Our electric coffee grinder started giving off blue smoke and sparks on Tuesday morning, putting a punctuation mark on what was shaping up to be a difficult week. A friend in Seattle came to the end of his relatively short road, taken by prostate cancer, then came the death of David Hernandez.

    David, a student at East Hampton High School, apparently committed suicide late Friday or Saturday at home. Word spread quickly that he had been the subject of harassment for being different, perhaps gay. Current and former students at East Hampton High School remembered their own experiences with bullying and insults. Some said that was the reason for David’s decision, which, not knowing any details, seemed plausible enough to me.

    Public high school can be hell no matter where it is. I remember well my East Hampton High School years and the abuses we dealt to the handful of fellow students we suspected were gay. And I remember vividly how if you stooped in the hallway to pick up a dropped coin, some kid would notice and shout out something like, “Look at the Jew!”

    It was stupid and adolescent, and no one did anything about it. This was a long time ago, but I doubt much has really changed. Changing attitudes among abusers is difficult; it’s far easier, then as now, to just look the other way.

    Every now and then I run into a man who was the subject of taunting when we were classmates at East Hampton. He seems well, but I cannot come away from these of guilt and regret. Why had we insulted him that way? What did my friends and I gain from it? Who knows. We were not bad kids, I suppose. Or were we?

    Amid this, a relative was suddenly unable to walk, apparently from Lyme disease, and needed a wheelchair to help get her to Southampton Hospital. One of the few positive moments in this sequence of events was how simple it was to borrow a wheelchair. All it took was a single phone call to the East Hampton Town Human Services Department. Yes, there was a wheelchair available at the Senior Citizens Center, and yes, I could come get it. And so I did.

    Small-town life does have its little rewards at times, if it also does not always allow you to forget about your past.

   Standing impatiently on a line that snakes toward a check-in counter or security area at an airport, you have no doubt seen people like us: one passenger in a wheelchair; one traveling companion trotting alongside, like a dog chasing a car; and one airport employee pushing that wheelchair — unhooking the cordons and sweeping his or her charges ahead of everyone who waits.

    My husband, Chris, was the one being wheeled to the front of the line on a recent trip, and I was the spouse briskly keeping up. The distances you have to travel between check-in and gate can be quite a workout, and he has difficulty walking much more than a couple of blocks. I noticed a few dirty looks thrown in our direction.

    Under normal circumstances, the trip from Nova Scotia to New York City is a simple, nonstop flight of just over an hour. But our return from Canada two weeks ago turned into a weekend-long marathon. By the end of it, we were very grateful for the wheelchair service, believe me.

    Impenetrable fog had settled over Halifax. Our Saturday afternoon flight was delayed, then delayed again, then finally, that evening, it was canceled. After a long day of hanging around, we made our way to an airport “inn” and to bed somewhat disgruntled. (Most carriers don’t pay for overnight accommodations when they are necessitated by bad weather.) We had to get up at 3:30 a.m. to make the alternate flight, which would take us to New York via Toronto, where we would change planes.

    Chris tends to be singled out for a pat-down, as well as an X-ray, at security checkpoints because he has metal replacement parts in his body that set off alarms. This had happened at La Guardia at the start of our trip, and it happened again on the way home, when — after the short night in the so-called “inn” — we got back to the Halifax airport long before dawn.

    Did you know that in some Canadian airports, you are processed through American customs before you even board the plane bound for the United States? And so we drowsily cleared U.S. customs, then flew to Toronto, where we had to deplane, pick up our baggage at a carousel, and then trundle it and ourselves through security again (yes, for the third time within 24 hours), and through American customs a second time.

    Without the wheelchair, without an extremely accommodating gentleman from Dubai who was pushing it — practically running to get us to the gate on time — and without the conveyor belts that allowed me to keep up with them, we wouldn’t have made the flight from Toronto to La Guardia.

    A friend recently told me about one of her older relatives, who asks for a wheelchair and enjoys special treatment at airports even though she doesn’t really need one. There would be some comedy in this, if it were being done by, say, Phyllis Diller in a 1960s comedy, but in the real world, it is a little much. (And I hope no one gets the idea from reading this.)

