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.” 

   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.

   Just this week we received a message via Facebook from a reader in California who expressed what sounded like disbelief that The East Hampton Star had begun to ask frequent visitors to its Web site to buy an online subscription.

    This occasional reader said he lived on the West Coast and picked up a copy of the paper when he visited here in the summer. “I like to keep up with the local news,” he wrote. “Is it really true that you now want me to pay for an on-line subscription?”

    It is a good question. Here is an answer.

    Those who see this newspaper only in its print edition are probably not aware that, after more than 16 years of giving content away free on the Web, we recently began charging for online access. The Star went online in 1996 with just a handful of stories a week from each print section. A little over a decade later, we began putting nearly everything on the Web each week. In 2010, we went to more or less full content online in a new, cleaner design. 

    As readers may well imagine, the cost of putting out almost any kind of publication is substantial. In the case of a year-round news organization in a resort area, like ours, which has a handful of lucrative months then a long period of slow sales, we must pay staff and other costs all year long because the news doesn’t take the winter off. Paying for coverage, editing, electricity, heat, and so on has become an increasing challenge.

    In this era of declining revenue from traditional sources, notably print subscriptions and classified ads, newspapers have been experimenting with charging for online access, among other sources of revenue. This winter, after extended consideration, we decided to try something new. Late last month, we followed the lead of many other newspapers and started a “metered” paywall at easthamptonstar.com. Those readers who visit eight or more Web pages on our site in a month are asked to buy an online subscription to continue. (Print subscribers receive full online access without extra charge.)

    There are, of course, free sources of news, and one could find work-arounds to avoid paywalls. But we believe that most readers will be willing to pay to support quality journalism — as they have through the print subscription model for a very long time, dating perhaps back to the 18th century, when books were sold this way.

    Anything on the Web is a work in progress, however, and reader feedback is appreciated.

   When Hillary Clinton, in an intense primary battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, said she was ready to lead the country from day one, she started an avalanche of everyday people using day one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says the use of these words to indicate the start or the beginning of something dates back to 1971, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t really common in the popular vernacular until an estimated 2.5 million people watched the candidates debate in 2008.

     I have no big objection to day one. It’s catchy and emphatic enough. By contrast, I never could stand hearing Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, saying how he thought we could grow the economy back in the 1990s. Before the era of Bill, the verb to grow meant to raise something, specifically something organic. Now, it has acquired a second meaning: to improve or increase.

    This is unfortunate, and it makes my brain hurt, but, clearly, there is no going back.

    I wish I had studied linguistics. Scholars, I am sure, can pinpoint the origins of such changes in English, and revel in tracing those changes, rather than just wincing and moaning about them. I am afraid, however, that at heart I am a dyed-in-the-wool conservative where language is concerned. Call me a word curmudgeon.

    Would you like to know another emerging usage that raises my hackles? It is when people say to gift when they really mean simply to give. As in: The sponsors of the V.I.P. suite gifted all the Oscar nominees with swag bags of goodies.

    How about the words “going forward”? I certainly would not use them to mean in the future and would ban this phrase from The Star if anyone would pay attention to me. The TV pundits say going forward all the time, these days, so I have to assume that those who use it in everyday speech are addicted to television news programs. (It’s almost as bad as at this point in time, another morsel of television-ese that makes my hair stand on end.)

    Then there are the overused words “transparent” and “transparency.” They are frequently heard lately in a political context, meaning the actions of a government entity are available for public perusal or the reasons for a decision are clear — or not. But Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary hasn’t caught on to this definition yet. It still gives the first definition of transparent as “the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly,” although its second definition, “free from pretense or deceit,” gets closer. This is one case in which I think the new usage is actually useful: It gets to the heart of a previously somewhat complex idea, in short order.

    Right here is where I should end this column with the maladroit “that said” (or, perhaps, even the ear-torturing that having been said). But, well . . . do I need to say more?

   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.

   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.

   My 5-year-old granddaughter, Nettie, is good at wishful thinking. I doubt that an adult gave her the idea that if you told the Easter Bunny, like Santa, what you wanted, you probably would get it. I am sure the bunny left her and her 3-year-old brother, Teddy, baskets with appropriate goodies on Easter morning, but leaving the bunny a note about what she wanted for (ahem) Easter must have been her own idea. And it was a two-sided note at that.

    Because she is still learning to read and write, and because I know her parents wouldn’t have indulged her in this, my guess is that she had encouragement and help from a baby sitter. (I had helped her write two stories, about a dog and cat who defeated a dragon and about a mermaid who wanted a pet dolphin, on a recent visit.)

    On one side of Nettie’s note it said: “Plase can I have a black kitten that never grows pu.” The spelling of please and the reversed u and p were testimony to a child’s hand. On the other side of the note, she wrote: “Dear Easter Bunny please can I have an iPod my mom and dad said yes.” Her parents had said no such thing.

    An e-mail about Nettie’s notes capped a weekend in Bunny Land. East Hampton certainly goes all out for kids on Easter these days. There were at least three community egg hunts and there had been at least two a weekend earlier, in East Hampton and Amagansett alone. When my own children were little, we relied on family and friends for egg hunts. For many years, we gathered at Mary Ella and Jim Reutershan’s place at Stony Hill, in Amagansett. An expanse in front of their house sloped downward from a low brick wall at the edge of a patio and the grassy area was surrounded by bushes and trees. It was full of perfect hiding places for kids of a range of ages. It was a great party, and it was the 1970s: Those were raucous events for the grownups, bloody Marys and all.

    One year, my daughter, the same person who didn’t approve of an iPod for her daughter, decided she was too old for egg hunts. Instead, she went to the party in a bunny outfit she made herself, starting with a pink leotard and tights, and hopped around giving the littler kids foil-wrapped eggs.

    Times change. Private rituals become commercially sponsored events. The Easter Bunny at the community egg hunt at Amagansett Square on Saturday was more than six feet tall, and he/she was a friendly sort, squatting to hold babies while parents took photos of them in the bunny’s arms and squatting to shake hands or give high fives to little people. The event, staged by the Meeting House restaurant at the Square, was fun, and it was jammed, as I hear the other hunts were that day. Kids dashed about to find eggs, and were then invited to decorate eggs or cookies and to have their faces painted.

    The family Easter egg hunt migrated from my house to my son and daughter-in-law’s this year. They served bagels and lox, cream cheese and tofu, cake pops, and fruit — but there wasn’t a Bloody Mary in sight.

   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.