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.

   No one in our household, nor at Russell and Fiona Bennett’s place up the way, heard the sirens Saturday night.

    It was a little after 10 p.m. when, according to a police report, a drunken driver flipped his BMW convertible, injuring himself and two passengers. We did not know about it until much later, when my sister sent us an e-mail saying she had heard of it on Facebook.

    In the morning, I went to look at the scene. Police investigators had indicated with orange spray paint the tire marks from Richard D. Forman’s BMW as it veered right toward a slight incline on the grassy shoulder, then skidded left across Cranberry Hole Road and into the trees.

    Four days later, the mess remains — a downed trunk, a toppled sign. The orange marks are also still visible where the police made them. And each time I drive past I get a little more upset.

    For me at least, incidents like these have more of a lingering effect the closer they are to home. Thursday’s crash on County Road 39 in Southampton in which a woman was killed when she apparently turned into the path of a Hampton Ambassador bus was tragic, yet farther away both in actual distance and emotional impact. A drunken driver sweeping across my own road, the route I travel a couple of times a day, often with my children in my truck, feels different.

    Cranberry Hole Road is one of those back routes that just invites drivers to speed. Long ago, my wife and I agreed not to let the kids ride bikes on the road near our house, except perhaps in the deep off-season and even then with adult supervision. There are now just too many cars going too fast to make us feel secure. Add to that drunks racing home from Lord knows where, and we are left with a sense of foreboding every time we pull out of the driveway.

    Mr. Forman, who refused a breath-alcohol test, will be relieved of his driver’s license for six months, perhaps more. What such punishment does not do is make our road any safer. There will always be someone else willing to take a chance, putting my family’s life — and their own — in danger.

   As any habitual reader of this column already knows, my neighborhood — or, anyway, the property surrounding my house — was, last fall and winter, home to a resident family of deer. Five would appear at once, and two were fawns. For the most part, they ambled, rather than ran, across the lawn or down the lane; they seem to enjoy visits to the adjacent East Hampton Library grounds, too. I never could figure out where they bedded down. But while other members of our household railed against them, I took a benevolent, maternal attitude. If any of the grandchildren were around, I would join them in rushing excitedly to a door or window to see what the deer were getting up to next.

    I am hardly a vegetarian. I’ve eaten, cooked, and enjoyed venison over the years. I remember that I once even thought it might be a good idea for deer to be raised on Gardiner’s Island for the market. And I am not opposed to hunting, especially if the quarry ends up on the table. But I have come to think of my house deer almost as pets. It follows, therefore, that even if it might be somewhat out of line with my stated beliefs about wild-animal life and death, I don’t quite like the thrust of the long-term management plan that East Hampton Town has just adopted, which advocates killing to control overpopulation.

    The 17-page document (not including maps) was devised by a group of experts and various government officials. The plan augments but does not revise the recommendation that a town committee made more than two years ago, to the effect that hunting should be expanded. It describes other methods that might be used to control deer, but only after the population is brought down to a more manageable level. And, as might be expected, it leaves every action in the hands of existing or future members of the town board.

    For its part, The Star editorialized on the plan a few weeks ago, decrying how long it is taking for anything at all to get done about a situation that is not just a nuisance but, in fact, deadly dangerous to drivers, deleterious to the health of humans and house pets, and, in winter, quite desperate for the hungry deer.

    Back in my yard, once spring arrived, the deer disappeared. I dutifully sprayed the plants around the patio with Tony Minardi’s “Deer Away” and made sure the potted hibiscus was close enough to the house to keep an eye on. Friends suggested my house deer had found other browsing grounds after being frightened by the noise coming from the construction crew at work on a house just over the fence.

    That theory was borne out by a few rather amusing treatises on deer “deterrents” I found on the Internet: Every imaginable form of obnoxious noise, from strings of metal cans to high-frequency sound devices, was touted. The only complication, according to these Internet experts, is that, as we on the East End know all too well by now, deer are amazingly adaptable; they are wily, and easily learn how to survive in changing human environments.

    Their adaptability undoubtedly explains why I have come home on several recent occasions to find a deer lounging on my front lawn and, well, grinning at me. That deer are almost impossible to permanently shoo away has been further proved, unfortunately, by the return, too, of at least one brightly marked doe, perhaps one of the fawns now a teenager, and the inevitable devouring of some house plants that had been doing nicely under the lilacs, where I put them for the summer. 

