Sherrye Henry recently announced by way of e-mail that the $40,000 needed to underwrite the Artists-Writers Game exhibition at Guild Hall next summer had been raised, and from only three sources — Mort Zuckerman ($20,000), who reportedly bought U.S. News and World Report so he could have a column and pitch for the Writers, Barnes & Noble ($15,000), and the Shana Alexander Foundation ($5,000).

    Thus it’s a go, and there’s even talk now about a Hall of Fame. I put myself in it when I appended a modern-day all-star team to a history of The Game that I wrote in 1991, and was chided by Helen Rattray for it, but facts were facts, I told her. Of course I’m older and less humble now.

    Originally an artists’ madcap romp, the Annual Agon turned serious when hordes of play-for-keeps writers elbowed their way in in the modern era. . . . My wife fondly remembers making Mort, who had cut in front at the players’ T-shirt table one year, go to the end of the line and wait his turn.

    But the purpose of this piece is to recall Leif Hope’s inimitable managerial stroke, the famous “Battery Show” of 1977 that he staged after the Writers had the year before, when the bona fides of two lawyer ringers were questioned, said in their defense, “They write legal briefs.”

    In the off-season he chanced to read in Sports Illustrated of the Connecticut Falcons’ phenomenal pitch­er, Joan Joyce, and while he couldn’t persuade the Falcons’ manager to part with her for a day, he did agree to send over (in Tom Twomey’s plane) his number-two, Kathy Neal, and her battery mate, C.B. Tom­asiewicz.

    The Game’s Impresario introduced them as “two folk singers from Omaha.” But it soon became evident they weren’t.

    Bowing to authorial angst, Hope played his recruits in the outfield from the second until the ninth inning, “when, as I recall, they had runners on first and third and were about to tie. I was pitching. I turned around and said, ‘Girls, come back in.’ A barbaric yawp welled up from the Writers. A popup, a strikeout, and a popup, and that was it — we won 13-7. Some guys didn’t talk to me for five years after that.”

    Presumably, the works of art he had Neal and Tomasiewicz submit before they took the field will be in the Guild Hall show.

    To think, it’s been 24 years since Chevy Chase ran down the third-base line to wrestle the Writers’ third baseman, Ed Tivnan, for the pop fly he’d hit his way.

    So, here’s to the show, and to the Hall of Fame, and also to the not so good old days.   

   Bedtime comes early this time of the year, or at least we try. I’m up an hour before the kids have to be out of bed to get a couple of ounces of coffee down before trying to cajole them into their clothes, to brush their teeth, to eat breakfast. If they make the bus, the older two are gone by 7:30. Then it’s time to stuff the youngest one into his car seat for his ride to school.

    At the other end of the day, the great holiday driving marathon has begun in which my wife, Lisa, and I shuttle the kids to and from lessons, parties, rehearsals, and shopping. Somewhere amid all of this moving around we have neglected to figure out what to cook for dinner and there aren’t even enough eggs in the fridge to whip up a batch of pancakes in the morning.

    Because Lisa cannot get away from her work as a teacher as easily as I can duck out of the Star office, my days have been punctuated by a midday run to pick up child number three from prenursery and take him to his baby sitter’s, and another at 5 p.m. to get child number two after play practice.

    Compounding matters is the rate at which my gas-guzzling truck burns through my wallet’s contents. And worse, how much these trips contribute in greenhouse gases. This has had me coveting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, but the price tag of what I really want, a nifty Volkswagen turbo diesel wagon that goes 40 miles on a gallon, is steep. Even factoring in the savings on fuel, the payback period would be long, and there is always something else that jumps ahead as a spending priority.

    So I lumber on in my rattling 2000 Toyota, getting to know all the potholes between here and Bridgehampton, watching the Canada geese drifting overhead toward their nighttime redoubt on Poxabogue Pond.

    By the time I pick up Evvy and head back east for Ellis, it is dark, and since it is only 5:30 or so, traffic is heavy. My eyes, tired from a day looking at my computer screen, strain as the oncoming headlights glare off my dusty windshield; the lines that carry the washer fluid having corroded away 50,000 miles ago.

