Many of my 1,214 Facebook friends have told me that they wish their lives were like mine, and I agree, I wish my life was like mine, too — as it appears on Facebook. Days are filled with beach walks, boating, and hula hoops, and nights with sunsets and live music.

    A recent event has led to the opposite effect, however, and now I wonder, “Should I stay or should I go?”

    As a news reporter, I “liked” several politicians months ago in order to keep up with current events. One of those likes was posted on my behalf, with no clicks on my part, front and center in the Facebook news feed during the airing of the Democratic National Convention. I was made aware of the posting by a message from and old and dear friend that said, “Really? Or am I being hacked?” Upon further inquiry, I was informed that Big Brother had told the public, “Carrie Ann Salvi likes Mitt Romney.”

    I’m not sure what horrified me more, the fact that something was posted on my behalf, that as an unbiased reporter who is not supposed to have a political opinion I was tied to a political party, or that it happened during the opposing party’s convention. I feel used, violated, and fearful of what else has or will end up in the news feed with my name attached. I immediately “unliked” Mitt, and Obama, too, to be fair and balanced.

    Several of my Facebook friends whom I have spoken with personally have told me that they live vicariously through me on Facebook. So, aside from the occasional tragedy during which I have sought the community’s prayers and positive thoughts, I have happily shared photographs and “check-ins” to spread the joy of my striped bass and strawberry-basil mojito-filled life.

    That life contained no war, bills, cat puke, rainy days, stressful deadlines, or politics. But now it has been violated, bonds of trust broken. My information was used without my consent to endorse the campaign of a political party. I must seriously consider if I will continue to live there.

    Sure, there are other reasons that removing myself might not be a bad idea. There have been family disputes, broken friendships, stalker situations, and there is always the question of how much time is wasted. Oh, but the benefits . . . how could 955 million active users be wrong?

    I have formed online friendships with those I didn’t get to know during school years, found a job in the news feed, met a boyfriend, screened potential new boyfriends after that one ended up being “blocked,” stayed in touch with faraway relatives, and received much-needed support during the recent loss of my father.

    Most important, I love to take pictures. I don’t understand it fully, but photographing the things I see brings me joy, and the thought of downloading the previous day’s shots makes me jump out of bed in the morning. Sharing the pictures on Facebook and seeing who enjoys them is fun for me, too, and over the last few months, seven or eight have been chosen to grace the cover of The East Hampton Star.

    There are other places I can share my pictures, such as Instagram, which is promising, but Facebook is a habit that is hard to break.

    I also heard this week that voting numbers have increased due to Facebook posts, and just yesterday that a group of gang members were arrested as a result of the news feed, so good does come of this, but it is also clear that one never knows who will view your information or what they will use it for. For now, I will modify the ever-changing privacy settings and expect the best, or another message from a friend.

  Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   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.

   September comes, and like many others, I find myself almost subconsciously taking stock of the preceding months. The impulse may have roots in an agrarian past, idealized perhaps, in which we counted up the season’s harvests, what we squirreled away in the rafters, so to speak, for the coming barren months.

    In this modern age, in which backyard gardens are a pastime rather than a necessity of life, the measures of the season’s success aren’t life-and-death. I had begun the year with great plans for my two raised beds, adding compost and hacking away the still-dormant poison ivy and weeds. The stumbling point came when it was time to figure out what to do about the deer, which, I believe, consider our driveway home — and anything we plant their just desserts.

    By midsummer, a volunteer spaghetti squash had taken over one bed, forcing out some fancy potatoes that had come back on their own. In the other bed, the leeks returned but went to seed in great, pale-violet heads before I managed to do much with them. The deer weren’t interested in either of these.

    Other yardsticks include the Sunfish, an unnamed small sailboat a friend gave me long ago when he sold his East Hampton house and moved lock, stock, and barrel to New Jersey. Have we used it enough this year? Will there still be days warm enough that one or more of the kids will want to go out on the bay with me?

    Beach plum jelly is another measure of the end of the season, and this year, I managed to get a few jars put up. Not so with blackberries, which did not appear to fare well in the August drought. I don’t know about grapes, though probably some are to be found in the wetter places.

