I was not myself this past weekend, nor was Mary herself. You may well ask, who were we then?

    “It’s not you,” she said at one point.

    “Of course not,” I said, “because I’m not myself.”

    Still, I felt like atoning for having freighted one night in the city with such a fervent hope we’d be able to get beyond ourselves that we came close to self-destructing.

    It was too much “relax and hurry up,” and for that I was sorry.

    By the time we got home — in record time — we had begun to find ourselves again. While I mowed lawns, she took arthritic Henry to Louse Point (our Lourdes), and, after a long nap I was able to report cheerily that “I’m beginning to feel more like myself.”

    Soon, I was beside myself with joy running within myself at the high school’s turf field.

    I am the designated joyous one, though sometimes I forget that joy is where you find it. It can’t be imposed, or manufactured, and it can’t erase pain, though it can go hand in hand with it, and, in fact, must, as lovers who’ve lived a while on this earth know.

    This week, I read that the fellow who wrote “Milord,” a song my father and I used to sing with gusto, had said that only joy should reign, that pain was a sacrilege.

    But how would you know joy if it weren’t for pain? Not that I’m plumping for it, but that’s the way it is.

    And so, at long last, we’ve begun to grow into ourselves, said Mary, knowing, as we do, that joy and pain go together, hand in hand.

   Leo the pig ate my sunflower seedlings on Monday. It was my own fault, having left the flat, in which they had germinated and begun to reach for the air, at swine’s-eye level on the patio. Ellis, our 3-year-old junior farmer, and I had planted them about a week earlier and been watering them daily, waiting for the little green heads to peek out of the soil.

    The seeds had come from a packet handed out by people on the East End Community Organic Farm’s float in the East Hampton Santa parade back in December. I had stuck two of the small translucent envelopes in the center console of my truck, discovering them only recently when I was digging around for coffee money.

    Planting something as relatively bulky as a sunflower seed was perfect for Ellis’s developing dexterity. The work went easily, and he was excited that the “babies,” as he called them, had begun to show.

    Leo was excited, too. Eating is what Leo does best, followed closely by sleeping. Until recently, when he wanted to be fed, he would nudge the ankles of whoever was in the kitchen; a few short blasts with a water pistol more or less broke him of the habit.

    Recently, Leo has been grazing in the yard from morning until his midday nap. In the last week or so, the huge bloom of pine-tree pollen that has fallen over everything has left him with a fluorescent snout. Sometimes, when he comes into the house now for a drink of water, a tassel of grass jauntily hangs from his jaw. It is indeed a pig’s life.

    As I have noted before, we have almost lost him twice. A young man my wife, Lisa, met recently told her he had seen him trotting along Cranberry Hole Road during his most recent escape. At 20 pounds and a dingy pink, he seems an unlikely target for a hawk; a passing vehicle would be another story.

    Lisa, still vexed that Leo will not be the 10-pound micro-pig she had been promised, still vows to send him back to his breeder. I’ve grown to like the little devil. So what if he eats the sunflowers? Ellis and I can always plant more.

   The pace is supposed to slow after Memorial Day, but I don’t see it happening. Could it be a portent of the busiest summer ever?

    June has usually been a respite between the weekend that traditionally marks the beginning of the season and the madness of July and August. Although second-home owners have long since stretched “the season” into fall and spring (and for some the winter holidays, too), it seems that this year June is being swept into the maelstrom.

    We know that the economy is largely dependent on the summer, but will the crowds reach a tipping point and begin to turn people away? Will this be the summer the South Fork bursts its seams?

    Most of those who live here all the time develop strategies for staying off the beaten paths. People will tell you that they never go to a supermarket on a Friday or that they just stay out of the village until it is all over. Those who know how to avoid driving on the main drags when the traffic gets heavy are sorry to say the back roads have been discovered. You can almost mark the change of the season by the number of cars on roads like Narrow Lane and Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton or Water Mill. You drive along pretty much by yourself until, without warning, there are cars in long lines.

    And what about the beaches? My husband doesn’t like to let a day go by without at least taking a look at the ocean, but he came here first in a summer family, so perhaps the wonder of it all is bred in. On the other hand, I am among those who rarely get to the ocean beach when the season is upon us; just knowing it is there is good enough, just seeing in my mind’s eye how thrilled the last dog I took to the beach used to be chasing gulls at the water’s edge. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? It was inevitable, given the increase in the number of people at the beaches, the dogs would have to go.

