The very first attempt I made at  journalistic writing was a fictional obituary as an academic exercise in an evening course at the Columbia School of Journalism. It never occurred to me at the time that I would go on to write and edit hundreds (and hundreds) of them.

    Not long afterward, I married into the Star family and began writing obituaries for real. Ev Rattray, whom I met at the journalism school and who had come home to edit the paper, set the standard: Obituaries were not to be written by rote, and they were to celebrate the life of those who died.

    At first, I found calling grieving family members very trying — believe me, it’s not easy to pick up that phone and attempt to ask questions with sympathy and sensitivity — but I soon learned that many were often, if not exactly pleased,  at least somewhat relieved to talk about their loss.

    As I have gotten older, I must admit, I’ve found myself handling far too many obituaries for contemporaries, for people I knew well, but it always remains gratifying to find something significant to add, whether it is a small, telling detail that illuminates character or a notable accomplishment that reminds the reader of just how much was lost. This has become harder to do as the community has grown, but we try.

    This week I found myself editing an obituary about a 90-year-old man I had never met. His family had given us material about his remarkable professional life. They had little to say about his long connection with this community, however, so I took the time to find out and to add something to what they had given us. I hope they will be satisfied with the result.

    Overfamiliarity with these matters comes at a certain peril, sometimes. A man I know told me something a week or so ago about his wife that was quite wonderful but little known. Because I spend a lot of time working on and thinking about obituaries, I blurted out — with an embarrassing lack of mindfulness — that I was going to write down what he had said and make sure it got in our archives so that it wouldn’t be forgotten when it came time to write her obituary. Naturally, he was quite taken aback, so I quickly added, “Thirty years from now, of course!” Oh, dear.

    I managed to check my tongue before I got around to injecting my plans for my own obituary into the conversation. Although I intend to be around a long, long time before anyone else has to think about it, I’ve had plenty of professional hours to ponder it. Ev Rattray, who was 47 when he died, had written his own obituary in anticipation of his final out. I think I will make it a family tradition.

   We are in flux. Though we’d love to hold on to those whom we love, it can’t be done. That much of them lives on in us is the most we can hope for. The body is gone, though the spirit, to the extent that it was transmitted to us and to the extent that we received it, remains, and, in the end, it is only the spirit that is real, I think; as real as the grass, the trees, the rocks, the hills, and the sea.

    “It comes in waves,” Mary said of her mourning in the days following the death of her mother, as apt an allusion as can be imagined. The waves are high-pitched, though, frankly, I told her, I thought it would be worse, that when the time came she would slump to the floor in grief. “Well, I am on the floor,” she said, “inside.”

    Meanwhile, she has been working at living. There are duties with which her mother entrusted her that she must carry out. These take up quite a bit of her time. And then there is work itself, which I’ve found in such times to be a blessing. And then there is the family, the older, younger, and youngest generations.

    “How’s she doing?” Kathy, who each week recreates our newspaper, asked.

    “She’s carrying on, better than I thought she would,” I said.

    “We’ve got no choice,” Kathy said sympathetically.

    The kids’ reactions have been striking. Our daughter Emily’s 6-year-old son, Jack, said, when told, “Grandma equals Infinity.”

    I remember Emily, at just about the same age, saying, when I told her that her grandfather, my father, had died, “I feel like a broken umbrella.”

    And Ella, our daughter Georgie’s 4-year-old daughter, said to Mary as they went into her bedroom one recent night, “Nana’s in the stars now. . . . Come, let’s look!”

   Things were certainly simpler back in the days when it was good old Eames Taxi or bust. My husband and I had an experience on the weekend with a cabbie who acted like he was auditioning for the Robert De Niro part in “Taxi Driver.”

    There are so many cab companies in town these days that I don’t even know which one was involved. If I had paid attention to the service’s name or phone number, I might have complained, but I hadn’t and I didn’t. Instead, I thought, “I’ll write a column!”

    We were coming home from the city on Sunday night, post-blizzard. The Jitney had made good time, even though the bus had to use the Sunrise Highway a good part of the way, what with the Long Island Expressway still being littered with snowbound vehicles, and indeed being closed east of Exit 57. We pulled in smoothly at the Huntting Inn, five minutes before the scheduled arrival time. (Jitney drivers, in my book, generally deserve nothing but praise.)