    We are home before 6 most weeknights. If it is clear, I try to get the kids to look up at the stars on our way in from the driveway. Lisa and Adelia, our firstborn, get home a little later. By then I usually have something or other going for dinner.

   Gathering up children’s clothes and winter coats for East End Cares to distribute among those whose belongings were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, brought me up short. It is true that three current generations of our family have lived in my house, but, even so, the amount of clothes we have accumulated — and hold on to — is out of line.

    Children’s clothes are in a class of their own, of course, when it comes to hand-me-downs: Having cousins and older siblings’ wardrobes to  shop  from is a terrific thing, given how quickly kids grow.

    (Just last month my daughter dragged some plastic storage boxes up from the basement, and was able to ship a 50-pound carton filled with fancy Hamptons-esque kids gear — including two pairs of expensive riding boots, several swimsuits with the tags still on, and more than a few handknit sweaters —home to the less stuff-rich island of Nova Scotia.)

    But when I went through the closets, I discovered some garments that have been hoarded for more than 50 years. 

    One of the most venerable was also one of the best made, and it remained in wonderful condition. The person who wore it when it was new is long gone, but I’m sure he would have been relieved to know it has finally been passed along to someone who needs it. It was his U.S. Navy dress coat, and it is apparently indestructible. Was it sentimentality or inertia that allowed me to ignore its presence in our upstairs storeroom all these years?

    On the hunt for winter wear, I also found a dowdy blue wool women’s coat with a fur collar, and two newish children’s coats, in toddler and teenager size, that I am sure none of my children or grandchildren have ever worn. Off the coats went, along with a wool jacket of mine.

    Looking through the closets, I came face-to-face with items I am sure most people would have given, if not thrown, away a long time ago. The pink cotton cardigan I wore over my yoga outfit this week is an example. I bought it in London in the mid-1970s, and it has for many years sported a few blue ink stains — ink stained, of course, we Rattrays being ink-stained wretches — that I never managed to get out, and some white spots where it was inadvertently splashed by bleach. Why did I keep it all these years? It’s not that special. Why do I wear it? Is it because it was purchased on a rare family trip, all those years ago?

    I can’t help remembering the Star staffer who, in the ’80s, I swear, wore something brand new every day. When pushed, she explained that she had a relative in the fashion business. I’ve got a few things hanging about that were new in the ’80s, too, like two silk skirts in pretty  prints. Do I really think I will fit into or find a reason to wear them again? I’ve thought occasionally that one of  the grandchildren might like them for dress-up, although they are in my closet, where the kids aren’t apt to go looking for entertainment.

    My attachment to old clothes probably has a lot to do with how my mother dressed me in as a child. I remember — with sheer horror — a gray dress with little pink-and-white appliquéd animals across its yoke that came from Gimbel’s basement. I didn’t like it. I certainly didn’t save it. I do have, however, a tiny checkered skirt and little white cape that my mother made as a costume for a show I was in, back in the days when moms tried to make their little girls look like Shirley Temple and we all took tap-dancing lessons. (At least I had the curls.)

    I pulled this handmade tap outfit out of a drawer the other day when three of my four granddaughters were in the bedroom, watching something noisy on television. I asked them to try it on, but it was too small even for the smallest. That one, clearly, I had saved too long. 

   I was more than confident, I was cocky.     

   It was the first week of October. I was sitting at the weekly East Hampton Star editorial meeting. I had already talked about what I anticipated the next few days would bring me on my beat, which is cops and robbers, plus the town’s zoning and planning boards. (Sometimes the last two are confused for the first two, but they are different, I swear.)

    I was finishing up, and, almost as an aside, I said, “I have jury duty on Tuesday.”

    I know how the system works. Hell, I’m part of the system. I’d be put through voir dire for one or two trials and then dismissed. It would only be a day or two at most. There was no way I’d be chosen.

