There is no way to say for certain, but it sure looked like a village traffic control officer was sleeping on the beach the other morning. Like I said, it was hard to know.

    About a week ago, I was out for an early surf at the first Georgica jetty. The waves were small, but with only one other lone person to share them, it was a good way to start the day.

    Now, I don’t want to pile on the local T.C.O.s — they have a tough enough job walking around in the hot sun dealing with a certain entitled subset of the summer population who think things like parking rules should not apply to them. However, this particular young officer first caught my eye when, riding on a four-wheel “quad,” basically a glorified dirt bike, he entered a federal no-vehicles area set up to protect the endangered piping plovers that nest west of the jetty.

    Cautiously, it appeared, he work­ed his way past the plover fence, then parked just out of sight around a dune. He was out of sight, that is, from anyone on the beach; from where I waited for a wave a couple of dozen feet from the end of the jetty, I had a full view. He leaned back on the quad’s seat and did not move again.

    I was sympathetic. I recall well my own early 20s and at least once taking a nap under my desk when The Star had an office in Montauk. My mood changed when I saw a woman with two dogs, one held on a leash, the other running wildly, enter the protected area, passing the no-dogs signs and blithely walking on. The T.C.O., asleep or just unable to see because of his hiding spot, took no notice. When the loose dog ran up into the inner nesting area, I started to get angry. I thought I should say something to the woman, but knowing how such conversations can run out of control, I did not.

    It was, however, with more and more disgust that I watched as she eventually turned her dogs east, walking within the village’s new 300-foot leash zone without an apparent care in the world.

    In the past few weeks almost every time I have been to a village beach, I have seen someone with dogs running free in violation of the rules — or piles of dog waste or bags apparently containing the same left on the sand.

    I doubt anything short of an all-out ticket blitz would put a stop to dog owners ignoring the law. Sleeping T.C.O.s do not help the matter, but frankly, at least when they are supposed to be awake, they really have better things to do.

   When Anna Mirabai Lytton, a 14-year-old from Springs, was struck by a car and killed in East Hampton on June 15, it was as if the community-at-large were bereaved. As a parent and grandparent, I can think of nothing so horrible as the loss of a child.

    I was not among those who knew her. Her father, Rameshwar Das, had taken photographs for The Star in years gone by, but I had never met his wife, Kate Rabinowitz, or son, James Lytton. However, like everyone at the John Drew Theater for her memorial on Saturday, I was overcome by the testimony to her as an extraordinary person. The theater was full and those who could not get a seat were allowed to listen from the lobby. It was the most moving service I had ever attended, and perhaps ever will. Everyone I spoke with afterward and in the next few days agreed and said their tears had flowed.

    Because Mr. Das is a fine photographer, the slides shown on the big John Drew Theater screen of Anna and her family and friends were numerous, funny, and charming. Even though no one knew the password for Anna’s computer, the family found someone who accessed the hard drive so the recorded music that preceded the program was her own playlist.

    But it was the picture painted of this young woman by those who spoke that was so overwhelming. And it was the courage and ability to contain their grief that stunned the audience as Anna’s father, mother, brother, and two grandparents spoke, among others. They described a rainbow of goodness that identified Anna’s personality. In his remarks, Eric Casale, the principal of the Springs School — from which Anna was about to graduate — said the mantra during the week as teachers and students struggled with what had happened was  “smile.” Anna was always seen with a smile.

    Krishna Das, a Buddhist teacher and singer, opened the program, drawing  “om” from those assembled before he sang.  Jonathan Sheffer, a composer and conductor, spoke and then sat at the grand piano to play as he sang the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It also was on Anna’s playlist. Three of Anna’s friends, as well as one of the girls’ mothers, described what they wanted to remember best about her. Another friend, Sienna Van Sickle, drew applause when she sang a song that she had sung together with Anna.

    When Ms. Rabinowitz said that on the day before Anna died she had reached out and told her what a wonderful mother she was, it seemed that everyone gasped in recognition of what an extraordinary person Anna was. And it sounded like the whole theater joined Jenni Muldaur, Krishna Das, and Ms. Rabinowitz, with David Nichtern on guitar, in the final song, “I’ll Fly Away.”

