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.   

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

    There is so much more than is dreamt of in my philosophy that all I can say, sitting in this Jacuzzi in a desert, with mountains behind it, and above them the vastness of the universe, listening to Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, and Jim Hall playing “Concierto de Aranjuez,” is, “I may not be very smart, but I know what heaven is.”

    We have some time on this vacation to take delight in each other, and to remember why we were magnetized from the start. The feeling is always there, but the distractions that are in the aggregate largely known as life often get in the way.

    This week in Palm Springs is, in our 28th year of marriage, our honeymoon. She reads to me from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, I read to her from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and though I overdo the steaks and underdo the pork chops on the grill, it’s all right. The margaritas I’ve got down pat, thanks to Alex Silvio.

    It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind.

    Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.

   The Edwards tradition of cutting a white pine from their own Northwest wood lots for a Christmas tree goes back to the time Christmas trees first became popular among East Hampton’s old-fashioned Presbyterians.

    And so it was in the 1960s and ’70s when we followed Jeannette Edwards Rattray, my mother-in-law, into the woods to get ours. She would also take home clumps of different mosses and winterberries, with their glossy leaves and small red berries, to build a miniature landscape scene in a big bowl: moss for grass, tiny wooden farm animals standing under the branches of the berry-laden  tree.  I don’t know if this was a local tradition or if it was a family invention, but I loved it, and for years would do the same thing, adding bits of other small plants or perhaps burying a pocket mirror (standing in for a pond) to complete the storybook tableau.    

    As might be expected, our forays into the woods weren’t always as full of holiday cheer as we might have liked. One or the other of the kids would object, strongly, to the tree the others wanted and make a fuss until we gave in and conceded to choosing another; then the process would be repeated until everyone was in a foul temper, stamping around under the green canopy, crunching deeper and deeper into the woods to find the perfect one. Our inability to come to agreement may be the reason why we always chose an extra, little tree for the children’s teddy bears. I still tell myself each December that I am going to have a bear tree, but I usually don’t.

    White pines are delicate. Their branches get dragged down by even moderately heavy ornaments, and the finished, fully ornamented and lighted product is, depending on your point of view, either a tree some woodland fairies might dance around or one you would expect to see on the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Sometimes the children’s friends would laugh at the sight.

    One Christmastime in the ’70s we had cut our tree and gathered everything up and were heading home on a road that was still paved in dirt and devoid of houses when a friend, who was buying and selling real estate at the time, came along in his own vehicle in the other direction. We were satisfied with our haul and feeling pretty merry.

    Ev rolled down the window of his big, green International Travelall truck.  “What are you doing in our woods?” he shouted, knowing our friend would take it as a joke. The friend’s two-word response was a loud, “Whose woods?” This answer had the ring of a portent — funny because it was already kind of true, then — so imagine how it resounds now, in retrospect?

     We don’t own any wood lots anymore, or any house lots in Northwest either, unfortunately. But I must confess that in recent years, we have held onto the tradition by surreptitiously finding places on public property or roadside byways that have overcrowded stands of white pines, cutting one, and scurrying away, hearts pounding.

    Frankly, I can’t believe I am admitting this in print. But I hope that if any of you readers catch us in the act, you will be forgiving, and let us go, if only for sentimentality’s sake.

   I got the best present ever for Christmas this year. It came a little early but I already love it.

    It’s a brand new titanium knee, given to me by Dr. Eugene Krauss of the Krauss Center for Joint Replacement in Riverhead. He was the fifth orthopedic surgeon that I saw and the first to find that I had tibial plateau necrosis, a dead bone.

    For the two years since I had a meniscus repair surgery I pleaded for relief, the pain was so debilitating. It would always hurt more on Sunday nights and I would cry. And I’m not usually a crybaby. As tears ran down my cheeks, I would beg my husband to find me help. Besides getting me in to see all these doctors, the best he could do was keep the ice packs in rotation.