    The East Hampton Town deer-management plan uses some phraseology that, in my view, creeps close to doublespeak: Expanded opportunities for hunting can “effectively and compassionately” deal with the problem until deer are “ecologically and culturally sustainable,” it says. And it dismisses immunocontraception, which may in fact  actually be an ecological and compassionate method. Apparently, according to the document, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation does not believe in it.

    Immunocontraception, which involves shooting darts rather than bullets to vaccinate deer so they are no longer fertile, has so far not been proven successful, but the Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y, has asked the D.E.C. to approve its use in a program devised by the Tufts University Center for Animals and Public Policy. If, as seems likely, it is going to take years for the East Hampton hunting plan to bring our local deer population under control, it makes sense to me that immunocontraception should be given a try in the meanwhile. What do you think?

   Elizabeth Kotz recently put me on to Electro Mix, little packets of minerals — heavy metals, her husband, Steve, told me — that I have found to be quite effective when playing tennis in humid heat.

    I had never known what electrolytes were — I still don’t — though Mary has always told me they’re very important and that I should not neglect them. Well, I’m here to tell you that one packet of Electro Mix dissolved in a bottle of water when exercising provides a marvelous boost; I can literally feel the electrolytes bounding around inside me. Indeed, as I should have said the other day as a three-hour agon on Buckskill’s grass courts was under way, “I sing the body electrolytic.”

    The next thing, someone’s going to tell me Electro Mix provides an improper edge. I hope not, even though I have said that after a certain age — 50, say — drugs ought to be mandated.

    And then there’s Tuesdays at Robbie’s, where, for an hour, I am put through the wringer, to such an extent that, as with the miracle mix of magnesium, calcium, and potassium, I can feel the salutary results.

    From wringer to ringer! Well, not quite that, but my serving shoulder is stronger, less achy, I’m holding the racket at the end rather than choking up, which I’ve done for the past two or so years convinced I was becoming weaker with age. In fact, during last winter’s men’s doubles league, I remember asking Tim Ross to “beam me down, Scotty, beam me down.”

    They say warp speed is theoretically possible — I read it this week in The Times — so perhaps I should stop thinking of age as some kind of impenetrable barrier.

    What was it Bobby Harris, the 67-year-old high jumper, who was to have competed in the Senior Games in Cleveland last week, once said to me? “You don’t stop playing because you get old — you get old because you stop playing.”

    “When East Hampton Indoor’s league starts up again this fall, I’m going to say to Tim, ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ ” I said to Mary this morning.

    She urged caution, but I’m more inclined to throw caution to the wind these days — if only there were some.

   Though normally I try not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, there are just a few things I have to get off my chest. Because here it is August and this summer, before it was even July, I couldn’t take any more. My eyes hurt from rolling, and my new seasonal utterance, “Puh-leeze,” was already overused.

    Maybe it’s because I’m subject to the seasonal barrage of entreaties from P.R. lackeys desperately trying to get attention for their clients, touting the next great Hamptons this or that.

     Or maybe it’s because, as a resident here for over 30 years (do I really have to also say ‘year-round,’ or can it just be assumed that living somewhere means you live there, all or almost all the time?), I am pretty tired of having my life, and the lives of my friends and colleagues and associates, diminished in the eyes of visitors who think somehow that because we live “in the country” our lives are not as interesting/fulfilling/glamorous or fill-in-the-adjective as theirs.

    Guess what? Did you ever think you might be the sadly shortchanged ones? Or that there might be a deep and satisfying and comprehensive world out here, of which you perceive only a part?

    How many times do I have to endure the fading interest of a conversation partner, once they find out I live here (heavens!)? Or the mincing questions, “You mean all year?” Or “What’s it like?”

    Well, it’s like living somewhere. I mean, like, in a community.

    Which leads me to the list.

    1. Geography and nomenclature. I don’t live “in the country” or “at Hamptons” or in “a Hampton.” I guess you could call this “out east,” but that presumes a starting point. Maybe you live “over west.” I’ve heard it called “up west” or “UpIsland.” But all of those assume one or the other geographic supremacy, a concept I shun.

    2. Don’t presume. Get to know this place, and your place as a visitor, part-time resident, or interloper. Don’t be an interloper. Listen, think, soak it in. Do real things and learn real things. Don’t presume. Try to act with a little sensitivity. This place is like it is; don’t barrel in and override it. Enjoy. We live here. It’s a real place, with a real flavor and heartbeat.

    3. Note: While there is hardly anyone that I interact with who would ask me the inane question “which Hampton are you from?” woe to the clueless jabberer who does.