    Someone said afterward that despite the harrowing circumstances of Anna’s death and torrent of grief it unleashed, he was left with a feeling of hope. Perhaps he meant that Anna’s life and her family proved there were still good people in the world.

   It’s quite common to see deer while driving around East Hampton. Every time I drive by the open field on Apaquogue Road there are at least 40 standing there, grazing like cattle. They have practically been domesticated, and thus we are immune to their presence.       

    We smirk as they munch on our neighbors’ flowers and vegetable gardens. But most of the time, we simply see them as part of the landscape and move on.

    Last weekend I biked back from a friend’s house late at night. The air was cool, and town was quiet. I used a flashlight to navigate the dark roads to my grandmother’s house. I rode down Crossways and took a left onto Georgica. Enjoying the silence and solidarity of the night ride, I cruised along on my zippy single-speed bicycle. 

    Only the bright circle of light ahead illuminated my path. There was utter peace, something one rarely experiences in East Hampton in the summertime.

    I’ve hit deer while driving in a car before. Most people who live in East Hampton have too, at some point in their lives. It’s a terrifying experience. The brakes slam and the car swerves. It’s not uncommon for people to veer into trees or bushes trying to avoid a collision with a deer. If it’s a small deer it might get caught underneath the car. But if it’s a big buck its antlers might fly through your windshield. The collisions, and even close encounters with deer while driving my beat-up 2002 Mercury station wagon, have left me breathing heavily in fear.

    But I’ve never even come close to a deer while riding my bike. That night, the calm of my ride was quickly interrupted.

    A large doe, probably 180 pounds, leapt across the road in front of me. I heard its hooves before I saw its body. It clicked and clacked on the pavement as it emerged from the shadows. I had been spinning along at 20 miles an hour, which made slowing on my pedal-brake bicycle difficult. I held my breath and braced for impact.

    All I heard was the deep heaving breath of the deer. It inhaled and exhaled as a bull would, ready to charge. The tempo of its clicking hooves sped up and it scooted just ahead of my front wheel, narrowly escaping collision.

    It stood at the road’s edge, still breathing heavily, and looked at me as I coasted away.

    Was that deer as scared as I was? From the protection of an S.U.V., you don’t hear the clicking of the deer’s hooves, or its belabored breathing. You can’t understand the animal. But on that bicycle that night, I understood that a deer is not the domesticated creature we perceive it to be. The deer is still very much a wild animal.

   Angie Duke is a summer intern at The Star.

The attention of metadata miners in a bunker somewhere in the godless West was drawn to the following intriguing telephonic transcript (for which a court order had been obtained, of course).

    “Hi, Sarah, this rain has been of biblical proportions, hasn’t it? I’m treating myself to some apple pie a la mode.”

    “A la . . . [crackling sound]? Ruth, I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up.”

    “A la mode, I said.”

    “Oh, a la [more crackling] is great!”

    “Reading any interesting books these days?”

    “Actually, yes, I’ve started ‘The Divine Comedy,’ the Clive James translation. There must be 72 versions by now!”

    “. . . Seventy-two virgins. . . ?”

    “Versions, Ruth, versions. . . . Guess what?”

    “What?”

    “Hod took me out last night, after he came back from work.”

    “Gee, Hod took you out? That must have hit you like a bombshell. He’s not exactly a fanatic for going out.”

    “We went to the Paradise.”

    “The Mecca of restaurants.”

    “Though I had a violent reaction to something I ate. There was a gastrointestinal explosion! I’ll spare you the details. I had to phone Dr. Reese.”

    “Who. . . ? Reese. . .?”

    “Yes, but he was in Phi [more crackling] del . . . for the weekend.”

    “Infidel. . . ?”

    “In Philadelphia.”

