John Lennon, I miss you. 

   This thought drifted through my mind last week as I swung the car around the Plaza in Montauk where, 36 years earlier, I watched as a long black limousine eased to the curb. Out stepped a skinny guy, hair cropped close, clad casually in orange T-shirt, blue jeans, and sandals; and his companion, tiny, long black hair flowing down and around a white kimono that billowed in the April breeze.

    I was lucky twice. My parents, thankfully, owned several Beatles LPs and a few 8-track tapes, and I was hooked by age 3. I still recall the day my mother picked me up at nursery school on East 20th Street in Manhattan, and we walked to a record store where she purchased what is popularly called “The White Album.” I used to lie on the floor in our apartment, my head next to a speaker, and listen for hours — in my memory, anyway.

    I also had the good fortune to know Rita Gosman. My parents were close with her and her husband, John, and my brothers and I grew up with their sons. When she wasn’t at Gosman’s restaurant, Rita was often at Pospisil Real Estate, there on the Plaza in Montauk. She had tipped us off — on the phone, her son, 8-year-old Chris, excitedly told 9-year-old me that we could meet John Lennon (!) if we waited at the real estate office on Saturday.

    In the end, we waited for three consecutive Saturdays, but finally that sleek car rolled up. Later, after they’d driven around town looking at rentals, John signed an autograph for both of us, including quick drawings of a lamb on a cloud, a minimalist self-portrait, and the date, “ ’76.”

    John had drifted, lazy like “Sun King” or “I’m Only Sleeping,” into a mind troubled by yet another mass shooting. Six killed, three wounded. This time, a fanatic apparently unable to distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims but, as usual, able to obtain an arsenal of lethal weaponry.

    This, barely two weeks after 12 were killed and 58 wounded at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” just a few miles from the site, in 1999, of yet another massacre by firearms. This, three days before another shooter pleaded guilty to last year’s murder of 6 and wounding of 13 in Tucson.

    Oak Creek, Aurora, Tucson, Littleton, Virginia Tech, the Upper West Side. Shock, a few calls for stricter gun control. And then, to paraphrase Frost, since we are not the one dead, turn to our affairs.

    “What does it mean,” John asked, “when a person is such a pacifist that they get shot? I can never understand that.”

    Nor I, John.

    Christopher Walsh, a new reporter for The Star, recently returned to the South Fork after 20 years in New York City.

   By the time I’d finished reading John Cheever’s short story “Goodbye, My Brother,” to Mary, we were both in tears, and, for a time at least, thrown back upon ourselves as beautiful writing will do to you.

    We’d been thinking of the day — a day free of care, a day of no obligations, a day largely free of traffic, which every summer becomes worse — when, all of a sudden, we were impelled to reflect upon life, not just on its joys, which, of course, we try to do as often as we can, but also on its sorrows, not to mention its horrors.

    As is her fashion — she is a much more discerning reader than I — Mary laid it all out, everything Cheever, who has captured my interest lately, A.R. Gurney having led me to him, had been writing about. She knew the reasons why her tears had welled up. Why, she wondered, had mine.

    All I could say in reply was, “It was beautiful writing . . .  he really hit it.” He had hit the ball out of the park, and the ball — I’m quoting here from Dylan Thomas, thanks to Robert Lipsyte’s memoirs, which I reviewed last summer — had yet to touch the ground.

    “Cheever said in another story that merely to touch one’s longtime lover is transformative,” I said during our reverie. Mary liked that thought. Then, with a laugh, asked if I couldn’t trim my toenails.

    And in that way, through banter, we began to lighten our spirits, and soon — though I was to think throughout that day and night and the day following how exactly I would describe life — we were on our way. It works every time.

    If I didn’t have her to talk to, I don’t know what I would do. We’re joined, not so much at the hip — though that is true enough — but at our synapses. People in our family marvel at how much we have to talk about.

    Perhaps in doing so we’re fending off grief (which Cheever’s narrator in “Bullet Park” had once thought of as a foreign principality) for as long as we can.

    But you’re wondering, no doubt, what words I picked to best describe life. Well, at least in my case, there’s joy and sorrow . . . and possibility.

   Among the subtle markers of the inevitable turn of the year is the arrival here of shorebirds from their northern breeding grounds. For a couple of weeks now, their numbers have grown along the Gardiner’s Bay beach as they fatten on the shoreline’s rich supply of food.

    Young sanderlings are the most obvious, or perhaps simply the most oblivious, near our house. Tottering along on their toothpick-thin black legs, they come within a couple of yards if you sit still. Floating with my head just above the water as evening comes, I can get close enough to one to study its gray markings, tiny black eyes, and sturdy black bill, which it jams again and again into the sand.

    There is plenty for them to eat here. Dozens of small crustaceans flee as my feet stir up the bottom. Above the shifting waterline, sand fleas hop incessantly until some bird makes them a meal. Perhaps I notice these things more than I used to; I joke with my friends that paying attention to the birds is a sign of age.

    A quartet of larger shorebirds, dowitchers perhaps, have been here for a couple of weeks. At least, I think they are the same group that has been passing by now and then. Dusk comes, and they rapidly wing west. Before long, they will quit this beach for good and head for their distant, southern, winter home. Something about their impending exit, even as I know they will be back tomorrow, makes me think of my own mortality.

    According to the calendar, this is the height of summer, yet the signs are unmistakable: fall will come soon. You can see it in the constant urgency with which the shorebirds rush back and forth hunting for food.

    The sanderling I watched this week paused in its path to briefly preen. Something on its thick, white breast needed attention. I blinked and it was gone.