    Ticks, on the other hand, did spectacularly this year, particularly the smallest ones, which have swarmed up our legs in great numbers. Then there is the unresolved mystery of the other bites on our legs and waists — the suspicion that they are from chiggers, though opinions vary about whether this traditionally Southern pest is prevalent in these parts.

    I suspect that the deer have quite a bit to do with all these pests, which my family tends to pick up while walking along the grassy sides of the driveway. Perhaps if I manage to get a garden fence done during the winter, we will tread with less trepidation come spring

   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.”

   A black guy walks in to a high-end hair salon in the Hamptons. . . .

    That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my attempt to formulate a joke about my experience. But maybe it’s funny enough as it is.

    Research for “Art Outside the Box,” which ran in the Aug. 14 edition of The Star, prompted my visit to Salon Xavier (pronounced za-vee-ay) to check out the art, and I can’t ever recall being so self-conscious before an interview. I combed my short, “naturally curly” hair — something I do only a handful of times a year — to fit in as best as I could in the presence of people who pay a pretty penny to be perfectly coiffed.

    Growing up in New Orleans led me to believe that hair salons are the last bastian of the separate-but-equal doctrine in the United States. There were black hair places, and there were white hair places, and nothing in between. Even my mom’s hair salon in the swank Uptown neighborhood was the only all-black business in the area.

    Needless to say, I experienced a tinge of anxiety on this, my first trip to a (predominantly) white salon, likening myself to the Rosa Parks of beauty parlors.

    To my surprise, I wasn’t turned away at the door because my hair wasn’t up to snuff; to the contrary, the receptionist was very friendly, requesting that I sit in the waiting area until the owner was free to talk to me, which I did . . . until I tired of wondering what the three desperate housewives with whom I shared the space were thinking. I then got up and wandered around the airy salon to look at Lane Berkwit’s photography exhibition, because that’s one of the reasons that I was there, after all.

    I was stopped dead in my tracks when I stumbled across another black person in the pedicure room, a Tyra Banks look-alike, sitting next to an elderly woman wearing a hat fresh out of the Kentucky Derby handbook. Seeing those two, side-by-side, freeing their feet of dead skin and hangnails, gave me a newfound attitude about racial inclusion at hair salons.

    I departed with my head held high. But the more I thought about my experience, the more I questions I had. Just because the Tyra Banks doppelganger had her feet serviced at the salon doesn’t mean she got her weave fixed there, too.

    I wondered where black people go to have their haircare needs met in the Hamptons. . . .

    Immediately, I pulled out my iPhone and Googled “black barber Hamptons,” and two Southampton businesses materialized: Steve’s Barber Shop and Affricardo. I breathed a sigh of relief until I realized they were located in Southampton, England.

    Then I clicked on to blackbarber.net, which, yes, hosts a database for black barbershops. It returned no results for the entire South Fork, and I think I heard it whisper, “Run. . . .”

    There was no way I was about to call local barbershops out of the blue to ask if they cut my kind of hair. That would just be silly.

    I remembered that Helen Rattray, Star publisher, wrote a column in which she described the various barbershops and salons in Sag Harbor. I thought for sure, with a well-established black community, including the Azurest neighborhood, the article would contain information about where black people go in Sag Harbor. Wrong. Doesn’t she know?

    When I think about black Hamptonites, only a few come to mind. Both Colson Whitehead, author, and B. Smith, restaurateur, sport dreadlocks they’ve probably been growing for decades. Hmm. . . . On the other end of the low-maintenance spectrum, Russell Simmons shaves his head. No clues there.

    Me? I’ve been cutting my own hair since 1999, when I was a freshman at Morehouse College, a historically black school in Atlanta. (I even practiced on my grandpa and some white folk.) Of course there were plenty of black barbers around, but I cut them out of my budget to allocate more funds to stuff like dining out and drinking, and buying a fake ID.

    At $20 a pop, every other week, I figure I’ve saved $6,760 on haircuts, and I’ve become quite the wine connoisseur in the process.

    Conversely, when I did away with the expenditure, I also eliminated from my life the black barbershop experience — the maniacal, sports-team-trash-talkin’, white-people-are-crazy, is-this-negro-gonna-cut-my-hair-or-dance?, graphic-descriptions-of-vaginas-even-when-kids-are-around experience. And I kinda miss that shit, yo.