    “Oh. . . . I’m praying for you, Sarah. And, by the way, I think you’re a real martyr for putting up with that sod Hod. . . . That reminds me I need to order some fertilizer from Agway. . . . I barely have time to think nowadays with all this bombarding we get from the media. Isn’t it the same with you? We’ve got to simplify, don’t you think? Living well is. . . .”

    “. . . The best revenge! I think I’ve read that book. We’ll take up arms to put our feet up.”

    “We’re on a mission — a crusade you might say! You know, Sarah, it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other. How about we get together Saturday.”

    “That would be nice, Ruth.”

    “Great, say 10?”

   An unfamiliar number flashed on the screen of my cellphone shortly after 7 on Monday night. I was waiting at home for my wife to get back from a quick trip in and out of New York City and thinking about how to get the kids to go to bed.

    I answered. It was Lisa, calling from a Long Island Rail Road car stuck in the approach to the East River tunnel. She said that a car behind hers had derailed and that the passengers had not been told anything yet about when they would be rescued. Though there were lights in her car, the air-conditioning was off, and, she said, passengers were dripping with sweat. She was using another person’s phone. Verizon customers had service in this portion of the underground; AT&T users, like us, did not.

    When we got off the phone, I turned to online news reports, of which there were few, and Twitter, which was abuzz.

    Those who were able to get messages out of the first six cars of the train were updating their feeds, many hashtagged #LIRR. I tweeted what Lisa had told me, and within a few minutes two reporters had sent messages asking if I could put them in touch with her.

    I noticed that the Long Island Rail Road had its own Twitter feed, @LIRRscoop, and that someone had posted a terse message that there had been a derailment and that Penn Station had been closed. Then nothing. Annoyed by the silence, I wrote a couple of needling messages. “Crickets,” I offered at one point. A couple of hours later, @LIRRscoop thanked me for my support.

    After 40 minutes of not hearing anything, I began to get anxious. Then it was an hour. Then two. Finally, Lisa was able to get out a text message: “Train is derailed on track still. We evacuated to another train that has to go to Queens and then back to Penn.”

   Lisa was able to get the 9:30 p.m. Jitney to wait for her as she raced from Penn Station to the 40th Street stop. Like the kids,  I was asleep when she got home after midnight. All I remember her saying was “seven hours.”

    In the morning, she was in good spirits. She had saved two small boxes of emergency water rations that emergency responders had given to the stuck passengers in her car. I took a photograph of them and, yes, sent it out on Twitter. No word back from @LIRR­scoop.

   Having attended a batch of end-of-year school and dance programs in the last few weeks, I have become acutely aware of just how segregated the world is that my grandchildren inhabit. This is a topic that can make even the most open-minded citizens squirm; no one wants the world to be like this, but somehow we still shy away from talking about it. So let’s talk.

    Call it de facto segregation, if you will: With only a few exceptions, my grandchildren live and play in near-isolation from those children who are so-called visible minorities.

    Last week I was impressed by a swell performance of the fifth-grade play, “Once Upon a Mattress,” at P.S. 41 in New York’s Greenwich Village. The school is so big that two casts were given a chance to perform and do tech on alternate dates. The production I saw had one black student in the cast, none that I noticed in the tech crew, and the audience included only one black family.

    Perhaps this imbalance was startling to me because of my own naiveté: Somehow, I have always held onto the idea that Manhattan is one big melting pot (or, to use a less outdated metaphor, crazy quilt). This misperception, I guess, harks back to the years when I spent a lot more time in the city, during the administration of this Governor Cuomo’s father, if not further. Once upon a time — do you remember the 1970s? — it was commonly accepted that our children were better off playing and learning among people of other religions, races, and creeds. . . . And, even more, that this would be healthy for us as a nation, too. How antiquated the words “melting pot” sound today.

    The school and dance performances I went to this spring on the South Fork also had only a mere sprinkling of students of color. The East End school districts actually are quite diverse demographically; the after-school programs my grandchildren attend, it appears, less so.