    Normally, we would walk the extremely short distance from the Jitney stop to our house, but we were coming off four days in the city where my husband had recuperated from outpatient surgery. Each of us carried a tote bag, and I was dragging our bulky, heavy suitcase, in which we had consolidated our belongings. Our car, left in the Reutershan parking lot, was buried under a mountain of snow. Even though it’s only a five-minute stroll to our front door under normal circumstances, on this dark and icy night we had no choice but to get into a cab.

    If you keep up with the news in these parts, you know that the East Hampton Town Board has been trying to come up with an effective law for licensing taxis. After Sunday night’s misadventure, I am convinced some sort of more diligent oversight is indeed overdue.

    When someone approached us to offer his services as we stepped off the bus, I gladly said yes. He picked up my heavy suitcase and forged swiftly up Main Street to his vehicle, which was quite far away. I chased after him, maneuvering the patchy snow and ice, as Chris waited at the stop for us to come back and pick him up.

    The taxi driver was already in his seat when I made it to the van, and he didn’t look up as I awkwardly navigated my way up and around snow banks and struggled to pull open the heavy sliding door. When I said I couldn’t get the door closed again, he was forced to turn around and acknowledge my presence. We went to fetch Chris, who just managed to make it from the snowy curb to the car. As he opened the front passenger door, the driver told him to get in back.

    The driver knew where Edwards Lane was, but for whatever reason was reluctant to leave us in front of our house, instead wanting to go around to the back, which would have meant a considerably longer trudge through the mounds of snow. When we asked how much the fare was, he answered, “Eight dollars,” then quickly recanted, saying, “No, twelve.”

    Chris climbed out of the car first, and as I got out, the driver started to pull away. “The suitcase!” I shouted, banging on a window. So he got out, carried it around to where I was standing, and dumped it unceremoniously into about eight inches of snow.

    After pushing open the partially frozen front door and getting inside, we felt like we had been attacking the summit of K2 — on the back of an abused and resentful sherpa — not paying a premium for a short taxi ride.

    The morose, strange, and indeed even hostile behavior of the taxi driver toward two — let’s just say it — senior citizens on an slippery winter’s night was inexplicable. Unless, I thought, he was stoned. Or jonesing for a fix. Or possibly just too simpleminded to notice the struggles of others. (There is, of course, a third explanation: That the driver had simply had a long, hard weekend ferrying people through the storm, and he was overtired.)

    Whatever the case, I’m glad I’m not among those trying to decide how to write a local law to make sure that fees are fair and predictable, that taxi drivers are competent, and that they aren’t climbing behind the wheel while under the influence of some substance or other.

    But if I see that taxi driver again on a dark night, he should watch out, or I might go De Niro on him.

    You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?

When someone proposed at a recent meeting of The East Hampton Star’s editorial staff that I might like to write about my 28-year marriage, I said, somewhat derisively, “You’ve got to be kidding.” And everyone laughed.

Actually, I hadn’t heard what the subject was to be; it’s my generic response to anything that has to do with one of our supplements.

And now that I’ve sat down to think about it, and about what goes into a good marriage — what makes it work, as it were — I’m still dubious. I don’t know that you can deconstruct it, that you can speak of marriage as if it were a Lego set.

I know one thing, having been married twice: It’s a crapshoot. That you have succeeded the second time (I’ve read that most second-timers don’t) has a lot to do with luck, though experience teaches you what to want.

I don’t know. . . . There’s a certain way she smells, the way she feels, the warm curve of her neck, the way she looks, especially with her high, intelligent forehead and perfectly shaped nose in profile . . . her true blue eyes. . . . I could go on in this vein, but perhaps that’s enough, this being a family newspaper.

No, no, one more thing. We all think when we’re younger that “the excitement,” as Frank McCourt referred to it, is the be-all and end-all. And yes, of course it is delightful and mysterious — and thus, to my mind, not to be analyzed overmuch — but I tell you, those of you who might tend to doubt that old people can be lovers, there’s great delight in merely touching. There’s a thrill in just that.