    Pretending to need a wheelchair is pretty far down on the scale of ethical behavior; a bit lower, I’d say, than parking in a space reserved for the handicapped if you are able-bodied. At least the parking-spot snatcher runs the risk of getting caught, and getting a ticket as a sort of karmic comeuppance. I can’t imagine many people having the chutzpah to pretend to need a wheelchair, weathering the slightly embarrassing fuss and attention, just for the benefit of cutting the line.

    All of which is to say: Next time your patience is tried by the sight of someone — and their companion — whizzing blithely past at the airport, you can probably safely assume they’d rather be mobile enough to wait and walk like everyone else. Save the dirty looks for the passengers who hog three or four seats when they lie down for a snooze in the lounge.

    Of course, sometimes age does come with a few perks worthy of envy. At La Guardia, we learned that those who had been born before 1937 — on the date of travel — didn’t have to take off their shoes before passing through the metal detector.

    So there!

   Since I’m not really in the fashion game, I’m just going to put this out there. This fall’s fashion, designed mostly by men, is horrible. I believe there is a conspiracy theory to take us back to the days of women’s suffrage and the deposition of the petticoats from 1776.

    The top fashion magazines are all featuring layouts from the top clothing designers that they seem to revere. Why else would they suggest we wear such ridiculous outfits? One advertisement that features a group of women sitting on a train is downright scary. They all wear blank expressions, except for the one with big, googly sunglasses, and tall, really tall, floppy fur hats that look as if many animals were injured in the making.

    They look like a crew of clones traveling to have their organs removed for their originals. If I were to happen upon that train in my jeans and floppy cardigan I would not walk, I would run, scared for my kidneys.

    Another ad features women who look as if they have spent the last 10 years underground, dead and buried. They are pale, with big dark circles under their heroin-laced eyes, and blood-red lips. They are propped against each other to prevent slump, wearing fancy clothes and really big handbags, presumably to cover their embalmed bodies. Oh yeah, that’s exactly what we women want to look like.

    And what’s with the big boxy coats this year? They make even the starving supermodels look fat, so can you imagine what they would do for us real gals? Yes, Mr. Designer, we look fat in those coats, all of us!

    Shoes are no better. One ad suggests that we all need to buy bigger and better shoes for winter, black oxfords with pilgrim buckles that make the slimmest of legs look chunky. The shoes are similar to the ones the nuns wore in parochial school when they still believed they could torture us. The heels are a bit higher than the nuns used to wear, which is a good thing, or I might have been scarred with a heel print on my forehead, or on my arse, as my Scottish grandmother used to say.

    Let’s face it, the fashion editors are scared of losing the revenue the fashion designers bring to the magazine, so they proclaim how wonderful and functional the fall fashions are. It’s just hard to believe they would betray their readers and allow us to even consider wearing these outfits outdoors, in public!

    The only designers I would even consider buying are Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren (but not the horsey stuff, which, really, Ralph, is not realistic; not all of us, not even most of us, are horse people, hanging out at the best of stables on a Sunday afternoon), and Donna Karan. The three of them live out here and are obviously inspired by their environment — and us real people.

    It’s baffling to me that most of the top-name designers are men. And why do they want us dead and buried, wearing really silly clothes? Do they miss their grandmas and are trying to recreate their look? Are they purposely trying to humiliate us? I miss my grandmothers too but that doesn’t mean I will ever dress like them. All I need to remind me of Nana Haulty and Nana Foster is a butterscotch candy melting in my mouth.

    Let’s not allow this, ladies. We’ve come a long way, baby, and I don’t think any of us wants us to go back to silly hats, heavy wool coats, and below-the-knee skirts, without even a side slit.

Janis Hewitt is a senior reporter, covering Montauk, for The Star.

   I changed my voice mail message this morning, announcing my return from “cloud nine” and my intent to attend once again to all things sporting.

    When Debbie Salmon asked on my penultimate blissful day where I’d gone on my two-week vacation, I said, “Here.”

    “Ah,” she said, “you took a staycation.”