    What’s more, I gave up the possibility of donning a trendy hairstyle that only a skilled tonsorial artist can accomplish. No more high-top fades, low-top fades, or anything in the middle. No more mistakes like when my great uncle, my childhood barber, leveled the rat tail I’d proudly grown for three months with one swipe of his clippers. “I didn’t know you had it,” he claimed.

    “How? You cut around it for the past three months!” I yelled back at him, in tears, picking up clumps of my wooly black hair from the floor, asking him to reattach it. He was clearly too old for the job.

    If I’d had a barber, I would have probably indulged in the recent black mohawk fad. Hell, maybe I would have gotten a couple of razor-carved messages in the back of my head just for old time’s sake. Or maybe an American flag . . . in case anyone doubted my nationality.

    Now, I’m running out of time as my hairline is fast-receding. As it vacates my scalp, I remain steadfast not to forget all the good times we had. I’ve dyed it blonde, red, and an unintentional rust-orange. It’s been wavy, straightened, greasy, dry, but never Jheri curled or  permed, praise the Lord.

    A part of me isn’t giving up so easily. Somewhere in the 1,000-page Obamacare law has to be a provision to cover black hair transplants. If there is, I won’t follow the customary procedure and allow them to take my ass hair and fuse it to the top of my head. I’d rather the silky mane from an Afghan (the hound, not the person). If Michael Jackson can be born with an Afro and die with “good hair,” why can’t I?

    I digress.

    I’m sure there are places out here that meet the haircare needs of blacks—or at least I hope there are.

    Larry LaVigne II is a reporter at The Star.

   It’s high summer and I’m apologizing about once or twice a week to people whom I’ve slighted either by commission or omission.

    What was it a sports psychologist told me once? That the pros didn’t beat themselves up because, while they were confident, they knew at the same time that they weren’t perfect nor could they ever be. And so, in taking that extra pressure off themselves, they were able to get nearer to perfection than a perfectionist could.

    Of the latter sort, for several years I’ve sighed every now and then in recalling that I misspelled the last name of the wife of an interviewee, leading off with an “A” instead of an “O.” I made the correction the following week, but still. . .

    Recently, in writing the obituary of the great runner Andy Neidnig, I said he’d done the New York marathon in two hours and 57 minutes at the age of 70 — about 35 minutes quicker than he actually had. That chagrined me too, as did the inversion of the final letters of a surname with which I was quite familiar in the caption of a photo that accompanied an article on the Max Cure Foundation.

    I should have accepted long ago that that’s the way it is, that journalism cannot brook perfectionists, or alleged perfectionists. By the same token, slap-dash work ought not be given a pass, or even worse, be cynically dismissed as the norm.

    I know that the above-mentioned errors are not cardinal sins, yet I am bothered — and humbled — by them. (Mary would say that in my case whatever humbles me is salvi­fic.)

    A cardinal sin in my parlance is when someone living has been referred to as “the late so-and-so” — as I have done one or two, maybe three times in my career!

    No, maybe only two, for in one case, after having been questioned by the alleged deceased’s cousin, who’d been out of the country for a while, I emerged triumphant (just this side of gleeful) on learning in the library’s reference room next door that the person I had assumed to be dead, a well-known drama critic, was so in fact.

    To continue with my list, more recently I slighted the masters swimming coach, unaccountably crediting another with the hard work he puts in.

    When a few days later I confessed to Tim Treadwell my “bad mistake,” he cut me off before I could begin to apply the lash. “It wasn’t a bad mistake, Jack.”

    And soon we were talking about the benefits swimming confers, on those of any age. When I said I was untutored in the sport, old, and frail, Tim said reassuringly, “There’s a lane for everybody.”

    I like that. A lane for everybody. Even for a wretch like me.    Jack Graves

    P.S. And there’s a line for everybody too. For my Aug. 23 column I cherry-picked several, as a matter of fact, from Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!”

    A friend said he’d liked especially what I’d written at the end . . . “rowing in Eden, done with the compass, done with the chart.”

    I readily confessed (to him and to you) that I’d lifted those lines from the Belle of Amherst, and had rearranged the sexes (rather cleverly, I thought) in ‘might I but moor — tonight — In thee!’

    “Those of her poems that I understand I love,” I said. “I’m sorry to have misled you. I wish I were, but I, sir, am no Emily Dickinson.”   

