Transitions are difficult. It is still summer, but the Canada geese are back in the fields. I already find myself concerned that it will soon be too late to make the most of the season. Suppose, I say to myself, you were on vacation here for only the last two weeks of August: What would you make sure to do?

    It’s hard for those of us who live here year round to break the rhythm we keep the rest of the year. But it’s a shame not to find time for the beach, to get on as well as in the water, to eat outdoors, to sit down with the people you enjoy who are rarely here during the rest of the year, to attend at least a few of the talks, shows, concerts, fairs — the myriad things that seem to have grown exponentially this year (not to mention the expensive restaurants and costly benefits).

    If you were here for the rest of August, you would be able to take advantage of everything going on around you, as well as of the farm stands at their best. They, too, seem to have multiplied this year. Depending on how serious you are about what you eat, you might even vacation here just for the corn and tomatoes, the squashes and berries.

    I was delighted recently to find blueberries marked “local” at one of the farm stands. I supposed they were grown on the North Fork, although I didn’t ask. They seemed to taste as good as those I remember from my childhood, which we picked ourselves on my grandparents’ farm. We had one cow for a while, but blueberry bushes had taken over the hilly pastures. My grandmother used to make a fine upside-down blueberry cake, which she insisted on calling a pie, but my grandfather’s blueberry activities were more unusual.

    Several times in season, he would pick enough berries to fill a big pail and then walk the three or four miles to the nearest hotels to sell them. When I was a kid, I thought he did it for the few cents they brought, but now I think he did it to relive his childhood in rural Mol­dova. (My grandmother once told me that she fell in love with him when he jumped from the ground to the top of a wagon filled with hay.)

    Summers are always too short, even if you are grown up and don’t have to go back to school. But I have to remind myself that the off-season is plentiful, and the weather is often exceedingly beautiful. I have relived my own childhood by picking beach plums and cranberries, and, yes, they are the fruits of fall.

   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.

   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.

   When I solicited Sinead FitzGibbon’s advice as to a lower abdominal strain that’s annoyed me for a while and has kept me off the tennis courts, she, a long-distance athlete for all seasons, said, “Take up golf.”

    Taken aback, I said, with as much finality as a diffident sportswriter could muster, “Never.” Which reminded her of her 82-year-old father, who had said when she made the same suggestion to him, ‘I’ll play golf when I get old.’ ”

    Now that’s the spirit! It’s not that I dislike golf . . . well yes I do. It is intriguing, yes, and, yes, it is fiendishly difficult, and thus a beguiling challenge, but I think the benefits, in the form of those well-publicized euphoric moments when the ball takes flight and lands where you want it to, far outweigh the costs in terms of the suffering one must endure.

    Besides, in golf you’re supposed to suffer in silence, take the slings and arrows in gentlemanly stride rather than rail at Fate and sling your irons arrowlike into the woods. One must, contrariwise, behave honorably, be courteous, and play by the rules. To do so builds character. What was it Falstaff said about honor? “Who hath it died a Wednesday”? Of course he was treating of risking one’s life on the battlefield, rather than self-destructing on a golf course, but I think there’s a connection. Who hath character shot 30-over on a Wednesday.

    And don’t pretend such woeful imperfection, such egregious falling short of the mark over the course of a four-hour round — for which you’ve laid out good money — doesn’t gnaw at the vitals. Okay, perhaps you have derived some pleasure, you’ve hit some shots of the sort they say keep you coming back. In the end, though, it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, a game for masochists in loud clothing.

    Now tennis on the other hand. Ah, tennis. A game that offers the joy of kicking butt (read reveling in the suffering of others), the antipathy that attends the invariable arguments as to whether the ball was in or out, and (for nine months a year) the ecstasy derived from bouncing undeleted expletives off resonant walls. Sort of like CERN in that respect.

    Tennis is a game for vicious people wearing white. I yearn to get back to it. In the meantime I must content myself with cheating at backgammon.

    Invited out the other day onto the water, where I hardly ever go, preferring to take in the views rather than hang over the rail, I ran to CVS to buy some Sea Bands, thinking they might help.