    “There’s as much chance of me being picked for a jury as there is of me being elected president of the United States next month,” I joked. Everyone laughed. Who’d want a juror who covered cops and robbers on their jury?

    It had been many years since I’d last done jury duty. Many years. Twelve deferrals ago. Sometimes I would get a summons and ignore it. A second summons would follow the first, this time much sterner. I’d go down to Centre Street and tell them I was going to be away on business, or I’d just started a new job, or yada yada yada. The stories I told the clerks over the years were always true, but I knew that I was ducking an obligation.

    “Okay, well, your new date is Oct. 9,” the clerk told me the last time I was there in June.

    I was being summoned for jury duty in Manhattan because, while I’ve worked for The Star since the beginning of the year, I haven’t given up our Manhattan residence. Some people are bi-coastal, I’m bi-island.

    On Oct. 9 I was due to appear in New York State Supreme Court as a potential juror in a criminal trial. Might as well finally get it over with — I was untouchable. And I wouldn’t receive any more of those pesky summonses for six years.

    At 9 a.m. that morning I stood in line with several hundred other potential jurors outside 100 Centre Street, waiting to pass through security. I was reminded of what a quiet town East Hampton really is when I got near the door and looked at the arraignment schedule posted there.

    Under the Constitution, after being arrested, arrestees must be arraigned — that is, told judicially what the state is charging them with — within 24 hours of the arrest. In East Hampton, it is an impromptu process. Last night’s drunken driver, after sleeping it off in a holding cell at police headquarters, will be brought to East Hampton Town Court after the judge sitting that day has had an opportunity to review paperwork from the police, usually around 10 in the morning.

    Not so in Manhattan. In the city, courts dedicated to arraignments operate throughout the day, 24/7. The jail, known as the Tombs, is attached to the courthouse via an enclosed bridge, so arrestees can be brought right over.

    I went to the jurors’ waiting room on the 15th floor. It was the size of a gymnasium, filled with chairs. No worries. I’d soon be a free man.

    I had a heavy load that week from The Star. I found a little corner and set up my laptop on a box. I heard my name called. Shoot. I packed up my laptop and headed to the 13th floor.

    Thirteen. Hmmm.

    There were 50 of us sitting in the courtroom. The judge, Justice Lewis Bart Stone, explained that the trial would probably last until about Nov. 8. Jeez, I thought. I’m glad I’m not going to be on this one.

    My name was called again, this time to sit in the jury box with 17 other prospective jurors. This was a process that would be repeated as many times as necessary until the attorneys and the judge agreed on the 12 jurors plus three alternates needed to proceed to trial. We were handed laminated cards, on which were a series of questions. The last question was, in essence: Do you have any friends or relatives who are either attorneys, members of a police force, or either accused or convicted felons?

    When I got to that one, I paused for a moment, then said, “I have friends who are attorneys, I have friends who are cops, and I have friends who are alleged criminals. That’s my job.”

    The courtroom broke out in laughter. Yes! I would be on my way to East Hampton in just a few more minutes.

    We were all sent to wait in the hallway outside while the attorneys and judge negotiated over who would be kept and who would be sent home. I talked with two prospective jurors who’d been in the pool of 18 while we waited. He was a doctor and she was a corrections officer.

    “You’re overeducated, and there is no way they’re keeping a corrections officer,” I said to them. “We’ll all be dismissed.”

    They called us back into the courtroom and called three names. The doctor, the corrections officer, and, of course, me.

    Six weeks later, on Nov. 21, 2012, the jury in the case of the People of the State of New York vs. Marte, Marte-Tejada, Meran, and Osuna rendered its verdict. In the interim, the doctor and the corrections officer were released from the jury for personal reasons.

    Me, I was still there. The 12 remaining jurors rendered justice as best we could, given the information presented to us. I came away from the experience with a profound sense of gratitude for being able to live in a country where the people are in charge of rendering justice.

    Still, thinking back to that early-October editorial meeting, I guess I should have run for president after all.

    When he is not on jury duty, T.E. McMorrow covers police and government news for The Star.

