Well, it’s official: Spring has arrived. For Sebastian Gorgone, it was heralded by the arrival at Gerard Drive of squid-chasing bluefish; for me it announced itself in the form of a deer tick latched onto my upper left shoulder.

    A day later, Peter Siefken finished the job that I’d somewhat botched, though I did remember to take two antibiotic pills, as he had recommended, soon after making the discovery. The potent pills made me feel wretched, though anything’s better than having Lyme disease, which messes with your brain.

    I think that’s my biggest fear, that I may wind up not in my right mind, which would be chagrining for a lefty.

    There’s the fear too of physical atrophy (not to mention teleological questions having to do with the soul), which is why I went this week to see Sinead FitzGibbon, who recently won in 6 hours, 28 minutes, and 10.86 seconds a 50K (31-mile) race in Pennsylvania, the Hyner View Trail Challenge, clawing her way up a series of steep hills and dodging potato-sized rocks dislodged from those above on her way down.

    She thinks I may be beginning to lose it — physically — and that, consequently, I should begin some strengthening and run-walk exercises, which she has duly prescribed.

    Mary bought me a watch because the running and walking intervals must be timed. I thanked her, but before setting forth had a consult with my body, which they say you should listen to. So far (though it’s barely audible given the fact that one of my hearing aids is in the shop) my body is saying it’s dubious. It is pretty much the same with Mary too, though it’s more a question of finding the time for her. Modest exercise is something we agree we can do together, though, of course, we can always play gin.

    I used to think that not to exercise — not to be engaged in one sport or another, whether it were soccer, squash, slow-pitch softball, running, biking, swimming, or tennis — was somehow retrograde, slothful (and sloth, we all know, is one of the seven deadly sins). And now, most of these sports have passed me by, with the exception perhaps of doubles tennis, where I nevertheless find that my customary confidence (some would say overconfidence) has begun to slip.

    I know what should be done, else why would I have sought out Sinead in the first place. All that remains, then, is to summon up the requisite energy to begin.

   Our family was in Fairfield County, Conn., over the weekend, not all that far from Newtown, where 26 students and school employees were shot and killed in December. My impression was how ordinary it all seemed around New Canaan and Norwalk, where we were for one of our children’s synchronized swimming meets.

    The Y.M.C.A. where the meet was held was adjacent to a middle school, and, it being a Saturday, dozens of kids and their siblings and parents were there for lacrosse and soccer matches. In the playground where I took our son, Ellis, to burn off some energy while waiting for the swimming awards, several boys of about the ages of some of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School chased each other in a game of tag.

    I watched a set of parents out of the corner of my eye. They played with two girls, sisters apparently, then kicked a ball back and forth between them. There was nothing unusual about it, no pall over the proceedings, just another beautiful weekend midmorning in the sun.

    The swim meet drew children from much of southwestern Connecticut, and Lisa, who stayed at the pool nearly all day, said that several adults she talked with knew families who lost children at Sandy Hook. She relayed this to me in a whisper, after which it was difficult to concentrate on anything else.

    These people, families, kids, were essentially no different than those devastated on that cruel December day. They were no longer just strangers I had read about in The Times or heard of on public radio; they were people like me — like you.

    There is no reaching those in Congress who stand opposed to reasonable new gun restrictions, I suppose. Yet I wonder whether they might remain so indifferent if they spent a Saturday as I did reflecting on the failure of the system to save those 26 people and the families and friends who loved them.

    If there is nothing else a society must do, it is to protect its young.

   A story in The Star last week about recycling left me, and perhaps many readers, with an uncomfortable awareness that the state law requiring that all refuse be separated at its source is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

    A spokesman for one of the largest carters on Long Island told The Star that even though separation at the source is the law, nothing requires carters to do anything about what their customers throw out or how they do so. The only requirement is that carters dump what they collect at facilities approved by the state, some of which are reported to actually sort refuse, while others accept specific kinds of waste. He estimated that only 10 to 12 percent of what the company collects is recycled.

    How garbage is handled is not a sexy topic, but it isn’t always boring, either. When Tony Bullock stepped down at the end of 1995, after eight years as town supervisor, he thought he had left the town with a state-of-the-art recycling and composting program following a state mandate that all Long Island landfills be closed. Men were hired to stand at a conveyor belt or picking station, where they sorted everything into the defined categories (a sorting that was also required of those who took their own garbage to the dump). Educational campaigns were undertaken, licenses for carters established, and those who didn’t comply with the regulations were fined. But things did not pan out quite like that.

