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.

   “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.

   Do you remember “The Piano,” a film starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, and a girl named Anna Paquin? Described by Jane Campion, the filmmaker, as a “Gothic exploration of the romantic impulse,” it was a hit at the first Hamptons International Film Festival in 1993, and, as they say, the rest is history. A part of that history is Ms. Paquin, 11 at the time, winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

    Enjoying, as I did then and have every year since, the opportunity to choose among many unusual movies, especially documentaries, and to see them more or less down the block, I am a HIFF fan.

    The festival that year was off to a smashing start, setting a pattern of screenings and seminars and, it may surprise you to know, enticing Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to the stage at Guild Hall to talk about movie-making and film pre­servation.

    From the beginning, the festival also made room for films with a local connection, including one starring a half-dozen local residents: Frank Borth, Ed Ecker, Hugh King, Cal Calhoun, and Tom and Katie Browngardt. The Star columnist Patsy Southgate said the film’s message was “that you have to know when to quit.” I wish they would rerun that one.

    The first year was not entirely without problems. The most serious was the resignation of Joyce Robinson, the sparkplug who started the festival with a few others, working from her East Hampton basement. The artistic director, Darryl Robinson, stepped in. There was some initial grumbling among residents that the East Hampton Town Board contributed $10,000 to the effort, but most people had a wait-and-see attitude about who and how many the festival would attract. As for The Star, we gave the festival a welcoming hoorah and an editorial titled “Break a Leg,” way back then, and we feel the same way today.

    The envelope of newspaper clippings in The Star’s archives about that first year is thick, as are annual files up to about 2006, when the digital era took over. We expect the entire Star to be digitized eventually, but the old files are still more fun to pick through.

    Among them are copies of Take One, a four-page sheet of reviews, profiles, and gossip that The Star published for four years, from 1997 to 2000. It allowed the staff to play Hollywood reporter for a few days. Each edition boasted a pen-and-ink drawing, or caricature, by the illustrator Van Howell. Looking back, my favorite is of Meryl Streep, who starred in “Music of the Heart,” the closing-night choice in 1999. (In preparation for the role of a woman teaching schoolchildren in East Harlem to play the violin, Ms. Streep took lessons and practiced four to six hours a day, or so Take One says.)

    My only problem with the festival in recent years has been that I can’t take off enough time to see as many films as I would like. No matter. Two of the remarkable films I saw this year, “Orchestra of Exiles,” about the founding of the Palestine Symphony as World War II was brewing, and “Koch,” with the longtime New York City mayor on hand to answer questions afterward, reminded me of why the festival means so much to many of us. 

   When it came time to take a photo following a recent interview with Patch’s Oliver Peterson, I struggled to fit around my neck the myriad press passes I’d accumulated over the years, along with the chain I once wore as Jacob Marley’s Ghost in a Christmas parade, and wondered at how ironic it would be were I to be strangled in the process.

    More likely even, I told him, was that I’d wind up buried under stacks of back issues (my ever-encroaching filing system) as in an Ionesco play, staring fixedly at my 1953 UNIVAC.

    “That was a bit embarrassing,” Paul Friese said, when I asked him if he’d seen the antique word processor in the background of the photo that Patch ran with my East Hampton High School Hall of Fame induction story. Oliver said he hadn’t seen such an ancient computer. Nor such an ancient sportswriter I’ll bet.

    But enough of mordant wit. It was great fun to read and to hear all the kind things people had to say on the occasion of my apotheosis. I won’t have to wait until my obituary for that then. My ears burned as Hughie King traced the foundation of my success to a total lack of ambition, and said he liked it that rather than use The Star as a springboard I had fallen for Bonac and the Bonackers.

    My greatest achievement, however, he said, was that when things got nasty, I could always turn my hearing aid off.

    At lunch at Citta Nuova, my daughter Emily said in a toast that I was so loved that “after he wrote a column claiming — falsely — that none of his daughters had helped him shovel snow from the driveway, I was lectured and shunned all night by the local athletes at Superica.”

   “I’ve tagged along to countless games and races with my dad over the years, events I really had no interest in — I just wanted to be near him.”

