Mary’s favorite show at the moment is “Newsroom,” but they speak so fast it takes me about half the hour to find out what it’s about.

    Don’t get me wrong, it is very good, but I think they’re all on speed. Either that, or I’m as dumb as I’ve always thought.

    “It reminds me why I didn’t stay in New York,” I told her the other night. “I would have been ground up and spit out long before now and sleeping under my Saks Fifth Avenue flannel-lined overcoat on the benches of Penn Station.”

    I had a thing for Saks Fifth Avenue once, and gin and tonics with twists of lime, and, above all, a white linen suit with a vest and buttoned fly that I think was a hand-me-down from my Uncle Jack.

    I fancied I cut quite a figure in the Halls of Ivy — I would have met myself under the clock at the Biltmore had I known who I was. The girls whom I fancied all had sonorous names. . . . “Wild nights — Wild Nights! . . . Might I but moor — Tonight — In Thee!”

    At least that was my wish.

    “I was very shallow, very callow then,” I said to Mary. “I’ve evolved over the years. From shallow to sallow. From a tweedy twit to a weedy wit.”

    The disaffection from the one I was persuaded me not to attend my 50th reunion recently. I didn’t want to be reminded of my blighted college years, when, knowing less than nothing, I thought I was the cleverest of them all.

    Now that I know I know nothing, and am moored in Bonac, things are going much better. I’m much more at home with uncertainty than I ever was, rowing in Eden, done with the compass, done with the chart.

   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.

   If you happen to have been on The Star’s Web site during the past few days, you might have noticed that an Aug. 16 story about a satirical film about the Ditch Plain surf scene circa 2012 was lingering at the top of the most-commented list.

    “Kook Paradise,” the firmly tongue-in-cheek documentary, was made by two Ditch regulars, Tin Ojeda and Danny DiMauro, and was premised on the idea that for all the Montauk surf hype, the waves are not really all that good. It’s a bit of a “The Emperor’s New Clothes” message.

    Well, that’s not quite how the film is being received. Commenters on the online version of the story have spared little invective in assailing Danny, whom I know, and Mr. Ojeda, whom I do not. Others have been drawn into the digital scrum, and apparently an actual, in-the-flesh confrontation is to take place on Saturday at Montauk’s Lions Field between two aggrieved parties.

    Others have beefed that the filmmakers are themselves relatively new to Montauk and, they figure, not qualified to say anything about anything.

    Having seen “Kook Paradise,” I feel confident in generalizing that the online protest is more about some bad blood from years past than about the film itself. Though its deliberately shaky and gritty footage does show beginning surfers in embarrassing situations, the accompanying narration extolling “perfect” waves makes clear the joke is on those who would consider Ditch Plain the equal of the world’s top breaks.

    Scores of vehicles storm east on the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway even when the surf is flat, their fedora or trucker-hatted owners planning to make the scene. A friend of mine (who surfs even in summer, proudly wearing kook-like wetsuit booties) calls them “evident life-stylers,” which pretty much sums them up. Ditch, their destination, will likely be gutless slop, but it hardly matters.

    Worthy of a short, amusing film? You bet. Something to fight over? Not really. But if you have a problem with it, you can meet me at Lions Field.

_

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   You’ve probably heard this complaint before; I’ve been irked by tote bags accumulating around the house for a long time. Now, I know I’m looking the gift horse in the mouth, and as problems go this doesn’t even rate — and I apologize, because I’m about to mix metaphors in a most egregious manner — but the straws that broke the camel’s back were two of my most recent unsolicited acquisitions: One, in cheery brown and orange, came from a home-furnishings business; the other, a gift from the Hampton Classic Horse Show, is super-sized and plastic-lined, with two inside mesh pockets.

    The issue seems to be that neither my husband nor I have learned to say no thank you. Waste not, want not, we think . . . and merrily shove these freebies into cabinets, drawers, and closets from which they are never again to emerge.

    This week, with no one else at home, I headed to the biggest trove, in a bin in the music-room coat closet. Alone in the dark they had multiplied to epic numbers. Among the rather handsome canvas ones were several more from the Hampton Classic. A few large numbers had unattractive corporate names or logos on them (including one that felt like rubber and would have been good in the rain, although no one had ever used it).