    4. Don’t dub yourself — anything. Especially when it starts with “The Hamptons,” or requires a capitalized noun. That just marks you as a yahoo here to play in the great Hamptons playground, and not someone who’s interested at all in learning what this place is like.

    5. Food is food. I like good food as much as anyone — healthy or decadent. But blasting social media with every detail of your intake is boring. I don’t want to spend my time looking at pictures of your plate, or read your sappy little posts about the extraordinary, special, amazing, fresh and better-than-yours meals you make using hand-raised, sung-to, and massaged vegetables that are amazing.

    Guess what? People have been raising vegetables forever. Just because you got out of the city and discovered a field of growing things doesn’t make your discovery interesting to me. I get it. You eat. You like food. You find it amazing that you can buy fresh eggs, or pick your own strawberries. Get over it. Or take these common pleasures in quietly, without constantly trumpeting about them.

    Key word, again: quietly. Deeply. Like a human being with a soul. Take all of the quiet pleasures in quietly. Nobody’s saying you can’t come out here and love the sun and the wind and the fresh vegetables. But the ability to tweet or post or brag about it is not what makes it a valuable experience.

    6. If you’re a stockbroker, you’re not a farmer. Don’t dub yourself “Farmer Whoever.” That’s bullshit. If you want to change your life, do it. And derive your satisfaction from the changes you make, not from the “Look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me!” factor.

    Maybe there’s a 6(a) here: From where I sit, there’s a whole lot of “Look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me!” behavior. Ask yourself, am I doing this/wearing this/buying this/going here for any reason other than to see or be seen?

    It’s here I make my plea: try not to be shallow. There are important things in the world, and the possibility of real, heartful, spiritual rewards.

    Ask yourself, if I was doing this/saying this/acting this way anywhere but the “Hamptons,” would I seem foolish?

    7. You don’t need knee-high galoshes to stride from your Range Rover into the deli, just because it’s raining. Those kinds of boots are for mucking out the barn. So if you’re not slogging through horseshit, it’s just for show. This is a town, not a stage.

    8. And speaking of . . . yes, this is a real town. We live here. We’re not just extras in the background of your summertime-fun movie. In fact, we are real. Most of us don’t posture.

    We’re concerned with substantive things — with our real-world concerns, families, friends, food we feel the need to eat and enjoy with loved ones, but not necessarily to brag about. Making a living, maybe having some fun if we can fit it around the shenanigans of you folks parading about the “Hamptons.”

    By the way, I like summer. And all this said, I don’t really believe in prescribing to others, or making demands. I try not to judge — honest. And I’m not really down on everyone who’s here. The more cosmopolitan, the better, I say. But it sure feels good to rant a minute. Maybe I’ll be more patient for it during this very trying month.

   Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, imagines a life one day in an area without East Hampton’s wild seasonal mood swings, but can thrill to the ride — most of the time — while she’s here.

   Gordon Grant, one of our neighbors, says now that our driveway’s fixed his kids will no longer have to wear waders when they come over on Halloween.

    Could it have been that that great system of lakes, seemingly scoured out by the retreat of the last glacier, was off-putting? I had never meant to give offense.

    “See,” I said to Mary the last time she complained of it, “one of the puddles is shaped in the form of a heart! Have you no concern for the environment?”

    And, in Spanish class, when they asked me where I lived, I’d always say, “Vivo en la Calle de la Vista de Puerto (Harbor View Drive) pero no tenemos una vista de puerto — es una vista des charcos (puddles).”

    I’ve always curried a little eccentricity, and yet I admit, as in the case of my late baby-puke-green 1967 Ford Falcon, it’s usually been at the expense of the neighborhood’s property values, which, because of our latest improvement, are now soaring.

    Geoff Gehman posits in his recently published (and very well-written) “The Kingdom of the Kid” that my fidelity to the deceased Falcon — “a home,” as I once said, “for wayward dolls” — was rooted in the sympathy I had always had for the anti-conventional Beales.

    Finally, however, a note left in our mailbox, to the effect that “the dead (the Falcon had given up the ghost one night in front of our house and I had backed it up onto the front lawn near the mailbox, where it was to remain for a long while) are usually interred” prompted me to act. And, with the dolls still in the jump seat, and with the obscenities affixed at our housewarming still on it, Reid Brothers towed the long-flightless Falcon away.

    I had no alternative then but to let the driveway go, and to put our bashed mailbox (replaced this past fall with a thoroughly respectable one) in a sling.  