    And does the metropolitan press have to turn its focus on us every year at this time, adding to our popularity? The South Fork may be a sought-after summer destination, but did Dr. Beach, Stephen P. Leatherman of Florida International University, have to designate East Hampton’s Main Beach number one in the country, better than any on Hawaii or elsewhere, as he just did? I’m not so sure.

    Those of us from a Jewish background probably have heard the Ashkenazi superstition invoked against praising something or someone, especially grandchildren, too much for fear of causing the opposite to come true by bringing in the evil eye — giving it or them a “kina hura.” Dr. Leatherman’s choice of Main Beach may have done just that. The good news is that having once been cited as number one, Main Beach won’t appear on Dr. Leatherman’s top 10 again.

   The perils of being a fair-skinned beachgoer are legion, particularly at the beginning of the summer when no manner of sunscreen seems to protect one from the inevitable beach nap burn.

    It takes place every year on the first day at the beach when sunscreen is seemingly carefully applied to face and body and an umbrella adds extra protection. This time of year, unless you have a wetsuit, swimming is not the object of visiting the beach. The ocean’s calming sound and pretty majesty are the primary sources of its appeal now.

    I typically use the beach as my excuse to tackle the pile of New Yorkers that I have overlooked during the spring and for the inevitable beach nap. It starts as soon as I flip over for the first time. As soon as my stomach hits the cradle of my towel in warm sand, my eyes get heavy and I begin to drift off. Sometimes I can make it as much as 5 or 10 minutes before it happens, but most of the time, it’s immediate.    My nap can last from 15 minutes up to two hours, a personal record. If I’m thinking about it, I apply extra sunscreen to my back and the back of my legs. Sometimes, I forget or I start out under the umbrella and over the course of the nap the sun changes angle and I am back in it. The burn that results is usually the same. I always neglect the same areas: a circle around the area behind my knees and a gash along the base of my tankini where my top has ridden up during the course of my rest.

    When I was growing up in Ocean City, N.J., we called this patchy, angry redness a Shoobie burn. Shoobies were, and I suppose still are, what people refer to as Day-Trippers or Day-Gos in other parts of the country. The name comes from the Philadelphia city dwellers who came down on the train and rented lockers at pavilions on the boardwalks in Atlantic City. They would carry their bathing gear in shoeboxes and the name evolved from there.

    It gathered currency and became the appellation for any day visitor from Long Beach Island to Cape May. Year-rounders or seasonal visitors used it with derision to complain about the crowded beaches and roads that resulted from Shoobies’ visits in the height of summer. Those who cared tried very hard not to be mistaken for one, which meant dressing a certain way and being as evenly tan or pale as possible.

    Here, there are different measures of what makes one an arriviste. The most conservative one being that anyone who has not owned property here for more than a half-century is “from away.” Decades and not months of residency are the true measure of an East End local, although judging from the weekend traffic, day-trippers are still finding their way out here en masse.

    Age has faded my recollection of the other easy giveaways that someone was a Shoobie, but no one forgets the embarrassment of a patchy Shoobie burn, achieved accidently, or intentionally in their cases because they only had one day to get their sun.

    Well I have one again and it is terrible. The band around my lower back is an angry purple and it has woken me up a few times since Saturday. The weird circle burn on my back legs is beginning to heal, but slowly and only with much chilled vitamin E gel with aloe. I am grateful that it is still cool outside, because wearing a shorter dress or cropped pants or shorts would not be pretty. Fortunately, I am past the age or the fashion preference for cropped tops.

    I may live on the South Fork now and be far away from the disapproving glances of the South Jersey cognoscenti, but the humiliation of the Shoobie burn still stings.

    Jennifer Landes is The Star’s arts editor.

   It was rather exhilarating to see some 600 fifth through eighth graders dash across Main Street one morning last week on their irrepressible way toward the Main Beach pavilion some three miles away.

    “It must be the funnest day of the year for them,” I thought, as the kids, from Montauk, Springs, Amagansett, and East Hampton, cavorted at the edge of the cool ocean, remembering how I had always looked forward to the Collegiate School’s field day in the spring. (It just occurred to me that I’m wearing Collegiate’s colors today, orange and blue.)

