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.

   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.

   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.

   Yes, spring may be here, but, besides the dazzling gold­finches and cardinals, there is the oaken semen dripping on one’s windshield, pollen-suffused air, allergies, tick bites, the wretched antibiotics required to treat them, and, sports-wise, it’s been a bit of a slog — the great majority of our high school’s teams not being playoff-bound.

    Still, lushness is to be preferred to slushiness.

    Presumably, there will be growth next spring, but then I wonder will I, a weekly sportswriter perhaps overly dependent on the winning drug, be here to enjoy it?

    “. . . Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day / To-morrow will be a-dying.”

    Of course, Robert Herrick was addressing virgins of the 17th century, not herniated geezers with total knee replacements of the 21st, but I hear what he was a-saying.

    Long before Herrick, of course, there was Horace: “Dum loquimir, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.” Carpe diem. Pluck the day. Though not so roughly as to forget the future, which, while it is not ours to know, we can try our best to shape. Which is why am I going to p.t. every week trying to strengthen, after 70-some years of slouching, my shoulders so I can stand erect.

    It was my late mother-in-law’s express wish that I not hunch. Thus I’ve made it my mission to straighten up and fly right.

    “Yet, it’s the process,” my inner voice reminds. “Don’t get so hung up on Ws, give the kids a break, treat victory and defeat as the imposters they are and have some fun while you’re at it. In short, be plucky, and pay attention.”

    I had to admit I was right: Keep moving, keep improving, that’s the ticket. Did the kids learn, did they have fun? Those are the main questions.

    In the end, though, why not simply settle for fun, for the movement that embodies life, and let self-improvement take its course.

    The other evening at my brother-in-law’s Derby party, watching the kids — there must have been at least two dozen of them — playing dodgeball in the backyard as the sun went down was enough, more than enough.

   As our children get older, Lisa and I have found ourselves shifting into the chauffeuring mode of parenthood. The after-school hours, and increasingly week­­ends, are spent driving the kids from one obligation to another. There are dance lessons, rehearsals of different kinds, and sporting events that have taken us as far as Pennsylvania.

    Spending that much time with the kids gives us a window into their world. In particular, I have been paying attention lately to the music they like to listen to. Forget about Dad turning on National Public Radio news; oh no, it’s pop music or else. I get even, however, by trying to pester the girls about the songs I find especially insipid or annoying. (Ellis is still too young to get it.)

    One peculiar thing about current FM radio hits that disturbs me is the frequent, if not constant, reference to alcohol. Singers boast of “drinking that bubbly” or “sippin’ gin and juice.” Because many of the songs drop the names of specific brand-name liquors, I found myself wondering, around summer last year, if there weren’t some kind of sponsorship going on.

    It turns out, not surprisingly, that I wasn’t the only one wondering. A group of pediatric researchers from the Dartmouth College and the University of Pittsburgh studied the top-40 songs from 2005 to 2007 and concluded that the average adolescent in the United States heard 34 references to alcohol each day.

    The researchers found that one in five songs that get heavy airplay had “explicit references” to drinking. Twenty-five percent mentioned a specific brand, and in those cases, the brands were associated with a “luxury life-style characterized by wealth, sex, partying, and other drugs.”

    My recent informal sample would seem to support these findings. One pop song’s lyrics talk about “when the bar closes, and you feel like falling down . . .” It’s not just about booze, however; friends are “in the bathroom getting higher than the Empire State.” And, speaking of New York, Jay-Z, the much-celebrated poet laureate of the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, rapped “MDMA got you feeling like a champion” in his anthem-like ode to the city. (MDMA, for those who don’t keep up with these things, is a drug that contains Ecstasy.)

    I can’t say that the radio music of my generation was inherently better for kids, though. The ’70s themselves were drug-soaked, if in a different way. One of my most vivid pop-related memories from that time was having a debate with my sister while our parents were driving us somewhere about the lyrics of “Muskrat Love,” the harmless, if cloying Captain and Tennille hit of 1976. I don’t remember what the specific dispute was about, though I recall certainty that I was right.

    Still, it’s a far cry from “nibbling on bacon, chewin’ on cheese” to today’s mindless celebration of things adolescents should view with apprehension, not aspire to as a symbol of the adult world.

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.

   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.

   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.