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.

   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.

   Whatever happened to the laughter boat? Which was to visit countries around the world and laugh, the idea being presumably that laughter would be catching.

    Sometimes I think our only hope lies, rather than in buggering priests or in cardinals with shadowy pasts, with the world’s comedians, those who have keen intellects and can hold a mirror up to the horrors and hatreds that individuals and groups somehow rationalize.

    We are supposed to be an open-minded country, with more comedians per capita than any other, and yet when sensible gun control measures are proposed, we rush to buy more; the applications — and the potential for more and more violence — mount and mount even as we propose that there be a respite from it. Long live death! And our precious freedom to deal it out.

    But when the highest clerical authority in the Western world is said to have collaborated with a death-dealing junta, it’s little wonder that the times seem out of joint.

    Comedians go right to the quick, to the heart of the matter, at least the good ones do. No b-s. We need more and more of them, satirists who can shame as well as needle and poke fun. Include everyone, for everyone is benighted at times; individually, collectively.

    Otherwise, sneakiness, in high, middling, and low places, which already has gone far, will utterly take over, and drones manipulated by faceless authority will roam the skies at will. Damn! I’m going out and get a gun so I can shoot them down. No, no, just kidding.

    Social media may at times be a pain; it is cacophonous and shoots from the hip, but it and the comedians could save us — from ceding power to the wrong people, from blithe unconcern, from cant, from secretiveness and self-deception.

    When people and governments can laugh at themselves, we will be on our way. It will mean then that we’ve begun to get serious.

   In the early East Hampton Town records accounts are frequent about the initial apportionment of land by the trustees, who were the only governing body. Though it is not stated in an obvious fashion, it appears that the grants of acreage were conditional in that recipients were obligated to abide by certain obligations, some spelled out, others apparently assumed.

    Requirements described in some of the records are for keeping a road passable, as in 1667 when Thomas Chatfield and John Miller were told, “Ye highway being still to remaine as they are already layed out.” Elsewhere in the old town books are orders that landowners had to keep their lands properly fenced.

    Property owners in those days seemed to be able to sell their land, however, more or less the way it is done today, with a private transaction signed in the presence of witnesses and officially recorded. In a 1678 contract signed with an X, John Edwards sold 10 acres “near a place called Indian well” for the sum of 20 pounds. And so it went. In 1693 Samuell S. Brookes sold his eight acres at Hog Creek to Jacob Schellinger for 45 pounds. Another transaction involved about six acres “lying neer the walnuts . . . in accabonick Neck,” among other plots.

    Little is said in the early town records about what a property owner could do on his land. (They were mostly men, of course.) Far more time and ink seemed to be spent listing the earmarks distinguishing cattle and who would be responsible for watching the herds sent each spring to Montauk to graze.

    It is a far cry from today’s Town Hall, where even the color of a shop’s new business sign can be the subject of several weeks’ debate. Want to build a house near a wetland? It will take up to a year to secure the necessary approval.

    Yet in some aspects property ownership 350 years ago is strikingly familiar. Then as now, land meant making money, if at a somewhat smaller scale.

   It’s really been a long time since I observed Easter in any meaningful way — or in any way at all. Tradition lived on this year, with an afternoon drive to Brooklyn and a late dinner, alone in my near-empty apartment, of Indian takeout and a couple Heinekens.

    Long gone are Easter Sundays when I was up with the sunrise and deep into a basket of chocolate before church. Still, the holiday marked spring and rebirth, another opportunity, like New Year’s Day, to finally get it right — to renew, to reaffirm, to rededicate oneself to seizing the moment, to cherishing each second of this precious life.

    Not this year. The sky darkened as I motored west on the expressway. Suffolk turned to Nassau, Nassau to Queens, earth to concrete, open space to confinement.

    My thoughts were far from renewal. Quite the opposite: The week had been marked by death. First, of an acquaintance in the professional-audio industry and then, just a few days later, of Phil Ramone, the “Pope of Pop,” a towering figure in the world of music, and an awfully good and decent man. It is the end of an era, and it will never be the same.

    As Exit 17W neared, acres and acres of gravestones rose, first from Mount Zion, then New Calvary, and finally, as the road loops to merge with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Calvary Cemetery. Each a veritable city unto itself, a miniature skyline of monuments to long-dead beings. As traffic straightens to parallel the East River, the sprawling, majestic, deafening silence of Manhattan is a bleak backdrop to so many tombstone shadows.

    It had started to rain at Union Square, and I hurried to Irving Place and a seat at the long bar of Pete’s Tavern.

