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.

   “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.

   Sometimes nothing goes right. We were to be 12 at dinner, 7 adults and 5 children. Turkey breast, which had been marinated in an Asian-style sauce, was in the oven, to be served with rice, broccoli rabe, and zucchini, an apparently perfect meal for all. Chris had made a big bowl of cut-up fruit for dessert, and it was at the ready, along with cake pops. (If you haven’t seen cake pops, they’re round balls of cake that has been iced and put on a lollipop stick. A favorite with the kids these days.)

    The meal would be late for a school night, 7:15 or so before Dede, who had a ballet class, and her father, my son David, who picked her up, could arrive.  My daughter, Bess, had promised to take her youngest, Teddy, to the East Hampton RECenter for a swim, a rare treat. But she had been trying to finish some work, which delayed their going, and they arrived back even later. As we waited, some of the kids, Dede and her sister, Evvy, and perhaps even Bess’s daughter, Nettie, decided we should play charades. What a great idea.

    The only fly in the ointment was that I had been at home resting with a five-day-old cold, which apparently dulled my brain because I neglected to get the turkey in the oven until much too late. It was far from done when we finally were assembled. Furthermore, on the premise that I was no longer contagious after five days, I had set the table. This understandably alarmed my daughter-in-law, Lisa, and I slunk back to my bedroom, taking my germs with me as she re-washed the tableware.

    David decided to take matters into his own hands. He sliced some of the turkey off the breast and sautéed it on top of the stove in an iron skillet. The children were fed. At that point, it being later than planned, David and Lisa, who had not eaten, scurried their three off. They left so quickly that Lisa called from the car to apologize for not saying goodbye. Bedtime would be late in any event.

    Teddy and Nettie played about as the rest of us eventually sat down to the turkey. I came out of hiding. It wasn’t exactly the special family get-together we had planned for the last night of Bess’s family’s visit — although you could say it was memorable.

    Feeling responsible for the chaos, I consoled myself with the thought of how much fun the charades had been. All the kids took part, and even 3-year-old Ellis knew how to act out a movie — “Iron Man.” 

   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.

   Now, I like Brian Williams. I usually watch his nightly news report at 6:30 p.m. But I have to take strong exception to the way he reported the emergence of millions of 17-year locusts expected in the next few weeks along the East Coast.

    Preaching to the choir, he was, full of anxious anticipation, brow furrowed with the threat of the looming plague. What’s next, he asked. First we are forced to endure mega storms, and droughts, and on and on. Oh the racket! Oh the horror we will now have to endure!

    The real threat, of course, is the spread of the urban mind-set. Mr. Williams chose not to report the real, wonderful story about the cicada nymphs appearing after completing their prolonged development underground, during which they sip fluids from the roots of deciduous trees. Trees, Brian. Remember trees? 

    With Earth Day nigh it’s time again for a wake-­up call, although it’s getting harder to hear one amid the suck and clatter of every wasteful form of resource removal imaginable. The bottom line is this: The world was not created for the comfort of Homo sapiens. The longer it takes for us to understand this, the more uncomfortable we will become, until the Earth takes back its garden.

    When pollen fills the air, flowering plants are not out to kill us with hay fever, as drug companies (sponsors of the nightly news) would have us believe. Hard as it might be to accept, plants don’t care about you or your hay fever. There’s a good chance our oversensitive sinuses are the result of the antiseptic lifestyle we’ve forced upon ourselves. 

    Superstorm Sandy was a big storm but she was deadly and inconvenient only because we were in her way. We have built too close to shore.

    Forest fires destroy homes in California and elsewhere because they were constructed where fire has always routinely blazed away to rid the woods of understory and to encourage new growth. 

    If the world seems like it’s out to get us it’s because there’s too many of us. It’s easier for us to be in the way of natural processes. If we alter Nature’s balances by burning fossil fuels, melting the polar ice caps, and causing the seas to rise, it’s our doing. The Earth is only righting the planetary ship. 

    The attitude expressed by Brian Williams the other night, and by so many others of late, that Nature is somehow in the way — an alien force to be sprayed away, drugged away, dammed away, and kept at bay so that we remain comfortably ignorant of the planet — is fast becoming a Weltanschauung, a fundamental orientation, a way of seeing our place in the total scheme of things. How sad.

    It may seem like the Earth is fighting back. Greenhouse gases, sea-level rise, and pestilences of one sort or another appear to be examples of the Earth getting even. For some fatally flawed reason, we are doomed to think in terms of conquering or being conquered, insult and happy retribution.

    I think it’s worse than that. We may be numerous, but we are small. It’s much more likely the Earth isn’t in this tug-of-war. It just doesn’t care. If we screw things up bad enough, we’ll be gone, and the world will just keep spinning.

   Russell Drumm covers the waterfront. He is a senior writer for The Star.

   The viewing choice the other night was between “Berkeley Square” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

    “I guess it’s ‘Berkeley Square,’ ” I said to Mary, “because you don’t like sushi.”

    “Penny [Wright, her boss at Rogers Memorial Library] says you don’t have to like sushi to like it,” she said.

    “The sushi one then.”

    I’m glad I chose “Jiro” because it’s about a man who does one thing well, so well in fact (he’s considered by many to be the best sushi chef in the world) that at 85 he’s still working every day and still trying to improve.

    Afterward, I told Mary to tell Penny, who oversees R.M.L.’s ambitious adult programs, that he reminded me of her. Mary said he reminded her of me, though I’m no Jiro. There were affecting things he said, though; that you must find work you love, work that absorbs and nourishes you unendingly.

    That kind of thinking had me thinking of Unamuno, the Basque philosopher who in his “Tragic Sense of Life” spoke of his soul forever ascending. Jiro and Unamuno . . . an interesting pairing, I thought, to borrow as foody phrase.

    Churchill told us never to give up, and Aristotle told us to practice the qualities we admired, but Jiro and his two sons go even further: Never give up, yes, but go beyond, go beyond.

    It was all, for me, very heady wasabi.

    Jiro gets itchy when he’s idled by holidays, like a fish out of water. I know that feeling too.

    And, as I think they said a couple of times in the documentary, it’s not about the money.

    Nor is it about living up to anyone’s expectations but your own.

   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.

   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.