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.

   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.

   Nights for parents of young and getting-to-be-not-so-young children can be complicated, and by the standards of those without progeny at home, the things we celebrate must seem a little weird. Take, for example, the case of one editorial staff member here who was positively giddy on Tuesday morning because both her toddlers slept all the way through to 6:30 a.m.

    Such are the small victories of parenthood. In my case, I was pleased one night this week that the sequence of prebed tears, various and sundry risings, and some raccoons scuffling outside ended just before 2 a.m., and I was able to get back to sleep by reading half an article in The New Yorker about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Dawn came soon enough, with the songs of birds awaking me.

    School-day mornings are hectic more often than not, with hunts for missing sneakers, complaints about what is for breakfast, and then a sprint out to the end of the driveway to meet the bus.

    On Tuesday morning, however, I had to drive two of our three kids to school in Bridgehampton, and anxiety about what I anticipated would be slow-moving traffic had me more on edge than usual. At Wainscott, I bailed off Montauk Highway and went by way of Sagaponack, looping up to Narrow Lane and slipping into Bridgehampton. It is doubtful that I saved any time by this roundabout route, but at least we were moving and the views were grand.

    With Evvy, our second grader, off to her classroom, I took Ellis to a play yard to ride the trikes before his prenursery session began. There, I struck up a conversation with a woman who, it turned out, had just made the drive from Montauk, staying on the highway the whole way. We had arrived more or less on time with our  charges and were pleased with the accomplishment, as minor as it may seem to those who do not know.

   When Whole Foods and the Red Horse Market both opened in time for Memorial Day, my theory that East Hampton has one too many of everything seemed borne out. I harrumphed when I noticed that Whole Foods, clearly not a farm stand, is calling itself one (I suppose because it does not intend to carry as many groceries as it does elsewhere). Still, I was impressed when word went out of a well-targeted marketing come-on: orchids for sale for $10 apiece.

    I wasn’t really surprised that the Italian-specialty outpost of Citarella, which was in the Red Horse space for a few years, didn’t last, but its demise may have been simply a case of bad timing: Had Joe Guerrera waited until this year to launch it as an addition to the Main Street Citarella branch, it might have made it. The demographic gurus for Whole Foods and the Red Horse are calculating that the economic tide may have turned. We certainly all hope they are right.

    Judging by the crowds over Memorial Day weekend, there might be more people here “in season” than ever. Casting your eyes around the gourmet-foods shops, you’d never know there are families in town having trouble affording groceries. The latest summer crowds are those who, recession or not, have money to burn. (Or could it be we are witnessing a local bubble of a different kind — a merchandizing rather than a housing bubble?)

    When the first Citarella opened on the South Fork, I avoided it and made it a rule never to buy fish there. Call it chauvinism: I just didn’t like the store’s expansive counters of  apparently every fish that could possibly be transported here. East End waters — and fishermen and shops — provide an extraordinary variety already. What we can find at the small seafood shops here is, I think, incomparable; shouldn’t what is really local be enough? But even after the Water Mill Citarella closed, the one in Bridgehampton opened, and the two emporiums of anything-you-can-get-in-the-city seem to be thriving, regardless of my gimlet-eyed objections.

    It’s a wonderful thing that true farm stands and farmers markets have proliferated recently, too. (To the point that my husband has now taken to comparison-shopping, checking the prices of different homemade jams and jellies at stands around town.)

    We are so lucky that a fair number of agricultural fields — some of which were preserved because the towns and the county purchased development rights — have survived, and not sprouted McMansions.

    Now it is strawberry season. But apparently the popularity of supermarket strawberries, in combination with property values, has convinced some East End growers to give up. At Vickie’s Veggies in Amagansett this week, Elaine Jones was surprised to hear that strawberries were still being grown and sold in Wainscott. She gets hers, as do others, from the North Fork. The strawberry fields in East Hampton and Amagansett, Ms. Jones said, have disappeared.