    By 1996, the town had a $500,000 recycling deficit because sales of recyclable goods were not large enough to cover the sorting expense and having other waste picked up and whisked elsewhere (perhaps to incinerators) was costly. Taxes went up. At the same time, out-of-town carters with alleged Mafia connections were starting to compete with local businesses, too. What had seemed a noble effort was having unsavory consequences.

    In 1997 and ’98, Len Bernard and Pete Hammerle, Republican and Demo­cratic town board members, respectively, worked together to straighten out the mess. They alternated writing a column for The Star called “Divide and Conquer.” Amid tales of employees forced to deal with unhealthy and unmentionable waste, the sorting facility, eventually, was scrapped. The workers were no longer needed, and the recycling center became a transfer station.

    Costs to run the waste-management system are now so low — there isn’t  even a facility manager anymore — that the town reports it makes money on garbage. But I’m not sure that means we are doing an environmentally decent job.

    It’s hard to pin down exactly what percentage of the town’s waste is being recycled today, and I think this is an issue that we residents should get more passionate about. It’s easy to feel good about how Earth-friendly we are when we buy organic vegetables and carry them home in chic cloth shopping bags, but if the bottles for all that mineral water we drink are just ending up in a landfill, how green are we really?

   I recently completed a two-day course to become a C.P.O., a certified pool operator, a person who’s responsible for keeping swimming pools and spas free of disease, injury, and worse. The class was held upstairs at the Montauk Firehouse.

    Most of the dozen or so who attended were renewing their certification. I was a first-timer and knew that chlorine had to be kept at a certain level to keep pathogens at bay. What could be simpler? 

    A whole lot, I soon realized, as Paul Blake, a National Swimming Pool Foundation instructor, plopped the 300-page “Pool and Spa Operator Handbook” on the table in front of me along with my own stack of worksheets, a green chartreuse highlighter, and (God help me) a calculator. Oh no!

    As Mr. Blake introduced himself I began to randomly leaf through the handbook only to find page after page of graphs and chemical equations. What’s the formula for cold sweat? The course was intense, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day with a three-hour test the final afternoon. I began to panic.

    Mr. Blake had us jump right into calculations for surface area of rectangular pools, round pools, kidney-shape pools. Then he showed us how to calculate the number of gallons they contained. We learned the chemistry of chlorine and the difference between free and combined chlorine. High and low pH, total alkalinity, and calcium hardness were explained.

    We talked giardia, shigella, norovirus, E. coli, the cause of swimmer’s ear, and how to respond to a “fecal incident.”

    Now, I’ve been a journalist for nearly 30 years. I’ve liked the learning part of the job, although at times the research can be a challenge. As I sat there hour after hour in the firehouse, I realized how long it had been since I graduated from college. Forty-four years ago this June, and since then I have not been taught, that is, spoon-fed information in any kind of formal way. How nice it was to sit and have knowledge showered upon me by someone who knew his stuff and better yet, knew how to get it across.

    I didn’t ace the test by a long shot, but I passed it, and at least now I know how to respond to a fecal incident, something I’d witnessed in verbal form during many an official gathering in my day job as a reporter — “Everyone out of the pool!”

   Russell Drumm is a senior writer for The Star.

   So, it’s spring — a bloody spring, a promising spring. Not long ago, when the Olympic committee was proposing to ban wrestling from the Olympics — wrestling, which, besides running, is the Olympic sport — I said to Mary I’d never met a wrestler whose character I didn’t admire. And now, given the abomination in Boston, that generalization is swept away — with the dead, with the maimed.

    I thought wrestling taught you to stand on your own two feet and not to whine, that it taught you to take what comes, whether defeat or victory, and that the dignity that crowns struggle is uppermost.

    It’s a tough sport, not for the faint of heart, not for those inclined to cast blame, certainly not for those inclined to blame “them” whenever things don’t go the way you want. I always thought wrestlers were courageous, not cowards, which is why I find it very hard to accept the fact that one of the bomber brothers — or I should say one of the alleged bomber brothers — was indeed a wrestler. I can’t understand it. I can’t understand why anyone would want to kill spring.

    And America, to my mind, is spring — the hope that it brings. You think, as you do when spring comes, that things will be better here. There’s always that hope, else why do people keep coming?

    The runners are right. We can’t let despair win. There will always be evil — even the evil that would pose as good. It cannot be wished away, yet it cannot win the day.

    Of all the sports, running to me speaks of life, of joy, of camaraderie. I’ve never been to a race from which I’ve not come away energized, hopeful, and, yes, radiant. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it.