    The two that I’ve actually made good use of came from The New York Times; because they have zippered tops, I carry them a lot on Jitney trips, and even had one dry-cleaned once. A smaller version from The Wall Street Journal looked chintzy by comparison.

    Then there was the heavy red one from Cole Haan, which had a shop here for a while and donated a pile to the East Hampton Library. The company’s name is discreetly printed inside, but I had found it too big to drag around. A bright fuchsia bag in a waterproof fabric also had a discreet designer label. The color had been fashionable about the turn of the millennium, if I recall correctly.

    A few small ones, in cloth other than canvas, came from museum gift shops, among them one that was a memento of my trip to China with the New York Choral Society. Yet another, that I had wanted to keep as a reminder of our visit to Salt Spring Island, off the coast of Vancouver, was nowhere to be seen. More recent paper-thin totes, like a few from the Wainscott Seafood Shop, for example, had also disappeared. But I found several that I swear I had never seen before, including one that was mammoth and alarmingly chartreuse.

    Having scattered them all over the floor for inspection, I proceeded to my husband’s bedroom closet to unearth yet another lode. My husband had left one batch on the floor, stuffed another batch into the biggest bag, and slammed shut the closet door. I hauled them all out. (He also had an honest-to-goodness, undecorated, vintage “boat bag” there, dating to the days when no one used the word “tote.” It was filled with Chris’s swimming gear: fins, snorkels, masks. I left that one alone.)

    I was about to walk away from the whole mess, having counted 37 tote bags in total, when other members of the household began arriving. What in the world was I doing, they wanted to know. I told them I was thinking of giving the totes in good condition away to people who were tote-bagless, if I could identify any. Maybe, I said, I could casually take a few to the dry cleaner’s and secretly forget to pick them up.

    My husband meandered in and scooped up a few, including the huge chartreuse one, saying we should keep them in the car to use for groceries. That gave me another idea: I would go to town and stand in front of the supermarket and give them away.

    By then, however, it was getting to be supper time. And it could be embarrassing to try to fob off tote bags on strangers, couldn’t it?

    Wondering if perhaps the Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box might want them, for use at checkout, I folded up those still lying on the floor, arranged them in neater stacks, and squashed them back into the darkness from whence they came.

   As summer comes to an end (yeah!) a lot of people will look back with a fond memory of the summer concerts they saw. I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 and still smile at the thought.

    It was especially cool for two reasons, the first being that George Harrison and I made eye contact and the second that our seats were so good that several members of the Lovin’ Spoonful sat in the same aisle as me and my fellow 12-year-old gal pals, one of whose father worked for The New York Times and got us the tickets at the last minute.

    And that’s also why I’m a Belieber. Yes, I, who am old enough to be his mother, am a fan of Justin Bieber. I like the way he treats his fans. For lack of anything else to watch one night this summer, I watched a documentary that featured his recent concert tour. The kid’s a sweetheart and gives his fans what they want: an intimate contact through hand touching and picture posing. In the film, he went out on the balconies of his hotels and waved to the crowds of teenage girls who had staked out the place and sang to them, sometimes in their own languages.

    It seems most of the concerts I attended were held in summer. I saw Joni Mitchell (nosebleed section), Laura Nyro (a quiet venue), Chicago (general admission), and Neil Young at Nassau Coliseum, where I’m pretty sure I got a contact high from the pot fumes in the air.

    I always wanted to see Carole King, but knew it best that I didn’t. I’m sure I’d be thrown out for my attempt to out-sing her on her own songs. My voice would make my fellow concertgoers think there was a cat in heat ripe for romance under one of the stadium’s seats and call security.

    When George and I had our eye-contact dalliance it might have been that I was one of the girls screaming the loudest, even though I wasn’t a screamer and peer pressure provoked it. It may have also been the big-busted chick behind me that he looked at, but for one very hot and steamy moment he made eye contact with a little frizzy-haired girl and gave her a memory to last a lifetime.