And then there’s delight in just being with the one you love. That’s the mental part and, frankly, a very important part when you’re speaking of a love and friendship that lasts.

Of course, it’s not always bliss. There will be disconnections, misunderstandings, slights, pouting, and full-throated recriminations of Vesuvian proportions even among those who most hours of the day ride the same wave length. But the storms, whose origins often can be traced to the archipelagos of childhood, pass — if you want them to. And with perspective, you’ll probably laugh about them some day.

I have my late father and stepmother to thank for this next: that if you love someone you will let that person do what he or she wants to do. Constraint, whether overt or covert, will not further love’s course. Resentments will build and love will ultimately die. Reform is not the answer. Think of your spice (plural for spouse), let them be, and love will flower.

I wrote a poem about that early on in our marriage:

I know this about love

that you must always be willing to let it go

that it is delicate, like a bird,

who, if you are worthy,

will alight, and re-alight,

that it is a most wonderful

feeling

disarming, not expecting, commingling

alight and re-alight

we live from day to day

no longer hopeful, wistful, resigned

sure

yet surprised

who would have expected it?

we laugh about that, and many

other things

Which brings me to the most important thing: Laughter is the straw that stirs the drink, at least in our experience. Mirth is frequently my preferred response to the human condition, yet it can lighten and refresh the spirits of kindred souls.

And keep in mind, as Dante, who had a great love, said (it’s on my bulletin board): “How brief a blaze a woman’s love will yield if not relit by frequent touch and sight.”

I intend not to let that blaze go out.

And remember: If you want your marriage to have legs, keep on your toes.

—

In the Quakers’ Grove

In the winter of 1984, Jack Graves, who is The Star’s senior writer and editor by far, having joined the staff in October of 1967, and who had been a bachelor for six years following a divorce, met a new member of the production department at her typesetting machine. Her name was Mary Anderson — and the rest is history.

Mary was leery of an office romance. Besides, she thought his advances would cease once he learned that she had 4-year-old twins.

Nevertheless, he invited them all to dinner at a small house he had rented on Floyd Street. The twins trashed the place, but he didn’t care. She did, however, and duly admonished them, after which she said, “Thank God I don’t want to date him!”

Yet they remained friends through thick and thin throughout the following year, and, in the end, his invincible surmise proved true and love blossomed.

Jack and Mary married themselves at the Quakers’ grove on Shelter Island, in March, 1985, the twins, Johnna and Georgie, cooing “kiss the bride” as M & Ms — which served in place of communion wafers — dribbled down the sides of their grinning mouths. The late Shep Frood made it official in their back yard on August 22 of that year.

   Lulu, an old cat, is still resident in my late mother-in-law’s sunny house, and we’re dutifully paying calls to feed her, though Mary worries that she might be lonely.

    It was unlikely, said Jane Callan. Cats aren’t like people. “Their number one question is ‘Who’s feeding me?’ Number two is ‘Do I have a soft, warm place to lie on?’ You might be number three. If you see to their food and comfort, you might be privileged enough to be tolerated.”

    “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were like cats and didn’t give a damn about one another,” I said, tongue-in-cheek, to one of our daughters and her husband, who were to head back this afternoon to California following a brief visit.

    “Mary feels so much,” I said during our tender farewell. “She’s always saying she wants to be more like me, somewhat less attached. . . . I wish I were more like her. Anyway,” I said with a smile, “you can’t say you’ll not be happy to see blue skies again. And, even though I hate doing it, don’t forget to text.”

    When, later, I told our doctor, who had asked how Mary was faring following her mother’s death, that we’d had a large gathering at my brother-in-law’s house, “an Irish wake,” over the weekend, he said, “Ah, a celebratory thing. . . . That’s one thing the Irish got right.”

    My brother-in-law said at the gathering that his mother and he had spent a lot of time together in cars when he was a kid — traveling back and forth in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” fashion between the coasts. Thus, at 9, he was pressed into duty as his mother’s navigator — foreshadowing his later career as co-owner of a metropolitan area delivery service.

    “I was her navigator,” he said. “And,” he added — speaking for himself, for his siblings, and for others in the room — “she was my compass.”