    Dr. Sheehan said running is joy. I know because I recently sent my son his book about running and being, and peeked into it before I sent it off. I never thought anyone else would outdo me in quoting philosophers and thinkers of times past to buttress his thoughts, but he did, leaving me in the dust.

    We can’t let despair win.

   Perhaps one of the more depressing, if relatively inconsequential, predictions of the results of the continued filling of the atmosphere with man-made carbon dioxide is that poison ivy will become more widespread and even more noxious.

    Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is among the so-called greenhouse gasses that are trapping heat around the earth. Researchers at a Duke University forest first noticed that a modest increase in the level of CO2, which they supplied to test woodland plots, caused poison ivy growth to surge. Headlines in the popular press followed the publication of the results in a scientific paper. Not only was the planet heating up, they cried, it is getting more dangerous, too.

    On my own little piece of ground, which is getting rapidly smaller every year, thanks to rising sea level-prompted erosion, bigger, badder poison ivy is grim news. Foolishly, about a week ago I went bare-armed at a weed-pulling effort around my two small, raised garden beds. Though I was wearing gloves, I got oil from poison ivy roots across my forearms. Then, I picked up our 3-year-old, whose side and back erupted in itchy welts a few days later.

    Ellis, who is in the indestructible post-toddler stage of youngboyhood, seemed little bothered by the rash. I, on the other hand, found the temptation to scratch nearly intolerable, and after trying Calamine lotion for a few days opted for cortisone — a steroid I usually avoid.

    I don’t know if you can overdose on cortisone applied to your arms, but at work one morning, I felt distinctly light-headed and had a strong urge to go hit home runs with Mark McGuire. Well, not really the home run part.

    CO2, the researchers found, causes poison ivy to produce a more potent form of urushiol, the oil that brings on the red and annoying allergic reaction in humans. Another study subsequently found that the juiced plants had double the growth rate and could bounce back from attempts at eradication more quickly.

    East Hampton Village, interestingly enough, where the Star office is, is more or less free of poison ivy. Reading a microfilm of a long-ago issue recently, I noticed an item about an early 20th-century drive to rid the village of the plant. Now, I can’t help but wonder if the predictions are right: Will the plant soon be, as one scientist joked, knocking at our windows?

   The family photos are scattered in clusters and packs all around the bedroom: They sit on the radiator, the desk, the three dressers — littered across any available flat surface. I got into this habit back in the days when I used to move between two houses every year (renting out what was my winter one to summer people), and needed to be able to scoop up all my pictures quickly, and pack them. Trouble is, they are getting quite out-of-date, and I haven’t figured out how to get prints of newer ones, particularly of the grandchildren.

    It goes without saying that I came of age before pictures were taken with digital devices, instead of bonafide cameras . . . before there were social-media sites on which to post them . . . before all of it.

    Actually, I must say here, I embraced word-processing in its very earliest days, and was among the first editors out here to edit on the computer. (I remember clearly that my Southampton colleague, whose newspaper operation was, in general, light years ahead of ours, insisted that copy-editing was better done with paper and pencil.) Now, however, communications technology is moving ahead more and more rapidly, and I fear I am being left behind.

     Naturally, I used to take photos with a camera, which I carried everywhere; I even knew how to get these photos off the camera on onto the computer, back in the 1990s and 2000s. Like most everyone, I don’t use a camera much anymore, which means I hardly take photos these days.

    I own a cellphone, yes, and it does have a rudimentary camera, but it doesn’t seem worth bothering with because of the poor quality. Everyone in the family seems to always be snapping away on snazzy devices — tablets, iPhones, I’m not sure what else — and e-mailing these images back and forth or, most frequently, posting them on Facebook. But, unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to harvest them and get prints.

    I’ve got a Facebook page, too, mind you. But I am being a bit slow learning how to finesse it. Sometimes I get e-mail notifications about photographs that friends have posted, but I don’t know why they come from some people and not others. I am also, I admit, reluctant to visit my Facebook page at all, because it accumulates everything everyone I know has ever posted, and I don’t know how to pare it all down; it would take hours to scroll through all the vacation photos, petition links, silly cat videos, outraged political rants, and so on. (Maybe I need to hire a teenager to sort me out?)

    Now things have gotten more complicated.

    Someone has set me up with a Twitter account. (If Pope Francis, @Pontifex, can work one, I guess I can, too.) I occasionally receive word of tweets, and I felt puffed up with accomplishment when I clicked to follow something recently. Next thing you know, however — as I learned at a family party last weekend — it turns out that the young set has migrated to Instagram, which apparently does everything the earlier sites do, and more quickly. At least that’s what I think I learned.

