Delis here, those that had power, were awash up to their hipboots in a flood tide of humanity the morning after Hurricane Sandy blew through. I told Artie Seekamp, of Brent’s, that he and his employees should get a prize — Bill Hall and One-Stop’s staff too — for having withstood the historic storm surge of egg sandwich orders.

    Springs, where I live, got off relatively lightly, yet we’ll probably, if history serves as a guide, be the last to have power restored. First in school taxes, last on LIPA’s repair list. That’s just the way it is.

    Dire things had been predicted — and dire things happened, elsewhere — though when I looked up from our bed at the sky at around 11 that night, when we were told the winds would be peaking at 90 miles per hour, the trees were utterly still.

    “This wasn’t a wind event — it was a water event,” Frank Ackley said to me at One-Stop Wednesday morning. “There wasn’t any wind. Now Gloria [1985], that was a hurricane, not this. . . . Maybe I’ll go down to Atlantic City, which will probably have power before us, and stay in a hotel with lights and hot water.”

    This he said after I’d relayed a published report that power might not be restored here for two weeks.

    Whereupon I went out to my car, only to find, on turning the key, that it had no power either.

    Leaving my dog, Henry, in the back seat, I walked up the hill behind One-Stop to Rick Holub’s body shop, where Rick and his assistant, Jimmy, were most helpful. A subsequent battery jump with no positive result led to talk of a tow. But first I had to get my garbage to the dump and Henry, who’s 13, home, about a mile and a half distant.

    Ben Hall, who was on his way to the village,  took me and my garbage to the dump, and after he’d dropped me off on Springs-Fireplace, I hitched a ride home in a car in which Danny Barros, an East Hampton High School football player I’ve written about, was a passenger.

    I’d hoped to hop in our other car on my arrival so that I could fetch Henry, but couldn’t find the keys. They were with my wife, who was babysitting our 3-year-old granddaughter while her parents were putting out this week’s issue of The Sag Harbor Express.

    I went next door, to a house that over the past several months has been wonderfully redone, a restorative effort that has lifted our boat, as it were, in paradigmatic capitalist fashion. There, Jorge, who had come to put some final touches on, but could not because there was no power, readily agreed to take me back to One-Stop, where he, a mechanic to boot, said, after assessing the situation, that the problem might lie with the ignition switch. He then took me and Henry back to my house, where I sat down to write this, Henry, on his bed in the kitchen, by my side.

    All by way of saying that while our power has yet to be restored, my faith in humanity, given the above exemplary examples, has been.

   For the kids, our six-day family evacuation to the grandparents’ house off Sag Harbor Road was an adventure. For me and my wife, Lisa, it was a chore. For our three dogs, it was deeply unsettling. The pig was indifferent.

    Our house is home to three dogs over my objections: an aged pug with only three legs, a mixed-breed long-haired lap dog, and a Lab-mix rescue with a black tongue and a skittish disposition. On Sunday, accurately anticipating a power outage, we decamped for higher ground. Lisa loaded the kids and the pig into her Chevy; I took the dogs and a couple of bags of food.

    My in-laws’ house, up a cul-de-sac in the woods, is one of those classic, light-filled East Hampton weekend places that has become a year-round residence. It has a beachy feel — all white-covered couches and pastel touches — not the kind of place a menagerie plus three kids can be left to run unsupervised.

    At least we had a place to go. As the extent of Hurricane Sandy’s effect on the coast became clear, our hearts went out to those left without a warm place to sleep, their clothing, or much else. A group of people from here who went to help in Breezy Point on Tuesday reported scenes of devastation, with little to no help from government at any level.

    As all this went on only a few tens of miles UpIsland, our little family of animals and people chugged ahead with life only mildly inconvenienced. We were lucky, of course, even if the dogs attempted to make a break for it to flee for home any chance they got.

    The pig deserves his own commendation for not giving a hoot about any of it. Leo is his name, and, again, over my objections, he joined the Cranberry Hole Road Rattrays in August. Supposedly, this high-priced porker will stay relatively small; I’ll believe it when I see it. For now, Leo’s feet barely touch the ground; he’s swept along in my older daughter or wife’s arms. And the food he gets — fresh chopped baby spinach, Milk Pail apples, oats, yogurt, diced grapes, nuggets of bananas — is healthier and tastier than the takeout I’ve been eating. Other than complaining when he was sent outside with the dogs to do his business in the swirling wind, he was a fine camper.