    Some days I couldn’t even walk on it, other days it wasn’t so bad, but I always had a limp. I told one doctor that I was broken and nobody would fix me. I was like a doll that was missing a limb and thrown to the bottom of the toy chest, along with Elmo, the Cookie Monster, old Barbie dolls, and broken Matchbox cars.

    The bone crumbled and fell into other parts of the knee before disintegrating. One doctor told me it was all in my head. Seriously? I walked in to his office with a cane. And, no rhyme intended, but I am somewhat vain. As a woman of a certain age, I’m fighting the aging thing on every level. The last thing I wanted people to see was me on a cane!

    There have been many things I’ve imagined: Santa Claus, the ghost of my mother, and the Boogeyman under my bed, but never would I self-willingly inflict pain upon myself. That’s no fun, and I never thought I was that powerful.

    I must say, though, that people are much nicer to you when you walk with a cane. I had doors opened and held for me, I was told to go to the head of the line at the pharmacy, and people moved out of my way, always casting me a look of sympathy.

    Another doctor giggled when my knee didn’t jump as my reflexes were checked with that tiny gadget that looks like a hammer used by elves in Santa’s workshop. The doctor said I had a dead knee, which I didn’t realize at the time is something that could actually happen to a person, and then she giggled. Looking back, I wonder why that doctor didn’t help me more, or at the very least contact my surgeon to say, “You know, I think she’s got something there.”

    I was told I had arthritis, edema, bursitis, and a severely bruised tibia, which was somewhat true — but it wasn’t bruised, it was dead, tongue hanging out of its cartilage dead, floppy dead, disintegrating dead, suffering a slow and painful death that was harder for me than it was for the bone.

    A top New York surgeon who operated on me for another meniscus tear in February told me in June when I returned to see him because the pain was so bad that I should just keep riding the stationary bike until my thighs quivered. He said the pain would eventually go away. At this point I’d like to see his head quiver until it went away. He took an X-ray and said the knee looked fine. But shouldn’t a doctor of his reputation know that a necrosis does not show up on an X-ray? Surf the Internet like the rest of us, Doc.

    My husband never lost faith that I would stage a comeback, even after I thought this was it, this would be my lot in life. The whole experience made me realize just how much he must love me. He did the grocery shopping, cooked all the meals, emptied the dishwasher when it was needed, and walked my dog, which was the job I missed the most. Instead of Mom always in the kitchen, the kids got used to seeing Dad bent over the stove and setting the dinner table.

    Finally, I called Dr. Krauss for an appointment that took over two months to get. He ordered an MRI of the area beneath my knee where I was having the worst pain, and lo and behold, he found the dead bone. Apparently my blood got lazy and stopped flowing to the area and it killed it. During my worst days I told my husband that I felt like I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee and it turns out I was walking around on a broken, crushed knee.

    I hope I’m not boring you with my knee story but to others who are suffering from chronic pain, I’d like to give you this gift: Don’t give up. There is a doctor out there who can help you. With my husband nudging me, I trudged to doctors in Southampton, Garden City, Manhattan, and, of course, East Hampton, before Dr. Krauss was recommended.

    And so, Santa, I’d like to say thank you. I’d also like to thank all the people in Montauk who have helped me through this in so many little ways over the last two and half years. I can say with confidence that I think I am now fixed. I might even tie a bright red Christmas bow around my leg on Tuesday.

    To the doctors who failed me miserably I say, Bah humbug to you. But to Dr. Krauss, who had compassion and looked a little deeper, I say thank you. And if I never visit a doctor’s office again Santa has delivered my Christmas wishes. And to my family I say, Mommy’s back. Now, get out of my kitchen!

   Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   “Peeloff the partisan war paint,” said President Barack Obama a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. The last thing we need is division when it is quite obvious that the opposite is required for the good of all and quite possibly is the point of all of the disasters of late.

    I never fit into the black and whiteness of the blue or red parties anyway. I guess I’m part of a purple political party. A patriotic peace activist, I support veterans and military spending, but prefer it be spent on servicemen and women’s salaries, so we don’t have enlisted families who earn so little they are eligible for welfare. At the same time, yes, I wish for the return of all troops, for the end of war, and for the National Guard to be here doing what it was created to do for our country.