    Scott King, our former highway superintendent, who did the driveway work entirely to our satisfaction, explained it graphically; our driveway was, in fact, a delta into which all the surface water of the neighborhood flowed (and into whose bogs copies of The New York Times often would have to be retrieved by our yellow Lab, Henry, who, luckily, loves to swim). Raise the grade a bit, Scott King said, and that would no longer happen.  

    Emily loves the wheat color of the gravel and whenever she sees a leaf on it she plucks it off. The gently curved entrance virtually says to visitors, “Come on in, and may you take comfort in the delightfully crunchy sound your tires and the comely stones make as the Graves’s estate hoves into view.”

    “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” I said to Mary as we admired Mr. King’s handiwork. “Or at least a joy for a while. I’d quote more, but that’s about as far as I got in ‘Endymion.’ ”

   Waiting in the San Francisco Airport departure lounge late Sunday into Monday morning for a delayed flight home, I noticed that of the couple hundred people hanging around only a handful were reading a good, old-fashioned book. Oh, folks were reading, of course, or looking at something or other, but the majority were using some kind of handheld device or computer. I saw no one reading an actual, hard-copy, dead-tree magazine or newspaper at all.

    Now at another city’s airport things might have been different. San Francisco is in the midst of a massive tech boom. Facebook’s initial public offering was said to have spawned 1,000 20-something millionaires. Thousands of new units of high-end housing are being built. Out to dinner at a fancy restaurant before hopping in a cab to get to the airport, I saw two of the new breed of hooded-sweatshirt-wearing gazillionaires; these kids weren’t waiting around in the morning for the daily paper to arrive.

    The reality is that the hoodie crowd, to the extent that they are consuming news, are doing so online. I myself often have read something in The New York Times well before my physical copy hits the driveway gravel.

    The Star, like The Times, has far more readers in the aggregate than we ever did, when you consider print and digital readers together. The puzzle is how to make the whole thing pay for itself.

    The news revenue riddle is the most intriguing aspect to the news that Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has bought The Washington Post. Mr. Bezos’s company grew fat basically by putting smaller booksellers out of business and then adding retail goods. At one time Amazon extended a hand to newspapers, tentatively offering to serve as a kind of digital newsstand. Now, business analysts say that buying The Washngton Post will give Amazon a way to directly reach consumers of its other products. Or maybe he’s just in it for the fun.

    What, if anything, this means for a small newspaper like The Star remains to be seen. It is nice for a day to read stories about the industry’s future rather than its decline. Looking at all those wired readers intently staring at their screens whom I saw in the San Francisco Airport, I have to think that Mr. Bezos may well have something new and interesting in mind.

   “I want to write about that,” I said, as I often do upon hearing about something I think sounds interesting, fun, and that the world would benefit from. The response from my new friend Bradley Francis, who I met a few weeks ago at a Wailers concert in Amagansett and again at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island, was “Okay, we’ll get you on a flight with us tomorrow.” Minutes later, his friend asked me a few questions and I was confirmed from LGA to ATL the next afternoon.

    This is not the norm for me, in the last 15 years anyway, and especially when I’m scheduled to work. I took full advantage of the opportunity, though, to use personal time to witness my new acquaintance rescue a horse farm in Georgia.

    The farm is called Dream Power, appropriately in my view. Because of the efforts of this young philanthropist, the dream of its dreamer — to offer therapeutic services with horses that help children and young adults with a multitude of disabilities from paralysis to emotional issues — was kept alive. My friend benefited himself, as well, from the giving feeling and his connection with the horses there.

    We stopped on the way to the airport to wire money that was needed immediately, then we were off to the farm to meet the volunteers and the horses.

    We listened to success stories from a counselor there, who is working as part of a program that helps victims of abuse and trauma. The farm’s founder shared stories of autistic children who have been transformed in the presence of the four-legged beings.

    During our travels, I mentioned that there was a similar farm in Sagaponack, and Bradley said without hesitation, “I’d like to help them too.” He suggested I reach out and offer solar panels to them courtesy of his Georgia business.

    Although this golden win-win opportunity was discovered via Facebook, I will not praise the social media gods once again in this column. Who I would like to take this space and opportunity to appreciate at the moment are those who might be considered “summer people,” my inspiration being one from south of the Mason-Dixon line who reminded me about Southern hospitality.

    For sure, the increased numbers bring more traffic and fewer parking spots, loud music and mass gatherings and less private beach time. Personally, I welcome opportunities to dance and socialize, especially with an increased diversity of thoughts, music, and even attire that brings splashes of color and inspiration. We can all use more music and fewer boundaries and separation between “us” and “them” in any form.