    I thought his gaze meant something, like he was interested in me, which, since I was only 12, actually would have made him a pedophile, and he wasn’t because he never called me or sent a roadie to get me from the crowd to meet him for drinks after the concert.

    When the four mop-haired blokes sang “All My Loving,” which begins with the line “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you,” I puffed up my nonexistent cleavage just like the girl with real cleavage behind me and thought George would jump off the stage and make his way through the crowd to find me. I waited, lips pursed, for my first kiss that never came.

    When they played “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” my hands tingled in anticipation, but that could have been from the fiberglass that I had worked with earlier that day on my little boat in City Island. Whatever, George Harrison looked at me on a hot summer night and I’ll never forget it.

    The end of summer is always bittersweet, just like the appropriately named bittersweet vines that will soon sprout orange and red berries signifying that autumn has arrived. They will be wrapped on our mantles, doorways, and in vases to cheer us and welcome the new season and an opportunity to make new memories.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   From time to time, you get to meet extraordinary people, people whose lives have made others better. Such was the case last weekend when Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian women’s rights and peace activist, came to East Hampton to participate at Guild Hall in what is called the Hampton Institute, a two-day series of talks and panels on topics of national concern.

    Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, a rights activist and journalist. The prize was deserved.

    Ms. Gbowee led the women’s movement that helped bring down Charles Taylor, the brutal Liberian president. You may recall television images of women in white tops and head scarves marching toward the presidential palace in Monrovia and refusing to go away until Mr. Taylor agreed to hear what they had to say. By that time, Liberia had suffered 12 years of civil war and at least 200,000 deaths.

    The prize has brought Ms. Gbowee to international attention and spurred her work for the safety and education of women and girls and for reconciliation and peace. She has founded two organizations, the Women’s Peace and Security Network and the Gbowee Peace Foundation.

    What is stunning when you meet her is not only what she has done and is continuing to do but her ability to cut through the cant, to explain what she is fighting for in simple, often anecdotal, language. Although only 40 years old, she has witnessed war, known child soldiers, been a refugee, and come out as a wise woman.

    Others who took part last weekend were pretty impressive, too. Kati Marton, for example, is the author of some seven books, with a new one about to be published about her life with her late husband, Richard Holbrooke. Dina Powell heads a Goldman Sachs initiative to empower women entrepreneurs. Kirsten Gillibrand is a lively and articulate New York senator. Joe Nocera is a New York Times columnist. Paul Goldberger, who now writes for The New Yorker magazine, is an expert on the man-made environment.

    And there were more, all accomplished and successful in their fields. But the inspiring spark of courage in Ms. Gbowee is impossible to miss.

    The program at Guild Hall was the third sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to “carrying forward the legacy and values” of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Its mission is to “reanimate progressive politics and build a sustainable society.” At Guild Hall, the institute follows a series of somewhat more home-grown panel discussions that were called Hot Topics.

    Ms. Gbowee, who has four children of her own and is mother to two others, recently added the African Women Leaders Network for Reproductive Health and Family Planning to the groups she works for. But she acknowledges that finding peace through reconciliation in Liberia may be even more daunting than reproductive rights.

    “We have a whole generation of young people whose only means of settling disputes is through violence. And then we have a whole generation who have no idea of why we fought, but because of where they find themselves . . . their ethnicity, the social group, their religious group, they have to take sides.”

    Leymah Gbowee’s story is told in a 2008 documentary called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” She has also been assisted in writing a memoir, “Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.” I hope some of you will feel compelled to learn more about her.

   In the end, the catbird won the battle of the blueberries.

   For whatever unknown-to-me confluence of meteorological circumstances, 2012 has shaped up to be a great year for the native high-bush blueberry bushes that grow at the edge of the swamps near our house. I noticed the pale-green young ber­ries late last month, and watched closely as they neared ripeness.

    So too did a catbird or two, which I could hear unseen in the brush issuing warning cries when I lingered near the patch. The calls seemed to say, “Be gone. These are mine.”

    Time being what it is in the busy season at The Star, and with three children at home, there was little chance I would get to the berries. Yet one morning before the day got too hot, I put on long sleeves and boots and picked about half a pint’s worth. I put my precious haul on the kitchen counter, a mistake, because I had to shoo off Lisa as she reached for a handful.