    With power out for less than 24 hours at our temporary quarters and no school, the kids were pleased to loll around watching TV or playing with their various electronic devices. After six days, the electricity returned to Cranberry Hole, and we, fatigued, finally went home, after cleaning up the in-laws’ as best we could.

    The dogs were ecstatic. The kids were relieved. And the pig? He just wanted his dinner.

   Halloween will be celebrated on Saturday in Belmar, N.J. I suppose the Belmar kids will have a good time, regardless — better late than never, when it comes to kids and their candy. But it’s hard to imagine the grownups really putting their hearts into caramel apples or ghost lollipops, after all the losses suffered there.

   Hurricane Sandy hit some people hard here on the East End, too, and it damaged a number of properties severely, but all we need do to grasp how lucky we are is to look UpIsland. I’ve never been to Long Beach or Breezy Point, but these Long Island communities are frightening examples of just how terrible a storm can be. We have been expecting the Big One for decades — The Star has never stopped beating the drum about hurricane preparedness — and it finally arrived, only this time the South Fork did not bear the brunt. There but for the grace of God. . .

   My family spent some time in the beach-and-boardwalk town of Belmar, during a couple of summers when I was small. Newark, also slammed, is across the river from Bayonne, my hometown. Staten Island, which is across the Kill van Kull from Bayonne, is where my high school friends and I used to hike. Bayonne, a backwater of sorts, was still in an official state of emergency six days after Sandy, and, in the Silver Lake section of Belmar, the streets were still flooded.

    By the time you read this, most of these coastal communities will have started receiving contributions of food and clothing, and those who lost their homes will, for the most part, have at least a temporary roof of some sort over their head. Meanwhile, volunteers have pitched in to clean up debris, to check on the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, to pump out water from basements. Social media is fueling this new kind of disaster relief: the self-organized, spontaneous coming together of strangers.

    (Those of us who want to help from afar have been sending cash. It is easy, these days, to donate. You can even send money by text. Among the familiar working with the displaced are: Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, United Way, Catholic Charities, and the Jewish Federations of North America. Others, closer to the ground, are the Community Food Bank of New Jersey and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.)

    No one knew on Tuesday what effect the ravages of the storm would have on the election, but early reports were that voting was heavy along the Jersey Shore and in other metropolitan areas where the damage was extreme, and where temporary polling places had been established amid confusion.

    CBS News reported that the first voter to arrive at a polling place in Little Ferry, N.J., got there 13 minutes before the polls opened. The storm had claimed his apartment and car, even though Little Ferry is not on the shore, but when asked why he was there so early, he said, “It’s important because it’s our day. No matter what happens — hurricanes, tornados — it’s our day to vote.”

   I met Elton John once. He had come to Quad Studios to play on a session for Mary J. Blige’s 1999 album, “Mary.”

    The song “Deep Inside” is essentially the two-chord riff of Elton’s “Bennie and the Jets,” with Ms. Blige singing/rapping over it. In the penthouse studio high above Seventh Avenue, he recorded a piano overdub, playing hot licks from the “Bennie” riff with one hand as he adjusted the headphones that kept slipping off with the other.

    I’m not really a fan of hip-hop or contemporary R&B, but I had to admit, it was pretty cool. Ms. Blige is a fantastic singer, and she was very nice. I was grateful for the experience.

    But it also made me depressed. Here was yet another classic song remade with cheesy, synthesized drums and bass, and various additional keyboard-generated noises thrown into the mix.

    By that point in pop-music history, the actual had fully, finally given way to the virtual. The capture of natural sound waves — the thump of a bass drum, the crackle of a snare, the vibration of a stringed instrument, even an electric guitar’s amplifier — was out; recording was now characterized almost entirely by digitized samples and ersatz emulations of every imaginable sound.

    Today, a virtual orchestra can reside within a personal computer, the vocal tracks on almost every hit song have been manipulated by pitch-correcting software, and popular music is marked by unfeeling, unchanging loops and sterile samples.

    That session also got me wistful about long-ago Thanksgivings. Every year when I was a child, my family would drive from Montauk to my aunt and uncle’s house in Calverton, where my uncle was the pastor at Baiting Hollow Congregational Church.

    The church had an adjacent building used for Sunday school and other activities. Inside was a huge, open room, boomy with long reverberations, and in one corner stood an old jukebox. There, in the lull between Thanksgiving dinner and dessert, my brother and I would explore its many offerings, over and over.

