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.

   “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.

   “Childrens’ Garden — No Ball Games, Cycling, Dogs” reads a sign published with a recent story in The Guardian, an English daily newspaper, informing readers that “the sometimes vexing question of where and when to add an apostrophe appears to have been solved in one corner of Devon: The local authority is planning to do away with them altogether.”

    Eastern Long Island has more in common with Devon than the name of an Amagansett neighborhood and a yacht club. Like us, it is, according to Wikipedia, “the only county in England to have two coastlines,with bays for fishing and seaside towns that attract tourists.” So should East Hampton follow the lead of Devon, England, on punctuation?

    Although Devon seems to be targeting only street names, The Guardian reported on March 15, “the news of the Tory-controlled council’s (apostrophe required) decision provoked howls of condemnation . . . from champions of plain English, fans of grammar, and politicians.” A spokesman for the Plain English Campaign remarked that it would set a bad example for children being taught punctuation in school “only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.”

    Adopting an anti-apostrophe policy aimed at reducing potential confusion over street names also alarmed Ben Bradshaw, a former culture secretary and member of Parliament, who condemned it on Twitter. “Tory Mid Devon Council bans the apostrophe to avoid confusion — Whole point of proper grammar is to avoid confusion!”

    Rogue apostrophes can certainly make a writer or broadcaster appear less than competent. Much of the trouble seems to arise from someone thinking an apostrophe is necessary to create a plural, as when a shop advertises “tea’s and coffee’s” or a restaurant announces it is “open Sunday’s,” or a television weather report broadcasts an alert on todays “low’s.” Anyone immortalizing in print the word “potato’s” or “tomato’s” is in danger of being mocked as a real Dan Quayle.

    There are further good reasons for maintaining apostrophes. In most cases, they are informative. Take Roses Grove Road in Southampton, for example. I don’t recall ever seeing it with an apostrophe, so (as I am not steeped in Southampton lore) it’s impossible to know whether the road had a lot of roses on it at one time or was named for a woman or family called Rose.

    At The Star, we try mightily to hold on to original apostrophes and original meanings, relying on history and common usage, even though sources are often obscure and sometimes contradictory. Note: It’s Sayre’s Path and Hand’s Creek Road, for example.

    In the ordinary vernacular of East Hamptoners, we talk about Buell Lane even though the street is labeled Buell’s Lane on one frequently used local map and Buells on another. (I blame the mapmakers. They have also managed to misplace the entire name of Gardiner’s Bay — a whole other kettle of nomenclature.)

    Not far off Three Mile Harbor Road, a popular restaurant is Michaels’ at Maidstone, signifying more than one Michael involved and that they both are, or were, owners. (When I first saw the logo, however, I wanted to move the little airborne comma between the “L” and the “S.”) Meanwhile, in Bridgehampton, the logo for Marders Nursery has long since dropped an apostrophe between the “R” and the “S,” and who are we to insist on putting one in just because we know the family name is Marder?

    Barneys New York did something similar a decade or two ago, apparently because the marketing department thought it just looked better that way on packaging and bags.

    As in Britain, apostrophes are slowly but surely going out of style on this side of the pond, too, and not only in street names but in words where they can make all the difference. There is your versus you’re, of course. I cry blue murder if a wrong it’s (versus its) shows up in the pages of The Star. But the truth is I myself have knowingly left out an apostrophe in an it’s while texting, assuming that the recipient would understand when I didn’t mean to word to be possessive. Maybe I should cut to the chase and blame computers.

    I might not agree with her on the subject of the serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma), but on the subject of apostrophes I have to agree with Lynne Truss, the author of the best-selling “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” in which she wrote, “No matter that you have a Ph.D. and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing: Good food at it’s best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot, and buried in an unmarked grave.”

   I don’t buy Easter outfits anymore. I don’t wear them. It’s not because Montauk doesn’t have an Easter parade — even though we don’t, that’s what church services are for — it’s just that I’ve outgrown the whole new outfit thing. And forget the bonnet. I’ve always hated hats; I don’t have the head for them.

