the leisure beat, especially near the end of the summer. But I never grow weary of the company I keep.

   Earlier this summer I was sitting with a couple of friends at the bar at the Topping Rose House and began to talk to the woman next to me. Why else go to a bar except to meet people you otherwise wouldn’t? In this case, both she and the conversation turned out to be well worth the next day’s hangover.

    Not only did she give me a generous chunk of her roast chicken and one of the establishment’s bliss-inducing brioche doughnuts, but she also had a lot to say on Lyme disease, a condition she has studied “diligently” since self-diagnosing with it three years ago. The reason I say self-diagnosing is that she never exhibited the classic signs, nor did the test indicate that she had it. “Fifty percent of people with Lyme test false negative initially and up to 50 percent of people with Lyme have no rash, bull’s eye, or visual indicators,” she said. Within a 48-hour period she went from “beyond active” to being like a “felled tree.”

    The reason she was telling me this was hat one of the friends I was with had just discovered she had a second case of Lyme. This is a woman who, through the outrageous incompetence of a Southampton doctor, has suffered the debilitating results of the spirochete’s having migrated into her nervous system.

    The two women traded symptoms, anecdotes, and hearsay back and forth like McEnroe and Borg, enthralling bar patrons and bartender alike. I took notes.

    “It’s vector-borne, meaning you can get it from a mosquito or spider or any blood-sucking arthropod.”

    “It’s also transmitted through fluids, like your pet’s saliva.”

    “They’ve even found it in Antarctica.”

    “Shelter Island is the epicenter of a worldwide epidemic.”

    “Yeah, but they’ve eradicated 95 percent of their ticks.”

    “It mimics the symptoms of Epstein-Barr and M.S.”

    “Michael J. Fox really has Lyme. He told me he tested positive.”

    “It’s predatory, but only if your immune system is vulnerable. I got mine right after my father died.”

    “There’s now a fatal virus found in ticks, Powassan virus. It takes less than 15 minutes to get into your system.”

    “I heard they’re covering it up till after Labor Day, so as not to scare people away.”

    “My acupuncturist thinks the C.D.C. should come here and call a red alert.”

    “The diagnostic tests are flawed.”

    “It hasn’t presented itself as lucrative yet to the medical establishment.”

    Blah, blah, blah. One startling fact or fiction (who knows?) after another.

    The other friend and I congratulated each other on being Lyme-free. That would soon change when she called me a couple of weeks later to say she’d tested positive, too.

    Now, I was the only one of the foursome who hadn’t yet contracted a tick-borne ailment.

    One morning shortly thereafter I awoke to find my cat rubbing her mouth on mine, dribbling a cascade of saliva. This was enough to awaken my long dormant hypochondria. So when I heard about a talk being given at the Old Whalers Church by “one of America’s leading experts on tick-borne diseases,” I went — along with about 40 other pilgrims on a sunny weekend beach day.

    Mara Williams is a nurse practitioner based in Sonoma, Calif., and the author of “Dirty Little Needle: What You Need to Know About Chronic Lyme Disease and How to Get the Help to Feel Better.” She became interested in Lyme when her 35-year-old daughter became bedridden for over a year and she watched as “many health care providers marginalized her by saying this disease doesn’t exist.”

    Here are some excerpts from her talk (by Lyme, she was also addressing co-infections such as babesiosis and ehrlichiosis):

    The East End is ground zero for Lyme; migrating birds carry it.

    All ticks potentially carry Lyme, not just deer ticks.

    Our weakest (physical) link is what the infection will affect.

     A cheesecloth sweep in New Hampshire was 90-percent effective in eliminating ticks.

    These are stealth pathogens; they create a biofilm, which is a tenacious goop. (Breaking down biofilm is part of Ms. Williams’s treatment. She referred us to the work of the Lyme researcher Alan MacDonald, M.D., whose studies show that biofilms protect spirochetes from antibiotics. He also apparently discovered a link between Lyme and Alzheimer’s, a disease he ironically has himself. Ms. Williams told us that Eva Sapi has continued in Dr. MacDonald’s footsteps.)

    You won’t get a bull’s-eye rash unless you’ve been bitten before; if a rash appears you definitely have Lyme.

    If positive, you must take doxycycline, 200 mg. twice day, prophylactically for six to eight weeks, and go on herbals for six months to kill the bugs, break down the biofilm, and support the immune system.

    Borrelia (another spirochete) is a thousand times more complex than any other bacteria ever studied.

    We’re finding babesiosis in the blood supply.

    And on and on.

    A compelling speaker, Ms. Williams recommended, if bitten, to use an organic spray (that I couldn’t hear the name of) that contains 10 percent azithromycin within 10 minutes. She also recommended preventing bites topically with lemon grass, rosemary, and bay laurel, a leaf she said you can “crumble and strew around your property.”

    “Don’t be afraid to look like a nerd,” she implored the well-heeled crowd, advising elastic waistbands and white socks worn over pant hems. (Say it ain’t so, please!) After possible exposure, she said to put clothes in a dryer on high for 15 minutes.

    On a political note, she said that the federal government is sitting on its hands regarding tick-borne illnesses. “We need to mount change on a local level,” she said, lauding Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. for his actions.

    At the end of her talk, I singled out a woman with blond curly hair who had been asking intelligent questions throughout. She turned out to be Anne Van Couvering, a naturopath with a practice in Sag Harbor. Dr. Van Couvering is an expert herself on the subject who “keeps up on the latest research” and who sees a lot of patients who present with co-infections. She uses herbs including cat’s claw, teasel, banderol, and astragalus to support immunity as well as probiotics to balance guts compromised by mega doses of antibiotics, without which “most people can’t get their health back.” Interestingly, most of her Lyme patients have sought her help for chronic conditions such as pain, fatigue, or insomnia, which they have mistakenly attributed to aging, anxiety, or stress. They are unaware it is Lyme because “it doesn’t flare all the time,” she said.

    Meanwhile, Ms. Williams is currently seeking funds to build a 24-bed retreat in Sonoma “that will offer an oasis of peace, health, and healing for those with chronic Lyme disease” and who “need to be in a place where they are not persecuted.”

    Alas, I became so alarmed about the disease that I neglected my vegetable plot at EECO Farm. As it is now after Labor Day, time will tell if the dreaded Powassan virus has really struck here. However, in this land of causes and charity fetes where we have raised money for everything from cancer to Mitt Romney, I humbly submit that we might build our own Lyme retreat.

   Debra Scott is a real estate columnist for The Star.

   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. 

   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.