    “All the essential lessons of life I learned through the way he covered and talked about local sports,” she continued. “He roots for the underdog, he celebrates females as equals, he ignores celebrities, he loves all athletes regardless of skin color, he tries to find the best in people, he will do all he can to make you funnier than you are, he captures your best angle, he always gives to causes he believes in, he’s 72 years old and still takes tennis lessons, and, more than anything else, he has chosen a career that makes him happy.”

    “If I were still covering the town board,” I had said to the audience (most of whom I’d written about at one time or another) “they’d be tapping me on the shoulder now to say, ‘Jack, Jack, wake up . . . the meeting’s over.’ ”

    “But thanks to the infusion of exuberance and joy that I’ve always felt in covering sports here, it’s not, ‘Jack, Jack . . . it’s over,’ but ‘Play on! Play on!’ ”

    Recently I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Frank Tuma Jr., now 88 years old, at his home alongside the Montauk Downs golf course. We talked about Frank’s young years in Montauk and his varied life experiences.

    Frank’s dad, Frank Sr., first came to Montauk in 1919 with the Coast Guard. His mom, a Baker from “under the bridge” in East Hampton, was from a large family who helped to settle much of what is now Springs. Frank Jr.’s middle name, Nathaniel, comes from the Baker side of the family.

    Frank Jr. has lived in Montauk all his life, but was born in the Swedish Hospital in Brooklyn. He grew up in the old Montauk fishing village on Fort Pond Bay, near Belber’s restaurant and the original Bill’s Inn (since moved to Fort Pond and named ENE).

    Many of the Tuma family, including Frank’s cousins Bob and Burt, lived near the bay as boys. According to Frank, the old fishing village was divided into sections — there was the area past the Union News Dock where a few locals lived, the Portuguese section of the village, and the area where the French Canadians lived and built wooden fish boxes for the local fishing fleet. One can only imagine the rich blend of languages and cultures that surrounded young Frank in those days.

    Frank attended the Montauk School, at that time located in a one-room house near the Montauk Firehouse. He went on to East Hampton High School and enrolled in the same class as his future wife, Marion (they would meet more formally at Trail’s End in 1948, after Marion’s first husband had passed away). Frank’s younger sister Vivien, who would subsequently marry Carl Darenberg, was in the first class of the new Montauk School after it relocated to Upper Shepherd’s Neck.

    While in high school, Frank spent a lot of time on the water, as a mate for the charter captains Harry Conklin and Carl Erickson. Upon graduating from East Hampton High, Frank enrolled at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., but would not graduate from college until 1947 due to his military service.

    As with many men of his generation, Frank felt the pressures of World War II and enlisted in the Navy. He went to Officer Training School at Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., and graduated as a lieutenant at the head of his class of over 200 men. A large part of his actual service was sea duty in the Mediterranean, shuttling troops between Sicily and Marseilles. Frank recalled with a smile taking military leave along the beautiful French Riviera and hearing the heavy artillery of the U.S. Eighth Army engaging in battle at the front in nearby Monaco.

    As the action in Europe wound down, Frank’s ship was sent to Bayonne, N.J., to be outfitted for the Pacific, but then word came that the war was officially over. Frank went with the boat to Jacksonville, Fla., to have her decommissioned, but rather than re-enlisting he returned to Colgate to finish his courses and graduate.

    Upon returning to Montauk, Frank worked as a mate and swordfish lookout on boats sailing from the Montauk Yacht Club. Even today, there are pictures hanging on the wall of the yacht club showing a younger Frank and other anglers with swordfish, marlin, and tuna. Frank had obtained his captain’s license at a young age, and in the late 1940s his father helped him buy his first charter boat. He would subsequently build his own boat, the Gannet, and fish her until 1952.

    A large part of Frank’s reputation as a Montauk businessman came out of his employment with the Montauk Beach Company. Lindsay Hopkins, a major shareholder in the Beach Company, had directed the purchase of much of the Montauk Beach Development Company from the pioneer developer Carl Fisher. In Frank’s words, “the Beach Company in the ’50s was Montauk — there was no chamber of commerce before 1952, and people came to the Beach Company for everything from directions to parcels of land.”