    So we come to my question: What will happen to family archives?

    Being a newspaper family, we have always documented everything, from baby steps on the beach to wine-saturated picnics in the Walking Dunes. We, quite seriously, have more than one old wooden filing cabinet filled with these prints. And now? Will these memories be forever consigned to cyberspace, instead of paper and ink? Left hovering without frames? How will future generations retrieve them?

    Children, listen: We old folks used to be told that we should label all our photos on the back, so that those coming after us would know who their forebears were and what they looked like. Which bald uncle once had a cowlick, how flat the landscape was from Pantigo Road to the ocean. But who will know how to find, let alone identify, everything posted on the Internet now?

    Perhaps another Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg will figure out how to create retrievable albums in space — to source and collect them for posterity — and make millions.

   The tenant in Brooklyn returned to Japan, so I took the opportunity to paint the living room and remove a bunch more belongings, not that I have space for them here.

    In the odd spare minute, I’ll go through shoeboxes filled with old photographs, mostly 31/2-by-31/2-inch Kodacolor prints, a blurred or fading date stamp on the back. Those that catch my eye get scanned and placed on a little stack on the desk, where they lay bare the magnitude of change.

    Forty years ago, two families piloted a late-’60s Nissan Patrol far down Gin Beach toward Shagwong Point. Swimming, running, laughing, the four boys were never happier, and may never be. Four grown-ups prepared a lavish seafood feast — lobster, clams, corn on the cob. The boys drained glass bottles of Coke and Yoo-hoo, the grown-ups gallons of wine.

    The whole time that rugged Nissan motored through the sand, the beach was entirely their own. A sighting of another human, another jeep, of any sign of civilization was so exceedingly rare as to draw long stares from the boys in the back.

    I haven’t seen it recently, but for decades that stretch of beach has resembled a miles-long and extremely narrow trailer park, a Jones Beach of recreational vehicles. From the westerly jetty, or from the boat steaming toward Block Island, the sight makes me wistful. I haven’t seen it recently because I don’t want to.

    More Kodacolor prints depict the scene in and around the house I grew up in. My father, Kenneth Walsh, was an artist. He’s been gone a long time now, and I had forgotten, or had never known, just how creative he was. His watercolor and acrylic paintings filled the walls, and the expanse of land on which our house sat, in Hither Hills, was similarly decorated with his creations. A wildly multicolored bird, at least six feet from beak to tail and wingspan just as large, flew a few feet off the ground, pole-mounted and turning with the winds. Great and small pieces of driftwood had been collected and fashioned into an abstract George and Martha Washington, or, perhaps, a seaside “American Gothic.” Another installation, a collage of New York City street signs and blown-up pictures of my impossibly young parents, brother, and me, the sand, sea, and sunshine a brilliant backdrop, illustrated the disparate worlds we inhabited.

    The dirt road I grew up on was paved decades ago, and the vast emptiness as far as young eyes could see has been divided and plowed and cleared and paved and built upon, and you can barely see the ocean anymore. The house has grown higher, a detached garage sits a comically inconvenient distance across the lawn, and a long fence, bisecting the land, obscures a swimming pool and all else behind it. Those bold, playful art installations are, of course, long gone. And if they weren’t, one or all of the multiplying summertime neighbors would have demanded their removal back in the go-go ’90s.

    Montauk was a paradise. I wonder if the hordes that clamor to be seen at the Surf Lodge, that crowd the share houses along the Old Highway, that brawl in spasms of drunken stupidity in the late hours outside the bars in town, can know that, like we did 40 years ago.

    I wonder if I don’t know a damn thing, if my 40-years-ago Montauk wasn’t already wrecked relative to 10 or 40 years before that.

    I retreat into Kodacolor and cliché, and Wordsworth, who died 163 years ago Tuesday:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

   Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

   As a cold rain slants down (and as the grass and mosses green before my eyes), it is pleasant to think of Cayo Levantado, an islet off the Dominican Republic to which we repaired recently to divest ourselves, however temporarily, of any untoward thoughts, or of any thoughts whatsoever, frankly.

    Things did not begin well: Our room, which was to have had “a garden view,” according to the Web site, gave out onto a macadamed back lot, which, although we were at a palatial resort hotel, seemed no different from what you might gaze upon were you at Motel 6.

    Yet, before I could say, “We could just as easily have taken pills,” Mary and I were, thanks to Ramon Santos, the front desk manager (que Dios le bendiga) whisked away to villa number 6, whose broad veranda faced the Caribbean.