    In my earliest memories, my family lived practically around the corner, on Gramercy Park South, and we dined there a lot. I was only 3 or 4, and the whole staff doted on me. I loved Pete’s.

    It was good to see José in the back, under the gas-lit chandelier at the cashier cage. José was at Pete’s way back then, and he’s still there. All the others — Mr. Frawley, Dottie — had died years ago.

    The bar was strangely quiet, and a bowl of soup and pint of beer were welcome after the long drive. Soon, a woman walked in, sat down next to me, and ordered a glass of wine. We struck up a conversation.

    She is a writer. “I’m a writer!” I say, pretending to be a writer.

    She has spent a lot of time in India. “I’ve spent a lot of time in India!” I exclaim. That one is true.

    She is a prolific author, a filmmaker, and the offspring of an internationally recognized figure in . . . well, I promised not to tell. More relevant: Her explorations of ancient and Eastern spiritual traditions greatly surpass my own, yet I am aware enough, I hope, to recognize and listen to one more awakened.

    In the course of an hours-long, sometimes contentious conversation spanning Gramercy Park, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, and New Delhi, the Hamptons and the Himalayas, the Beatles and the Buddha, and the wretched and the sublime of the Indian subcontinent, a joyless holiday became, instead, a gentle awakening. I like to think of it as a meeting of like minds, but that’s inaccurate — one troubled, clouded, faithless, another tranquil, clear, knowing. One came away with a spark of renewal, though.

    Rebirth, renewal, resurrection. What I needed was a reminder.

   Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star. “I Am the Resurrection” is the title of a song by the Stone Roses.

   “Have you seen a white skateboard?” the woman asked me, a hint of desperation in her voice.

    I had noticed her a short time earlier at the Abraham’s Path kids park run by the town in Amagansett. We were on the basketball court, and she and a young girl were taking shots, talking in Spanish and English interchangeably, while my son, Ellis, and I passed a ball back and forth.

     Across the park, two boys, the woman’s sons, I assumed, took turns on a skateboard on the ramps, while several other girls who were under her charge rode bikes.

    On that late Saturday afternoon, it was chilly as the sun went below the Town Lane oak trees. Someone not far away was cutting something with a chain saw. A couple of older boys and one or two other adults taking care of children were the only other people in the park.

    Before it had gone missing, I had noticed the skateboard, a Penny Board, of the sort that my 11-year-old daughter had idly asked me to buy her a couple of weeks earlier as we walked in East Hampton Village. I said no, or more like, “No way. You already have a skateboard.” She probably responded, “You’re mean,” or some variant on that particular kind of guilt trip.

    For all the world, the boards, with molded plastic decks and wide, flared wheels, remind me of the first, junky skateboards we had as kids in the 1970s, before we graduated to laminated wooden decks and better wheels. But, as a middle-aged dad, there is much I don’t know about what’s cool and what’s not, or so I am reminded daily. Penny Boards, at about $100 a pop, are cool.

    Protocol at the youth park is casual as far as personal possessions are concerned. Things are left here and there as kids move from one activity to another. Those of us who are there frequently more or less know which gear belongs to the park’s free rag-tag collection of bikes and helmets and so on and which does not.

    There was an all-corners search for the white board; nearly each of the family in turn asked if I had seen it. Either a parent unsure about who owned what innocently packed it into a car, or, the other possibility (more likely in my opinion) was that one of the older kids, noticing an easy grab of desirable gear, spirited it away.

    I helped look for a while as Ellis and I made a few final rounds of the track, he on his three-wheel scooter, me jogging alongside. It was pretty clear that it was not going to be found.

    By the time we left, the woman seemed resigned that the skateboard was gone for good. Her kids asked me one last time if I had seen it. “It glows in the dark!” one said. “No, sorry,” I said, really meaning it.

   One of my assignments last month was to take pictures at an East Hampton Village Board meeting on the issue of solidifying a more modern approach to the vastly important international issue of Dogs on the Beach.

    One man spoke at length concerning forming a 2,000-strong organization directed toward “education” and “behavior” of both dogs and dog owners on the beach. He seemed to view it as a social activity, socializing with other dog owners at the beach, like in Central Park, but the beaches of this far-flung village are not Central Park.

    As I see it, the main problem with dogs on the beach is that 8 a.m., every day of the week, is not an appropriate time to bring your dog to Wiborg’s Beach to go to the bathroom. Simple solution: Have your dog go to the bathroom in your own yard or in proximity, then bring it to the beach.