    I remember going shopping with my two daughters and having terrible rows about the outfits they wanted vs. the outfits I wanted them to wear. Usually, they won. But recently, when they looked back at pictures from when they were younger, I got in trouble for letting them wear what they wore back in the days of Easter shopping.

    When I was younger and shopped with my sister and mother for our Easter outfits, I remember having the same type of fights, but ours were in the Salvation Army, rather than Macy’s or Kmart, so my daughters should consider themselves lucky.

    Now, seeing themselves in pictures, they ask how I could have let them wear those outfits. One year, my youngest, Jenna, insisted on wearing a Chanel lookalike skirt suit. She was 4 and had by then learned from her older sister that if you raised your voice and embarrassed your mother in a store, it was a sure bet you’d get what you wanted.

    Mother didn’t want to be reported on and sent off to court for child abuse, even though Mother was the one being abused by two little girls no taller than her mid-thigh.

    So Jenna got a pleated black skirt and a little shocking pink jacket with tiny black patch pockets. I must say, it was good imitation and a stylish look — for a 50-year-old woman. But she was 4!

    That same year, her sister, Heather, who is now a slightly conservative dresser, wore white leggings splashed with large blue and red stars, pink tights, and a pink soccer-type jacket, while sporting chopped bangs that she had cut herself. I can’t blame myself for that!

    I never made them wear hats, though.

    In my day, the Easter bonnet was all the rage. I have long, curly hair that often turns frizzy in salt air. Frizzed-out hair bulging from the brim of a hat from my ears on out does not suit me. I also refused to wear a secondhand hat, which caused even more fighting with my mother because the only hats for sale in the Salvation Army (before thrifting was popular) were old lady hats filled with God only knows what type of parasites.

    Nope, there was no way I was going to get head lice for Easter, and I won that fight.

    On Sunday, the only new thing I will be wearing is a pain patch across my new knee. But hey, if the weather ever warms up, at least I’ll have a kick in my step. The funny thing is, if it’s as cold outside on Sunday as it is today while I write this, with a light dusting of snow on the ground and my thermostat cranked up to 70, I will be wearing a hat, of the wooly sort.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Our spirits have been rising lately with the promise of spring, though spring, as anyone who’s lived in Bonac a while knows, can be a will-o’-the-wisp, heralding the year’s truly most depressing season — summer.

    It’s not “A-a-pril come she will,” it’s “Memorial Day, get ou — out of my way.”

    Winter has its depressing moments too, though there is some cheer in inveighing against unseen Principalities and Powers as you edge ever closer to the fire. In summer, of course, the object of your disaffection is closer at hand, too close at hand if he or she is the one who’s just bent your fender, or has extended his or her (to be politically correct) middle finger.

    We’ve been lucky in that regard. When someone, a well-known someone, crinkled our driver’s-side panel in the Amagansett I.G.A. parking lot once, she was kind enough (I say kind enough because civility doesn’t live here anymore, at least not the year round) to leave a brief confessional autographed note, promising to pay for the repair, which she was to do in its entirety.

    People always used to leave notes when they dinged your car, but it is rare nowadays, just as it seems to have become rare to stop when someone’s been whacked in the night.

    Do unto others, et cetera. . . . Which reminds me I’ve just ordered from BookHampton the Oxford Annotated Bible, which was one of the books on my late mother-in-law’s Index. They made me pay for it up front, but, as I’ve said, in so many words, you can’t trust people these days. Not even me, although I think I may be genetically predisposed to do the right thing. (Note: There is hope now that they may one day be able to remove from your DNA the gene for sanctimony.)

    “Sometimes people order books and don’t pick them up” was the explanation.

    “Good God, you drive a hard bargain,” I said, wondering why they would think the world’s most popular book (it is still, isn’t it?) would go unclaimed for long. Soon after, I returned with the cash, and of course I asked for a receipt, intending to write it off as a professional expense.

    Well I know not everyone’s perfect; I do take every deduction I can get. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that I work round-the-clock, even though I’m a narcoleptic. I would write poetry too, but I’m told insomniacs do that.