    I shouldn’t have worried, for the cruise to and from Coecles Harbor on a restored wooden prewar cabin cruiser was marvelously placid, the adults convivial, and the children beguiling.

    I had bought a good bottle of California pinot noir for Ed Gifford, whose 51st birthday we were celebrating, though I’m afraid I drank most of it. At one point, I reported that my eldest daughter had, after spending a number of years in suburban Pittsburgh schools, proved to be an immediate hit when she moved back for the second half of her senior high school year.

    “Emily had been a cheerleader in Pittsburgh — they were raucous,” I said. “She livened things up here with new cheers.” 

    Whereupon everyone who’d been listening became constricted with uncontrollable laughter. Usually quick on the uptake, I waited until they came up for air and had wiped away their tears before asking what had been so riotously funny.

    “We thought you said, ‘Nude cheers’!” one of them said. “It wasn’t just me — she heard it that way too.”

     Then I began to laugh. “That’s the funniest thing I ever said,” I said.

    “But you didn’t say it,” said the captain.

    “Oh yes I did,” I said. “It just needed some fleshing out.”

    Later, I told Emily about it as we talked on the phone. “I had them rolling in the aisles, Emily.”

    “I’m not surprised, Dad. You’re a clown.”

    “ ‘How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester!’ ”

    “I didn’t say that.”

    “Prince Hal did. To Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. I’ve begun to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. They’re on my bucket list.”

    “Well, anyway, that was very funny. And did you also tell them I was the naked high-dive champion at the Maidstone Club?”

   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.

   “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.” If that musical ditty doesn’t immediately ring a bell, I’ll tell you it is, or perhaps more properly used to be, a familiar (and jocular) ending for songs, particularly in bluegrass. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but I couldn’t get it out of my head for a couple of days recently, after making an amusing bungle of an attempt to make a simple appointment to have my hair cut.

    You know how people used to say Sag Harbor was once the bar capital of America, with more gin mills per capita —supposedly, anyway, and I suspect many port towns once made this boast —than any other place? I think we can now legitimately retitle it the salon capital of the South Fork.

    About two months ago, l had my hair done there by a woman named Jackie in a Main Street salon. I liked what she did, and it was time to do it again. My daughter-in-law had given me the phone number originally, but neither of us could remember it or find it again.

    I thought the place was called Salon 67 (it’s actually Salon 66) but couldn’t locate a listing in the phone book, either. So, naturally, I tried information. Quickly given a number, I called and made an appointment. The polite woman who answered the phone said her name was Irina, but didn’t comment when I asked to have an appointment with Jackie. (Or so I thought.)

    A few days later, something unexpectedly came up, and I found it necessary to reschedule my appointment. Once again, I had neglected to write down the phone number, and I tried information again. But this time, the operator insisted no Salon 67 or 66 was listed anywhere on the South Fork. Hm.

    Just why the talented Jackie doesn’t have a listed phone number for Salon 66 is still unclear to me; has time passed me by, and are land lines becoming a thing of the past? I gather she relies on her cellphone and business cards and is doing quite well. She has set up her shop where Marty’s Barbershop used to be —but that didn’t help me find the number.

    Now, the circulation manager at The Star knows a few Internet tricks. She didn’t tell how she ferreted out Jackie’s last name and cellphone number, but that’s exactly what she did. When I called to make a new appointment, however, Jackie was surprised: No, she said, I had not called previously or made any appointment at Salon 66.

    So whom had I called?

    I was both mystified and bemused.

    Turns out that there are more small salons in Sag Harbor than in East Hampton, Bridgehampton, or South­ampton. One of them was expecting me on Thursday at 4, but . . . which one? Hoping to find the answer, I searched the Web and came up with too many to call: Fingers Fine Haircutting, the Style Bar, the Harbor Salon, Studio 99, the Quibaldi Salon, and at least four others. I anxiously wondered what Irina would think when I rudely didn’t appear for my appointment.

    Then, to my surprise, my phone rang the day before the Thursday on which I had inadvertently made an appointment in the wrong place. It was Salon Xavier calling to confirm. Oh, dear: I owed them an explanation.

    When I finally got to Jackie’s, we had a good laugh.

    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!”