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.

   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.

   At an age when many of my peers have retired or, if they are not quite of retirement age, busy with new interests, I’m still pounding the keys at The Star and continually confused about which of the zillion enticing summer events I should pursue in my hours off. A trusted colleague hit the nail on the head: “It’s a job just trying to figure out what to do,” she said.

    For a while, I thought it would be a good idea to let my (very good-natured) husband be our social secretary. He seemed to enjoy it; you see, he tracks everything he wants to remember, and everything that interests him, on his iPhone. Plus, being gregarious, he loves a good excuse, such as an R.S.V.P., to call someone up for a chit-chat. However, by the end of July it turned out that this arrangement just made our lives more complicated.

    I would check the in-box on my laptop, go to my engagement calendar, and then have to ask Chris to look at whatever information he had recorded for us electronically. Who could have imagined that in our 70s we would be managing a triple or quadruple-barreled diary? Somehow, with all this scheduling overkill, we sometimes end up not going out at all.

    My own cellphone is straightforward, with no bells or whistles or Internet, and I like it like that because it feels like a way to simplify life. However, together, my husband and I have gotten so used to relying on our take-everywhere phones that we forget to listen to the land line’s old-fashioned answering machine for days and days on end. Whoops. We keep missing messages, and not hearing about things until it is too late.

    The truth is, my workdays are less complicated than my weekends and evenings. No negotiations or schedule cross-checking is involved when I am at The Star. The project at hand might be exciting, or tricky, or rustrating, but it is much easier to deal with whatever pressing matter is directly in front of me than to try to decide what I might do in the evening or the next day.

    I am surprised to find the office a relief from the stress of life in “the Hamptons.” I guess my mind has just been boggled this season by all the hassle and crush.  I’d like to take a bit of time to cook the fruits of land and sea or to enjoy the great outdoors, with the incomparably lovely weather this week. But, really, the only respite seems to be the quiet around my desk, and those moments at the end of the day when I’m walking up the lane toward home. I love it when I can do nothing at all.

    It is said that many people revert, at least in some ways, to childhood when they get older. Perhaps that is at the heart of my befuddled mood this summer. The summers of my formative years were spent on a 108-acre farm in the Catskills. We splashed in the brook that ran through it, picked blueberries, and played in the shade of an old apple orchard. Now, if I could only find a nice, secret brook and an empty apple orchard, I would know exactly what to do.

   “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.

   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.’ ”

   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 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.

   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.

   My brother-in-law said as I mumbled something about having to go to the U.S. Women’s Open this past week that there was, after all, nothing else to write about.

    “What nonsense,” I said. “There’s Little League!” And, indeed, our 9 and 10-year-olds were not to disappoint on the evening of July 1 as they took the wind out of Westhampton’s sails, by a score of 10-0, a merciless rout that was ended mercifully after four innings instead of the customary six.

    “Are we going to be in the newspaper?” Jackson Baris, one of Tim Garneau’s players, asked as that game began. “Yes, you will, but I’d rather write about you winning than losing,” I said.

    I’m glad to say the kids obliged. One wants upbeat things to write about if you’re like me, without having to take pains, such as you might in following golfers around 300 acres, however breathtakingly beautiful they may be.

    And so, knowing that my favorite photographer was eager to go, I, aside from a brief visit to Sebonack with my brother-in-law Friday afternoon, decided to watch it on TV.

    And I’m glad I did. The TV crew and commentators made far more sense of things than I, an avid non-golfer, ever could, and you couldn’t get any more upbeat than Inbee Park, who calmly took the course apart, winning her third straight major this year, tying a record set by Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1950.

    You’ve got to hand it to these South Koreans. How do they do it? I doubt they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over there to join a club like Sebonack. To talk of democratizing the game when such obscene figures are involved seems absurd, though I know efforts are being made here. The First Tee national school program, about which I wrote recently, is in our schools now, and I’m mindful as well that a good number of private clubs, the Bridge, Maidstone, South Fork, and the East Hampton Golf Club among them, have beenvery helpful when it comes to supporting high school golf teams.

    Still, you wonder. Once the kids learn, where will they play? Montauk Downs maybe, which I’m told stacks up quite well when compared to the private courses out here. That’s where my brother-in-law plays, even on New Year’s Day.

    And even he (as I too have vowed) has said he’ll never go to another U.S. Men’s Open. There’s one coming to Shinnecock in 2018. I had to buy periscopes the last time a Men’s Open was played there, forbidden, as I was, to venture inside the ropes. “Periscope-a-dope,” Muhammad Ali would have called it. The good news is that I’ll either be retired or dead by then, perhaps both. Or just dead.