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.

   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.

   Last month a friend gave me, unsolicited, a copy of a book called “Wheat Belly.” What was she trying to tell me?

    It hadn’t escaped me that, having reached a certain age, my middle had begun to expand. I eat very healthfully, and exercise regularly, but still the old spare tire clung to me like an embedded tick.

    Five years ago, when I was 20 pounds lighter, clothes hung on me like on a mannequin, draping just so. With my postmenopausal figure resembling more the Michelin Man than its former hourglass, I still haven’t figured out how to dress. Yes, I’ve discovered Spanx and tops that blouse over the extra padding. And, yes, I’m relieved that mommy jeans are coming back so I don’t have to worry about a dreaded muffin top. But I want my former lighter-on-my-feet self back.

    So when my friend handed me the “Wheat Belly” book, I welcomed a new plan. It seemed easy: Don’t eat wheat. Just remove one thing from my diet? I could do that. As long as I could imbibe spirits, which was forbidden on a diet I had been considering.  

     The gist of the book is that today’s wheat is not our grandmother’s. According to the author, William Davis, M.D., Europeans started eating wheat cultivated from a wild grass called einkorn around 3300 B.C. Einkorn was a simple food, containing only 14 chromosomes in its genetic code. Around that time, it was hybridized with goatgrass and the resulting emmer wheat contained 28 chromosomes. (“Plants such as wheat have the ability to retain the sum of the genes of their forebears.”)

    Emmer sustained several civilizations until biblical times when it naturally merged with another grass and became Triticum aestivum, a 48-chromosome wheat. The more genetically complex, the more pliable its flour became, it allowed for less dense bread. And so this last wheat stayed with us until the middle of the last century.    

    Today’s wheat (even whole wheat), Dr. Davis writes, is so toxic you’re better off eating sugar. It has been hybridized and genetically modified to produce higher yields. It also is easier to thresh and produces lighter flours.

    Wheat no longer shimmers in amber waves‚ it is now predominantly “dwarf wheat” — any taller than a foot, its super grains would cause the plant to collapse. By 1980, thousands of new strains of wheat had been developed, producing dramatic genetic changes and untold numbers of chromosomes. Yet “no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains‚” according to the book.

    Today we are a society addicted to wheat, which, among other things, has opiate-like effects on the brain, making it difficult to go cold turkey. Thus, eating wheat makes you high. And not eating it, when you’re in the cycle, makes you low. It’s also a potent appetite stimulant — a bagel begets a pizza begets pasta — and mood agitator. There’s a lot of science in the book, but suffice it to say that the wheat-caused “cycle of insulin-driven satiety and hunger” is responsible for growth of fat specifically in the visceral organs,” as well as its “familiar surface manifestation.” In other words, the wheat belly.

    Fortunately, I didn’t eat much wheat to begin with. But it is astonishing how, as soon as there is a rule telling you not to do something, you suddenly want to do it. Why did I find myself at Maison-Kayser bakery on Third Avenue eyeing the financiers or going into Crumbs to ogle the cupcakes decorated like fine jew­els? Or, why was I drawn inside Mary’s Marvelous to inhale the scent of fresh-baked goodies? After all, “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.”

    In my first wheat-free week I got through a visit to Southampton almost unscathed, despite my intense yearning to score a bag of the salty-sweet-crunchy nuggets of my youth, Crutchley’s doughnut holes, which Kathleen King has reintroduced at Tate’s Bake Shop. I was able to pass, but only because the friend I had joined for dinner had a plate of fried calamari. Yes, they were battered, most likely in wheat, but I made a decision there and then: If a plate of irresistible morsels is sitting in front of you, and the wheat quotient is minimal, I won’t torture myself. Seems like a good rule. And it took my mind off Crutchley’s.

    This is how things went for a while — cravings that I was mostly able to ignore.  At home I could control what I ingested. With the gluten-free fad in full swing, it is easy to find satisfying wheat replacements. I’d been eating brown rice pasta for a while anyway. Delicious. Trust me, and readily available, you can also buy quinoa pasta, also delicious and wonderfully textured. And the Sag Harbor shop Provisions carries several tasty breads made of rice or millet flour, which are light and tasty. 