   On Monday evening at a picnic at Long Beach in that neither-here-nor-there world between North Haven and Noyac, there was a nearly constant rumble in the western sky. As the sun set, commercial helicopters, one after the other, raced in from Jessup’s Neck on trips to East Hampton Airport to pick up customers. An equal number, twice punctuated by departing seaplanes, went south to north.

    Among the dozen or so adults at the beach for a Labor Day gathering, I was probably the only one paying attention to the aerial parade. Like much of the noise associated with summer on the South Fork, we tend to tune it out unless it’s directly overhead, or if, like me, you spend a lot of time at work thinking about it.

    Safe to say, none of those on the beach that night were of comfortable enough means to spend $3,400 on a one-way shot from East Hampton to Manhattan. And, from where we were, a mile or more from the helicopters’ path, the racket was audible but a few notches less than annoying.

    For many Noyac residents and others, particularly those who keep their windows open in good weather or hang around in their yards or by the pool, the overhead passings of the wealthy can be a scourge. The Town of East Hampton, which owns the airport, apparently has no demonstrable interest in limiting noise. A seasonal control tower, which was billed as a source of relief, has been a bust.

    I can claim no personal stake; where we live, a couple of miles east of the Amagansett business district, air traffic is not particularly vexing. A large, white helicopter goes east and west occasionally, and the dull drone of planes towing advertising banners present a commercial backdrop on some weekends. Still, we all should feel sympathy for those whose lives are disrupted merely because they live closer to the airport than we do.

    By dark on Monday, the helicopters appeared done for the night, their well-heeled occupants gone back from whence they came. The headaches they left behind will linger.   

   On Friday morning as Labor Day weekend began, we were unfortunately — in Penn Station. Why had we done something so foolish, you may ask? We had a date in New York the night before and had somehow messed up the Jitney reservation for the trip back. By the time we called, all the morning buses were full, and so, anxious to get home as soon as possible, we decided to take the train.

    Getting to Penn Station is never really a problem, but, oh, those lines once we were there. You might already be aware that these days the Long Island Rail Road no longer divulges the track numbers in advance. Passengers have no choice but to stand amid a mass of hundreds of fellow travelers, all jammed together to get the best look at the overhead information boards, jockeying for position so as to be the first to sprint to the gate.

    Once the track was posted for the Montauk branch, the surge of people racing toward the gate was an all-out stampede, with elbows and duffel bags in full swing. Any summer-Friday rush at Penn Station is a survival-of-the-fittest situation, but this was almost frightening. We were lucky to get seats at Penn Station and again after we changed trains in Jamaica.

    I couldn’t imagine braving that maelstrom every week, as so many do.

    I also couldn’t help but think about all the South Forkers who are upset about the helicopters and jets coming and going at East Hampton Airport. After my brief sortie at Penn Station, I was able to sympathize a little more with the increasingly strident and, yes, resentful voices about noise emanating from the airport. There are lots of ways to distinguish between the haves and have-nots in a community such as ours, and how we travel here is one of them.

    Is there any way we could turn back the clock? To re-create East Hampton Airport as the small-town facility we once were proud of? Or is it too late?

    It’s been a long time since I found myself flying in and out of East Hampton. I did it a bit in the late 1980s, and it was really fun. Seeing the headwaters of the Peconic from a small plane, or the North and South Forks dividing below, was a thrill. So was the sight of Manhattan as the plane approached from one direction or another. (It’s possible to feel similar elation in a big commercial plane; if, for example, you can view the long white line of the south shore of Long Island, from Montauk to Brooklyn, as you head to J.F.K. For the most part, though, big planes and big airports aren’t fun at all anymore, even when the place you are going to is an occasion for joy.)

    I love the idea of short hops in small planes, and wish I could take more of them. But I really do sympathize with those whose heads are rattled and whose peace is destroyed by aircraft noise. Over the past few years I’ve done my own share of complaining, as more and more jets — lined up for a long, low approach to the runway — seem to skim the roof of my house. And I live in the heart of the village, miles from the airport.

    We have been reading letters in The East Hampton Star for many years about this subject. Battle lines have become entrenched, and those who have the good fortune not to live along one of the potential approaches probably have become sick of the airport controversy by now. But I ask you to read a few more: In the last two weeks we’ve published interesting letters from Peter M. Wolf, which recommend regulations for getting out of this morass. Read them and see what you think.

