The one thing my children know is not to buy me perfume for Mother’s Day on Sunday. And even though the perfume makers purport to use all types of natural ingredients, such as sandalwood, rose, patchouli, white lilies, and ambergris, they also use chemicals that are not listed on the label that include benzoin resin, deer musk, acetoin, bisabolol, and perillaldehyde, whatever that is. No wonder I’m allergic to it.

    Like smoking, the scent of a perfume can have second-hand repercussions, like asthma (have it), itching (have it), and rash (have had it). Maybe it’s the scent of deer musk in the one scent I do wear that’s making me forage through my own garden lately and wince at bright lights.

    Last week a little boy sat behind me at a school program. Cute as a button, I thought, until I got a whiff of him and thought I would have to flee the auditorium. There was no one in the seat next to me, so he flung his upper body over it and was basically in my face. I smiled at him, complimented his singing ability as he sang along with the students on stage in my right ear, but started getting annoyed when, instead of applauding, he kicked his feet against the back of my chair.    But even that was less annoying than his aroma. I do believe he’d doused himself in his father’s cologne, using the whole bottle. First my nose started twitching and then I started itching all over. The itch was unbearable, but I resisted leaving because I didn’t want to miss seeing my sister’s child receive an award. As the students on stage sang their hearts out, I was discreetly trying to scratch the itch on my back, thighs, and near my ears.

    When I had to reach under my sweater to scratch under my bra strap I worried that someone would think I was flashing them, so I maneuvered my arm so as to get at it. Anyone watching me move my arm back and forth against my right side would have thought I had a tic.

    After the ceremony we celebrated by going to dinner in Montauk. My hair smelled so bad from that little boy and my face was so red from my reaction that I felt I had to explain to anyone greeting me that I was wearing some strange kid’s cologne.

    It reminded me and my sister of a time when we were in elementary school and my mother used a new detergent on both of us and our two brothers. By midmorning, Mom was called to the nurse’s office to collect the four of us. We were itching and scratching so bad the nurse was afraid that whatever we had could be contagious. Scabies is not something to be shared. But it wasn’t contagious, it was an allergic reaction to the detergent.

    To say Mom was embarrassed would be an understatement. At home, we all quickly showered and put on clothes that hadn’t been washed with the itchy stuff. And, being the wise children that we were, we managed to allow her guilt to fester and cajoled her into feeding us treats for a week to compensate for the embarrassment we told her we’d been put through at school. (Actually, nobody cared. The other students considered us lucky to get out of school early.)

    A mother’s guilt is something that is very much alive and active. Most of us mothers have had it at one time or another. We deserve to be celebrated on Mother’s Day. We also deserve a really good gift. Take my advice, bring plenty of cash when shopping for her. And if you see any of my three children around Montauk tell them they should read this column.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star and its Montauk correspondent.

   The provocative story of what happened when an Associated Press reporter broke the news that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, ending World War II, came across my desk this week — by random coincidence, at the same time controversy was breaking out over the recent revelation that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained records of 20 A.P. phone lines.

    The wartime reporter, Edward Kennedy, was one of only three members of the American press allowed to witness the signing, and, like all three, was allowed to do so only on the condition that he hold the story until its release was approved by the brigadier general in charge, Frank A. Allen Jr.

    According to his own account,  Mr. Kennedy deliberated “which course did my duty as a reporter dictate — subservience to a political dictatorship, which was contrary to the principle of a free press and in violation of the word of the government and the army, or action which I believed right. . . .”

    The news of war’s end went out over the A.P. wires just a few minutes before editors learned that the Germans had announced the armistice in a radio broadcast several hours earlier. It had also already been broadcast in 24 languages, including English, via the American Broadcasting Station in Europe.

    Mr. Kennedy did not know it at the time, but history makes clear, that the army had decided to allow Russia to announce the surrender at a later ceremony in Berlin, a concession granted for (apparently misguided) political reasons. The Soviet announcement was the beginning of Russia’s dominance in Eastern Europe — and the Cold War.

    Even though the A.P. had congratulated itself on its historic scoop, it did not stand by its reporter. He had defied military censorship, and he was censured and then fired. Eventually, he became the editor of papers in California.

     The New York Times, which had (naturally) used the A.P. story on page one with huge headlines, nevertheless also found fault with him. In an editorial two days later, The Times said he had done a “grave disservice to the newspaper profession.”

    I wonder what its editorial board would say about that today.

    In an article that came out in The New Yorker only a few weeks after the armistice,  A.J. Liebling, the legendary newspaper critic and accomplished war correspondent (and onetime resident of Springs), wrote, “I do not think Kennedy imperiled the lives of any Allied soldiers . . .  as some of his critics have charged. He probably saved a few, because by withholding the announcement of an armistice you prolong the shooting. . . .”

    Mr. Kennedy, who is no longer alive, was nominated this year for a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, or a citation, with the idea that such recognition would serve to correct what those who nominated him called “a major journalistic and public-policy wrong.” Nothing came of it.

 The only public recognition Mr. Kennedy has received is engraved on a memorial sundial in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, Calif. It reads: “He saved the world an extra day of happiness.”

   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.

   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.

   “Whose Garden Was This,”  an evocative song by Tom Paxton, who lived in East Hampton for many years, came into my head this week after I drove through the railroad underpass on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton and was suddenly startled, not by an approaching vehicle (although that is a real concern), but by a stand of some two dozen wild lupines. I had forgotten how stunning their blue-purple flag-like flowers are.

    Like Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Tom’s song  was an anthem for the fight against environmental degradation. At the time, though, the lyrics spoke to places far away, at least as far as I was concerned; I never thought the day would come when they struck home here on eastern Long Island. 