   BookHampton has a daily quiz now, and so I thought why oughtn’t I to have one too.

    Which Shakespearean characters said:

    1. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

    2. “For in a minute there are many days.”

    3. “It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

    4. “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t is I know how to curse.”

    5. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

    6. “Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an eseam-ed bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty!”

    7. “Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

    8. “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye. . . . Talkers are no good doers.”

    9. “My library was dukedom large enough.”

    10. “A plague o’ both your houses!”

    11. “Who hath it [honor]? He that died a Wednesday.”

    12. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more: Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

    13. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

    14. “Naught’s had, all’s spent where our desire is got without content.”

    15. “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls, doing more murder in this loathsome world than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.”

    16. “And yet, for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.”

    17. “O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”

    18. “What light is light if Sylvia be not seen — what joy is joy if Sylvia be not by.”

    19. “There is no world without Verona walls but purgatory, torture, hell itself.”

    20. “Care is no cure, but rather corrosive for things that are not to be remedied.”

    Answers: 1. Dick to Jack Cade, “Henry VI, Part 2”; 2. Juliet; 3. Lady Macbeth; 4. Caliban, “The Tempest”; 5. Trinculo, “The Tempest”; 6. Hamlet; 7. The Banished Duke, “As You Like It”; 8. Richard III; 9. Prospero, “The Tempest”; 10. Mercutio, “Romeo and Juliet”; 11. Falstaff, “Henry IV, Part 1”; 12. Henry V; 13. Malcolm, “Macbeth”; 14. Lady Macbeth; 15. Romeo; 16. Nerissa, “The Merchant of Venice”; 17. Antony; 18. Valentine, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”; 19. Romeo; 20. Pucelle (Joan of Arc), “Henry VI, Part 1.”

   Sharp criticism greeted the New York Post editors’ decision this week to put a photograph of a man about to be struck and killed by a subway train on the cover of the Tuesday edition. The image presented the Post with a dilemma its editors are likely to face a lot more than we do at The Star: when to run or not run photographs that could cross a moral or ethical line. I’m not saying the Post made the right choice, but the question is more nuanced than the critics make out.

    People quickly took to Twitter and other online forums to denounce the choice. Taken by an occasional Post contributor, the image was of Ki-Suk Han, 58, just after he was pushed from the platform and as he was scrambling to climb to safety.

    R. Umar Abbas, who took the photograph, told the Post that he had been on the same platform and had begun running toward the train firing his camera, hoping the train’s driver would see its flash and stop in time. Others on the platform were similarly unable to help.

    The controversy over the photo, of course, has assured its distribution. Other media outlets, such as The New York Times, piled on. The journalistic thinking in reprinting or airing the troubling image of Mr. Han’s last moment was that because the Post was widely faulted for running it, the photograph itself had become news.

    To me, the criticism seems disingenuous. So many front pages of the nation’s newspapers in recent years have had photographs of the dead, often children, killed in wars, in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. How is it somehow different and across a line to show one of our own people, a New Yorker, about to be killed?

    If it was wrong of the Post to publish it — and for The Times and many others to reproduce the Post’s Tuesday cover — it is also unacceptable for The Times and others to run images of those killed by United States drone strikes, terrorists’ attacks, and Israel’s retaliatory bombings in Gaza.

    Our contemporary culture is soaked in images of death. To be outraged at the Post but ignore all the rest seems hollow. It can be an unpredictable, and brutal, world, and the news media by and for adults must reflect that unfortunate truth.

   That the South Fork is part of the greater metropolitan area rather than the rural place we used to think it was has become almost impossible to deny. You get the message from conspicuous consumption, both in the size and shape of many new houses and in the boutiques that have turned East Hampton’s Main Street into Madison Avenue East. But you also get the message by simply taking note of all the millions of special events you can participate in on any given jam-packed weekend.

    Take Saturday, for example.