   It is difficult to imagine that a building as substantial as the Montauk Bathing Casino, which once stood on the ocean beach, was gone within 30 years of its opening. The sprawling set of buildings and covered pavilions was part of Carl Fisher’s Montauk Beach Development Company’s grand plan to build a sparkling summer resort at the far eastern tip of Long Island.

    I recently stumbled across an advertising brochure the company put out in 1929 among some of The Star’s many old files. It described an elaborate facility with a 150-foot-long saltwater swimming pool, which overlooked a 1,600-foot-long boardwalk — wide enough for two cars to pass. What happened to the boardwalk and if it ever really was built to all of its promised length, I have not been able to discover, but photographs of the casino, or pavilion as it is sometimes described, show it was quite an attraction.

    Shaded cabanas lined the beach on the roughly seven-acre site, which was toward the east end of downtown Montauk. Behind the cabanas, in later photographs in our archives, you can see at least a second swimming pool and a sheltered sandy play area. An awning displays the place’s later name, the Surf Club. In a photograph, probably taken by the late Dave Edwardes, a couple sits pool-side in the afternoon sun, the woman gesturing, making a point perhaps, the man tilting his head as if he is but half-listening.

     In 1967 the site was the subject of an East Hampton Town Hall controversy over whether to allow multiple residences there. In an echo of today’s Montauk disputes, homeowners nearby feared that the development would harm their interests, even though town planners said that allowing the retail zoning to persist could result in more intense use of the parcel, with buildings up to four stories high.

    The final chapter for the Montauk Beach Casino came in August 1969, when it was razed by the Fire Department in a training exercise. It had been partially destroyed by fire the prior spring, and the then Montauk Improvement Corporation’s directors had decided to “make a complete job of it,” The Star reported.

   I’m not a big fan of heart-shaped jewelry. I find it juvenile, so I wasn’t too upset when a heart-linked gold bracelet my husband gave me one year for Valentine’s Day went missing while I was wearing it. I might wear my heart on my sleeve but never around my neck, on my wrist, or ring finger.

    As is my luck, a friend of my daughter’s found it about eight months later on a wooded path I used to get to the cliffs at Camp Hero in Montauk. It was a bit crushed but still wearable. Nonetheless, I threw it in my jewelry box along with the other odd bits of gold jewelry that I owned. Hearts, gold or silver, stay tucked away. If it’s a heart-shaped box filled with chocolate-covered nuts, it will also stay tucked away, hidden actually, so I can savor them whenever one of my frequent chocolate cravings kick in.

    Once the price of gold soared, I started looking at my trinkets in a whole new light, wondering what they may be worth if I sold them. Winter in Montauk will do that to you. Now, I’ve become obsessed and have started studying almost everything I touch for its resale value.

    Since the experts have said we need more green and black tea in our lives, I’ve started drinking diet Snapple. As I sip from the bottle, I learn a lot from the little tidbits of information inside the Snapple caps, but what I really think about is if the bottle will be worth money in 50 years.

    I’ve learned that brain waves can power an electric train, which might be useful to the people who live near the Montauk train station who complain about the constant hum of the idling engines, especially in the summer months. Imagine if they could use their brain waves to move the trains about 5,000 feet west? Ready, all together now, concentrate and move that annoying train.

    But I digress. My husband and I recently sold a signed piece of art that the artist had given to us for Christmas one year. The piece was buried in a book in the space under my bookshelves, with a bunch of assorted candles, surf magazines my son has been featured in, old VCR tapes, and books. We sold it for a few thousand dollars and later learned on the Internet that it was worth about 10 times more than that.

    It makes we wonder what else we can sell. (Yes, it’s that bad out here in Montauk in winter.) I look at everything now with dollar signs in my eyes. Will the glass bottle with the swan-like S engraved on it be worth thousands of dollars someday the way old glass Coke bottles are?

    My children wonder why I save so much and I blame it on my mother, who saved nothing. When I returned home to City Island in the Bronx for a visit after my first summer in Montauk, I found my bedroom stripped of everything I owned and was told it had all been thrown away. She also read my diary that was hidden under my mattress, but that’s another column!