    Meanwhile, as Robert Burns said, “Nae man can tether time or tide.”

    Or summer in the Hamptons either.

   Yesterday at 7:02 a.m. spring began in the Northern Hemisphere. With any luck the change of season will bring an end to the seemingly relentless string of coastal storms that began on Oct. 29, when Hurricane Sandy steamrolled the region.

    Sandy was just the biggest and single-most destructive of the 2012-13 assaults. A northeaster followed just over a week later. Then, after a number of ordinary blows, came the February blizzard and a couple more storms, including one on March 6 that echoed the great northeaster of that date in 1962.

    This winter’s repeated battering might just be coincidence. However, climate scientists have said that the number and intensity of storms is likely to increase as the climate continues to get warmer. For East End residents, the effects of these storms might well be a sign of things to come.

    Walking along the various beaches, as I have a lot this winter, I have been struck by a sense that the end is nigh. East of our place on the southern reach of Gardiner’s Bay, one house now sits on the beach, difficult to get around at high tide thanks to the encroaching water. Another is about to have its foundation exposed in the next storm, or maybe the one after that.

    A little farther on, a homeowner has hired a contractor to pile what looks like dirt where his dune used to be. Beyond that is a house with nothing but a double row of oversize sandbags holding it back from the brink. A vacant lot to the east, which the Town of East Hampton bought last year with $1.1 million from the community preservation transfer-tax fund, is not so slowly being eaten away when the northeast wind kicks up.

    On the ocean, if things do not change for the better, the White Sands Motel on Napeague looks like it may have one more summer season before its easternmost wing is fatally undermined. Along downtown Montauk, hotel owners might as well be piling sacks of cash on the beach, so fast does the sand they buy and bring in get swept away. Farther east, Ditch Plain looks far from summer-ready, and many of the boulders from a short jetty that once stood strong have been tossed around like playthings.

    It is difficult to escape a sense that this is a slow-moving apocalypse. Answers are few, and for now all we can do is walk the beach and wonder what will be.

   “It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” This Sir Walter Scott quotation provided Peter Matthiessen with the title of his book “Men’s Lives, “on the history and decline of the South Fork’s inshore fishery — and about the men whose lives depended on it. The quote has an ominous ring, and I wasn’t surprised that it kept coming to me when I was in Nova Scotia last week.

    On Feb. 17, five young men were lost at sea off the south shore of Nova Scotia, some 75 miles southeast of Liverpool during a storm described as fierce. The men, who were from 21 to 33 years old — the captain, actually, the youngest — were from Woods Harbor, a small town, far from any urban center, where the living isn’t easy. Some were married, and some left behind small children.

    The fishermen were out in the ocean long-lining for halibut from a 42-foot boat. Other boats in the vicinity were reported to have headed in earlier to avoid the ferocious wind and driving snow. But the Miss Ally crew, according to a witness who knew them well, had trouble with the lights that would have helped them pick up their gear after dark, and the crew decided to wait out the night and retrieve the equipment in the morning. They expected to return to safe harbor the next day, and had been in contact with Canadian joint-rescue services, when an automatic distress signal went out at about 11 p.m.

    The boat, it is believed, capsized in high seas. According to volunteer divers from the community who later reached the vessel to conduct their own search, its wheelhouse and living quarters were torn off. It was reported that waves reached as high as 32 feet that night, and that winds were of hurricane force. No bodies had been found as of Tuesday.

    A Canadian government official was quoted in a Halifax newspaper commenting that “it would be easy to say fishing boats shouldn’t go fishing in the winter, but that doesn’t make operational sense.” Change the euphe­mistic word operational to economic, and you’ve got a bit more of the story.

     Pictures of the five young Nova Scotians can be found on YouTube, if you search for the words Miss Ally. You can see them holding babies, drinking beer, posing in prom outfits, and clearly loving the freedom of their lives as fishermen (goofing around, dancing on deck, posing with gigantic fish, showing off their muscles).

    One video is a slideshow of photos posted to the accompaniment of Billy Joel singing “The Downeaster Alexa” (written, of course, about the dwindling fishing fleet of eastern Long Island). You don’t have to have known the men or their families — or even to know the community — to feel the heartbreak.