    I was surprised by the 26 activities listed in The Star’s Winter Holiday supplement for that one day. And, really, the figure should have been 27, because one of the events I attended — the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival at the Bay Street Theatre — was missing from the list. Some 16 documentaries were shown at the Take 2 festival last weekend and, Saturday night, Susan Lacy, the founder and executive producer of the terrific PBS series “American Masters,” was honored at a reception and one of the films she has made, “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” was shown. I wouldn’t have missed it, even though we had spent the afternoon at Guild Hall for an HD screening of “La Clemenza di Tito” from the Metropolitan Opera.

    Our enriching Saturday selections meant that we had to skip another favorite event: one of Music for Montauk’s outstanding free concerts, this one by Freddie Bryant and the Melting Pot Jazz Sextet. We also couldn’t make it to that night’s screenings in the OLA Film Festival at the Parrish Art Museum, although we would have loved to.

    Talk about choice!

    Not only has our overall population ballooned, but so has every imaginable kind of pursuit, hobby, and entertainment — from farmers markets to road races, from public gardens to book clubs, from kids’ art lessons to baking classes. We no longer just have the original Hamptons International Film Festival and the HT2FF and OLA, we also now have an East End Black Film Festival, which had its seventh incarnation at the Parrish in November. (For two years we also had a Wildlife Conservation Film Festival here, although it seems to have given us up in favor of New York City, where it will take place in early 2013.)

    I’ve been amazed, and sometimes amused, by the way in which city folks always seem to maintain busier schedules — a hectic recreational, social, educational round — than the rest of us, even when they are supposedly out here to take it easy.

    I am pretty sure this is the case because many of the people we used to think of as city dwellers now spend as much or more time here “in the country” than they do in Manhattan. It’s not so much that they have moved to the country but that the country has been absorbed by the town. The only question that remains is why so many of them persist in wearing barn jackets and Wellington boots.

   “Tashi delek.”

   The words, mumbled while fishing for coins in my pocket, surprise me, though it was I that had uttered them.

    New London, Thanksgiving Day, 11:30 a.m. I’ve allowed so much time to drive to Orient Point that I catch an earlier ferry and arrive an hour sooner than anticipated. I’m famished and everything is closed. Finally, not far from the Amtrak station, a small grocery, open.

    A middle-aged couple sits inside. Finally, I’ve chosen a few items, and stand at the counter. On the wall, pictures of the Dalai Lama.

    They too are surprised at my greeting, and we begin to talk, and with a long wait for my brother and his family to collect me, I recount my adventures in India, where they were born. Long journeys to Jaipur, Agra, Rishikesh, Mumbai, Ko­chi. To the breathtaking Namdroling mon­astery in Bylakuppe and, in the far north, to Ladakh, the eastern region of Jammu and Kashmir.

   Sometimes called Little Tibet, Ladakh is remote, mountainous, and primitive. The power grid is unreliable, the roads are deadly, and the air, even in this otherworldly land, hangs heavy with diesel exhaust. Being a coastal type, more suited to the ocean, it’s not really for me.

    But there is a serenity there, among the vast blue sky, the snow-capped peaks, the ancient monasteries, and the sangha, the Buddhist community of monks, nuns, and lay followers. I’m guessing it’s a more tranquil and welcoming environment than what lies across the border, where at least 90 Tibetans have self-immolated since 2009.

    In Ladakh, I knew many Tibetans. “The first time I saw a Chinese soldier,” one told me, “he said, ‘I’m here to help you. I’m going to plant your crops.’ ” Some years later — 1959 — the People’s Liberation Army brutally suppressed an uprising against the Chinese occupation, and the tragedy of Tibet was under way. The Dalai Lama fled to India. He has not returned.

    Another Tibetan acquaintance, in a book for which I edited the English translation, wrote of Chairman Mao’s “struggle sessions,” in which leadership was forced to “confess,” before agitated crowds, to crimes and exploitation, only to be tortured. This man’s uncle perished in such circumstances.

    Of all the wondrous characteristics of the Tibetan people — and I count many — most inspiring are their unerring compassion, even toward those who have so cruelly, ruthlessly trespassed against them, and the hope they sustain in the face of what seems utterly hopeless.

