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.

   While everyone in America is celebrating the Fourth of July on Wednesday, I will take a moment to celebrate my dog, Brodie, an incredible golden doodle who looks like a platinum blond, purebred golden retriever. Sounds silly, I know, but read on nonetheless and you too might celebrate him. He is my hero.

    I promised in my Christmas column that I would never again write about my very painful knee problem. But it’s not fixed, so I’m breaking my promise. Yep, that’s me, Janis the promise-breaker. And besides, everyone I know in Montauk is probably wondering why the hell is she walking so funny with that grimace on her face?

    I’m one of those people who write what they know. And I know my knee is screwed! I believe I damaged it on all those long walks I used to take daily in Montauk, through the woods, to the cliffs at Camp Hero, and to the Montauk Lighthouse, which is exactly one mile from my home. But I’ll tell you: It hurts like hell, folks, and even after two knee surgeries and visits to countless doctors I still walk with a gait. It’s noticeable, not just by pedestrians, but by Brodie, who has helped me in many ways that all the doctors I’ve seen have not. He helps me walk.

    The first time it happened I didn’t really know what he was doing, nuzzling my butt and leaning on me as I walked down the hallway of my house. I thought he was just horny. But then I realized, oh my God, he’s trying to help me! (And I’m welling up with tears here at the memory.)

    Usually a big, fluffy goofball, always laughing and smiling at us, Brodie saw from his dog bed that I was having trouble, clutching the wall as I walked, and he jumped up to support me. He leans very gently on my left side and I hold on to him while he walks me step by step down the hallway with a very serious look on his beautiful face. I note his beauty because everyone who meets him thinks he’s a she. He’s a pretty boy. I wonder how he even knew that it was my left leg that’s been giving me so much trouble. He has shown a side of him that I didn’t even know he had.

    I always wanted a golden retriever, as I’ve heard that they are amazing dogs. But I resisted because of their shedding problem and an allergic child. When I was offered this adorable little golden doodle puppy, I was told they don’t shed. Wrong! He sheds so badly I could make a blanket out of his fur. That is, if I were handy, and I’m not, or if I were inclined to sleep under a dog blanket, which I’m not, because though he’s my hero he still smells like a dog.

    At the end of my hallway is the bathroom to the right and bedroom to the left. Wherever I’m heading he guides me there and then waits either outside the bathroom door or in the hallway outside the bedroom to take me back to the main part of the house. The first time my husband saw him do it he couldn’t believe it. He now calls him my therapy dog.

    And so I think Brodie deserves an award for heroism. I imagine the pretty boy walking to the stage, guiding me, head held high and proud, to accept his award, but that’s only in my fantasy.

    In reality Brodie wouldn’t make it to the stage for an award. He’d be greeting and jumping on everyone along the way. He’s a jumper and that’s one thing we haven’t been able to contain. He can’t help it. This dog is so full of love it oozes out of him and he treats everyone from complete strangers to the gas station attendant as his long-lost best friend. If he sees a human far off, he’ll stand on his hind legs and prance toward him like a gazelle to show the love. But dogs were meant to be a man or a woman’s best friend, so we have to allow him that.

    And while you’re watching fireworks and raising a glass, please make a toast to dogs everywhere. They are amazing creatures, even if they sometimes don’t look it.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   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.

   Our daughter, who while she wasn’t particularly athletic has one of her own who shows every sign of being so, recalled the other evening that her girls softball coach had been a marvelous encourager and that, thus, she had grown, through his encouragement and through practice, to rather love the game and to play it well.

    I remembered, after some cogitation, that his mantra — what he told the kids when they gathered around him — was, “Pay attention.” Yet, often — certainly it’s been so in my case — we tend toward not paying attention. Maybe to pay too much attention will break your heart. 

    The coach’s first name was Leander. Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” says his namesake, an exemplar of persistence, swam the Hellespont every night guided by a light held by his love on the far shore.

    Interestingly, Jane Brody in a recent column on optimism, links it, not so much to a chronically happy state, but to persistence, to engagement, and to genes governing the brain’s neurotransmitters.

    Much points, of course, toward a pessimistic view of life — we are here only for so long and then it is taken from us. Yet it is so wondrous, despite the horrors.

    Sometimes, though, life’s spark is extinguished even while we live, a prospect that gives me more pause than does a quick exit. Montaigne warns against such fearful thoughts. Get on with it, he says. Hey, you never know!

    And since you never know, pay attention to planting your cabbages. His own brother, he tells us, “died at the age of 23 while playing tennis; he was felled by a blow from a tennis ball just above the right ear.”

   Should I give up tennis then? No, because for me it’s pleasurable and I’m an optimist — ordained to be so perhaps. Still, I shouldn’t complain, especially given the fact that I’ve exceeded my threescore and 10, and, furthermore, to complain would be pessimistic.

    When Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote Emily Dickinson to tell her he was getting married, she said that was wonderful and that the greatest compliment she could pay him was that “you are yourself.”

    As for me, I’m an optimist. I persist. I take delight in life and in physical activity, and would like to think I’ve been an encourager to some, though I try not to pay too much attention. For to do so can break your heart.

    If truth be told, and I’ll not tell it slant, I am quite unorganized.

   Our photo files, which, I tell everyone, are a Black Hole, are a case in point. I dare you, for instance, to find 1982. It’s utterly disappeared. I never did like to file those contacts and negatives anyway, which is why it’s such a mess in The Star’s attic. And I’m no better at home, a failing that has become all the more glaring given the fact that Mary is now an archivist.

