“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!”

   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.

   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.

   It’s been a long time since I’ve been single and in the market, but having a contractor do some work around the house this year kind of took me back to the thrills and insecurities of my dating days.

    You finally find the guy you want, the one who impresses you with his smarts and know-how. But if it’s springtime or even close to it, you know he’s seeing other people. Still, he calls. You make a date. He cancels once or twice, but then he calls you on his own and makes another date. He shows up. You’re elated. You see him every day for the second half of a week. You’re walking on air all weekend. Things really seem to be moving along nicely. This could really be Mr. Right.

    Then he doesn’t show up, for one, two, three days.

    He doesn’t call. You find yourself looking out the window every time a big truck goes by.

    You break down and send him a text, carefully wording it so you don’t sound too needy. He texts you back right away. He lost his phone, misplaced your number, he’s so glad you got in touch. He’s still totally into you and he’ll be by tomorrow or the next day. He sends flowers. Oh, wait, it’s a contractor we’re talking about. He sends one member of his crew to take care of some important-seeming task — maybe making a big pile of dirt or filling in a big hole. Something that makes you feel as if you’re on track again.

    You go door shopping together. Online. This is getting serious.

    He starts coming by a few times a week again. You love what he does for you. And then Memorial Day weekend rolls around. One small part of the job is three-quarters done. Another part is midway between chaos and completion. You haven’t seen him or heard from him for days . . . weeks? It feels like forever.

    He’s left you for someone richer and more fabulous. You’re sure you’ll never see him again. You send him an e-mail. You text him again. You feel abandoned. You can’t call; you could never disguise the desperation in your voice.

    Then he calls again. He’s coming by today. He’ll be there all week. He’s finishing the job. Everything you asked for . . . well almost . . . is done. He puts the fence back up, picks up his tools, and moves out. And you say to yourself, “That’s it? He’s leaving? Just like that? It’s over?”

    Carissa Katz, an associate editor at The Star, is happily married with two kids.

   During the 20 or so years when we rented our winter house in town every summer and moved to one five miles away, on Gardiner’s Bay, we had the drill down pat. Even when the kids were young — when we had a dog and a cat or two, plus assorted pets like Ginger, the goat, and Peeper, the aggressive goose — the process worked. Patterns developed about what had to be done. I knew which china to store away and which to leave for the tenants. Never mind that when we got to our summer house it was chaos; the tenants, at least, weren’t left with a mess.

    That ritual came to an end after one of my sons got married and took over what had been our summer house as his year-round home. Nevertheless, I have often wondered if the system could be revived, somehow — perhaps if we moved out of our village house and into one owned by my husband’s family, down by the ocean, for August. Or, maybe, by playing the real-estate domino game, renting something smaller for ourselves for a month and still making a bit of money on this one.

    Last year, I decided I needed to take these idle thoughts more seriously. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before I discovered just what it would take to get the house ready to show. Suddenly, it seemed, everything from the window shades to the front steps needed fixing or upgrading. Nevertheless, I dove into the process with this summer in mind. I told myself that even if we didn’t rent out the house, it would be nice to have it shipshape again.

    If you live in one place for many years, you are bound to find a task such as this overwhelming. Plenty of things around the house had worn out or gently fallen into disrepair. My daughter says the concept of  “shabby chic” could have been inspired by our family.) Would tenants be happy with our 1960s Le Creuset pots and truly ancient cast-iron pans? Would they be comfortable with our old cotton-poly-blend sheets, or would I need to buy new, matched sets? Would they mind the shelves that were overflowing with books? Certainly, the empty jars and forgotten staples in the pantry would have to go; and probably the toys in the grandchildren’s playroom would have to be boxed up and carried to the attic, as well.

     Then, of course, there would be the closets. When they are small and stuffed, as ours are, it is incredibly dreary to empty them. And what should I do with the antique Chinese bibelots in the corner cupboard, which were brought home from Shanghai in the 1920s (and have practically never been moved since)?