    I had, and a wonderful one it was. As usual, I had worried how the paper would get along without me, and whether I’d be able, being so close at hand, to keep the steering wheel from turning up The Star’s driveway. I did have a couple of urges, but sat down and held on until they passed.

    A lot of my time I spent in the 15th century, having set myself the task of getting through the plays Shakespeare (with some help from his friends in some cases perhaps) wrote about the War of the Roses, and, aside from the mellifluous language, found the pickings rather slim, though Joan of Arc did say something in Act 3 of “Henry VI, Part 1” that proved helpful to Mary on her way to say a final farewell to her much-loved aunt: “Care is no cure, but rather corrosive / For things that are not to be remedied.”

    Aunt Peggy’s death two days later got me to wondering, as I thought about her — a live wire if there ever was one — and Mary and her cousin Tom and his wife, where in Emily Dickinson’s poems was the invocation having to do with the birds and the butterflies and the bees. I found it when I returned this morning:

    “In the name of the Bee —

    And of the Butterfly —

    And of the Breeze — Amen!”

    And of Aunt Peggy too.

    Often I went with Henry to Louse Point at the end of the day and hit him tennis balls to fetch in the channel there. Old now and hardly able to climb the stairs at the office, he’s a teenager in the water, when he swims toward me in the golden path of the setting sun.

    I paid attention to the birds too, as Mary would have done, and took my sweet time in the outdoor shower.

    Her mother, a Stoic, on one of my visits said no one should be allowed to live past 85, and we laughed at that. “But first I have to read all of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Greek myths,” I said, “which will pretty much bring me full circle.”

    She’s a parasite of the state too — at least that’s what I said after I’d learned she paid no federal income tax. I still loved her, I said, “even though I know you’re laughing all the way to the bank on the third of every month as my shoulder’s to the wheel.”

    That wheel has been at rest lately, though now it’s begun to turn again, and pretty much on its own.

   People don’t throw things along the side of the road the way they used to. This is a good thing; nobody really likes to look at litter.

    That wasn’t quite the case when I was a kid growing up on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett. In those days, my cousin Cleo, who lived just down the road a piece, and I would walk the grassy margins hunting for discarded matchbook covers.

    We thought ourselves collectors of the highest order. We would carefully unfold each matchbook, removing the single staple that held it together and throwing away the double cardboard butt where the matches themselves had once been anchored.

    This came to mind Sunday when my wife, Lisa, and I decided to get at the papers and various and sundry items that had fallen, or been placed, behind a tall kitchen hutch. Working on the opposite side, Lisa called, “Do you want these?” In her hand were three pages of matchbook covers that Cleo and I had taped in orderly rows onto lined paper and stored in a three-ring binder.

    Did I want them? To me, they were solid gold.

    The collection, if anything, seem­ed as good as it did more than 30 years ago. Among the graphic gems were one in brown block letters on pale yellow (how ’70s!) from the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, a barely legible silver-and-white one from Lenhart’s Motel and Cottages in Montauk, and one from the Bridgehampton National Bank when it had but one branch, for crying out loud.

    From out of town, there was the promise, “You’ll be dynamite. Learn electronics, create a new career, enjoy a whole new life style. Build your own CIE color TV.” One  matchbook offered, “Valuable pos­tage stamps from 77 countries! Free!” Another advertised a Rand McNally road atlas for $1.25. Yet another offered, “15 ways to get ahead.”

   The crown jewel of the collection, as far as Cleo and I were concerned, and a sentiment probably shared by those of us who grew up around Amagansett at the time, was from the M & P Diner, which had been in the building that now houses Art of Eating catering. This matchbook cover never made it to the three-ring binder; instead, it was given a place of honor in a small gold-tinted metal frame. On one side is a photograph of a topless woman covering her breasts, her hair alluringly tangled. The other side advertises steaks, chops, and cocktails.

    As far as I know, the only people who ever went there were kids to whom Mike, who ran it, supposedly would sell beer with no questions asked, and a few cops. Cleo and I were ecstatic when we found it.