    Still, while slovenly when it comes to record-keeping, I have a rather tidy memory, and so it was that I vowed I would come up with some important financial papers the other night and went in search for them. Soon after, having rummaged through several file boxes in my closet, I returned in triumph to the kitchen with some of the contents — three pairs of underpants, a bottle of Neutrogena conditioner, and two moldy leather glasses cases.

    It’s a wonder we stay afloat. I hate tending to the details, which a teacher friend of mine once said was absolutely necessary to do if one were to get on in the world, if one were to live a responsible life. Thank goodness I have a responsible wife, for I hate dealing with personnel of any kind (living and breathing human beings are a different matter), I loathe paperwork, and abhor wrangling with the faceless inquisitors of corporate America. Such a waste of time.

    Time that I could more fruitfully be spending in trying to figure out how to beat Mary in backgammon. It’s been difficult, for I’ve had to turn the instructional book I’m reading upside down to make sense of it given the way she sets up the board. But that’s okay. Nurtured in the hot-type years, I can read upside down and backward.

    She has this foreboding that I’ll begin to trounce her once I catch on, but the truth is I’ll never catch on. My brain, nimble in some ways, is dense in others, especially when it comes to numbers, though as I write this I am mindful (and somewhat bemused) that our publisher, in a 1990 memo to new staff members, said that I never made a mistake and understood budgets.

    If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 and the bat cost $1.00 more than the ball, how much did the ball cost? I stared at that question for minutes on end last night, uncomprehendingly.

    Ten cents? Ten cents . . . right?

    No, no, no, a thousand times no! Now I know the answer is 5 cents, but only after I beat it into my head. And that rote approach, I’m afraid, is the only way I’m ever going to beat Mary.

    But wait! Why try to beat her? It will only piss her off. If I can just get to the point where I can give her a good game, that would be good. A good game . . . that’s what we all want.

   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.

   The other day Apple iTunes, after years of meekly opening when clicked upon, inexplicably balked, demanding that I put in my password and username before it would let me give it 99 cents to hear Petula Clark singing “Downtown.”

    Aaargh. Am I the only fool alive who can hardly ever come up with the right combination of those two maddening computer evils?

    Like most people who spend hours e-mailing, online shopping, Facebooking, word-game playing, and other time-wasting, I have too many online accounts. I use the same two passwords for most of them (more on that in a moment), but the usernames are mostly different. Which one went with which of the passwords to get me to 1964 swinging England?

    Apple gave me just three chances to sign on, and I struck out. It then consigned me to a special hell for people it thinks are identity thieves, where you must first click on the day and year you were born and then, if you get that right, answer a bunch of “security” questions. (“Who was your best childhood friend?” “What was your first job?”) I never even got that far, because a red exclamation point popped up telling me I wasn’t born when I thought I was.

    Tried again, wrong again. Not wanting to spend half an hour on hold to argue with a stranger about my birthday, I gave them my e-mail address instead and they sent a link that would let me choose a new password.

    Now I would no longer have one of the good old passwords that I know by heart. Instead I was directed to create a typographical Frankenstein with “minimum eight characters, must include at least one number and one capital letter, cannot have three of the same letters in a row, no asterisks or other marks like %#&~#, nothing you’ve used in the last 12 months.” Congratulations to me, I’ve created an alphanumeric monster that will be impossible to recall 30 seconds from now.

    Yes, I do know why they ask us to contrive these convoluted strings of symbols. It’s so hackers will give up after a while and try an easier mark. I know — but I don’t bother, and I’ll bet you don’t either, unless maybe you’re over 55. Older people, Cambridge University scientists recently discovered, pick passwords that are at least twice as secure as those chosen by under-25s.

    But like me, most people want something they can remember easily — their first name, or their dog’s, or 123456 — not something they have to look up every time. The most popular password in the world, and this has held true year after year and in every language since passwords were invented,  is — ta-da! — “password.” When I first read that someplace I thought to myself that I should change the password on my cellphone account, which is “wireless,” but I never did.

    Even systems administrators who are supposed to keep the rest of us safe from the bad guys mess up sometimes. Like millions of others, I had to get a new credit card two years ago because someone, probably a Russian teenager, stole T.J. Maxx’s passwords and broke into its database.

    The other rule about passwords is to have different ones for different Web sites, because if you use “qwerty” (another hot one) for Optimum and eBay and Yahoo and YouTube, you’re probably using it for online banking too, and if you’re attacked by a password-sniffing worm, there goes the 401K.

    Nobody observes this rule much either. But it’s the usernames that really throw you. When I first ventured onto the Web I used my first name spelled backward; then I started adding whatever year it was (“eneri96”), then I’d pick usernames I thought related to the site (“shinesforall” for The New York Times, “buyer” for eBay, only hundreds of others thought of that one first and I wound up with something like “buyer557,” since changed.) 

    The dilemma will not go away. But who can remember all these words, much less which two must walk down the aisle together? Offices are full of despairing computer jockeys who’ve jotted their passwords down on sticky notes and stuck them on their monitors.

    I’ve begun keeping a printed list, four pages long now, hidden in a desk drawer where only a thief would think to look. The people at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor say it should be “encrypted.” Oh Lord.

    Irene Silverman is an editor at The Star.

   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!”