    Carl Fisher had built the Montauk Manor, the yacht club, the Surf Club, and the Montauk golf course as enticements for getting people to go to Montauk and buy property there. Having taken over all of Fisher’s holdings, the Beach Company actively marketed large subdivisions from the Carl Fisher era. Frank was hired by Glen Kissel, a member of Beach Company management, and worked as a salesperson for the company until 1956.

    In the mid-1950s, Jerry Wouk bought the Beach Company and renamed it AllState Properties. AllState holdings at that time included the Montauk Manor, the Surf Club, the Montauk Yacht Club, and the Montauk Water Company. Though each entity had its own manager, Frank was appointed overseer of all four operations, a rather notable position. With the death of Frank’s dad in 1961, Frank was now responsible for four separate businesses, plus the family fishing charter business and bait and tackle store at Tuma’s Dock.

    In-season, Frank’s day would start at 3:30 a.m. at Tuma’s Dock, where he would book charters and oversee the store until his mom came in several hours later. Frank would then go home to change clothes and report for work at AllState by 9 a.m. Frank’s stature as a real estate salesman in Montauk was solidified by that time — he told me that when the Montauk Yacht Club was sold to Jerry Finkelstein in 1965, it was the only major Montauk deal that did not go through his hands.

    In 1966, the Israel Discount Bank, run by Mort Hyman, bought AllState Properties from Jerry Wouk. Under Hyman’s guidance, the Circle in the center of town was sold to Suffolk County, and the Montauk Village Association was deeded much of the underwater land in Fort Pond and Kirk Park. Shortly thereafter, the Montauk Downs golf course was sold to New York State.

    Several years earlier, Frank had sold the land now occupied by the Montauk Airport to Perry Duryea Jr. In a much larger transaction, all the land from Third House through the Indian Fields, and all the way to Shagwong Point — over 1,000 acres — was sold to the county for $750,000. In retrospect, it is clear that Frank Tuma Jr. played a large part in defining much of what is present-day Montauk.

    By the late 1990s, much of what had been Beach Company property had been sold, and Frank left the firm in 2001. He would then open the Tuma Agency on Main Street in Montauk to trade in real estate, having sold Tuma’s Dock to another party in the early 1990s.

    Frank recalled with pleasure the many trips he took with both my grandfather and my father to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He always asks me how the hunting was after a trip I take now, and sometimes when I return I bring Frank and Marion a fresh-killed goose, already cooked.

    I could not help but be impressed by Frank’s grasp of Montauk history and his close relationship with nature and the sea. He said his mom was one of the first postmistresses ever to serve in the U.S. Postal Service, and she worked in the Montauk Post Office for over two years.

    In another anecdote, he said that every year that he can remember, Montauk has always had a big storm around or shortly after Labor Day weekend. That observation made me a bit uncomfortable, but I’ll bet he’s right. He remembered walking down the street from high school in East Hampton during the 1938 Hurricane and seeing huge trees strewn around the sidewalks.

    As we wound down our conversation, I asked Frank what he thought of all the changes in Montauk, the influx of new people and new ideas. “Time goes on,” he said, “and progress is inevitable — but I don’t have to like it.” That’s a forthright and honest statement from someone who has done a lot and seen a lot in his lifetime here.

______________

    Perry Duryea III runs the Perry B. Duryea and Son wholesale seafood business and restaurant in Montauk.

   How do you write a column when a bad hurricane is on its way . . . and your power is likely to go off before deadline time? You could try to write about something else, something light and humorous. (For instance, I’ve been planning to get a column out of my husband’s odd fascination with casseroles, and how he made one of his own creation that was so massive we had to freeze quarts of leftovers.) But with the tension in the air, and the gravity of what could possibly happen, such thoughts get blown away with the wind.

    And so I decided to write about hurricanes past.

    I remember my first. The year was 1960, and the hurricane was named Donna. I’m sure we must have driven out to have a look at what was happening on the ocean beaches as the storm approached, but what has stuck with me all these years is the sense of excitement, the adrenaline rush, as we stood at the head of Three Mile Harbor being battered by the wind.

    I remember Gloria, in 1985, when we were without power for 13 days, and had to read by oil-lamp light. Being without power was — as I remember it, anyway — actually a lot of fun, like traveling back in time.