    Springs and Montauk have large numbers of Latino children; Amagansett is largely white, and so, too, are the tiny Wainscott and Sagaponack districts, as well as the Ross Lower School. The overall population of the East Hampton schools is now reported to be 41 percent Latino. Its black student population continues to shrink, while the Bridgehampton School — which not too long ago had a predominantly black student body — is now reportedly divided in approximate thirds among blacks, whites, and Latinos.

    The Hayground School in Bridgehampton seems to be unique in that one-third of its 4-to-11-year-old students is said to be of rainbow color — not only black or white or Latino, but also Asian and Native American.

    Probably I should have expected the demographics of Manhattan’s School District 2, where P.S. 41 is located, to be overwhelmingly white. Rents in that neighborhood are very high, and, unfortunately, the wealth of our country is still quite divided along racial lines. On the South Fork, as well, the gentrification of once working or middle-class neighborhoods — not to mention the large number of exceedingly rich homeowners — is reflected in what you could call a sort of economic segregation. (And this economic divide is then reflected in the lack of visible diversity.)

    I know that local school administrators are doing their darnedest to meet with wisdom the changing demographics of their districts. What concerns me is how easily we, parents and grandparents, simply accept the fact that our children circulate within a bubble of privilege — a bubble that we are often too privileged to even see, much less acknowledge openly.

    What does this de facto segregation mean to our American democracy?

   Given the tantalizing headline, I couldn’t wait until Thursday to read “Here Comes the Sun,” Carrie Ann Salvi’s “Relay” in the May 16 edition of The Star, so I snuck back to the production department on Tuesday afternoon. (Tuesday afternoon is never ending, as Paul McCartney sang in “Lady Madonna,” so I had time to spare.)

    Carrie Ann dispensed some fine advice about getting outdoors and basking in the sights and sounds in intrigue of nature’s beauty, to borrow a few words from Van Morrison (“Come Here My Love”). The piece reminded me of a letter I wrote to The Star a few summers ago, as I sat sweating in the literally 100-degree heat of my Brooklyn apartment, having just sliced my palm open in the act of installing an air-conditioner. The Great Recession had reduced me to a lowly freelance writer, a divorce was imminent, and the nearest beach was at Coney Island (don’t bother). In hindsight, it was the midpoint of a years-long descent.

    The letter was given the heading “Chill Out, Give Thanks” and, probably composed in a dreamlike state brought on by heat exhaustion and the drowning of much sorrow, pleaded with certain of The Star’s warring letter-writers to stop bickering and appreciate the paradise in which they live. I suggested they go to the ocean together and jump in for an exhilarating swim, and promised to make the 100-mile trip to join them if they did. (No one got back to me, but the offer stands.)

    I love how songs can stir memories of people, events, and times in one’s life. For me, the Beatles’ “Revolver” album always takes me back to long-ago summers and will, one hopes, provide the soundtrack for more to come.

    One of my earliest memories is of being in a car with my father, driving from our house in Hither Hills to the house of friends in Culloden Shores, where we picked them up and drove them to our house for dinner. It had to be July or August, and in my recollection, “Good Day Sunshine” played on the car’s radio as we made our way up and over the high hill on Flamingo Road.

    What joy emanated from the old Buick’s cheap speakers! A jaunty, bouncy number recalling the English dancehall music that in no small measure informed their staggeringly brilliant oeuvre, “Good Day Sunshine” still delivers a smile and the promise, through the long, frigid nights of winter or the cool rain of last Thursday, that, as Mr. McCartney sang years later, “It’s never too long before the summer comes again / It always comes again.”

    And so it has. If you’re reading this, Sir Paul, please get in touch. We should definitely take our guitars and bike down to the ocean this summer.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star, and if Sir Paul should care to know, he can be reached at cwalsh@ ehstar.com.

   I played on grass on Sunday. On the surface, of course. And it was wonderful. Not only because it’s so easy on the feet, but also because we — me and Al — won!

    Playing on a grass tennis court is my idea of heaven, so it was appropriate, I suppose, that it was Sunday.

    “Some keep the Sabbath — going

    to church —

    I — keep it — staying at Home —

    With a Bobolink — for a

    Chorister —

    And an Orchard for a Dome. . . .”