    The drinking age was 18 when I was in high school, and the story was that kids would follow the warrens of dirt- bike trails that in those days wove through most of town to get to the M & P Diner, which was known uncharitably as Maggot Mike’s. Then, after a hurried transaction with the vaguely intimidating man behind the counter, they would ride away with a six-pack cradled between their legs. I never went in the place, which made me nervous even as I drove by years later. I thought about it though, and now I have a matchbook to remind me.

   I’m not alone, obviously, in being reluctant to submit to a party on my birthday. I haven’t had a real one since the year I turned 49 and threw one for myself, with a packed house and the kids helping prepare the food — a barbecued leg of lamb, if I remember correctly. That was the 1980s, when parties usually ended up with lots of noise and friends drinking to the music of early Frank Sinatra.

    Forty-nine was a good age to celebrate because it was still younger than 50. That party was held indoors, because my birthday falls in autumn, but most of our family birthdays are celebrated outside: Two of my children and three of my grandchildren were born in June or July. Birthday-party season is a long streak of popsicles, bonfires, and paper cups scattered by the wind.

    (My husband’s birthday comes in summer, too, in late August. I remember a particular big one, when we set up two long tables in the yard and hung dozens of paper lanterns.)

    Try as hard as I might, I just cannot believe the grown man who is my oldest child will be 50 in a few days. We aren’t having a big bash, but he had one once, on his 40th at the pavilion at Maidstone Park. Somehow he doesn’t seem so keen on a major celebration now, 10 years later.

    Anyway, he has had a big party each summer, his entire life, when the Devon Yacht Club sets off the Fourth of July fireworks over Gardiner’s Bay. The size of the Fourth of July party has waxed and waned with the mood of the decades, from an annual bacchanalia with cars parked halfway to Montauk to a gorgeous, but much more quiet, gathering of the clan in less go-go times. But what a boon it has been for our family to have a house at the beach, and a perfect view, all these years.

    We had a low-key celebration of the 12th birthday of my oldest granddaughter, the ballerina, last weekend — and the present she suggested I get her arrived in a big box yesterday. Her aunt, in Nova Scotia, gave her the now-vintage set of  “Anne of Green Gables” books that she’d gotten on her own 12th birthday, lo so many years ago (although it remains to be seen whether those romantic stories still hold power over the modern adolescent mind).

    The ballerina’s sister, who is a synchronized swimmer, will celebrate her 9th birthday at a beach party before the end of this month. And then comes the birthday for Nettie, in Canada, who will be 6 on July 9. I hear that there will be pony rides, and a Monster High fashion doll wearing a skirt made of vanilla cake and cherry icing. As it happens, July 9 was also the day Nettie’s late grandfather Everett would have been 81, and her great-grandfather, my father, Abe, would have been 115. Isn’t that something to celebrate?

   “For India’s Children, Philanthropy Isn’t Enough.” The article in The Times caught my eye, and dozens of memories leapt to mind, each a vivid snapshot from one of five visits to that faraway land.

    The article described the crushing poverty that still afflicts many Indians, and the “endemic corruption, from the very top down to the ground level,” that will prolong it, perhaps forever.

    It sounds like a disclaimer now, a rote recitation. “There are so many wonderful things about India,” I’ll begin. “It’s endlessly fascinating, and I have met many wonderful, beautiful people there.”

    And you know what? India really is endlessly fascinating. There really are wonderful, beautiful people there. It is the birthplace of Buddha, yoga, meditation, so much ancient wisdom, and, not least, Krishna, the blue-skinned godchild and Supreme Being of the Hindu faith.

    But on the material plane, India is a disaster. And the corruption, as religiously practiced as it is deeply entrenched at every single layer of society — and there are many — is absolutely maddening.

    Indira Gandhi International, June, midnight. The smell hits first, as the glass doors slide apart and I step into the arrivals hall, but the heat is close behind. Something is burning. Hints of incense, garbage, and particularly nasty soot envelop me. It is 97 degrees.

    The auto-rickshaw careens past mountains of garbage, belching soot into the filthy air as it snakes through a free-for-all of cars, buses, trucks, ox-drawn carts, scooters, cows, bicycles, pedestrians, dogs. Any time the vehicle comes to a stop, the beggars are upon it, young mothers with infants, children of all ages, hands outstretched, reaching inside, pawing me.