    Regular readers may remember that it is about this time of the year that I begin to write about making jams, jellies, or preserves. Long ago, as I have said before, I gave up on making large batches of any one variety. Instead, I try to put up a jar or three of what comes into season as it comes into season.

    So far, the shelf reserved for such things has a couple of jars of strawberry jam on it and a couple of sweet-pickled summer squash. Later will come beach plum jelly, wild grape jelly, black raspberry preserves, and, later still, canned tomatoes.

    The blueberries, though I managed to cook them into jam on Saturday morning before shuttling off our eldest child to camp, will not take their place on the shelf. The few ounces of goodness they produced when boiled up with an equal weight of sugar are destined for immediate consumption.There will be none to follow.

    By the time I made it back to the patch to pick anew, the catbird had stripped the branches bare.

   Summer is over. For me, anyway. I’ve been at The Star for June and July as an intern from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I don’t have to tell you that The Star is a terrific publication — you’ve probably been reading it for years.

    The stories are well researched by dedicated journalists who are serious about their craft. The newspaper that comes out each week is the beautiful result of a few dozen people and their pursuit of excellence. It’s been an honor to be a small part of that unit this summer.

    This internship has certainly taught me quite a bit about the journalism industry. The Star is in a charming old building with dozens of awards lining its walls. The editors have taken my reasonably written stories and other work and they’ve smoothed out the rough edges. Some of my stories needed more buffing than smoothing. I couldn’t have found a better place to learn and grow as I continue to improve my skills as a journalist. If I only had more time here.

   But, it’s back to my real life. I’ve been working part time on a master’s degree in journalism while I’ve worked full time at the university as an academic adviser for undergrads. I love working with young people — helping them navigate their way through college and majors, careers, and their social lives — many of them away from home for the first time.

    This summer gave me something I haven’t had in a long time, the thing I’ve wanted most in the world. This summer gave me time. I’ve had time to visit friends and family and introduce my children to dozens of people who are important in my life. I’ve had time at the beach. We’ve spent oodles of time wandering around Montauk while both of my boys searched for the perfect necklace to bring home. I’ve had time to just watch my children enjoy themselves without schedules of any kind.

    They’ve participated in sand castle contests, baseball games on the beach, a trip to the Lighthouse. They’ve been to an outdoor movie in Amagansett, made dozens of trips to Ben and Jerry’s, played some mini-golf, enrolled in surf camp, and swam pretty much every single day. Their usually blonde hair has been bleached from chlorine, sun, and the sea. Their little bodies are brown despite the tremendous amounts of sunscreen we’ve applied.

    Coming all the way to Montauk from Colorado for the summer has been quite an adventure. Throw two young boys into the mix and it makes things even more interesting. I asked my 9-year-old to describe his summer in one word.

    “Amazing,” he responded with shining eyes and a smile.

    Tomorrow we start our journey home. My oldest son starts fourth grade on Aug. 15 and the little guy starts kindergarten a week later. I’ll go back to work at the university. And life will go back to normal for a while. For a while.

    This summer, the internship, the entire experience really, have given me a lot to think about. I love the work ethic of the folks at The Star and of New Yorkers in general and I really love to write. Introducing my children to a summer at the beach and the wonders of searching for beautiful treasures from the sea has been fantastic.

    Once I get home, I’ll start trying to figure out if there is a way for me to write more, have summers off, and bring the boys back for summers on the East End once in a while. Lofty? Sure it is. That’s okay, though. I love a challenge.

 Kathy Noonan, an intern at The Star this summer, lives in Boulder, Colo.

    Read a letter recently in The East Hampton Press the writer of which was outraged that a successful psychiatrist, who’d had “one glass of wine” at dinner, and who was driving his 86-year-old mother home, had been caught up in the police dragnet of a few weeks back.

    That fatal glass of wine had resulted in the “guilty-before-proven-innocent” psychiatrist spending the night in jail “along with 20-plus others.” The cops, she concluded, had acted out of spite, envious of the successful. Something “right out of Nazi Germany [had] occurred.”