    There were very few couch potatoes to be seen in the high-energy Bonac on Board to Wellness horde. To the contrary, many of the times were impressive; and some, in the high school’s boys varsity track coach Chris Reich’s view, were even “phenomenal.” He is eyeing in particular three seventh-grade middle school boys who ran the 5K that day in the 19s, “what I did when I was a freshman.”

    Lea Bryant, the middle school’s health teacher, who, with Barbara Tracey, the school’s nurse, oversees the wellness curriculum there, said that during the course of the school year the students were encouraged to make “healthy choices having to do with fitness and nutrition, and to set personal goals. We feel camaraderie is important as well. We try to encourage them to feel high naturally.”

    “It’s such a spectacular day on so many levels,” she said. “The time of year is wonderful, and it’s great that they all get to do the same thing, and that they’re all striving to do their best. . . .”

    My late stepbrother, who lived most of his life in France, said on returning from a brief visit to the Springs School once years ago that he didn’t know if the students were learning much, but they were having fun — a Descartean critique that he probably would have extended to American education in general.

    I’ll bet, though, that if they were having fun they were, indeed, learning something. Fun may not be the sole prerequisite, but it can play a big role — as was abundantly evident to me at Main Beach the other day — in awakening the imagination and in encouraging the mind to examine just how one comes to live a good life.

   Sunday afternoon, after having kept the kids cooped up in the house for the preceding 24 hours or more, it was time to get them out for some air. Lisa took our eldest off in one direction, and I loaded the other two into my truck for the drive from our house in Amagansett to Montauk.

    Our destination was the Montauk School playground, which is probably the best one around. A thick layer of ground-up tires covers the ground and provides an appropriate cushion for Ellis, our 3-year-old, who knows little in the way of physical fear.

    The air was cold with a northwest wind coming from where the school sits atop its hill. My knit cap, vest, and denim jacket were hardly enough to keep me comfortable, though the kids stripped down to T-shirts almost as soon as we arrived.

    Despite the wind going the other way, we could hear the starting strains of a band warming up at the Surf Lodge across Fort Pond. Evvy insisted that the music was from a vehicle parked on the street, it seemed so loud and close.

    After a while someone got hungry, so we drove the long way around, up Second House Road, down Edgemere, and into the downtown. I opted for quesadillas and a burrito at a back-street takeout joint, and we headed for the beach.

    I had wanted to see the new rock seawall at the trailer park and thought the kids would like to explore a bit. After they ate, Evvy and Ellis headed for the water’s edge. The tide was out and they could scramble across broken-up pieces of concrete. Then we headed for the stone jetty, where for more than an hour they collected seaweed, shells, and fishbones, piling them on a flat rock and declaring it “salad.” Evvy, who is almost 9, indulges her little brother in games.

    At one point a father with two young children came by. While he stood at a distance, the older of his girls scrambled right up to see what we were doing.

    “Where do you live? Here?” she asked Evvy.

    “Well, sort of. Amagansett,” Evvy answered, not seeming at all proud, the way someone older might have been.

    We played for a while, tucked out of the wind behind the rocks and concrete, then, into the sunset, we went home.

   Let us now praise all things good about Memorial Day weekend. It goes without saying that those who live here year round usually stagger away from the first onslaught of the season complaining: “Oh my God,” or, “Help us! It’s begun,” or, yes, “It’s never, ever been worse!”

    So what good things, you ask?

    Let’s start with the State Department of Public Works having filled most of the potholes and smoothed out the main artery into and out of town. Huzzah! The gods of traffic, I observe, have favored East Hampton over Southampton, where delays for road work continued into the week.

    And how about the rain . . . which didn’t cease until the weekend was almost over? Okay, rain may have put a hex on outdoor barbecues, but, on the other hand, it probably kept day-trippers, and the traffic they create, to a minimum, right?

    I’m not entirely certain restaurateurs or hoteliers would consider a steady downpour a good thing, but various shopkeepers have told me over the years that when it pours, people hide inside the stores. So that cloud had a silver lining, right?

    The rain also pushed the trees and bushes, finally, into full leaf. Home gardens are now overflowing with all the plants that survived the winter and the voracity of the deer. Bambi and company have just about destroyed the few rose bushes left in my backyard, but, on the other hand — I’m trying to stay on the bright side — I don’t remember the lilacs and narcissus and the irises ever being as lush.