    I have hippie-ish qualities such as a passion for socially responsible living, but I usually wear makeup and sometimes high heels while I am burning incense and sage. I also enjoy being barefoot on the beach listening to drumming with a hula hoop spinning around me, which does not make me a vegetarian, as was assumed recently. I love pigs and also bacon; I love deer and also quite a few hunters.

    I strongly believe in the separation of church and state, and religious freedom without taboos of unorganized practices such as Paganism, an earth-based religion that does not  worship Satan. I am in favor of the legalization of marijuana and feel that most pharmaceutical drugs should be illegal.

    I tried to wrap my head around the Sandy Hook massacre this week and here’s what I came up with: After an altercation at a school, a 20-year-old, mentally ill man was denied a rifle in Danbury, Conn., due to gun control laws that required a 14-day waiting period and background check. This did not stop him from having several guns in his possession and using them to kill 20 innocent children and 6 adults in that same school. Why then, is gun control the loudest discussion I hear?

    Yes, control over the hands an assault weapon lands in makes sense, but many laws already exist and are not enforced, or simply do not work for criminals who, by definition, do not usually obey the law or apply for a permit or license. In some communities, heightened gun control has led to more than a 30-percent increase in gun violence, as well as a rise in smuggling of cheap machine guns.

    I was a pre-kindergarten teacher in what seems like another life, and I cannot begin to imagine the horror of a gunman in a school. In another former career, I worked with those who had mental illness, among them a friendly man with pyromania who told me he felt like burning the building down. I have also known those who struggle with mental illness, and studied psychology as a concentration in college. This is the issue I would like to hear more about.

    With skyrocketing rates of suicide among both civilians and military members, stigmas need to be removed and resources found to identify and help those who desperately need it. Domestic incidents reported to the police and school psychologists are a great starting point. With some told by police that their mentally ill family member must be charged with a crime in order to receive “assistance,” it’s clear that programs and support for families are a necessity too.

    Obama Care should address mental well-being, especially personality disorders, which afflict about half of all psychiatric patients and are characterized by deviant social behavior, ineffective coping skills, extreme anxiety, distress, or depression, usually traced to childhood or early adulthood.

    It should be as easy to see a psychiatrist as it is to buy a gun. I have heard too many stories of suicidal people, including military members with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had to wait over a month for a visit.

    Law-abiding citizens who use guns responsibly shouldn’t suffer, but they should exercise common sense. First off and most important, keep them locked up, whether there are kids in the house or not.

    As for school security, the “American Legion Creed” preamble almost reads as a job description, and many other former military members of all ages would qualify and appreciate the job.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter for The Star.

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

    So, as I sat down at the computer on a quiet morning the day after Christmas, I came up blank. There was little noise in the house other than the breathing of our ancient pug, who was resting in the dog bed she reluctantly shares with our pet house-pig. The north wind of the night before had stopped; looking through the kitchen windows, even the smallest of winter’s bare branches were still. Our children were still asleep, tired from a long run the day before. Starting early with presents, then a brunch here, then a round of visiting that ended at nearly 11 p.m., it had been a good day.

   So I sat, thinking that I welcomed the near-total silence in the house. The year, and especially the month or two leading up to the day after Christmas, had been demanding. Summer had come and gone with its frenetic pace. And then, when I thought things were about to wind down, Hurricane Sandy upended normal routines. Against the tense backdrop of the presidential race, the war in Afghanistan and drone strikes in Pakistan continued to add to the lists of the dead, though Americans seemed increasingly immune to the news. Then came the Newtown, Conn., killings.

    This has been a year for reflection necessitated by events, but events that are difficult to process. The great annual reset that is the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day, could not come soon enough, as far as 2012 is concerned.