    All the little 45-rpm records stood vertically in a rack. By punching the right buttons, a mechanical arm grabbed the selected disc and lowered it onto the turntable. The needle dropped and glided through the groove, sound pouring forth from the big mono speaker, and lifted when it reached the end. The arm lifted the platter and put it back into its slot, and then moved on to the next selection. It was mesmerizing to watch.

    Today, I can remember just one song from that old jukebox, though I must have played all of them. It was Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” from the album of the same name (which also featured “Bennie and the Jets”). A reference, of course, to “The Wizard of Oz,” the lyrics of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” suggest a rejection of opulence and yearning for a return to simplicity.

    The plaintive falsetto wail leapt from the scratchy vinyl disc: “You can’t plant me in your penthouse/I’m going back to my plough.”

    I still get goose bumps at the memory, kneeling in rapt attention in front of that big old jukebox as the beautiful sounds filled the huge, empty room. But that was a long time ago.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for 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.

   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.

   “Did you see ‘Trouble With the Curve?’ ” I asked the nurse following my hernia operation at Southampton Hospital.

    When she said she hadn’t, I said, “Well you wouldn’t quite get it, but the scene at the urinal, during which Clint Eastwood remonstrates with his reluctant-to-pee penis, was as nothing compared to what I’ve been going through.”

    Initially, they said on the recovery floor I wouldn’t be able to go before I went. “Because they wanted to know that all systems were ‘go,’ ” an inquiring cousin from Pittsburgh was to say later during a phone conversation I’d engaged in after first saying “hello” into the TV remote and getting no response.

    “It was as reluctant as Romney when asked if he’d make his tax returns public,” I told Penelope.

    Standing there in the hospital, I had visualized all sorts of things: I was at the Augean Stables urinal at the Yale Bowl alongside hundreds of others in 1960, unselfconscious beer drinkers all; I was in the Yankees’ locker room during game five with the Orioles and Joe Girardi’s piped-in voice was saying it was my turn next at bat; I was listening to Durell Godfrey, who had said, with a self-satisfied grin, the day before the operation, “Did they tell you about the catheter. . . .”

    Another nurse said I was putting a lot of pressure on myself with all of the above, and that I should simply relax and deploy it.

    Finally, my doctor made the decision five or six hours after the procedure that I could go with or without the flow. He told me there had been three holes. I had been patched up like an inner tube, and since I was riding high on Marcaine, I took with equanimity his diktat that there’d be no tennis for me till Thanksgiving.

    I hadn’t even known I had an umbilical hernia in addition to the others when I went to the doctor’s office, I told my cousin, who replied that she had been similarly surprised years ago by a bulge while showering the morning after she and the other bridesmaids had wrestled down the bride’s girdle on her wedding night.

   There is still a surfcasting rod in the back of my truck, despite a sense, widely shared, that the striped bass fall run is fizzling out.

    Mike Solomon, an artist I know who fishes nearly every day, says that despite his best efforts nothing has been going on on the beaches for him. The last decent fish I know about from up this way showed up on Oct. 11 when John Musnicki caught a 36-inch bass in East Hampton. Montauk has been slow, with a couple of exceptions, since before Columbus Day. You hardly see gulls along the shore, the picking has been so slim.

    The lack of fish is not entirely unanticipated. Even though surfcasters here enjoyed good years in 2009 and 2010, there were warnings. For several seasons, regulators have noticed dips in the number of young bass in Chesapeake Bay. But the sudden differences between one fall and the next seem more about the vagaries of bait and water temperature than anything else.

    Just the other day, I was sitting in my truck at the beach just looking at the water when Larry Cantwell pulled up, looked at the fishing gear unused in the back, and laughed. That’s what you do when you’ve got the bug, but the bass just aren’t around. You can see it in the postures of would-be surfcasters, who sit slumped at the steering wheel, peering out to sea. Others stand on the sand talking, trading ideas about what the bass might take a swipe at if they come past. 

    Out at Montauk Point the other morning, the usual October crowd in the lower parking lot, where the campers are parked in rows when the fishing is good, wasn’t there. A few people on the beach cast listlessly or dozed on the rocks.

    It’s times like these, Harvey Bennett, who runs the Amagansett Tackle Shop, says, that customers start coming in and asking about clam rakes.