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.

   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.

   On reading Gavin Menu and Cailin Riley’s pieces on me in The East Hampton Press last week, my ears were burning, my heart was soaring, and my cheek was sticking out when I told my co-workers that it must have been a slow news week.

    Slow news week or no, I was fascinated to read about me, and — even more important — to read pieces that were written very well, with grace and with the quality of mercy not strain’d; though I’m sorry, in Cailin’s case, that my ramblings were so vague and tendentious that she probably had to spend an inordinate amount of time in fashioning that silk purse from my sow’s ear.

    “All I remember of the interview,” I said to my colleague Rusty Drumm, “was that I went on and on, and kept saying, ‘Oh Jeez, maybe you shouldn’t print that. . . .’ ”

    “The shoe was on the other foot,” he said, with a smile.

    If it weren’t for my outsized ego (my daughter Emily constantly marvels that the people in our family who have the least reason to preen — she and I, namely — are always doing so), I would be warier still of the press, for, as a journalist who has interviewed many people, and who is generally a blabbermouth, I know that interviews involve a great leap of faith on the part of the inter­viewee. One can always be misunderstood, one can always say something(s) stupid that will wind up in print, and one can always in going on and on make it supremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff — assuming that there is any wheat!

    “No wonder you’re the best sportswriter in the state!” I said in a thank-you phone message to Cailin the day the Graves-to-Be-Enshrined interview, which had the facts right, the quotes right, and the tone right, came out. “I’m going to go out and buy 50 copies!”

    Just joking. But I tend to do too much of that, I think. So, seriously, thank you very much, Cailin and Gavin, and Ed and Claude and Kathy. . . . L’chaim.

   The North Carolina Legislature earned no small degree of derision recently in attempting to tell scientists there how to predict sea level rise. A bill pending in the Southern state would constrain how its coastal commission calculates the rate of increase, requiring that numbers be based on trends only since 1900. This would leave out exponential shifts that may follow unforeseen changes, such as accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.

    In coastal parts of that state, officials will have to skirt the new law to plan for what current research says could be sea level rise in excess of the limit. As on Long Island, much of North Carolina’s coastline is highly vulnerable to inundation. Policy makers will have to take that into account, the state capital be damned.

    That some municipalities there have actually passed resolutions prohibiting work on meeting the challenges of the predicted inundation is beyond belief. Of course, that may be a step or two better than what has happened here, at least in the Town of East Hampton, where officials have sidestepped the issue for years and acted as if it will all go away.

    These are big problems, and you can understand why elected officials, very few of whom have a background in the sciences, are not equipped to deal with them. Still, the best available evidence shows that the sea is coming and long-term preparations must be made.

    Where I live, on the bay in Amagansett, the beach has moved landward at the rate of about a foot a year for almost 50 years. The erosion is irregular; some years nothing much happens. Then, in one night, 12 or more feet can be sheared off the low bluffs. And, guess what? It never comes back.

    Back in the early 1960s, when my parents chose the site for the house, they put it as far back as they could, buying us time. Neighbors were not so cautious, and after the last bad northeaster, several of their foundations were battered by the waves.

    As lawmakers dither, somewhere King Canute must be smiling. He was the Norse leader whose courtesans told him he was so powerful that he could hold back the tide. Legend has it that to prove them wrong, he had his throne carried to the water’s edge, and, as the sea rose, he pointed out the hubris of his sycophants.

    Canute was making the point that no man, not even a great leader, could force heaven and earth to bend to his will. North Carolina lawmakers, it seems, have not yet learned this lesson.

   What is going on when 314 lookalike members of a gigantic crowd, and 235 of their spouses or partners, gather under a huge tent and do things like wave big white handkerchiefs around while singing? It’s an Ivy League reunion, of course — at a men’s college.

    I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I accompanied my husband to the 50th reunion of his class at Yale. The class of ’62 was among several having reunions during a three-day weekend earlier this month, and Yale certainly knows how to stage them. But I kept asking myself who these men were and why Yale means so much to them.

    Chris had accompanied me to a reunion at Douglass College 16 years ago, but I could hardly say it was a similar event. I had been lured to attend by being asked to be on a panel about working women. There is really only one friend from my days at Douglass whom I have kept up with, and those I would have hoped to reconnect with didn’t show up. The big moment came when I reminded Reiko Fukiyama that she used to try to play my position as well as hers in field hockey, a sport I never got a handle on but was obligated to take part in for some reason having to do with Douglass’s being a state school. Chris and 313 others had more meaningful bonds.

    That’s what was so astonishing. In the first place, a fairly large portion of the class returned for this 50th reunion. In the second, any doubt that these men — all around 70 years old — were cut from the same oxford broadcloth was graphically dispelled when they all (well, 99 percent of them) appeared in tan pants and blue blazers. My guess was that, although they had to differ politically and economically, they were more alike culturally than I could have imagined.