    Now I know what to say should I be pulled over: Not “Do you know Eddie Ecker?” but “Do you know I’m a member of the 99 percent? See, it says so on the rear bumper.”

    Class warfare (“But the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep” — Ecclesiastes 5:12) and Nazi Germany aside, I don’t like these mass stops either, though a lawyer friend said they were for the greater good and that therefore were not a fit subject for hyperventilation. “You really shouldn’t drive after having had two glasses of wine,” she said. And before I could say, “red or white?” added, “Contrary to what that letter writer says, you wouldn’t be arrested if you’d only had one.”

    I was sobered by her admonition, especially on hearing her say an accident victim stopped at a traffic light had been arrested for D.W.I. after his car had been struck by another drunken driver who had died in the collision.

    It is not the time, I suppose, given the five deaths and serious accidents here this summer, to recite Article V of the Constitution’s amendments, the one having to do with with warrantless (and thus illegal) searches and seizures.

    Still, I have some cavils: As for class warfare, Latinos seem usually to bear the brunt of it here rather than prominent psychiatrists, and as for the greater good, one wonders, having read Tom McMorrow’s front-page story last week about the Brazilian couple pulled over on Montauk’s lonely Industrial Road, if it is always served by our police. And finally, one wonders, having just been administered the sobriety field test by McMorrow himself, how many teetotaling “seniors” whose sense of balance has waned would pass!

    And now on to something more cheery. I was at the dump, as is my wont most summer days, when hailed by Joe O’Connell, a fellow avid tennis player who had enjoyed my golf guffawing column of the week before. The setting seemed particularly apt inasmuch as I and he — especially he, who has two new knees to which he recently added a new right shoulder — are living, walking examples of the efficacy of personal recycling.

    “Look!” he said, extending his right arm straight to the sky. Because shoulders are tricky and require a lot of rehabbing — and sometimes are never quite right — he said he had been forced to serve underhand for a while, “but the guys I play with had trouble getting those underhand serves back.” I told him I’d found the same thing last week when forced by a strained lower abdominal muscle that’s taken about a month in coming around to serve softly (though overhand) to my opponents as well. “Despite that, I won as many games as I usually do,” I said. “And now I know now I’ll be able to play this way into my 90s!”

    He spoke for both of us when he said in parting, “I’ll never give up!”

   A fuss broke out in the world of journalism earlier this month, when several leading news organizations admitted they had agreed to allow the Obama and Romney campaign staffs to review quotations before publication. A New York Times reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, broke the story about this devil’s bargain, which included his own paper among others.

    From where I sit in my creaky, wooden editor’s chair, it should be inconceivable that professional reporters at the highest level would go along with a demand that allows sources to massage what they (or their candidates) say after the fact or to kill unfavorable points altogether.

    According to Mr. Peters’s account, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and Reuters had also agreed to allow interview quotes to be vetted by officials in exchange for access to sources.

    Accuracy is one thing, but that is not at all what the campaigns are interested in. Both sides frequently have asked for changes to off-the-cuff statements to make their man look better. The message, Mr. Peters amusingly wrote, can be, “. . . no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.”

    The single exception was the Associated Press, which deserves a Pulitzer for this just on principle. The AP’s rule, explained by its Washington bureau chief to Steve Myers, a Poynter Institute writer, was that changing quotes after the fact was a “red line” not to be crossed. That is how it is at this newspaper — as it should be across the journalism spectrum.

    I find it particularly bad that The New York Times, which suffered a serious blow thanks to Judith Miller (a part-time Sag Harbor resident) in the overheated lead up to the Iraq war, would agree to this practice.  Ms. Miller eventually was derided for working too closely with her sources in repeating false information to build the Bush administration’s case for the United States invasion based on erroneous reports about supposed weapons of mass destruction.

    It is perhaps a stretch to go from campaign trail blather to helping an administration send troops to their deaths on false pretenses, but the ethical standard should be the same. Reporters and news organizations that cede any part of the story to their sources’ control are no longer fulfilling their essential role as the people’s watchdog.