    “Mi mujer esta feliz, y por lo tanto estoy feliz,” I said to Ramon, who replied, with a smile, “Happy wife, happy life.”

    To see Mary happy was a boon inasmuch as the call of duty lately has been insistent and persistent. As for me, I’m deaf; that’s my excuse, one that was all the more available to me down there inasmuch as one of my new hearing aids all of a sudden gave up the ghost and the other almost drowned, its forgetful owner having dived with it in place into the bathtub-warm turquoise water. Mary revived it with a hair dryer, I’m happy to say, which enabled me to continue with my Spanish lessons, one of the Gran Bahia Principe Cayo Levantado’s chief recommendations, to my mind.

    My professor, Estephan Cordero Salome, who was, above all, patient, said he could have me fine-tuned linguistically in a month. When I told him I probably never would retire, America being an expensive country and my job much to my liking, even at this late date, he offered to continue our dialogue through the Internet, which I plan to do. With gusto we sang “La Bamba” and “Alla en el Rancho Grande” together, songs I last sang with Eduardo Ponce de Leon, a native of Uruguay, as we drove along in a Jeep on Okinawa almost 50 years ago.

    In the tradition of “The Man Who Loved Dickens” — less sinister though no less obsessed — I reveled in the fact that I had among the employees a captive audience that was not only easy-going but willing — tips or no — to put up with “The Gringo Who Loved Spanish.”

    The novel I brought along to read, along with Helen Vendler’s “Poets Thinking,” was Santayana’s “The Last Puritan,” a rather strange book to take to such a hedonistic place, you might think, and, indeed, you’d be right inasmuch as the young brainy, athletic hero, Oliver Alden, was unlucky in love. That fed into a theory that had been taking shape in my mind — Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman having also figured into it — to wit, that, sadly, genius and a happy love life often were uncoupled. Was I bragging or complaining?

    Bragging, I supposed, for there was nothing to complain about on Cayo Levantado.

Eighty years ago last month, a boy was born in Eisenach, Germany, in a country already being torn apart as the Nazi Party rose to power. That boy was Karl Egon Heilbrunn, my father-in-law, and the story of his coming into the world, his defiant father, and what happened next is one of the millions of small tales of that terrible time that should not be forgotten.

In and of itself Karl’s birth, the second son of Siegfried Heilbrunn, a Jewish butcher, and his wife, Beate, was just another in the small city that once was home to Martin Luther and Bach. In photographs, Siegfried appears to be a tough guy; his family remembers him as a rough character, stocky with thick hands that could quickly take apart the largest steer.

It was he who decided to take out an ad in one of Eisenach’s newspapers, announcing Karl’s birth, and that was not out of the ordinary. What was, however, was that Siegfried Heilbrunn had the paper put the first four letters of his first and last name in bold type. Think about that for a moment: Sieg Heil.

At a time when the Nazis were ascending and had become a force in Eisenach, a Jew had to be brave to do something like this, mocking the party’s own spoken salute. Demonstrations quickly followed outside the butcher shop. Karl’s brother, Martin, then only 3, was sent to the hospital, where his mother was recuperating, with a tall bunch of roses and a butcher knife for her to hide under her pillow.

Word spread, and Julius Streicher, the master propagandist later to be put on trial in Nuremberg and executed for his role in the Nazi war crimes, denounced Siegfried in the pages of Der Strurmer. It was, Streichter said, evidence of “jüdischer Frechheit,” which Martin Heilbrunn translated for me this week as “insolent nastiness.”

That was not the end of it. Germany was soon to be convulsed in one of the greatest human tragedies in history. Whether or not the birth announcement had a direct role in what followed for the Heilbrunns is probably unknown now, but it is clear that the butcher shop came under increased scrutiny.

Martin told me recently that officials eventually went after his father on taxes, and in 1936, when his mother mis-charged a customer a couple of pfennig due to a confusing new regulation, things escalated rapidly. An Eisenach police officer who knew Siegfried warned him of the gathering danger and took him into custody for his own safety. He told Siegfried that he had but 48 hours to get away; if the Gestapo were to detain him, he would have been but 2 hours away from a concentration camp. Siegfried understood that he had to leave Eisenach. He agreed never to return and never to work in Germany again.

Beate remained behind to close the shop and sell the family house, Martin told me. Then the family fled for the United States, ending up in New Jersey in July 1937. Karl, whom I have not said much about so far, and whose first memory is of hiding under a bed while the Nazis entered his house, will celebrate his 80th birthday with family and friends this weekend at home in East Hampton.