    I also remember the only hurricane — before Sandy — that scared us enough that the family evacuated from the house on Gardiner’s Bay. The year was 1976, and it was Hurricane Belle. Ev and I, our three kids, and our dog were invited, along with other friends, to join the Morrises in the big house at the corner of Buell Lane and Main Street in the village. Like this week, we were concerned about the projected storm surge and flooding.

    In those years, the 1970s, our house on Gardiner’s Bay was many yards farther from the shore, behind the protection of more dunes, and higher dunes, than remain as we go to press. Part of the reason we thought it safe to put the house there was that old-timers had told us the area had not flooded in 1938. (Unlike much of Napeague, just to the east, which went underwater.)

    Fortunately, Hurricane Belle weakened by the time it hit Long Island, passing over Jones Beach. The kids roasted marshmallows in the fireplace and a swell time was had by all. Still, the winds were strong enough to bring a large limb down onto the roof of the house we’d evacuated to; it fell on top of the room where we had gone to sleep. We all thought it was pretty funny that, as it turned out — because of all the trees in town, and the lack of trees in Promised Land — we had inadvertently put ourselves in harm’s way.

    In those days I drove a big Cadillac with a white hard top and an odd, beige-ish body color. (It was never my style, but I chose it because I thought it might afford a measure of safety for the weekly trips I used to make in and out of the city.) In the midst of Hurricane Belle, my Caddie, which a friend called the Brown Cloud, was elected to drive to East Hampton Town Hall on some errand or other. I don’t remember any feeling of exhilaration that time.

    Now, we wait for Sandy. The generations who live now in the house on Gardiner’s Bay have gone for the duration to a house in the woods. Here on Edwards Lane, in the village, I hope I am benefiting from experience, having stocked up and heeded all the tips about how to survive without power. My son Dan and I waited patiently on line at the supermarket, hardware store, gas station, and bank. In fact, it was almost as if civility — so obviously lacking in our day-to-day rush, push, and hustle, in recent decades — had returned to town.

    The mood of those on line at the ATM I went to was actually jolly. “Mayor Bloomberg said to get cash,” a man said, adding a crack about Mayor Bloomberg being de facto mayor of East Hampton, too.

    “But there’s nothing to worry about,” he assured those of us behind him in the line. “My mother’s down on the beach right now giving the storm a hex.”

   Memories are embers that fade to ash if not tended. Last weekend I brought my father’s ashes to a cemetery south of Syracuse to reside beside my mother. It was his wish. The Ondondaga Valley Cemetery was cloaked in a gossamer fog pierced by the yellow tops of turning trees. Tall pines spread their bows evergreen above the stones.

    Dad’s ashes were contained in a cardboard urn, the cardboard to match his Yankee frugality. I carried the box inside a canvas duffle bag, a tan color with the words “Lt. R.M. Drumm” stenciled upon it. I found the bag in the attic with his green dress Marine Corps uniform that would still have fit his 98-year-old frame.

    We drove through Nedrow past what had been my mother’s family’s apple orchards, through Lafayette, and past the Onondaga Indian Reservation near the fields and wooded hills where Dad and I hunted rabbits and partridge in deep snow with shotguns, the nose of Bucky, our German shorthair pointer, leading the way. When dad played lacrosse for Syracuse University in 1936, a number of his teammates were Onondagas. I have a stick made for him by a member of the tribe, a man named Gibson.

    We hunted in winter, in deep snow, from early morning until late in the afternoon, warmed by our trudging and by the heat of the rabbits against our backs in the pouches of our game jackets, the heat slowly ebbing. Dad’s amazing accuracy, the smell of gunpowder in the cold air, Bucky so spent by day’s end we had to lift him into the car.

    Dad was an artillery officer assigned to protect a fighter squadron in the Marshall Islands during the war. He taught me the most difficult targets were the long ones flying straight away. He knew the trigonometry of it. I always wondered if it explained how he was hell on partridge and pheasant.

    In the weeks before he died one year ago tomorrow, his short-range memories lapsed as thought they didn’t matter. At the same time, he could name every kid in his high school class at the Valley Academy, the long ones flying away.

