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.

   The difference between my husband and me, at least since he retired, may be boiled down (ahem) to the way we share kitchen duties. We both like to cook, but for themost part I load the dishwasher and do all the picking up and putting away. He provides the elbow grease, washing the pots — and, okay, the wine glasses.

    Still, Chris and I are a quite conventional heterosexual couple, my longstanding career, and the fact that he was a single father,  notwithstanding. In the 1950s, when I was coming of age, wives were homemakers and husbands were breadwinners. That is how it was and how most people expected it to continue to be. Period. It wasn’t until 1963 that Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” got the matter of gender roles among married men and women into mainstream discussion. Ms. Friedan was concerned about the division of labor in middle-class families at the time, and she helped women insist that they, like their husbands, had a right to pursue a profession.

    When we talk about marital equity today, of course, we mean a lot more than who washes the dishes and changes the diapers. We are concerned about those who are gay and who would like to be married. Times have changed.

    In the 1990s, domestic partnerships and civil unions between couples of the same gender began to be legalized, in 2004, same-sex marriage was approved for the first time, in the State of Massachusetts. My brother-in-law Bob and his longtime partner, Joe, were the first men ever to be married in Lawrence, Mass. As we honored their love for each other and danced at their wedding, we were aware that it was an almost revolutionary event.

    Today, couples decide for themselves who will be the homemaker and who will be the breadwinner.Sometimes, they decide who will be both: Wives, even if they are the one bringing home most of the bacon, still seem to end up planning the meals, getting the laundry done, and, if there are kids, organizing them and hustling them out the door to wherever they have to go.

    In an article in The New York Times Magazine earlier this month, a survey of women who had opted out of powerful careers to care for their children described the uneven results of trying to re-enter the work force after 10 years, as well as the negative effects figuring it all out had had on their marriages.

    Betty Friedan, who spent lots of time in Sag Harbor when she wasn’t gallivanting around the country, once told me that “The Feminist Mystique” had come along too late to change her own attitude toward men. A force for women’s independence, she nevertheless loved being squired, and usually was.

    Fifty years have intervened since Betty Friedan caused a sensation, but I can’t help thinking that if she were alive today she would be right there in acknowledging how hard it is for women to be both mothers and professionals. She had been criticized by successive generations of feminists for, among other things, being dismissive of gays. She was resilient, though, and I am sure that today she would have something positive to say about our culture’s more all-embracing understanding of marriage. I would love to hear it.   

   I’m sure those of you who read my columns are expecting a rant about our summer visitors on this Labor Day weekend. And I do hate to disappoint, but social media has taken the fun out of that. This summer I learned to seethe internally and had not one fight with an annoying individual.

    I also learned how to avoid them. I stayed close to home on weekends and tended my garden, read a few summer novels, and went only to our secret beaches. Yes, we still have some. I also slept with a bird, which sounds weird and a bit kinky if you’re into birds, but let me explain.

    On a warm summer night right after enjoying a seasonal meal of fish, lobster, and the sweet corn on the cob of summer, I sat outside digesting my meal. While sitting in a chair on my patio, my cat, Storm, ran past me with a baby bird in her mouth, still wiggling with life.

    I yelled at Storm and she dropped it, knowing she was a bad cat because this summer Storm has become the mortal enemy of birds in my neighborhood, and I’m sad to say this wasn’t the first bird she brought home. I’ve saved five of them, but only the guy upstairs knows how many didn’t make it to my house.

    I picked up the baby bird, which was quite feisty and kept nipping at my fingers. My daughter and her beau were visiting from Hawaii, and he’s like a walking encyclopedia on just about everything, but not in an annoying way. He told me the baby bird was a jay and had not grown his flying feathers yet. He said if I put it back on the ground or perched it in a basket from a tree branch, which a wildlife Web site advised, it would become a meal for one of the other wild animals in the neighborhood.

    So, I grabbed a big plastic storage container and filled it with grass clippings, a makeshift nest, and twigs. We covered it with a large window screen and I placed rocks on top of it. But then we realized if we left it outside all night those pesky raccoons that roam under the cover of darkness could easily break into the container. Storm is a housecat who I insist stays in at night, so leaving the container inside wasn’t an option either. I didn’t want her to think we were offering her a feast of bird.

    We discussed what to do and I decided that if I put it in my bedroom I could lock Storm out and then see what the morning would bring. On the advice of Ethan, my daughter’s boyfriend, I planned to nurse the little guy for a week or so until his flying feathers came in, and then I could release him while the sound track of “Born Free” played in my head. Digging worms for his food wasn’t on my agenda for my summer vacation, but when life gives you a baby bird, you dig up worms.

    He slept on top of a dresser near an open window in my bedroom, and for the most part he was very well behaved. That was, until morning broke and he heard all the other birds outside in my heavily wooded neighborhood. He started jumping and chirping all over the box. Since Jenna and Ethan had left in the middle of the night for their flight home, I put the container in their room and went back to bed.

    Shortly after, I heard a loud chorus of blue jays in the trees in my backyard. And since I have a history with blue jays, I knew they were looking for their offspring. When I was 12 or so, I was riding my bike home from my grandparents’ and found a little blue jay flopping around in a patch of grass on the ground. Thinking I was Mother Teresa, I scoop­ed it up and placed it in my bike basket to take it home and care for it.

    Well, those adult blue jays descended from the tree branches above and attacked my head so bad I threw the bike down and ran all the way home. Thinking about that now, I realize that’s about the time my hair curled, probably from fear. So, just like Meryl Streep said in that movie, “The dingo’s got my baby!,” I can now proclaim, “Those blue jays frizzed my hair!”

    I knew from their cackling outside that they were looking for their baby. There were loads of them squawking in the trees, which was not something they normally do around here. Fearing a home invasion, I took the baby bird in the container outside and laid it on its side under a hedgerow of privet bushes and he scooted out and scrambled through a pile of blackberry brambles. Soon, all was quiet with the jays. Since I have a great fear of them, I didn’t stay long enough to see if they rescued him. Besides, my hair stands on end on its own, I do not need blue jays to encourage it further.

    As I write this, Storm lays cuddled on the softest blanket on my bed. A crow caws outside my window. I tell her, “He’s calling you for a duel, Storm.” She looks toward the open window and yawns, as if she’s bored by the whole bird thing, which is good because I can’t take it anymore. She is also now wearing a bright red collar with bells on it, so the birds can hear her coming.

    And if next summer is anything like this summer, with our visitors being rude, arrogant, elitist, and downright stupid, it might be a good idea to release a swarm of blue jays on them. Not only will that keep them away, it will also help business at the local hair salons.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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. 

    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.