    Lupine, which used to follow the bird’s-foot violet in flowering along local roadsides, are just about gone now. They had held on for quite a while despite inappropriate public mowing in the name of road safety. Some years ago an effort was made — in East Hampton, at least — to convince the  Town Highway Department to schedule its mowing in keeping with botanical seasons, but it didn’t take. Changes in accepted government procedures require public insistence, and the voices for the protection of roadside flowers were too muted.

    Lupine wasn’t the only flower that used to grace the roads. Later in the summer, grass was punctuated by orange butterfly weed. Like the lupine, butterfly weed was pretty much taken for granted until it was too late.

    Of course, there are still flowering plants and bushes in out-of-the-way places here. A hidden forest of mountain laurel is breathtaking in June. Rosa rugosa, from which you can make rose-hip jelly, continues to thrive near the beaches, and goldenrod and asters pop up in August. Beach plum bushes put on a pretty show in good years.

    There also are members of the orchid family on Napeague’s wild lands. If you know when and where to look, you can see lady’s slippers and orchis, although they are much rarer than they used to be. These Napeague plants have been subject to neither mowing nor overdevelopment, but some of them are pollinated by bees, and bees are in serious decline.

    The disappearance of native flora is to some extent an aesthetic matter, I suppose. (That is, if you don’t consider the protection of biodiversity to be important as a general principle.) But such is not the case where shellfish are concerned. I remember the 1960s and ’70s, when people from away, unfamiliar with the South Fork, would ask whether it was safe to eat local clams. Of course! we told them, with exclamation marks in our voices. It never occurred to me in those days that in 30 or 40 years our waterways would write a different story.

    Today, shellfishing is banned either temporarily or after rainstorms in some of our harbors, and a few prohibitions may turn out to be permanent. If roadside mowing was death for many wildflowers, an overabundance of nitrogen and of chemical pollutants is the obvious cause of contaminated shellfish.

    The good news is that if you love lupine and butterfly weed you can buy seeds and plant them in your garden. Meanwhile, scientists seem to agree that it is not too late to reverse the downward trend in our harbors and bays. We will just have to make our public outcry louder and more persistent this time.

   Ah, Memorial Day, how did you come upon us so quickly? I don’t know about my fellow locals, but I’m just not ready for you.

    I’m already missing winter’s empty stores, quiet checkout lines, and roads that were not yet filled with pedestrians and bike riders who don’t seem to get that there are vehicles in their midst, people rushing to their jobs, people in a hurry. The bumper sticker that says, “We’re not all on vacation,” says it all.

    I’ll miss my Sunday afternoon drives with my husband, which will now end as he starts fishing every free chance he gets, leaving me alone to fight the crowds on beaches, in parking lots, the supermarket, and just about everywhere else.

    On our winter drives we often see other long-married couples taking their afternoon drives, which makes me feel old and almost makes me want to stop taking them. But we won’t because there’s nothing else to do at that time of year, and that’s how we like it. Sacred Sunday, we call it. In a perfect world no one would have to work on Sundays.

    When we drive through the quiet streets of Montauk we see the new houses under construction, many of them much bigger and grander than my own year-round residence. How do these people get to come to my town and build a bigger house than me? I, too, want a gazebo attached to my house or an oceanfront view. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem fair that those of us who live here year round often live in small houses, well smaller, anyway.

    But I’m also jealous of those who are finding Montauk and the Hamptons for the first time. I’m jealous of the ones who have yet to find the secret beach that is littered with conch shells and driftwood that I take home for my collection, or the horse ranch high on a hill where Montauk horses graze and gladly take handfuls of carrots. I’m jealous of the first time they see Oink, our resident pig who roams as freely as a dog and has become something of a tourist attraction.

    I’m jealous of the adventure they are about to embark upon and the friends they will meet. When I first came to Montauk as a young recent graduate of a business high school, which allowed me to receive a diploma as long as I promised not to type for a living, I, too, found many adventures, some not too cool. Ironically, I now type for living and am actually not too bad at it.

    There was the first time my friends and I decided to walk from the downtown area to the Montauk Lighthouse, not realizing it was about five miles of tough road. We ended up turning back when we thought it must have fallen into the brink. “It really couldn’t be this far, can it?” we asked ourselves. Ironically, I now live near the Lighthouse.

    So we hitched a ride, thinking that there was safety in numbers. Of course, a weirdo picked us up, the same weirdo that I see nowadays and know as a local. As we sat in the back of his car, we held hands and prayed for our safe return to the motel we lived in. Ironically, that guy is now a friend of mine.

    Then there was the time a newly-met friend and I decided to embark on a bike ride after she took some Ex-Lax. She had asked my unprofessional opinion of how many she should take to get her bowels moving again and I told her about two or three. Hey, they were chocolate flavored, that’s all I knew. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pedal so fast and furious to the nearest restroom. There is no irony here; I still love chocolate.

    On our first summer out here, my close girlfriend, who grew up next door to me on City Island, was hit by a car in front of the Montauk movie theater. She was fine, took a ride in the ambulance to the hospital, but became agitated when a reporter from this newspaper got in touch with her for more information. “I don’t want this in the paper,” she told the reporter. “My parents will make me come home if it gets out.”

    I do look forward to the warm days of summer and lazing on a beach all day. I look forward to eating steamers, lobsters, homemade chowder, and fresh corn on the cob. I look forward to outdoor dining and family boat rides. I look forward to having a whole afternoon by myself while my husband fishes. I look forward to people-watching and watching summer blockbuster movies at the Montauk Movie. But what I really look forward to is September.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   “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.

   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.