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.

   To the marriage of true minds I admitted an impediment on our 28th anniversary, unaccountably forgetting to give Mary a card, a failure of the heart rendered all the more stark when I saw, in her card, that she’d opened her heart to me.

    The setting was tranquil, fittingly so for such an occasion, mother-of-pearl colors refracting luminously off white clouds while the sun went down behind a lone clammer in the harbor.

    As I continued to stammer, she said she hadn’t wanted to punish me, for God’s sake, with her gift, a pair of royal blue swimming trunks Gubbins would have for me the next day. Royal blue swimming trunks, I thought, for a royal pain in the ass.

    Neither of us got a kick from the margaritas — the first time that’s ever happened to me. I felt leaden. We ate up, paid the check, and drove home.

    “Are you ever going to speak again?” she asked as we returned later from a walk in the dark with the dogs. Then I sat down with a lined notepad and began to write. The words at first were forced, and I crumpled the page up, and began writing again.

    And then out of my anguish they began to come. I was “plighting my troth,” as the late Sheppard Frood, who married us in our backyard, said we were to do — as Mary, who was justly dismayed that I had not, had done earlier that evening.

    I remember her asking Justice Frood what the “troth” we were plighting was. It was our truth, he said, an old word for truth. She, being a truth-teller, then said she would plight it.

    I printed out what I’d written in script when I was done, folded it, put it into an envelope, and handed it to her, and went out of the room, awaiting judgment.

    When I returned to the living room she said what I’d written was beautiful and that she would always keep it, though it was strange that I found it easier to write than to speak.

    “Well . . . I wrote what I felt,” I said, happy that I had done so.

    She sometimes says, and rightly, that words are cheap. They are — except when they are true.

    Tonight I’m making the margaritas — with real lime juice.

   Amid all the acrimonious and confusing debate about health care as election rhetoric rises to a fever pitch, one fact is indisputable:

    Medicaid “is the only safety net for millions of middle-class people whose needs for long-term care, at home or in a nursing home, outlast their resources.”

    The statement is from the first paragraph of a page-one story in The New York Times of Sept. 7. It haunts me, although it wasn’t a surprise. Getting older myself, I am fortunate to be able to afford long-term care insurance, and I hope it will help me live on my own in my last years without becoming a burden to anyone in my family.

    My parents were lucky to live a long time in good health. They eventually moved to a pleasant apartment in a complex for seniors in Deerfield Beach, Fla., and my father, who collected premiums as a Prudential Insurance agent with a route in a lower-class neighborhood of Jersey City, lived till 96. My mother, who died at 94, spent the last two years of her life with me.

    My mother’s surviving sisters were not so lucky. One was widowed as a young woman and did not have children; the other never married. By the time they were in their late 60s, they were sharing a subsidized apartment in a poorly maintained building in Bayonne, N.J. Neither had anything much in the way of income, although Miriam’s husband had been in the Army during World War II and worked in a hardware store after the war. As they aged, I arranged for one, and then the other, to go to nursing homes — on Medicaid. My brother and I, their only close relatives, were in no way able to pay for their nursing-home care. Such care, according to The Times, now averages $80,000 a year.    Let me repeat that: $80,000 a year.

    The Times article described a retired schoolteacher with dementia who went on Medicaid after depleting rather impressive lifetime savings of $300,000. All but $50 of her monthly income, $969 from a pension and Social Security, went to the nursing home. “I’m so scared about what’s going to happen to me,” her 66-year-old daughter, also a retired schoolteacher, told The Times.

    And if this is the fate of someone who dedicated a lifetime to a unionized public profession like hers — during those halcyon decades when a pension was what most people earned and expected — what should everyone else (the self-employed, people in service industries, people working for Wal-Mart — America’s and the world’s biggest employer — people who have bounced around from position to position in the “new economy”) expect?

    How do you, personally, Republican or Democrat, expect to pay for your own health care when you are 80 or 90 years old?

    The personal becomes the political when you consider that 63 million Americans depend on Medicaid, not only the elderly but poor children who otherwise would not have medical care and disabled people with conditions such as Down Syndrome and severe autism.

    Although there has been vociferous debate about the Republican plan to redesign Medicare, if approved the changes wouldn’t begin for 10 years. However, the Republican candidates for president and vice president have promised that next year, in 2013, they will start cutting Medicaid by one-third (some sources say 35 percent, others 39 percent), or $810 billion, over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, as baby boomers get older, the ranks of Medicaid recipients can only increase.

    “And just think about it,” said President Clinton, who laid all this out very effectively at the Democratic National Convention last week, “If that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do. So I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do everything I can to see that it doesn’t happen.”

   “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.

   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?

   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.