    I also remind myself of their support of businesses that would not otherwise exist for us year-rounders.

    I am grateful for networking opportunities, too, from visitors such as this one, who brought me a chance to have fun while I shared a glimpse of those who are making a difference. In an ideal world, this is what I would be doing with most of my time.

    “Did I tell you we’re going to Africa in October?” Bradley asked the next Sunday, in almost the same spot at Sunset Beach. When I snapped out of my jaw-dropping awe from words such as “helping,” “orphanage,” and “solar,” I simply replied, “I will get my passport ready.”

    Who knows . . . maybe I will be a summer person, too.

   Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter for The Star.

   I think I’ve finally made my fortune: I’ve come up with an anti-raging pill that preliminary tests have shown lasts a full 48 hours.

    There are, of course, some side effects, none really serious like death, though if you remain inordinately compassionate for more than the prescribed length of time you might consider calling a doctor.

    Simply pop a Graves Saves (tm) anti-raging pill in capsule form as you cross the Shinnecock Canal, and you will be amazed by the well of fellow feeling that arises within. Traffic tie-ups that would have had you blowing a gasket and giving other drivers the finger in the past are almost instantly transposed, as you inch along bumper to bumper, into heartfelt inquiries as to their health and welfare and that of their families.

    You’ll find — at least our preliminary studies have shown — that your disarming demeanor will become infectious, once, on rolling their windows down in order to flip you the bird, people actually realize that your joy is genuine and not satiric. And we even go so far as to predict that at least some of the friendships you strike up as you’re bottled up along Route 27 will last.

    You might argue that the Graves Saves (tm) pledge of human decency is at variance with reality, or, at least, with the reality extant in this country in which you hear “I’ve got mine” far more often than you hear “Hope you’re fine.”

    Don’t get us wrong: We don’t want to go overboard. The meek, as we all know, ain’t likely to inherit the earth anytime soon. That’s why we’ve limited the dosage to just 48 hours, just to get you through a weekend in the Cramped Hamptons. On long weekends, of course, you’ll have to double up.

    But, as we’ve said above, should your periods of civility last beyond the stated period, have a loved one slap some sense into you, or, that failing, call our hot line, where we have extremely discourteous round-the-clock assistants who will call you every name in the book so that you can get your heart rate back to normal.

    And, remember, the next time you’re steaming, take Graves Saves (tm) and you’ll be beaming!

    Use responsibly, and, who knows, we may become the Reunited States of America.

   Up early Saturday and Sunday looking for waves worth surfing, I made an informal survey of beach conditions following what had obviously been two wild nights on the sand. Almost everywhere in town, the beach garbage cans had filled to overflowing, and people had left their trash in the general vicinity.

    At Georgica Beach, I salvaged a pair of tiki torches, used just once, it appeared, complete with a half-full jug of lamp oil from a post-party heap. I passed on taking a galvanized wash tub, still filled with burned wood from the night before. Sea gulls or raccoons had been there before me and had strewn the remnants of several picnic dinners around.

    And so it went. At one Napeague ocean beach, I saw in the distance a party winding down as the sun began to rise. What appeared to be a score or more people lay bundled in blankets and sleeping bags. (Later, I understood that Marine Patrol officers showed up to take names and see what was what.)

    As the sun got higher in the sky, guests of the motels and condos along the Montauk oceanfront were hustling to stake out prime spots with towels and beach chairs. A determined-looking man coming down the steps from the Royal Atlantic in a big hurry nearly struck my head with a wooden umbrella post as I passed.

    I could not even get close to Ditch Plain, thanks to a surfing contest. Just why one of the town’s most popular beaches was given over entirely to an event that would prevent residents from going there struck me as a good question.

    On Saturday morning only Montauk Point was quiet, and I got into an easy conversation there with a parking attendant. Paying the $8 fee, I parked and surfed for an hour.

    Because the waves were small, few, and far between, there were only a handful of people in the water, which was fine with me. I have a number of friends who have either given up the sport or take the summer season mostly off to avoid the crowds. I suppose it is getting the same way with the beaches themselves, what with the increasing horde.

    East Hampton Town officials get interested every now and then about opening a new oceanfront beach. That notion is all well and good, but, as my weekend rounds indicated, the town does not adequately manage those it already has. As when my kids beg for another dog, bird, or pet pig, the answer has to be: Prove that you can take care of what we have first and then we can talk.