    I had some really cool stuff from my hippie days that included long, granny dresses, John Lennon-style sunglasses, a fake fur coat that I wore with my long bell-bottom jeans and a long black cape. I would sell it all on eBay for a chunk of change if I still had it.

    I’ve never been a wheeler-dealer. I left that up to my brother, who attempted to sell my little blue sailboat right out from under me when we were teens. Her name was Bluegirl and even though I had no sails or proper rigging for it, my girlfriends and I would row it out on the water to sunbathe in. My mother stopped the sale, but Bluegirl was eventually lost in a storm.

    It always surprises me when I read in the paper that something sold for quite a bit of money, something that most of us would think useless. A painting that was purchased at a yard sale that sells for $10,000 is everyone’s dream. I have an old wall clock, floral metal trays bought from estate sales, and a complete set of Waverly novels that were written in the 1800s that I’m holding on to so they’re worth even more when I decide to sell.

    I am currently negotiating with a New York City dealer on a book owned by my sister that was written by Theodore Roosevelt and is autographed by him. It’s all about big game hunting, which he took great pleasure in. But it’s disturbing how he describes killing wild animals. I told my sister that if it sells I expect a commission or at the very least a dinner at Gosman’s restaurant when it opens.

    My recent sale of the artist’s piece and the price I saw it could have gone for has made me greedy and I’m saving even more stuff. My daughters really give me a hard time. “You never use it,” they claim, while telling me to throw out perfectly good stuff.

    What they don’t know is that my grandmother’s elaborately embossed punch bowl from Germany that I was lucky enough to receive after her death will one day be their inheritance. I think it’s worth a lot of money, but then again I’m eyeing Snapple bottles and crushed bracelets, so what do I know?

    If I decide to sell the punch bowl sooner, I’ll be moving to an island somewhere warm and will leave the house and all the junk in it to them. That will be their inheritance, and I’ll get even for the mean things they’ve said to me over the years.

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   “Where do wars and internecine strife go?” the New Year asked on arriving at the dump.

    “Here, in nonreconcilables,” came the answer.

    “Thanks, it’s a heavy load.”

    “Wait, I’ll help you,” said the supervisor, sweeping some ancient antipathies into the pit as he made his way to the overstuffed van with the YR-2013 plate.

    “Here I am tossing them out and they’re not even paid for!”

    “Tell me about it, we’re a wasteful country. I’ve got some credit card debt of my own. My hair’s starting to turn gray and I’ve still got student loans to pay. Maybe if enough bright kids were able to receive an education without putting them in hock forever they could help get us back on track. . . . Oh, while I’m at it, deferred dreams go in that bin over there. I imagine you’ve got a few of those.”

    “Yes, I found the path to citizenship littered with them. I picked up as many as I could.”

    “What else you got?”

    “Well, there’s gallons of vitriol and countless vials of vilification, and decanted rants left over from the latest campaign. . . .”

    “They go in with the glass, broken promises, and shattered hopes. No, wait; they’re too flammable. Better put them with the assault and batteries, snake oil, and blown fuses down at the end of the shed.”

    “How about frivolous lawsuits?”

    “In the fear and clothing bin that’s on your way out.”

    “And all these amputated limbs?”

    “Limbs? Limbs go with the leaves and brush out back.”

    “And myriad miscarriages of justice?”

    “That sounds like a medical question. Hold on to them for a bit, I’ll have to ask.”

    “I guess it’s the same with bad blood. . . . Where do I unburden myself of hidebound religious beliefs?”

    “They’re rigid, right?”

    “Exceedingly so.”

    “You needn’t rip them apart, just lay them to rest with the cardboard.

. . . By the way, you don’t have any discarded Bushmasters? We’ve got a special area for disarmed firearms now.”

    “I wish I could say I did . . . I wish I could say I did. . . . “

    “Well, buck up, kid,” the supervisor said as the van with the shiny new bumper sticker began to pull away from the drop-off area. “The new year’s just begun. We’re Americans, we’re programmed to be hopeful. We’ve got no choice!”

