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Point of View: Won’t Wash Off

Point of View: Won’t Wash Off

One thing we must know by now is that we cannot control the world
By
Jack Graves

   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. 

 

The Mast-Head: The Hard Questions

The Mast-Head: The Hard Questions

Time and again, it was Eileen who asked the hard questions
By
David E. Rattray

   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.

 

This Is a Test

This Is a Test

How can I trust her to someone else?
By
Carissa Katz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

 

I Stand Naked

I Stand Naked

There I was on deadline with no “h,” no “j,” no “g.”
By
Jack Graves

   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.”

 

The Mast-Head: To School, Carefully

The Mast-Head: To School, Carefully

Then there are the real dopes — the drivers on cellphones
By
David E. Rattray

   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.

 

The Mast-Head: Old Iron Anchors

The Mast-Head: Old Iron Anchors

We were able to raise what turned out to be a massive iron anchor from the sand
By
David E. Rattray

   A story that popped up in the last week, about an old anchor hauled up by some members of the Lester clan while they were fishing in the ocean off Amagansett, reminded me of a similar find my family made quite some years ago.

    It probably was in the mid-1970s. My father had restored an old menhaden fishery striker boat, putting a long-shaft Seagull outboard on the back so we could putt around Gardiner’s Bay.

    One day, someone (I can’t remember who) noticed what looked like an anchor on the bottom in a couple of feet of water. Some time later, using the striker boat and the lifting power of a rising tide, we were able to raise what turned out to be a massive iron anchor from the sand. Slowly, we ran the boat, with the anchor slung underneath it, to the beach in front of our house.

    There, the anchor rested for years — all five feet and a couple hundred pounds of it. It would be exposed by storms, then buried by sand, then exposed again. We figured it was being preserved this way; had it been left exposed it would have rusted to nothingness quickly. Then, one winter, it was gone.

    Subsequent heavy erosion never revealed it, leading me to conclude that someone with one heck of a strong back and a big truck had noticed it and decided to take it home. I think about that anchor every now and then, and wonder where it ended up.

    It has been a long time since anything as interesting has appeared around the bay, the result, I assume, of the fact that Promised Land’s fish-processing plant ceased operation years ago. Lately, the rusted things in the water are likely to be steel fence stakes. And, ever since Hurricane Sandy-related dune-restoration efforts, I have found bits of asphalt washed out from what passes for sand these days.

    I keep looking, of course, because there is good stuff still out there. Or at least I hope.   

Connections: Division of Labor

Connections: Division of Labor

When we talk about marital equity today, of course, we mean a lot more than who washes the dishes and changes the diapers
By
Helen S. Rattray

   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.   

Relay: Tick Tock, Tick Tock

Relay: Tick Tock, Tick Tock

The conversation turned out to be well worth the next day’s hangover
By
Debra Scott

   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.

Connections: Profits in Health Care

Connections: Profits in Health Care

End-stage kidney disease is the only chronic disease whose treatment is paid for by the United States government
By
Helen S. Rattray

   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.

 

Relay: I Was Working

Relay: I Was Working

“Do those rules apply to me?"
By
Durell Godfrey

    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.