    My father always thought of himself as a soldier-poet, and he was. He wrote plays and poems. Art Buchwald was in his Marine Corps unit and the two of them created a newspaper, a mimeographed newsletter really, while on the island of Eniwetok during the war. They maintained a correspondence until Buchwald died in 2007.

    About a week before he died in his sleep, he began reciting from memory stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Day is Done”:

“A feeling of sadness and longing,

That is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles the rain.”

Come read me some poem,

Some simple and hearfelt lay,

That shall soothe this restless feeling,

And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,

Not from the bards sublime,

Whose distant footsteps echo

Through the corridors of Time . . . .

Read from some humbler poet

Whose songs gushed from his heart

As showers from the clouds of summer

Or tears from eyelids start. . . .

And the night shall be filled with music,

And the cares, that infest the day,

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away.”

    I read the poem in its entirety and placed in on the cardboard box in his grave. A handful of dirt. Embers to ashes.

Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   Could the great income inequality in this country have caused the Great Recession?

    Apparently, recent economic studies are advancing this idea, to wit, that squeezed middle-class earners, beginning in the 1970s, increasingly borrowed to keep afloat, betting chiefly (and wrongly, as it turned out) that the value of their heavily mortgaged homes would forever rise.

    Advanced economies at the time were experiencing sluggish growth, which, the studies say, led to lax regulatory oversight and to a concomitant financial sector bubble “caused by banks overdosing on risky loans.”

    So, rather than being a mere side effect accompanying growth, steep income inequality may actually play a role in stunting it, these studies say.

    “When a handful of yachts become ocean liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss,” the International Monetary Fund’s study said, adding that “the earnings of the top 1 percent took a knock during the recession, but have bounced back. In contrast, the average working family’s income has continued to decline through the anemic recovery.”

    If the above theorizing turns out to be true, then we should, rather than cutting taxes across the board and slashing spending, as Romney and Ryan would have it — more of the same ol’ laissez-faire — change course, and rather than further outfit the ocean liners with more and more amenities, seal the legions of leaky canoes by taxing at the top, eliminating tax loopholes for the mega-rich, and spending on job creation.

    An article in the New York Review of Books this summer that looked into the reasons why some countries were rich and some were poor, said at one point, “The most important factor behind their [rich countries’] emergence is the historical duration of centralized government.”

    That’s centralized, not de-centralized.

   The Obama administration has primed the pump to some degree, though, to my mind, not enough. As far as I can tell — though it’s hard because they never give any details — Romney and Ryan’s policies would be a bust, at least when it comes to recaulking and lifting the myriad boats that are sinking.

    And remember, as Mark Shields said not long ago, this country has never elected a president with a Swiss bank account.

   A child’s bucket, full to the top, of mantis shrimp sits in the office refrigerator. I picked them up on the beach early Tuesday, just after sunrise, before the gulls could get to them.

    There was a lobster, too, that I considered taking, but it was nearly snapped in two by the waves Hurricane Sandy pushed up, and it had already begun to smell. The mantis shrimp are destined for a cooking pot, provided I can get the sand off them.

    Oddly, until the bad winter storm of Dec. 26 and 27, 2010, I had not known that mantis shrimp existed in these parts. I had read about them and their remarkable snapping ability. After that storm, I found a couple of them dead along the beach; on Tuesday, the wrack line was strewn with them. I could have picked up hundreds.

    Several species of mantis shrimp — though not the ones we have here, apparently — have club-like claws they use to stun prey. Researchers have become interested in the appendages’ composition and structure, wondering whether what gives them remarkable strength could be useful breakthroughs in military or industrial applications.

    It is lucky that the Star office is in a part of town where we are among the very few on Long Island with electricity. This means that I can keep the rare haul fresh and presumably edible until we can have them for dinner.

    There is a range of interest in our family where shrimp is concerned. My wife, Lisa, is allergic to them; the 11-year-old loves them; the 8-year-old will eat a few, and Ellis, who is 2 and a half, spit them out the few times he tried them.

    Preparation, from what I saw on the Internet, is basic. You just throw them in a pot or on the barbecue for about five minutes, peel them, and eat with soy sauce. As the frenetic pace of post-storm reporting and activity subsides, I hope to find a moment to get them on the table. We’ll see what the family says — that is, if I can get rid of the sand.