   “Not that way!” Jasper said, after I cut his scrambled eggs into fork-size pieces. His small feet began to stamp a protest beat on his chair. A rant of frustration simmered just below the surface. “You moved it!”

    “Which way?” I asked, unclear of the infraction.

    “Turn it around,” he demanded, a whimper now set to the rhythm of his feet.

    I stirred the eggs in the bowl. Not it. I rotated the bowl clockwise. No. Then counterclockwise. No.

    “If you know what you want, you do it,” I suggested. But he’s 21/2. Whatever harmony I had shattered, it was important that I be the one to restore it.

    He persisted.

    “Jasper, I don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I said.

    “Not that way. Like a ladybug,” he explained.

    Like a ladybug?! Really? Thanks for clearing that up.

    Apparently a ladybug, if it were scrambled eggs, would form a semicircle snuggled up to one side of the bottom of the bowl.

    Sometimes translation is a guessing game. I can’t say if anything else will need to be like a ladybug, but if it does, I’ll have a better than 50-percent chance of guessing what that means.

    When we fill a cup or bottle for Jasper, he likes it to be “all the way up to the mountain,” meaning very full. And if it’s juice he’s drinking, he prefers that we “make it warm in the dishwasher,” meaning not straight from the cold fridge but mixed with room-temperature water from the sink.

    Since the onset of cold and flu season and all the talk of sickness, germs, and not sharing food and drinks that have been in other people’s mouths, he is emphatic that we not repeat what he says: “Don’t say that. That have my germs on it.” The more I work to understand this sort of reasoning, the more sense it makes. It’s true, that phrase had been in his mouth, and I guess if I put it in my mouth, maybe I could get his germs.

    I should turn his own logic back on him when I hear him repeat some of the expletives his dad and I have let slip in our moments of frustration. They definitely have our “germs” on them.

    Sometimes when he’s talking a little too quietly to hear, I ask him what he’s said. “I’m talking to myself,” he answers.

    While his 41/2-year-old sister begins every day singing or talking to herself in her room before she calls for me, then engages in conversation as quickly and constantly as possible once we’re in a room together, Jasper is often more reflective in the moments before bed and after waking up. He’ll be still and quiet for a long time so I think he’s sleeping. Then, he’ll turn to me and ask some big question that’s been burning in his mind through his long silence: “Mommy? What cows eat?”

    It’s a much easier question to answer than some of Jade’s early-morning inquiries. “Why when I was a baby I ­wasn’t in a people egg?” she wanted to know a few months ago.

    “Because babies grow inside their mommies’ tummies,” I explained.

    “But how did I get there?”

    Umm . . . like a ladybug?

   Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor.

   I’m a little tired of this — propping up the economy every year when it comes to Christmastime. I read in the papers where we must keep spending to keep ourselves out of yet another recession, and I’m doing my part, but it’s becoming burdensome. I can’t do it all alone.

    “Never again should we take a vacation early in December,” Mary said on our return recently from a week in Palm Springs. She was talking about walking underdressed into winter, and, initially, I’ll admit, it was a shock to go all of a sudden from the 70s and 80s to the 40s and 30s, but we’re acclimated now. In fact, I’d say it’s almost balmy as of this writing.

    While her thoughts were weather-related during that dawn takeoff — the only time during our stay I’d seen the burnt radiance of the desert sunrise over the backlit mountains, as compelling, by the way, as our sunsets at Three Mile Harbor — mine tended toward the agony of the holiday that awaited. Christmas will be upon us with all the vengeance of Superstorm Sandy, I thought.

    We had for a week somehow sluffed off the weight of obligations, and it had been wonderful. But, on our return, as I said, Christmas in all its enormity loomed.

    The Rubicon has been long crossed, nothing can be done. “Don’t, whatever you do, feel obligated in any way whatsoever,” we say to each other — out of a sense of obligation, before being tossed about once again by the season’s storm surge of social, economic, and psychic imperatives.

    Yet, once it’s all over, boredom and ennui, wonderful boredom and ennui, ensue — at least until Memorial Day, by which time, I hope, our credit card gods — and yours too, I say, with hearty good cheer — are fully appeased.

    Boredom and ennui . . . ah, the true tidings of comfort and joy.