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.

   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.

   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 will be a good ole time in Montauk this weekend for the Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The fun starts tomorrow at a luncheon to honor this year’s grand marshal, Jack Perna. It’s also an opportunity for everyone to pull the green out of their closets.

    Women will be wearing green dresses, green blazers, green shoes, green nail polish, and, like me, a green scarf. Green is not my most flattering color, so I keep the wearing of the green minimal. When I wear green it makes me look as if I’m sick. I don’t want people I’m talking to thinking I might be getting ready to puke on their new green shoes.

    Members of the Friends of Erin will all be sporting their green blazers and black derbies, and I have to say, some of them clean up real nice. Other men add a flash of green on their ties, and still others will smile with green teeth, but I don’t think that’s intentional.

    The best outfits are the ones worn for the parade on Sunday. That’s when spectators really dress it up. It amazes me how foolish some people will allow themselves to look during a parade. But hey, everyone loves a parade, right? Well, everyone except those who actually live in Montauk, many of whom stay home to avoid the rowdy crowds.

    Quite a few of the women lining the parade route wear green wigs, but I’m thinking a little hair dye might be in order and might offer myself up for the job. I can do it, you know. I went to hairdressing school and turned many a head of hair green, unintentionally of course, but they got over it, though some of the lawsuits might still be pending.

    While I was really good at doing hair dye for those who wished to sport a green head of hair, hairstyling was not my forte, which I learned the hard way, especially when women would cry when they looked in the mirror at my station.

    In beauty school, as they called it, experimentation was rampant. My husband never knew what I’d look like when I came home each day. I had streaks of purple hair before that was a trend, a shag haircut dyed brown that made me look more like Ringo Starr rather than Joan Jett, whose look I coveted, and various colors of nail polish, which was a stretch because I don’t usually wear nail polish. It makes me feel too dressed up for daily life in Montauk.

    We also did facials. And that’s when I really turned green. At beauty school — which is an oxymoron because most of the technicians weren’t even close to being pretty and they didn’t compensate with a good personality — we were encouraged to use ourselves as guinea pigs. So one day I got home early and slathered my face with a thick green clay mask. This was years ago when people still used all that junk. It had to stay on for a half hour, so I lay in bed reading while my skin was supposed to be tightening and getting younger looking, and I fell asleep on my side.

    My husband came home, walked into the bedroom, and called my name. I turned over to greet him with the green clay mask on, which by this point was all crackly and flaking and looked like the spackle painters use, and he literally jumped with fear, thinking I had caught some deadly disease at school.

    So, I’ll just stick to my green scarf this weekend. But I will be at most of the festivities, wearing my usual black pants and whatever blouse isn’t wrinkled. And if I get adventurous, I might add a few green streaks to my blond hair. With my luck, though, and lack of hairdressing talent, it might just fall out, and I’ll be stuck wearing a green hat!

    Or I might just stay home and drink green beer. I hear it’s good for you, no matter what the color.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   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.

   The flight from La Guardia to Halifax is a cinch: A small plane operated by Chautauqua Airlines for Delta gets you there in less than an hour and a half, and makes it hard to believe you are traveling to another country and have to bring along your passport. So it was with what you might call careless abandon that, in the air headed to Nova Scotia, I filled out a Canadian customs declaration. Too much abandon, as it turned out. Just exactly why I answered in the negative when ticking off the query that asks if you are bringing in food remains unclear even to me.

    I had checked in my suitcase at La Guardia. In it was packed a small round of soft French cheese, Petit Livarot from Normandy, doubly wrapped in a balsam-like box, inside my cosmetics bag. It was a gift for my daughter, who lives in rural Nova Scotia (a land of many lobsters but few cheeses). I was dismayed when, after a delay of a two hours, we landed at Stanfield International in Halifax and I didn’t find my suitcase on the carousel at baggage claim. “The airlines aren’t supposed to lose suitcases anymore,” I thought, fretting. But the airline hadn’t.

    Turning around to find someone to ask about it, I spied the suitcase leaning against a barrier with a uniformed guard standing nearby. When I walked up and expressed relief at its being there, I noticed that a green tag had been placed on it with the words: “Take to Inspection.”

    It didn’t occur to me that anything was amiss as I got on a fairly long line of recently debarked passengers whose bags also had been cherry-picked. And then, with my suspect luggage up on a low counter, a customs official asked to see the form I had filled out; he surveyed my answers, then asked whether I was carrying any food. Blithely (no, foolishly) I said “no.”

    Only then did it dawn on me. Cheese! An official sniffer dog had identified something in the outer pouch of my suitcase . . . and there it was, the Petit Livarot, wedged between toiletries. I had no good answer when asked why I had not declared it. Shame-faced, I listened to a rundown on Canada’s customs regulations. I began to get quite anxious. Would I be fined? Jailed? How serious would the penalty be?

    A second official walked over, peered at the little package of cheese, looked at me, and said, “My dog, Roscoe, is never wrong.” After rifling through the rest of the suitcase and finding no other contraband, the inspectors apparently decided that I wouldn’t have left the cheese in an outside pouch if I had intentionally been attempting to smuggle it in. Then, they actually put the cheese back in its little box, zipped the cosmetics bag back up, and let me go on my way.

    It wasn’t until that evening, when I had presented the cheese, along with the embarrassing story, to my son-in-law, that I realized how brazen was my crime. Even if there hadn’t been a professional customs dog named Roscoe on duty to sniff it out, the jig would have been up. “What is that smell? Good lord!” said my daughter, coming into the room. My own sense of smell hasn’t been very good for some years now — and so I wasn’t aware that I had, apparently, illegally imported to Canada the smelliest cheese in all of France. We double-wrapped it back up, and sealed it in the refrigerator, because it was stinking up the kitchen.