    Memorial Day is also a traditional time for old-home get-togethers. My husband and I swam against the tide this time, traveling away to spend time with family elsewhere. Getting out of town is nice, too.

    As far as I am concerned, though, the absolutely best thing about Memorial Day weekend, rain or shine, is the reopening of farm stands and stands and farmers markets. Goodness, this is a land of plenty. Produce grown right here is suddenly abundant. Beautiful rhubarb, tall asparagus, big, bouncy lettuces . . . it’s almost impossible to resist any of it.

    Some years, when spring has been warmer, local strawberries were ripe by Memorial Day. They weren’t ripe yet this year, true. But isn’t it pleasant to reflect that we don’t have to settle for hard, tasteless red orbs from — far, far — away? (Caveat emptor: If you notice your local gourmet grocer selling strawberries labeled as local later than mid-July, ask to see the crate they came in; false strawberry advertising has become a bit of a scourge.)

    Another good thing about Memorial Day is that people who rent houses are past their annual rush, and can breathe for just a moment or two —at least long enough for a glass of wine on the porch. And the tradesmen who have been up to their eyeballs in stress trying to finish up plumbing jobs, pre-season landscaping chores, and the like, might possibly have a few hours free to work for their year-round customers again. I like that.

    Another thing nice about the end of May is the fact that the days are just about as long as they will get. The summer solstice is only three weeks away. And it’s all downhill after that.

Dear significant-others of the comb over guys,

    I know you are suffering, and I am here to help. Trim this part off and leave the rest of this article around the house for the gents to see in the sanctity of the room where they do the comb-over.

The Comb-Over

    Do the gentlemen with seven hairs 11 inches long that stretch from left ear to right ear really think that that looks like a healthy head of hair? Really?

    Do they think the viewing public doesn’t notice the high sheen between the wispy strands and instead think: “Wow, that’s a handsome head of hair on that man!”

    No, gentlemen, we are not fooled. No one but the comb-over (C.O.) is fooled by the comb-over.

    On the street a comb-over, if noticed, and they often are (and for the wrong reason, especially in a high wind) is thought of thusly:

1. That guy is in major denial.

    2. That guy with the “C.O.” is not a C.E.O.

    3. That guy is vain for the wrong reasons.

    4. He is delusional.

    5. He is going to the wrong barber.

    6. He embarrasses his family on a windy day or coming out of the pool.

    7. This is a guy who thinks the Donald’s hair looks healthy.

    8. This guy is insecure about his looks. (And who wants to wed an insecure fella?)

    Consider the former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani. Plenty of 9/11 pictures show him with an egregious comb-over. He’s a rugged fella and that vanity distracted from his cool.

    Years later he remarried and the comb-over was gone. He is all the better for it, a good-looking man with a perfectly fine head of head.

    If the hairline the higher power gave you is . . . er . . . unfortunate, consider a full Kojak, a full Bruce Willis, a full Yul Brynner, Vin Diesel, or Ben Kingsley. Lack of locks never hurt these guys! Remember that a full Kojak is not painful. (Ask your dame friends about a bikini wax, and you will be strutting your stuff plenty quick.)

    Still a little worried? Try a moustache or a European stubble, a hipster under-lip thingy, a Panama hat or a boater. Try some fab new glasses. People might notice a change but they just might think you look less like grandpa and more youthful — maybe you lost weight? A great big confident smile is always a good accessory, and it doesn’t get in trouble in a wind! A big smile and the last thing anyone remembers is the hair, or lack of it.

    A comb-over telegraphs “insecure” which is high up on my personal list of aesthetic deal-breakers. (Along with hillbilly teeth.)

    And please no more comb-overs pretending to be a ponytail.

    Wake up, thinning guys. It is summer. Jon Hamm is famous for going commando in one way (and you may already be “going commando” like Jon Hamm); consider going full-commando, from top to bottom. (Remember the movie “Commandos Strike at Dawn”?)

    Okay, let’s be reasonable. Gentlemen, if your head is a terrible shape or if your career requires it, then get yourself a great toupee. If you go in that direction, please get a better set of toupees than that famous actor-Scientologist. Realism is key.

    Really.

   Durell Godfrey is a photographer for The East Hampton Star and keen observer of comb-overs (and many other things).