    It is so funny, these intrepid four-legged creatures running amok with tennis balls in their mouths, sticks too, rolling around like nuts on the occasional dead seagull. Perfect time to go lick one of the terrified tourists who thinks dogs should be leashed, trained by expensive trainers, and act like well-bred cats.

    Some people want the police to get more involved and want uniformed officers to go to the beach and ticket errant dog owners. I think a policeman in uniform chasing a dog owner around the beach is ridiculous, unless someone has been attacked or injured. East Hampton Town has an entire division known as animal control.

    Another woman at the meeting suggested a fine of $500 for failing to clean up after your dog. The fine should be $20, and warnings should be the standard protocol.

    Why doesn’t everyone just take a week off from taking their dogs to the beach? Problem solved. We will call it Dogs Off the Beach Week. One week a month, all your Facebook friends and Twitter and Instagram followers could be invited to Dogs Off the Beach Week. There could be a benefit to raise money for the Dogs Off the Beach Campaign.

    East Hampton Village has a long history with dogs. There has always been a big unruly yet beloved dog roaming the village, always. In 1969 there was Sheba, owned by the Barnes family. Sheba was so big she took up half of the sidewalk, and once she mistakenly knocked down two elderly ladies on Main Street. It was a village scandal, and we children went wild for the whole event. Thank God no one was injured.

    Sheba was always accompanied by Brandy, her faithful male cohort, also a dog, and never leashed, but after becoming senile and snapping at little kids, Brandy eventually was leashed.

    The mayor’s concept of leashing dogs upon entering the beach is not a bad idea, but why not make it voluntary? Why not have all the restrictions be voluntary? The people cannot be trusted? At the same time we should also not have to spend our days engaging individuals not in favor of dogs on the beach. When we bring our dogs to the beach, we seek solitude from the incessant battle of managing a family house and trying to keep pace with the fast-talking Range Rover crowd.

    I did meet a young woman sitting at Georgica Beach last summer with a rather well-mannered dog. I mentioned that the scooter person was going to show up and ask her to remove the dog from the beach. It was a wonderful day in July. She explained to me that the dog was a trained emotional support animal and that she had definitive proof allowing her to keep the dog on the beach with her. I was impressed with her explanation. The modern world had apparently taken its toll.

    In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Violent revolutions are taking place around the globe. Perhaps our American sense of entitlement here has stepped beyond the boundaries of reality when we follow our neighbors around reporting them to the police when they have a dog on the beach after 9 a.m. in the summer months.

    People who walk around the local beaches following people walking on the beaches with their dogs should be ticketed. I am not certain who would give the ticket. We the people could always find someone for that. We could call that person People Dog Ticket Follower Executive for Eastern Long Island Towns, and the position could be advertised in the employment section of The East Hampton Star.

   Morgan McGivern is a staff photographer at The Star. He owns a tri-colored corgi named Flint.

   I was surprised when, on arising this morning, I was cheery. There was no reason to be, but perhaps I am programmed to be so, particularly when things aren’t going well.

    There is spring, of course. Where it is I don’t know, but everyone’s saying they can sense it; there seems to be general agreement as to its inevitability. And then, of course, summer, which I inveighed against recently, perhaps unfairly, but it had it coming. “Ou sont les etes d’autant?”

    I do these “25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports” columns each month, and it is interesting, as Pat Hope once said, to meet myself coming around the corner. Things go whooosh! Just like that. It’s gotten so that yesterday seems like today. Indeed, it may be “all one fuckin’ day, man,” as Janis Joplin said.

    Except some days do seem different — more cheery, less cheery — but if you always look at the big picture, which is impossible, I guess that it’s all one fuckin’ day. During which there is a time for this, a time for that, as Ecclesiastes says. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, nothing new under the sun . . . a chasing after wind.

    Therefore, we are to enjoy ourselves, he says, inasmuch as our days here are few and we’re all dead in the end.

    “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might,” saith Ecclesiastes. Something to get the blood flowing.

    Amen to that. In fact, I understand the editor of The Onion recently advised such a course of action, and everybody’s marveling on Facebook that a funny man is such a sage. It’s good advice, though, for Americans, many of whose hands endlessly do with their might the bidding of monolithic corporations.

    It is this facelessness, this growth of unanswerable power that is scary. We need flesh-and-blood contact, not machines telling you if you know your party’s extension you can dial it at any time. While you wait — because you never know your party’s extension — you could be finding something to do with your might.

    Let’s not get put on interminable hold. Our days here are few.

    And with that I’m off to Cayo Levantado.