    Fifty years ago, Yale was a school for white men. Of the 1,000 or so who matriculated in the class of ’62 about 850 are still alive), only two were black. Asians were nowhere to be seen. Students got a traditional liberal arts education; hardly anyone majored in the sciences, and many, perhaps most, went on to graduate school. Some retained allegiances to the underground societies they had belonged to as undergraduates, and lawyers and doctors and academics were well represented. A not-so-small cadre had remained Chris’s friends all these years.

    Never mind that the weekend offered dozens of lectures and panels, as well as opportunities to tour Yale’s museums and early-20th-century Gothic buildings (which I think are hideous). For me, the weekend’s best part was making the acquaintance of a number of accomplished and down-to-earth class of ’62 spouses, and by the illusion that everyone who went to Yale in my husband’s day sings.

I joined a group who rehearsed and sang at a memorial service. My husband was among a big batch of former glee club members who entertained at dinner one night. The class of ’62’s Whiffenpoofs were part of another evening’s entertainment, highlighted by his classmates David Finkle and Bill Weeden, who became a legitimate cabaret act after college. And then there was the singing of “Bright College Years,” which I gather is Yale’s traditional alma mater, with the waving of those white handkerchiefs at the last words, “Where’er upon life’s sea we sail: For God, for Country, and for Yale!”

   Leilani was blessed on Sunday. For over 20 years, I took photographs from the deck of the Montauk-based cutter Ridley, and the Point Wells before it, as the harbor’s fleet of fishing boats, yachts, sailboats, and a kayak or two, many of them well supplied with water balloons, paraded by during the annual blessing.

    Sunday was the first time a vessel of my own, a Bristol sloop purchased over the winter, received the protection of the good Lord via four distinguished prelates who stood  robed and making the appropriate gestures, this year from the deck of the party boat Marlin VI Princess.

    It felt good, although not every mariner believes in the blessing. Quite the contrary. I remember Capt. Dave Krusa putting extra lines on his boats to keep them fast to the dock during the blessing.

    And, speaking of lines; those made fast, paid out, coiled, spliced, laid up, and written, I confess my love of sailing has a lot to do with my fascination with rope. It was among humankind’s earliest inventions. It is as close to an extension of our own muscle and sinew as one can find. Sailboats have a lot of it to to haul, coil, and cleat, and to be wary of. Rope can turn on you if you’re not careful.

    Which leads me to shamelessly plug the book I have just finished writing titled “A Rogue’s Yarn.” The title refers to the one length of twisted yarn that is dyed an identifying color before being twisted together with many other yarns to form the finished rope. Originally, it was meant to show prospective buyers that the rope was the real deal, not made of inferior or recycled fiber.

    My book is a yarn spun by one particular rogue, a homeless surfer with a dark obsession who dwells undetected in the basement of Waikiki’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He believes plants are conspiring to reclaim the Garden of Eden and he becomes a guru of sorts to the homeless who live in Kapiolani Park. Meanwhile young women continue to disappear mysteriously from the tourist capital of the world.

    “Rogue” will be launched as an e-book within the next couple of weeks with cover art designed by Dalton Portella.

    So, after being blessed Leilani motored out the inlet, set sail, and turned west toward Gardiner’s Island, her sails filled by a 15-knot breeze from the south. Then came that moment we sail for, when the boat’s two-cylinder drumming ceased, replaced by a peaceful exhalation, a powerful silence.

    It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, or some such old saw that defines the difference between motoring and sailing for me. I’m a recreational sailor with the luxury of not needing to get any particular place at any set time. But I like the idea of being able to navigate using what nature provided sailors prior to the invention of the iron wind. Sailors must be forehanded, that is, able to plan ahead using nature’s variables, a mental exercise one can never master, nor tire of attempting to.

    Timing a tack, for instance. Put an extra wrap onto the winch, turn the wheel hard-a-lee. Wait for the luff of the sail to say when, then sheet it home. A new boat, a new book, a new direction, and coils of spun yarns. 

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   If you believe that a multimillionaire who did well for a small group of wealthy investors by putting money creation ahead of job creation actually is a champion of the middle class, I’ve got a fridge I’d like to sell you — one whose vertical freezer section we can’t get into.

    Mesmerized by the refrigerator’s stainless steel exterior, Mary and I, in our collective wisdom, failed to take into account its design, whose faults soon became evident once we’d squeezed it into the hole between the counter and the sliding glass door. It looked good — it still does. Perhaps it is fitting that the freezer section is pretty much stuffed, not with frozen food, but with various-sized ice packs for the alleviation of pain — the valueless repository, if you will, of pain capital.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve nodded my head in assent when someone refers to “the collective wisdom of the electorate.” To the contrary, I have found that, since Reagan (another candidate who looked the part), we have not collectively been very wise. The income gap has become since Reagan an abyss, a dislocation that poses a dire threat to our national security. Will only the wealthy henceforth be effectively educated? Will only the wealthy be able to pursue happiness? To afford medical care? Will only the wealthy be spared the corrosive results of environmental degradation? Will only the wealthy continue to call the shots?