    That couple in the grocery store was like that. Once second-class citizens in a third world country, they now scratch out an existence in a small city in America, many thousands of miles from their ancestral home.

    But they seem happy.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

   Mary had been after me to change my voice mail message, which, she said, aside from being boring, was way too long.

    Allen, our neighbor, said, in a message he left, that it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. And so, opinion being deeply divided, I tried to be more succinct. Now when you call, you’ll hear me say, “I’m either jumping to conclusions, hurdling obstacles, or running a fever. Please leave a message.”

    All of which seems fitting for a sportswriter to say. Mary says she likes the new message much better, and so it stays; though undoubtedly, now that I’ve hit upon a pleasing form, other greetings will come calling at 4 a.m., as the above did. . . .

    “I’m either taking the ball and running with it, passing up a great opportunity, or kicking the can down the road. Please leave. . . .”

    “I’m either screwing up my courage, plumbing the depths, or wiring for money. Please leave. . . .”

    “I’m either fishing for compliments, casting a cold eye, or waiting with bated breath.”

    “I’m either (this can be addictive) raking havoc, reeking of garlic, or recreating. . . .”

    As to this latter, I am about to re-engage with life following 42 days  of quietude imposed as the result of a hernia operation, and simply knowing that I’ll soon be venting my spleen again on the tennis courts seems to be having a cardiovascular effect.

    Just to be able to run around Herrick Park the other day was salutary. I say “run,” it was more of a stagger. But I was moving, and when I was done I felt a lightness — of spirit, I suppose, though maybe the blood wasn’t getting to my brain — that I hadn’t felt for a while.

    Interviewing John Conner for the sports pages had served as a catalyst. He has had many moments in the international and national track world’s sun, though, despite a serious accident a decade ago — an accident while cycling that virtually ended his stellar running career — he has nevertheless remained undaunted (he walks, he swims, he bikes, he works out), and he’s as irrepressible as ever.

    A great example of the life force for the young whom he coaches — and for the old!

   Life on the beach is a temporary proposition. This I learned from my father, who was old enough in 1938 to remember the hurricane that ripped across Long Island and became the one by which all others here are measured.

    That storm and the devastation it brought were fresh enough in his mind in the early 1960s, when he and my mother had a 480-square-foot Cape Cod cottage moved from near Three Mile Harbor to Cranberry Hole Road, put it on a foundation, and doubled it in size. According to family lore, my father checked with old-timers about where surging waters had reached in 1938, and then placed the small house about as far back on the rectangular acre lot as possible.

    I grew up in that house and it is now the one in which my wife, Lisa, and I are raising our three children. Over the years, I’ve measured the distance from the road to the top of the dune and concluded, with the help of old surveys, that we have lost roughly a foot of beach a year since the 1970s.

    Then came Dec. 26-27, 2010, when 12 feet of dune was clawed away in a 36-hour period. By comparison, Hurricane Sandy was a piker, only removing about a foot of dune, although the northeaster that followed a few days later peeled off another two feet.

    This is not to say that Sandy was mild. On the contrary, my friend Jameson Ellis and I went up to the dune line for a last look on the morning it arrived just as high tide was approaching. Gardiner’s Bay was an unfamiliar brown river rushing from right to left past our feet, heavy logs bowling over nearly everything in their path. Before we left, Jamey and I went back to the house and carried my collection of hand tools to an upper floor on the chance that the bay would reach the basement. It did not.

    The thing that Sandy did do, however, was make me realize that moving our house farther back toward the road and putting it up on pilings was going to be my problem, not my children’s.

    Recently, Larry Penny, who is The Star’s nature columnist, and I were having an e-mail exchange about storms when he pointed out that with one exception there has been a storm in New York State worthy of a federal disaster declaration each year since 2007. People talk a lot these days about the “new normal” in this and that; for those of us living on the far east reaches of an eroding island, bad weather is something we all are going to be taking a lot more seriously in the years to come. And sooner than we think.