    Following this story, I found myself reminded last week of a very sad play I read in college, “Riders to the Sea.” Written in 1904 by John Millington Synge, it describes the grief of an Irishwoman whose husband, father-in-law, and five sons have been similarly lost. In the final scene, she makes a famous speech. She says:

    “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain” — that’s a Gaelic festival —  “and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.”

    A Facebook auction and donations page, titled “The Courageous Crew of Miss Ally,” has been created to help the Miss Ally families financially; the auction will continue through the end of March.

   “I want your life,” said my Aunt Pat from California upon seeing me at my nephew’s wedding on Friday night. “I joined Facebook just to look at your pictures,” she said.

    “No, you don’t,” I assured her. I don’t post an update when I struggle to make the rent, I explained. I don’t share a picture of that. But yes, I live on an amazing island and I am blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful commute to East Hampton, by land and sea, and I enjoy capturing it when I can and sharing.

    I’m sure Aunt Pat is not the only one who thinks I live the life of Riley, whoever that is. “In her color portrait world, she’s got it all,” sang Rob Thomas in his song “3 a.m.”

    I did post one picture of myself being pulled over, I thought. I just had to, the contrast of the Mardi Gras beads on the rearview mirror and the red flashing lights offering an opportunity not to be passed up. But the next four times I got pulled over, for an expired inspection, were not so colorful, and the last one brought me to tears, when I really just needed a quick drive to the ocean for a breath on deadline day at the paper. I have been trying to remedy the inspection issue with estimates and regular visits to mechanics on my days off, with no success.

    The next time I saw Aunt Pat I was crying in the glamorous ladies’ room of the Fox Hollow Inn after it hit me that my father was never going to take my mother onto the dance floor again. My therapist told me I have all five of the top causes of stress, and people think I have the perfect life. In some ways, I do. Aunt Pat hugged me and cried with me at the loss of such a huge presence in our incredibly close, large family.

    My cousin Lisa was also impressed with my life as determined from my Facebook posts. “I see that you’re a journalist for a newspaper!” she said. That is so exciting and fun; you are so lucky, she said.

    I agreed, but I wondered if my gorgeous cousin had any clue how much my hairstyle suffers progressively from Monday through Wednesday as deadline approaches, along with the decline in the number of breaths taken, my level of patience, and my ability to socialize. (Many know not to talk to me on a Tuesday; some find out the hard way.)

    We Star writers pour our hearts into our weekly stories, before editors fine-tune the words to flow smoothly for the reader, and we wait, wondering what might be sliced and diced. Lately our stories have often had to be cut or held, what with the decrease in advertising leading to a much smaller paper at this time of year.

    This week I saw a lot of negative posts about the media, but I wonder if those people are supporting print newspapers and public radio or simply the drama-filled, sensational television news. I wonder how many have a subscription to The Star. I wonder how many even read any full articles at all, or rely on the scrolling words at the bottom of a television screen or their Twitter and Facebook “news” feeds, or, worse yet, extremist radio personalities.

    Our paper is well done. So much energy and detail go into its content and photographs, in addition to checking facts and fairness. It is an amazing group effort, and some of us who rely on the income from the work struggle greatly to make ends meet in positions not known for high pay. But we think it important that messages get out, and are drawn to furthering that purpose.

    We are a cool bunch. Through our own stress and trauma and those of people we write about, we support one another with empathetic glances and cupcakes. We share a kitchen in a lovely historic office, with uncomfortable chairs and vintage equipment that frustrates us but sustains a pleasant simplicity.

    Sometimes there are the delightful sounds of children gracing the building, and there is almost always a dog or two, and even the occasional visit by a miniature pig, but not lately, due to circumstances too funny to mention. (Ask David Rattray if you must know, and definitely before you go out and get yourself a miniature pig.)

    A pig is just one of the things David must deal with while managing all of the sections of the paper, the angry complaints, the letters to the editor, keeping employees happy and paid, preventing lawsuits, and creating an online presence to keep up with high-tech readers. All while picking up children from school and taking them to their various lessons.