   I love winter here: The office phones ring less in January and February. The great and unrelenting river of e-mail narrows a bit. There is time for a walk on the beach, time to plan. There is time to be with our thoughts between distractions, and this I look forward to most of all.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

    A similar feeling of joy in the outdoors occurred on Christmas Day when we went to spend time with my son David and his family in the house on Gardiner’s Bay where he and my other children grew up. Being out in the wild landscape — and the blustering wind — of Napeague lifts my spirits and, this week, reinforced the daydream I indulge in that someday much of the sandy and exotic land that surrounds the house will become a park.

    Perhaps we all were meant to live in the outdoors. Or maybe it’s just that being outdoors reminds me, personally, of the well-being I felt as a child on my grandparents’ 108-acre farm in the Catskills or as a college student during the summers I was a counselor at a summer camp, where we slept in lean-tos or teepees or under the shelter of a covered wagon. In any case, when our house on Napeague was finished in 1963, I embraced the rare landscape that surrounded it. The house was not just isolated, it was, in fact, one of the only houses in sight and the only one on our empty road that was lived in year-round.

    These days there are plenty of houses along Cranberry Hole Road, but, as far as I am concerned, it is still one of eastern Long Island’s last great places.

    I have saved part of a column that Larry Penny, The Star’s nature columnist, wrote in these pages some time ago about why Napeague is to be treasured. I am not sure that those who make decisions about how the Town of East Hampton uses its community preservation fund think often about Napeague, or the part of it called Promised Land, but here is some of what Mr. Penny had to say:

    “The water table is only a few feet below, and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dune plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe in all of America.”

    Edible wild mushrooms and prickly pear cactus grow on Napeague. There are other rare plants, including lady slippers; cranberry bogs can be found off the road to the south, and wildlife, from toads to snakes to foxes. We have found huge old whale bones, over the years, in the dune craters between Cranberry Hole and Montauk Highway; it is easy to dig up arrowheads, too (although I won’t tell you where).

    If I could, I would gather botanists and zoologists, birders and expert environmentalists and ask them to draw a heavy line around the part of the landscape that remains, in Larry’s words, “very much intact” and, as Larry suggested, preserve it “for future centuries.”

   How can any of us go about our daily lives as if nothing had happened? We learn to look away from, if not entirely ignore, human suffering in other parts of the world, but it ought not to be possible to act inured to disaster closer to home.

    The incongruity of the tasks I have had in front of me this week with the conditions among thousands of others a scant 80 miles away, whose work has been put on hold or, perhaps more to the point, whose lives are at risk, is unnerving. Here on the East End, where no one lost all their possessions, where, with one tragic exception, almost no one suffered personal harm as a result of flooding or power failure, you might say that the rug was pulled out from under us, but only so far.

    My job at The Star since Hurricane Sandy has been, as always, to help get it out. I’ve also been editing our annual holiday supplement, which will be in the paper next week. As a result, I have been far removed from the devastation elsewhere, thinking about pleasant things: knitted scarves and socks, children’s books, tree ornaments, holiday music, for example. I also have been immersed in the minutiae that goes into the production of what is, to all extents and purposes, a magazine — not to mention a huge calendar of events that stretches from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.

    The columns I write, such as this, are usually about 400 or 500 words long. Imagine coping with a list of events that contains 3,764 words. (At least that’s how many words Microsoft Word tallied when I last looked.)

    Next week’s Star is the Thanksgiving edition, but many of us have been conscious of how much we on eastern Long Island have to be thankful for. Sandy gave us what almost amounted to a forgiving blow while it spent its fury to the west.

    This week, The Star, and its Web site, report on the phenomenal efforts being made by East Enders to help those in distress. Many have gone UpIsland to join in. The Sag Harbor Fire Department has donated an ambulance. East End Cares, a group recently organized in Montauk, has sent volunteers to the St. Francis de Sales neighborhood of the Rockaways.

    If, like me, your only way of trying to help is financial, let me suggest that you consider Paddlers for Humanity, another local organization, which is accepting donations for East End Cares. Its East Hampton address is P.O. Box 2555 and its Web site is p4h.org. 

   “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!