    Out in public, wheat seems to crop up everywhere from wraps to pasta, and especially on hors d’oeuvres trays as an inexpensive vehicle for getting the main event into your mouth. So I had to eat more consciously. Hard cheese at events works because I can use my fingers rather than crackers. Ditto for soup chasers, which sadly don’t seem to be around as much this summer as last.

    With only one thing to avoid, it’s been pretty easy. I’d say I’m 98-percent wheat free, cheating only at first when someone brought a fabulous banana bread into the office. Now those things fail to tempt me. Much. 

    It’s been five weeks. I lost five pounds within two weeks, but have continued to hover at that same number since.  While I’m sure that avoiding “Frankenwheat” is a good thing, my belly has shrunk only minimally. I’m thinking of renaming it “wine belly.”

    Debra Scott is a writer and member of the production staff at The Star.

   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.

   The East Hampton Library, it seemed, broke into the highest echelons of good causes — up there with the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, motherhood, and apple pie — on Saturday, when a reported 2,000 people jammed into a tent on the Gardiner-Flynn grounds off James Lane in the village for the ninth Authors Night extravaganza. The crowd was estimated as 25 percent larger than ever before.

    While this has been a summer of collective moaning and sighing (and swearing) about crowds, traffic, noise, rude behavior, etc., the unmatched number of people crowded onto the South Fork has had a few positive effects, too, especially in raising the proceeds at charity events. Benefit parties are being sold out, and everyone says the amounts raised are only mounting and mounting.

    Authors Night was the culmination of a year’s planning by the co-chairs, Sheila Rogers, executive vice president of the library’s board of managers, Dennis Fabiszak, the library director, and Patti Kenner, reception chair. They worked with committee and subcommittee chairs who also met regularly. The proceeds, when you combine the $100 a ticket book-buying reception with the haul from 26 dinner parties following the reception, plus the take from the free children’s fair on Sunday, are expected to reach $375,000. Many of the essentials required were donated, keeping the budget for so large an affair minimal.

    But what amazed me were the logistics. A flock of about 100 volunteers started the day early, setting things up and shepherding authors and books, food and drink, and book — and celebrity — lovers to the right place. Ms. Kenner apparently kept an eye on plans for everything from the napkins on the food tables to the flowers and the check-out lines.

    I am told that 830 cars were parked on the field, and I myself saw many others lining Main Street. There were parking helpers and golf cart drivers to ferry guests back and forth. Eight security personnel were on hand (although no one was reported to have gotten rowdy).

    Given the size of the crowd, I was surprised to learn that fewer authors were invited this year. The number was 104, compared to 125 last year and 180 the previous year. Ms. Rogers said she always asks the writers what the library can do to make Authors Night better; honing the number was one of the results.

    Maureen Egen, a member of the library’s board — who retired not long ago from a top career with the Time Warner Book Group and Little Brown — acted as liaison to publishers and was instrumental in bringing in some writers of note for the first time. Every book was donated.

     Then, imagine: Volunteers were back on Sunday morning to dismantle it all and set up for the children’s fair, which included a book reception of its own, carnival rides and games, crafts, roving performers, and snacks. Of course, that had to be dismantled at day’s end, too.

    Although more than 600 guests attended the dinner parties, enjoying good food and conversation in honor of one or more of the authors, the event at the art dealer Larry Gagosian’s art-filled Gwath­­mey house on the dunes took the prize for glitz. Among the 120 who attended were Jack Nicholson, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffet, and Anjelica Huston, among others. Clive Davis was the honoree.

    Many of us remember the John Steinbeck Book Fair, a fund-raiser for South­ampton College, which began in 1977 at the college and became the annual Meet the Writers event at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, heralding the summer season for some 20 years. It ended in 2002, four years after Ms. Benson’s death. Tickets were $15 and the college reported proceeds totaling $157,000 over the years. I think Elaine would be amused that Meet the Writers was the genesis of this very successful Authors Night, and bemused by the phenomenal numbers involved.

   “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.