   “Happiness is the only sanction of life,” Santayana says at one point in his discussion of reason and how it comes to be, adding that “where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

    I’ll drink to that, to happiness . . . however you want to define it. For me, mainly, it’s having the freedom to be your own person, or the freedom to be able to create yourself.

    “When should I stop?” an elderly man asked Sharon McCobb at the Y the other day as he was working out with weights.

    “Never!” she said.

    And so I continue on my way, reading for no particular reason books about reason (hoping something will get through), exercising my First Amendment right to be flip, and running — staggering is more like it — until I flop.

    “The knowledge that a clock striking two has struck one is a big thing, Santayana said,” I said to Mary the other night. “To know that two’s antecedent is one is a sign of progress, of forward movement.”

    But she, who has been wading through a miserable swamp of details having to do with an estate lately,  was not one to be impressed. “Frankly, I think that progress for me,” she said, “would be utter stasis.”

     Existence for her lately has been a mad and lamentable experiment, I would guess, if not worse.    

    She doesn’t have the leisure to be at leisure, to reflect, as I have been, on what it’s all about. . . . I suspect, though, that she may already know damn well what it’s all about, and that that may be the problem.

    At any rate, I am sympathetic, which, as Branch Rickey says in “42,” is a word derived from an ancient Greek one for suffering. 

    I would be in error if I left it that happiness for me lies solely in creating myself, for I cannot be myself, I don’t want to be myself, if she is not herself. Her horoscope in El Diario said recently concerning Geminis: “Todo se resolvera,” which is to say everything will work out.

    It didn’t say when, though. I hope it’s soon.

   With apologies to Sarah Palin, our family’s pet pig, Leo, went rogue last weekend. In fact, he did it twice.

    With 50 fast approaching, apparently my mind is not what it used to be as on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, I left the gate to the path down to Gardiner’s Bay open. Leo, whom I will describe a little more shortly, took advantage of this, sauntering out that way, and as best as I can figure, slipping off into the woods for parts unknown.

    To be honest, I did not even know he was missing in the first instance. My wife, Lisa, found him walking around in the driveway when she got home from some Saturday errand or other. The second time it was not until I was in the house making lunch for a couple of kids on Sunday that I noticed he was not in his usual place at my ankles — poking at me with his snout in the hope of a bite of something, anything. It is not for nothing they call them pigs.

    Leo is a source of great entertainment in our household. His personality is somewhere between the studied indifference of a cat and the food-mad nature of a dog. When he is not eating or looking for food, he is asleep. Most of his snoozes take place under a blanket in one of the dogs’ beds, or, if he can manage it, on someone’s lap. Outside, he is prone to sudden and inexplicable sprints around the fenced yard, which usually end with his going back to munching the grass.

    In a week or so, Leo, still less than a year old, will top 20 pounds. This is something that I find highly amusing, as Lisa and our older daughter, Adelia, had bought the come-on of some Texas Internet pig breeder who swore up and down that its pigs do not exceed 10 pounds when fully grown.

    I had said that the pig would likely hit 40, kind of like a small Labrador retriever, but with shorter legs. Lisa and Adelia insisted he would stay small with the same vigor they insisted that I would never have to lift a finger to help take care of him. Well, you can just guess how that turned out. Lisa threatens every now and then to send Leo back to the breeder. I think she wants to do that so she doesn’t have to listen to my telling her I told you so anymore.

    The truth is that other than the occasional wet spot he leaves on the bath mat, he doesn’t bother me a bit. In fact, I like him just fine. I even enjoy putting together his meals of fresh spinach, carrots, fruit, oats, and yogurt when I have to. And, frankly, it gives me no end of pleasure to remind Lisa that I was right on all counts. Hey, honey? Hah!

    So it was with no small measure of panic that I responded to Leo’s second disappearance. With the kids’ help, I circled the house calling for him and shaking a plastic container of dog food, an otherwise sure-fire way to get his attention. We went to the beach; he was not there. I took to the woods; he was not there either. I phoned the East Hampton Town police and left my number.

    Then, moments before my father-in-law arrived by car to lend a hand in the search, there he was, calmly trotting up the driveway.

    Later that day, since his second escape had been my fault, I said that I would deal with all the ticks he had accumulated while on his wayward jaunt. We sat down together on the kitchen floor, me with tweezers, and Leo with his eyes shut, dreaming, I suppose, of his two days on the run.