    In Mumbai, the auto-rickshaw driver overcharges me by 500 percent. A bystander sees what is happening, commands the driver to refund my rupees, and then demands twice the sum for rescuing me.

    I walk across the small park at Connaught Place and am accosted by a teenage boy insisting that he shine my shoes — sneakers, actually. I decline, and he points to my footwear, suddenly covered with cow dung. Back in the auto-rickshaw, I remove my soiled sneakers. When the vehicle comes to a stop, a feral child walks up and casually grabs them.

    In Jaipur, my self-appointed tour guide insists on taking me to a “guru” who can “read my aura.” As it happens, this guru doubles as the proprietor of a jewelry shop, but promises that his gift is freely given. My crown chakra is blocked, but I am in luck: by purchasing this stone, placed in this setting, and purified in the ceremony that only he can perform, balance will be restored. For this, he wants $750.

    If Lord Sri Krishna knew what was going on, I daresay he’d be very blue indeed.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star. If he ever finishes his first book, this will be the title and subject of his second.

   A friend of mine who has a friend in Vegas who’s a bookie told me an interesting story the other day.

    He said his bookie friend had said that if Romney and Ryan win, my friend should pay for his round of golf when they played there and take him and two of his friends out to dinner. Whereupon my friend said that, in the alternative, should Obama and Biden win, he expected his bookie friend, a devotee of Rush Limbaugh, to pay for his round of golf and to take him and two of his friends out to dinner.

    “He wouldn’t take the bet,” my friend said. “Obama’s the heavy favorite in Vegas, at 1-to-2. That means a $10,000 bet will get you $5,000.”

    To me that bookie tale spoke volumes.

    On another subject, the Artists-Writers Game has become so serious that there’s hardly anything funny left to say about it anymore. Ou sont les madcap romps d’autant? The margin of victory is usually narrow these days, a run or two, and the games invariably go into extra innings. No spectators are getting beaned anymore by Alec Baldwin’s errant throws from third, no one’s running down the third base line, as Chevy Chase once did, to wrestle Ed Tivnan for possession of his foul popup. No Suzanne O’Malley in sequins with pom-poms to pump up the crowd. Come to think of it, no women played this year. It’s all come down to this.

    My eldest daughter said during a telephone conversation the other day that she was tired of the bumper stickers that say, “Heaven Can Wait.”

    “How do they know they’re going there?” she said.

    “I think it’s pretty likely that when it’s over it’s over,” I said.

    “Maybe they should say ‘Purgatory Can Wait. . . .’ ”

    “Or eternal damnation. . . . Ah, that would be a good one: ‘Eternal Damnation Can Wait.’ Though that might not fit. ‘Hell Can Wait’ would fit. But the fact is, Hell can’t wait.”

    “Dinner can’t wait either, Dad. Talk to you later.”

    My sister phoned last night to say that the bookshop in her Midwestern suburban preppy village had never heard of the playwright A.R. Gurney. Now this shocked me inasmuch as he’s been writing plays about suburban WASPs, i.e., her neighbors, for years. I told her I’d send her the four or five plays of his that I had, venturing that she’d find them funny.

    I didn’t have to look far for an example to give her of his type of humor: “They asked me for the East Hampton High School Hall of Fame plaque which sports I’d played when I was younger, and I told them soccer, baseball, tennis, lacrosse, ice hockey. . . . And after hanging up I remembered what Dad once said after I’d written him a letter thanking him for always being there for me. ‘It was the best letter I’ve ever received,’ he said, ‘but you left one thing out.’ Somewhat taken aback, I asked him what that was. ‘I taught you how to play squash!’ ” I phoned Jim Nicoletti back and asked him to please add squash to the list.

    A.R. Gurney would have loved it.

   My son, Ellis, and I spent a few minutes one afternoon this week gathering great handfuls of eelgrass and making a quick pile of it after Saturday’s hard northwest wind pushed long lines of the stuff on the bay beach near our house. My intent was to add it to the compost; Ellis, who will be 3 in February, thought it was a fine place to drop down for a rest and look at the sky.