    When an acquaintance of one of my sisters-in-law said she might well vote for Romney because he was good looking, and was duly assailed on that count, the acquaintance said, “Well, Obama hasn’t done anything.” He had done things, my sister-in-law replied, and if he hadn’t done as much as he’d wanted in his first term, she continued, it was because cynical Republicans had blocked him at every turn. They had made a mockery of governing.

    I, for one, had hoped he’d do more. He had the bully pulpit, if nothing else. Latinos are right t0 wonder whatever became of his campaign promise of immigration reform. Workers are right to wonder why he did not do more to stimulate the economy, and why the palms of progenitors of the crash were greased. Those weary of our military’s overreach are right to urge that we begin to put our own house in order (the present financial mess having been caused in large part by “war on terror” profligacy) and insist that our allies step up.

    I’ve commenced a War on Error. The first order of business is to puff out the cheeks, purse the lips, and blow hard into the hole made by a closed fist whenever Mitt Romney says he’s an advocate for the middle class. I’ve got $10 that says he’s not.

   Monday night was the occasion of the annual East Hampton Star All-Star Awards in which we give recognition — and an dinner out with family or friends — to local high school juniors whose academic and extracurricular performance has been noted by their respective schools’ administrators. This year, as I drove to the dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant, I was thinking about what the world that these young men and women were inheriting would be like.

    As I do before such events in the privacy of my pickup truck, I talk out loud to myself, working out what I might say. But most of the time when the microphone goes on my better ideas go right out of my head, and I find myself wishing I had made crib notes. This time, however, one idea stuck: that these students, most of whom will be college-bound by this time next year and entering professional adulthood in five years, will be facing a time of unprecedented challenge.

    This, I told them, might sound scary, but in my view it was something to be envied. Out of great obstacles come great solutions, I said, thinking of climate change, global population growth, and economic inequality. If there was one generation I truly envied, I told them, it was theirs.

    The way the All-Star Awards night works is that a representative or two of each school’s administration or faculty gets up while dinner is being served to say a few words about their nominees. The range of accomplishment and background we learned about was, as it usually is, remarkable.

    Sometimes the selections surprise us. I was moved when Jack Pryor, the principal of the Bridgehampton School, spoke of two students, Vanessa Cruz and Made Aditya Nugraha,  who came to the district — and the United States — knowing little English and, through hard and unrelenting work, did well in their course work and won the admiration of their peers and faculty. Vanessa is from Mexico and Made from Bali.

    When her turn came, Maria Mondini, an assistant principal at East Hampton High School, said that when she spoke about her students’ sky-high grades, volunteering, and sports accomplishments, she couldn’t help wonder where she had been in high school. This is a sentiment I share each year at the awards. “This is,” I told the group in all modesty, “a club of which I would not have been a member.”

   Like most of us, I get a lot of spam — from politicians I do approve of, from organizations I don’t approve of, and from merchandisers of everything from country-style window treatments to sketchy-sounding laser-hair treatments. They really were annoying this week, however, when I got back from three days out of town.

    I had taken off thinking it would be nice to have a holiday from the computer. Unlike lots of others, I’ve been satisfied to have a cellphone that does nothing more than make and receive calls. No apps, no e-mails, no thank you. When I got back, though, my Microsoft Mail was full of unwanted missives too numerous to count.

    For months, I’d wondered why the “junk” function on my Mac wasn’t performing its alleged task, that is, putting mail directly into the junk folder when the sources I repeatedly clicked on as spam appeared. With little confidence in being able to adjust the junk “preferences,” and without consulting a guru, I had soldiered on. Until this week, there weren’t that many irritating e-mails each day. Now, however, the time had come to do something about it.

    So began what were hours of opening unwanted e-mails and searching for the tiny word at the bottom saying “unsubscribe.” Even the word “unsubscribe” itself is annoying. How can you unsubscribe to something you never subscribed to? In the once-upon-a-time days of telemarketing, all you had to do to get rid of a solicitation was to say, “No, thank you,” if you were polite, or hang up the phone without saying anything if you were rude. And telemarketers rarely left messages when you were out of town.

    We all know that telemarketing has been all but replaced by e-marketing. I am sure you can get an undergraduate degree these days in the various iterations of the art. But in my attempts to seek solutions to my spam problem I made the mistake of Googlng the word “e-marketing,” and came up with information that I fear one would need a doctorate to understand. Perhaps I am only proving how low down on the Bell curve I am when I admit what I gleaned from the following bit of information: “Facebook [yes, I understand] today started rolling out the new Open Graph [huh?] apps [maybe yes, maybe no] for its Timeline [what?] profile.”

    It is said that you don’t need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car. And you don’t need to understand mathematical theory to add and subtract. But any analogy with the use of a computer fails. I will never understand how a computer works — programming, codes, algorithms, nanotechnology — but I wish someone would at least explain to me how to turn on the ignition and apply the brakes.