    It is not easy. But it is worth it. Sharing the truth and the good news is exciting, and it is important to warn residents of the bad news. Perhaps if it wasn’t for our stories and editorials, the situation here would not improve.

    News needs to be read. I hope that those who understand its value will support newspapers and share the content whenever possible. Meanwhile, we will continue doing our jobs in hopes of a day we can make a living from such a career, or at least the appearance of brownies on our kitchen “share” table.

   Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   Two Novembers ago I was set straight by Jane Callan, who tends the flowers in The Star’s windows, as I was bemoaning the season that was falling into “the sere, the yellow leaf.” Winter, she said, to the contrary, was not a sad time — not a sad time for a lover of flowers, at any rate — but a time of renewal, a time for gathering strength “so that they’ll come back even stronger and bigger than they were before.”

    There is a wonderful resilience in nature that is eminently evident to anyone who has ever had a plant, but too few of us, she thinks, really pay attention. “Most people,” she said during a conversation this week, “want the plant to be where they want it to be, not where it wants to be. I see that a lot when I go into people’s homes.”

    She traces her love of plants to her childhood when she visited greenhouses in New Jersey. She likes to see them grow and thrive. She won’t go so far as to say they speak to her, but by keeping an eye out she is attentive to their needs, which, she says, are not great. The flowering kind basically need proper light, proper water, and to be free from stress — just as we do, in order to live long lives.

    “I can see that that one,” she said, pointing toward a hibiscus in the window, “needs a drink.”

    Anybody passing by this office can tell that these plants, which include the aforementioned hibiscus, gardenia, jasmine, and citrus tree-form “standards,” as well as cyclamens, roses, begonias, lantanas, bougainvillea, and flowering cacti, are where they want to be, and that The Star truly “shines for all” in their case.

    “I’m not sure what direction the sun is coming from,” she said in answer to one of my questions, “but they like it, and they like the cool nights. In the summer, I take them home and keep them outside in the pots so that they can have the sun, fresh air, and the rain to wash over them.”

    Interestingly, she keeps no plants in her own house. “There’s no light. Because of the overhangs. It was built in the ’60s.” Were she to do so, her plants would languish, merely exist, rather than live.

    “I feel sorry for the plants I’ve seen that haven’t been properly cared for. You can tell — they look scraggly, sapped of strength. Most people don’t know what they’re supposed to look like . . . they’re just there. They’re thought of as a design element. It’s always a problem: Who are you thinking of? The plant? Or yourself?”

    A question we all, or most of us anyway, could take to heart.

   April showers bring May flowers, but March showers bring peepers. These tiny frogs are rarely seen but heard every evening from now until late summer. They begin as a thin chorus, gradually growing into a stunningly loud, high-pitched din by the peak of breeding season.

    In past years, when the peepers reached their orgiastic crescendo I would phone my friend Todd Osborn in Seattle and, saying nothing, not even hello, just let the frogs do their thing while he listened. Todd died last year from cancer, so this season’s frog-song carries for me a mournful note amid all the hope and amphibian lustfulness and biological imperative it signifies. I will be thinking of him as the frogs rave on.

    Tuesday’s downpour and warmer daytime temperatures were enough to draw the peepers from their winter hibernation, and a knot of them could be heard calling just after dark from the marsh near the driveway. It was too wet to stand outside and give their song a good listen, but comforting that the sound signaled the end of winter as I walked in from the driveway after work.

    As I do each year, I wrote the date of the peepers’ arrival on a basement wall in pencil. Ten and 12 years ago, the peepers would not be heard until the week of March 20 or later. This may be too short a time sample to mean anything, though the trend toward earlier appearances is clear from my basement record.

    From the day the frogs first sing there is no turning back. Osprey will soon appear overhead, joining the red-winged­ blackbirds, house wrens, and other early arrivals on the South Fork. Striped bass season opens tomorrow. It’s difficult to believe: Just a week ago, we were shoveling out and groaning under yet another dump of snow.