    That, of course, was Emily Dickinson, whose Trinity was the Bee, the Butterfly, and the Breeze.

    I felt that way too last weekend, driving through Springs, which was in full flower. We even had a peony in our garden, which largely has been abandoned to the deer, and it smelled wonderful. With a storm brewing later, I made sure to stake it. Something so beautiful should stand erect, not hunch.

    Aside from the grass courts at Buckskill, I also worship in our outdoor shower, a bower whose fading, white-painted frame on Sunday was nearly overgrown by honeysuckle and rhododendron blossoms. Over it all were the trees and a sky so blue.

    “. . . Instead of getting to Heaven,

    at last —

    I’m going, all along.”

    Perhaps it’s this feeling that makes it so hard, especially at this time of year, to concentrate on what we call the news — largely the enormities, outrages, freakishness, and universal griefs that would vie with fecund nature for our attention, clawing at us when we should be out with Larry Penny listening for the whippoorwill’s call, which, after driving miles and miles he heard one recent night in Hither Hills.

    Jane Schacher played it for me on her iPad. And the chuck-will’s-widow’s song too, and, once I’d remembered its name, the nightingale’s, “pouring forth [its] soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!”

    It don’t get no better than this.

   Our regular readers are likely to have noticed a couple of new features in the last few weeks, two columnists who add perspectives not always reflected in The East Hampton Star and a notable departure.

    The first new addition to come aboard was Rebecca DeWinter, the nom de plume of the author of “Tales of a Hamptons Waitress,” a personal column about what it is like to work in food service on the South Fork. Rebecca is fairly sure that if we used her real name, her kiss-and-tell about patrons gone wild and some of her missteps would quickly result in her getting the boot from her restaurant job. All we can say is that she works somewhere in our coverage area, and only our bookkeeper knows her real name, more or less.

    Next, Debra Scott has begun writing about real estate in a column we are calling Company Town. East Hampton pretty much rises and falls along with the area’s fluctuating property sales. It was really an oversight not to get someone on this beat sooner.

    Rebecca reports on what happens on the floor, her co-workers, and making a go of it as a young college graduate suffering the not-so-occasional verbal abuses of summer visitors putting on airs. Debra has the tricky job of unraveling the back stories of East Hampton’s principal industry without crossing the line into outright promotion of one or another broker’s listings.

    As to the departure, Rusty, as he is known to one and all, has left the building. Although the Russell Drumm byline will continue to appear in these pages, he packed up his desk and headed east into retirement of a sort a couple of weeks ago. He will continue to write features and the weekly fish report, but after something like 35 years covering, among other assignments, the East Hampton Town Trustees, it was high time for him to start enjoying the good life.

    This week as well, we welcomed Angie Duke to the staff as a summer intern. While we take on interns regularly, Angie’s arrival is notable in that he is among the first of what I expect will be a long line of the children of some of my friends who are now old enough to want to learn about newspapering.

    At the beginning of the summer, it is exciting to take note of these milestones. We are looking forward an interesting season.

   Nostalgia, Platonic love, and a church-like experience would hardly be on the average man’s mind when contemplating a routine excursion to the East Hampton Town dump. Now the dump is referred to as the East Hampton Town recycling center. But Sunday arrived, time presented itself, the dump beckoned.

    Cardboard boxes, a damaged plastic storage container, a toy lightsaber, a carved wooden handle, a child’s club with a note of the aboriginal: These artifacts would make their final departure to the unknown.

    The way Henry, Lane, and Morgan Jr. had swung those extendable plastic “Star Wars” swords on the lawn, it was unlikely this one still glowed the way it once had.

    And that old black jacket never did bring me much luck. Some of that Kmart clothing can be like that.

    Other things would be loaded into the Ford truck: a small amount of unruly sweepings from the driveway, some remnants of the annual winter wood-splitting massacre, a half-baked lampshade, a book concerning Donald Trump, two empty wine bottles, a destroyed pair of L.L. Bean tropical-weight shorts. Can’t be seen in shorts like those around this place anymore.