   The other day, much to my astonishment, our two absolutely indoor cats fetched up with fleas.

    I know there was no winter last year, and I know that makes a difference, but in 12 years of indoor cats and human feet walking in and out, this is the very first time for fleas. Can this be climate change on a totally local level?

    A nice flea bath at the vet was in order for Dilly and Lois. Dilly stood still for the bath and the blowing out of her Maine coon cat fur. Lois was profoundly unwilling, and had to be sedated for her bath.

    I thought when they got home that they would be so disgruntled that they would make me feel even worse than I already did by going on cat strike (those with insulted cats will know what this is), or by hiding out. Nope. They were really grateful, purring and cuddling.

    It was a slightly different matter the next day when the gooey stuff had to go between their shoulder blades. They used the old kitty jungle telegraph (human ears cannot hear or translate it but it is a universal cat S.O.S.). They scattered, but I prevailed.

    Now that I know what to look for, which heretofore I did not, this flea thing will not happen again. I made this promise to the kitties: They will endure the gooey stuff and I will check them using the flea comb and little dish of soapy water trick I just learned about online.

    All this fleeing from fleas got me to wondering what on God’s green earth is the reason for fleas. Of course they were useful in ages past if you wanted to spread the plague, but who wants to do that nowadays?

    Fleas fall into that category of critters I can really do without. Things with lots and lots of legs freak me out, but so far they don’t threaten me with bites and stings.

    I realize that mosquitoes feed all the neat evening birds that swoop around, and ticks keep guinea fowl full. I am not a fan of spiders, but on the plus side I know they catch bad things like Japanese beetles. On the negative side, spiders do mean things, too, like snagging pretty things like swallowtail butterflies. The bigger bugs eat the littler ones and so on and so on.

    What does the flea do but torture animals?

    The cockroach has survived millenniums, but I can see no earthly reason for them either. Cockroaches don’t do much for anyone apart from inspiring bad dreams and giving everyone the creeps. So why are they and the sneaky little flea here? What do they do for the world?

    Is there a creature that dines on fleas? If so, it seems to be doing a crummy job of keeping up with them. What do they accomplish in their lifespan? A flea circus is not enough of an excuse, in my book, for their place in the great scheme of things. But flea markets are another thing entirely.

    I never imagined I would be looking forward to a deeply freezing winter, but I hear that makes a difference in the flea population, so bring it on. I have nice cats to keep me warm.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer to The Star.

   Now I know what these people have been writing about all summer.

    The other night, playing in a doubles league at the East Hampton Indoor-Tennis Club across the street from East Hampton Airport, there was an Armageddon-like roar such as I’d never heard before. I could only liken it to an A-bomb test.

    Living in Springs, I’m not used to hearing a lot of aircraft overhead, and thus, perhaps, have been less sympathetic than I am now with those who built houses in the airport’s environs, knowing, of course, that they knew an airport was there.

    Once home, I thumbed through “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and found the descriptive words I was looking for on page 309 in Oppenheimer’s reaction to the initial mushroom cloud, which he had taken from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

    I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. . . . That’s how it sounded. Then and there it became clear to me that jets like this should be banned from our airport. Let these destroyers of our world land at Westhampton and be driven the rest of the way in sleek stretch limos as they sip aged Scotch and watch “Wall Street Week.”

    Remember the sports car track in Bridgehampton? Closed down, in part, because the decibel levels on Millstone Road soared to power lawn mower range? The noise at the track was nothing compared to this. Nothing.

    Karl Grossman recently wrote of how these destroyers of our world pay $12,000 to be helicoptered to and fro. “It’s pocket change to them,” a friend of mine said, with a smile.

    “It’s a prime example of how twisted our society has become,” I said. “What is so important that they do on earth that their fellows here should be subjected to such obscenity?”

    They’ve got to do something. . . . Do you think that after re-routing air traffic from Northwest, where some of East Hampton’s politically well-connected live, to a corridor spanning Wainscott and Sag Harbor — whose well-to-do homeowners don’t like it either, and are making noise of their own — they’ll send it over Springs, the Queens and Brooklyn of East Hampton. It seems only right.