    Photos of gorgeous houses — in shelter magazines or on the pages of publications like The East Hampton Star — can be insidious. I don’t dare spend too much time poring over them, because I am afraid of being infected with Martha Stewart syndrome: an obsessive compulsion to reach for impossible-to-meet standards of organization and spiffiness. As far as I’m concerned, it’s akin to the unreasonable beauty standards young girls are burdened with by ubiquitous media images of super-skinny fashion models and surgically enhanced Hollywood stars. (My laundry room just doesn’t measure up! My towels are too thin!)

    So now it is the end of June, and I’ve long since missed the potential summer renters who start looking in February or March. I’m reconciled to reality. A long trip in August is not in the cards. But there’s still next year. And the house is indeed shaping up . . . except for just one thing: The brokers tell me if I really want to rent I’ve got to put in a pool.

   When one of my tennis partners the other morning asked what I did, I told him I wrote sports for The Star, and had worked at the paper for such a long time, going on 45 years now, that I was probably fit to be embalmed.

    “But first,” I said, “I’m to be enshrined!”

    I have thought seriously lately of changing the greeting on my voice message machine from “I’m either at a game, going to a game, or coming from a game” to “I’m either being enshrined, going to be enshrined, or coming back from having been enshrined,” but Mary and my eldest daughter, Emily, have turned thumbs down on that.

    “I couldn’t believe that no one could think of anything but nice things to say about you,” Emily said, after she’d read the piece Cailin Riley wrote about my East Hampton High School Hall of Fame induction in The East Hampton Press which I’d sent her.

    “Well, you have to suspend your disbelief at times like this,” I said. “I may cheat at backgammon, making me a candidate for the Hall of Shame, but you have to admit I do write well. One has to take the chaff with the wheat — assuming there is any wheat! As to the piece, I’ve always depended on the kindness of sportswriters.”

    “I like what you said about being in ‘the joy department,’ ” Emily said. “I am too. It’s a joy to teach first graders. They’re little experts when they come to you. Each one’s alit passionately on subjects in preschool that they love — trains, dinosaurs, bugs, whatever. I was reading them “Charlotte’s Web” the other day and was saying that Charlotte had gone off to lay her eggs when one of the kids began sobbing. We all looked at him, and then he said, “When spiders lay their eggs, that means they’re going to die.”    

    “A future entomologist,” I said.

    Teaching first graders and then having the summer off puts Emily in the joy-squared department, I guess, while plain old joy will have to suffice for me.

    Getting back to Cailin’s article, Claude Beudert said he had hoped she’d put in the nice thing he’d said about Mary, who, he assured Cailin, had quickened my pulse and got me breathing again. (These weren’t his words — I’ve been writing lately about Jean Carlos Barrientos’s brave save of a drowning man in the ocean off Napeague, but it’s dawned on me that these medical terms describe well what Mary did . . . cardioimaginative resuscitation.)

    I would have continued on living, yes, and working ably, and being cordial, but I would not have experienced the joy that I have in these past 27 years were it not for Mary. It’s because of her that I can say blithely that I’m in the joy department, and can promise solemnly never no more to cheat at backgammon.

   As dusk came Friday night, a group of parents and children gathered on the ocean beach to mark the end of the school year. The children were sent off to gather wood. Someone went up to a friend’s house to get paper and some matches.

    I showed a couple of eager kids how to build a twig tepee around balled-up pages of The New York Times, then how to layer on larger logs. Among the adults there was a bit of discussion about whether to dig a pit, but since I had been put in charge that evening, I overruled the pro-pit faction, saying it would eat up the radiant heat and make the fire more difficult to clean up.

     With the arrival of summer weather, more people are taking to the beaches to sit around bonfires. At the risk of sounding like I am preaching, I’d like to run down the rules, as well as what, I hope, might be a way to make sure the tradition continues.

    East Hampton Town and Village still allow beach fires. The town says that no fire can be closer than 50 feet from anything flammable and must be at least 100 feet away from a lifeguard stand. Where there is not enough beach width, fires can be within the 50-foot buffer, but no less than 25 feet from beach grass or permanent structures.

    In the town, fires cannot be kindled until 5 p.m. and must be extinguished with water by a minute before midnight. As for materials, nothing with nails or made of chemically treated wood may be burned.