    Eelgrass has made what appears to be a comeback in Gardiner’s Bay, supporting a bounty of scallops. At the same time, the spongy, green Codium, a true seaweed thought to have spread around the world from the western Pacific, has all but gone away.

    When I was a child, my father referred to Codium exclusively as Sputnik weed,  apparently due to its appearance in our region more or less contemporaneously with the Soviet satellite’s game-changing 1957 launch. For decades, it was the most visible seaweed washing up on the beach at the southernmost reaches of the bay, where we live. Now rockweed is dominant in the near-shore shallows. The eelgrass, I presume, has repopulated in underwater meadows in slightly deeper water less affected by storms.

    The day after Ellis and I made our pile, we returned to the beach with a fish box and filled it with eelgrass. Then Ellis removed his shirt and shorts, tore off his pull-up diaper, and went for a swim. When he got cold, I had him hop on top of the box for a ride back to the house and a hot shower — with a detour at the compost bin to dump in the eelgrass.

    Many years ago, when I was traveling around between high school and college, I ended up on Inisheer, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. There, I saw huge piles of kelp, which the inhabitants gathered to freshen their fields and to pack for export. The memory of those haystack-like mounds and the people who made them has stuck with me, as I hope Ellis will dimly remember our own late-summer afternoon on the beach when he is older.

   I was thoroughly puzzled when my husband, Chris, came home one night recently carrying a gigantic bag full of lima beans. He launched into a story about how his father had brought home unshucked limas once a year, and how — in homage to a neighbor’s family name, Lyman — they jokingly called them “Lyman beans” around the dinner table.

    “So what?” I wanted to know.

    Did he and his siblings actually like them?

    He said they all loved them, and that it was fun work getting them out of the shell, too.

    Now, I don’t dislike lima beans, but I decided long ago that they weren’t tasty enough to be worth the calories they contain. They apparently have more calories than potatoes!

    “I’ll shuck them,” Chris offered. That was a good thing, because I was determined to take no part in this particular idea of an amusing morning.

    Neither of us is as dexterous as we once were. Chris has been known to complain that it is getting hard to fasten the button-down collars of his preppy broadcloth shirts. I had been watching election coverage when he started in on the task, and I tried to pay him no attention. In a while, though, I started to feel sorry for him . . . or for his right thumb, anyway. We decided to shuck the suckers and watch TV at the same time. I pulled over a chair.

    Getting lima beans out of their pods is a lot harder than shelling peas. You could get callouses! Pulling off the string between the two halves doesn’t do the trick, as far as I could tell. Instead, you take your thumb and push firmly on the rounded end of the pod. It usually opens, at least a little. You can then pull the sides apart, and pluck out the beans.

    Eventually, with much toil, we had more than two people would want to eat at one sitting (unless, of course, they were lima-bean maniacs, like my husband). That was when I remembered that I had many years ago saved, but never used, a recipe from The New York Times for baked lima beans and pears. I found it easily in one of the crammed drawers near the stove. It sounded excellent, I had to admit.

    Here it is:

Baked Lima Beans and Pears

Three 10-ounce packages of frozen lima beans

Two large pears, cored, peeled, and sliced crosswise

1 cup chicken broth

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup chopped onion

1/4 cup light molasses

1 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

    Preheat oven to 200 degrees. In a heavy, two-quart casserole, combine ingredients. Bake, covered tightly, about eight hours.

    No, that isn’t a typo: eight hours.

    At supper, some 10 hours after we started on the lima-bean campaign, Chris cleaned his plate with obvious relish, and pronounced the recipe a keeper. But after all the fuss and effort, I didn’t find the lima beans particularly delicious. I’d still rather have potatoes.

    The Times recipe was by Lee Bailey, who once had a home-furnishings store in Southampton. Mr. Bailey was interested in entertaining, as well as food, and credited Nora Ephron’s novel “Heartburn” for the original recipe. Unlike my husband, he had the good sense not to try to shell them himself.