   Did you know that all 400-some-odd members of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years? (Okay, the number is 435, not including the non-voting members who represent the United States territories and the District of Columbia.)

    I am willing to admit my own ignorance on this quite simple fact. Apparently I’m not alone: I’ve gotten consistent responses in the negative over the last few days, when I asked friends if they realized elections in the House aren’t staggered, as they are in the Senate.

    Not everyone I spoke to was as concerned as I am about who is going to be elected in November — and where the country will be headed — but, at the very least, we ought to know how our national government works, don’t you think? You get a better understanding of how representatives committed to the Tea Party took over the House in 2010 when you know that every seat was on the line. Were the terms staggered, the outcome might have been somewhat different.

    Senators, of course, serve for six years, with one-third of them coming up for election every two years. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election this year, two are now held by Independents (Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders), 10 by Republicans, and 21 by Democrats.

    I have never contributed to a senator’s election campaign, but a good number of incumbent Democrats have got my number, or, I should say, my e-mail address this year. Among them are Dianne Feinstein of California, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Jon Tester of Montana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. I am sure there’s an explanation of how I got on their lists and why I don’t get similar requests for money from New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. At least their missives have acquainted me with what they stand for.

    As for Senator McCaskill, The New York Times reported this week that $15 million has been spent to defeat her since July 2011 by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the 60 Plus Association. Ms. McCaskill is not expected to hold on to the seat she won with 49.6 percent of the vote in 2006.

    There is something very unsettling about super PAC money wielding power in state elections. When the Supreme Court ruled in what is known as Citizens United in 2010 that corporations and unions were entitled to First Amendment protections, the decision unleashed unfettered millions for political campaigns.

    Even if you were to concede that spending by national super PACs was acceptable in connection with presidential campaigns, it strikes me as truly inappropriate for such money to affect the election of anyone running to serve the people of a given state (or one of its regions). Moreover — in any potential future vote on legislation to override Citizens United, how independent could the decision be among congressmen who leaned hard on out-of-state super PAC money for their victory?

    Representative Tim Bishop, our local congressman, said recently that the Karl Rove forces had begun advertising against his re-election only five days after he was declared the winner of a very close race in 2010. Doesn’t that make a mockery of how a congressman is supposed to be elected to represent the people?

   I write in praise of the ugly golf shirt.     

   Oh, I’ve got a beauty. It’s not loud, no. It would be better if it were loud. It is, rather, a mottled mix of black and gray specks — inexplicably or inadvertently designed by someone in the employ of Bert Pulitzer to look like the ghostly nothingness of an old antenna television after the programming ends and the final bars of the national anthem fade.

    The white noise of the fabric is broken up only by some piping’s attempt at sportiness at collar’s edge and sleeves’ end. The shirt was made in Pakistan, back before their coddling of bin Laden. On the plus side, the thing’s got a pocket, always useful; it’s adorned, in the sole nice touch, with a tiny tag showing a tan duck in flight against a green background.

    I wear it all the time, to clockwork-like groans from my wife.

    Golf shirts, particularly sin-ugly ones, are perfect for the office-casual world we live in. They can have all the style and sex appeal of a convention of insurance agents in Scranton — just as long as there’s a collar. I mentioned to a colleague once that the field of static adorning my torso had been my late grandfather’s and saw her gaze lose focus and her mouth go slack as she imagined that it had actually touched his decaying flesh.

    It hadn’t, but it had been one of many shirts he won or was given by various golf clubs he belonged to or visited. (He was good, could shoot his age in his late 70s.) A handful of these were handed down to me. Not bequeathed, mind you, more like they were left lying around. One is from L.L. Bean, which bespeaks quality. But then it’s pale yellow, which bespeaks the toilet. Another, all white, is still in its packaging in my garage — stiff too-big collar, regal flourish of an insignia on its breast signifying . . . something regal.

    At my grandfather’s funeral, 10 years ago in Panama City Beach, Fla., my father wore one of the old man’s suits in a combination of tribute and practicality. It fit pretty well, just a little big. There’s something unforgettable about that, so I didn’t need to be reminded of it, yet was nonetheless when I heard on NPR one day how Andre Dubus III built his father’s coffin, climbing inside it himself to get the dimensions right. (They say Dubus fils is a good writer, but pere’s stories have meant so much to me I can’t bear to read anything by his offspring.)

    What I wore to the funeral that hot May day in Florida, after bombing across the Panhandle in a rented Ford Escort past scenery remarkably similar to eastern Long Island’s — sandy soil, scrub oak, shrimpy pine — was my only sport coat (Latham House, wool), my only dress pants (also wool), and my only dress shoes (pebbled leather by Nunn Bush, scavenged at the Bellingham, Wash., Salvation Army a year before).

    In the wake of the momentous passing of a generation, even a decade on, what have you got? Besides my golf shirts, I’ve got my grandfather’s Springfield College diploma and a miniature keychain football. He was the football coach at Suffern High upstate, and then the athletic director at Rockland County Community College. He apparently did a lot to get the college a new field house, way back when, and felt robbed when it wasn’t named after him.

    His was a classic American story of upward mobility — son of an Erie Railroad signalman, later a salesman for a drug company, later still retiring to a beach house in Florida. That world and those possibilities seem a thing of the past, as does all the leisure time he and his peers seem to have had.

    But I don’t think about that when I put on my golf shirt. I don’t even think about all the visits I failed to make. Instead I think about that one-story house on a white-sand beach near the end of an undeveloped Panhandle in the 1970s, its views out sliding glass doors onto the Gulf of Mexico, watching for dolphins in the morning as my grandfather and I ate corn flakes and sliced bananas.

    That part isn’t so ugly.

    Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

    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.

   “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.

   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.

    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?”