    A bucket of water must be kept within 10 feet of a fire at all times, and no fire is to be put out with sand or buried. Finally, all fire debris must be removed, and the beach restored to its natural state by the end of the night. Southampton Town has banned beach fires, although Southampton Village allows them, more or less under the same rules as in the Town of East Hampton.

    East Hampton Village has gone one step further, recently confining beach fires to metal containers up to two feet in diameter. This is an effort to limit their number as well as to discourage the spread of charcoal debris across the sand. Similarly, Suffolk County allows only contained fires at its two outer beach areas here, at Cedar Point and Shagwong Point, Montauk. Fires are not allowed on any of the state park beaches, that is, on Napeague or at Hither Hills, Camp Hero, and Montauk Point.

    From my perspective, residents of the Town of East Hampton are lucky to still be able to enjoy a fire on the sand. Being a responsible citizen by returning when the sun comes up to scour the fire site may just help keep it that way.

   East Hampton had a major development boom in the 1980s. At least in developers’ dreams: A 400-unit subdivision was planned for Montauk’s Hither Woods, 64 oceanfront house lots were to be carved from Shadmoor in Montauk, the 845-acre Grace Estate in Northwest was to become a community modeled on Hilton Head, S.C., with clustered and single-family houses and a nine-hole golf course, and Barcelona Neck, between Northwest Woods and Sag Harbor, was on the block.

    And what did the East Hampton Town Board at the time do? In 1982, it abolished the Town Planning Department. And what did voters do? They turned the board out of office and voted for open space. Democrats took over Town Hall in 1984, re-established the Planning Department, and worked with the county and state to buy and turn much of this acreage into parkland.

    Today, 30 years later, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Councilwoman Theresa Quig­ley have proposed putting all the town agencies and quasi-judicial boards under one so-called “environmental” umbrella. Deja vu all over again? The proposed change would eviscerate the Planning Department, whose staff evaluates every application before the decision-making planning and zoning boards. The rationale given is simple: to make government efficient.

    Remembering what happened in the ’80s, however, it may be that because the East End has remained relatively unscathed by the economic downturn, similar development pressure has made itself heard among the powers that be.

    Under the proposal, the Planning Department would be assigned to long-range planning, This sounds legitimate, until you stop to think about it. In order for such long-range town planning to be in any way effective, it would have to lead to the revision of the comprehensive plan after public hearings and adoption of new regulations.

    If Mr. Wilkinson, Ms. Quigley, and their supporters believe East Hampton has gone overboard in protecting the environment and would benefit from a broader tax base — along with a larger population and the housing, services, infrastructure, and schools that would require — they should say so out loud and call for another blueprint for the future, including strategies for reaching new goals and cost estimates. Otherwise, their suggested reorganization does no more than put the cart before the horse.

   Havens Beach in Sag Harbor was closed by order of the Suffolk County Health Department yesterday and the day before that after heavy rains raised the possibility of bacterial contamination. But you wouldn’t have known this had you stopped by for a swim.

    Once word comes from the county that the beach is to be closed — as happens from time to time — the village has the lifeguard hang up a generic “no swimming” sign, and they leave it at that.

    The general source of the problem is known: an 880-foot-long ditch that wends its way up toward Hempstead Street and its road drainage. But just where the bacteria associated with human waste come from is far from obvious. The ditch eventually crosses the beach, presenting an inviting rill to children who like to splash in its water.

    When I was still the father of just one child, in ignorance, my wife and I allowed our 2-year-old daughter to plop down and play in the ditch. In fact, I only learned of the risk when a man who lives near Havens Beach happened to notice what we were doing and walked over to clue us in.

    Since then I have watched with growing frustration as plans to do something about it — or at least issue honest and explicit warnings — fail to be made by successive crops of local officials.

    For more than a decade now, successive Sag Harbor Village Boards and East Hampton Town officials have fumbled several variations of a remediation project. A few years ago, fences were extended along the ditch, and signs put up noting possible bacterial danger. These are routinely ignored. So far, that’s about it.

    Two years of study by engineers hired by the Village of Sag Harbor have produced a plan to install a system that will capture contaminants before they can cross the bathing beach and reach Northwest Harbor. The project will include the installation of sponges laced with an antimicrobial compound that should kill most of the pathogens.

    I hope the project goes forward, but I’ll believe it when I see it.