    All would make it via the 2004 Ford Ranger two-wheel-drive truck to their final resting place at the town dump.

    How many great memories can one location hold for a person? Seems like yesterday when I refused to allow my father to ride along with me on the weekly dump excursion. The air temperature was hovering around 92 degrees and heading upward; August heat had set in like a wildcat’s claw.

    I told my dad that he was not coming to the dump with me, and that was final. I told him, “What do you want, to drop dead of the heat at the East Hampton Town dump?” He was dressed in his usual bona fide safari jacket, nylon pants circa 1965, thin Christmas socks, and clean sneakers. Dad was closer to 90 years of age on that day than he was to 80.

    He was very mad about the whole thing. I explained to the man, “Your obituary headline will be ‘Judge Dies at Dump.’ ” Some sharp newspaper person might point out what a total idiot the son was, taking his aging father to the dump when the temperature there could have been 100 degrees.

    The matter blew over later that day. After much deliberation, Dad decided that if he had a stroke from the heat at the dump, it might not look so good for me. People from this part of the world talk about stuff like that.

    Late May 1987: What glory it was, in the era when men were mice and women were . . . now let me think. Oh well, my 1966 Ford Twin I Beam made it to the top of the hill. The top of the hill was where you used to dump lots of stuff prior to full-scale recycling. The hill was steep enough, and the gears were so low on that old truck, and what was left of the motor was not so get-up-and-go — a man was left wondering if the truck would make it to the top of the hill.

    As anyone who has delivered stuff to the top of the hill at the old dump in an antique truck knows, the view was quite good, and a scent of times gone by was pungent. It was the late 1980s, and the dump was destined to become what it is today, a recycling center. No more top of the hill nowadays, in a 1966 Ford in a state of dilapidation. How sad it really is; it was so fun.

    Boldly on to the present! The dump scene this recent Sunday had a touch of intellectuality to it. A man wearing a well-worn yet diplomatic East Hampton High School football jacket pondered a few books left on a stone sidewall next to the nonrecyclable bin. One of them was “The Art of Zen, the Art of Zen Drawing.” He had a hardcover cradled in his left arm, the black-lettered title broadly displayed: “Microwaving.” Me, I never really learned how to use a microwave oven.

    After many walks back and forth to the variety of recycling bins — glass, cardboard, plastic, and tin — I exited the dump in my truck, only to return. How does one go to the dump with small amounts of household leaves or brush and head to the regular recycling area without driving into the dump two times? As with microwave ovens, I never have figured out how to do that. It is a ponderous situation. Someday I will ask one of the people on duty at this fine East Hampton Town recycling station, “How do I recycle my household garbage and drop off some brush without having to leave and re-enter the main entrance?”

    My Sunday at the dump required one extra excursion from my family’s home, carting two large rhododendron branches in the back of my truck. Everybody in East Hampton knows unsightly piles of brush are not acceptable anymore. The in style is the Bridgehampton “new larger house look”: nothing on the lawn, new S.U.V. in the driveway. No forlorn yet beautiful daughter splayed out on the lawn in partial tears. The derelict uncle on a minor bender, blurry-eyed, thinking about his future, seated in some old outdoor chair.

    No, no, this will not do. No thoughts of future adventure on one of the many global seas for that young uncle. It is off to Target, Polo, or J. Crew for a set of new clothes. No piles of brush are allowed to be seen, and definitely no older trucks. Everything must be thrown away, neat and tidied up, especially the people.

    My son refused to ride shotgun with me to the dump. Can’t blame him. Morgan Jr. did hoist the heavy garbage cans into the truck bed and loaded some other garbage and whatnot. With arms like a truck driver’s and a head like a water buffalo’s, Morgan Jr. is the perfect Loader of Truck for Dump Run.

    He does a much better job of it than my dad used to. On the other hand, my dad used to meet the most interesting people at the dump. Like the guy in the old white van who was in the witness-protection program, who had either been run over by a car or had run somebody else over — never got that story straight.

   Morgan McGivern is a staff photographer at The Star.