    Perhaps farmers are instead planting corn, with which supermarket corn truly cannot compare. Or can it? This winter, someone brought home a neatly plastic-wrapped pack of four ears from lord knows where, their husks stripped away to show that the kernels were uniformly perfect. (Genetically engineered?) To my dismay — yes, dismay — they didn’t taste half bad.

    I spent a lot of childhood summers where the evening drill was to go out and pick the corn immediately before putting it in the pot. Those are wonderful memories.

    The population of the East End of Long Island was once dominated by farmers and fishermen. Many of us, people and organizations, with government help in some years, have done what we could to promote the preservation of the land and the waters. We know that the inshore fishery is dying. Could it also be that our taste buds are quietly reminding us that the traditional way of life is history?   

   My British cousin, Jamie Gosney, recently decided to put together a compact disc — he calls it a family album — featuring the clan’s favorite songs as a tribute to his mum, my aunt Jen-Jen, who turns 80 in August.

    And he offered up a method with which everyone is familiar: “If you were, indeed, shipwrecked on a desert island, this would be the one piece of music you just couldn’t live without,” he wrote in an email.

    Well, you can’t ask me a question like that, it just opens up a host of others. My brain is a bad neighborhood, and if I spend too long walking down the dark alleyways, I will get mugged. And that’s what happened with this inquiry.

    First of all, as my wise 16-year-old pointed out, the question is probably about a deserted island, not a desert island, although it could certainly be both. No matter which, I would like to know how the hell I got there. For me to get to a desert(ed) island would require money for plane fare and plenty of vacation time, neither of which I have coming to me in the near future. I can barely afford to get to Shelter Island.

    Second, what am I listening to the music on? If I have a little portable CD player, what am I plugging it into? Or is it solar?    

    “It would run on coconuts,” explained the wise 16-year-old patiently.

    “Apparently, so would I,” I said.

    If I were cast away on a desert island I think I would be too busy trying to find food and plan my escape to sit about and listen to one song, over and over, on some newfangled coconut-powered electronic. 

    Would I become attached to this machine, this one relic of my past life? If it got sand in the works and died one day, would I be cradling it in my arms and screaming “Sony!” a la Tom Hanks?

    And then there’s the question of the song. This was easy for my kids. They just picked their favorite songs of the moment. When you’re a kid, whatever you’re listening to right now, today, is the best ever and you will love it until the day you die. Ask kids what is their favorite color, their favorite movie, their favorite food, and you get a cut-and-dried answer.

    For adults, or at least this semi-adult, it’s not so black and white. Rather than think of a song, I started thinking about that song’s qualifications, like some sort of psychological evaluation.

    I would want to add a song to the family album that was something that the whole family, from the doddering elders to the bouncy brats and everyone in between, could enjoy.

    The song would have to be up, and happy, and evocative of people doing stuff collectively, family activities, since those are the things I would be pining for on the island. I would want the performer or performers to sound like there were in-jokes, a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork, while they performed. In fact, the song would have to be about teamwork and doing things together.

    And if by chance I were not to escape from that island prison, and my anguished bones were found one day, with the cursed song still playing on the fruit-energized machine, I would want it to define me, for people to nod and say, “Ah, yes. That song was pure Bridget.”

    I was putting a lot of pressure on this song. And on myself. I lay awake at nights, cursing my sweet cousin James, looking at the endless empty line of an imaginary horizon, waiting for a ship, a plane, anything to come and remove me from my solitary hell.

    This went on for months.

    Until just a week ago, as I was on a long-distance drive and a song came on the radio. I hadn’t been thinking about Jamie’s question, and yet, here it was. The song. The song that fulfilled all my requirements. A song I could, if need be, listen to over and over, using the tune as a musical crucifix against the blood-sapping repetitiveness of lapping ocean waves and eternal sand.

    I quickly sent it off to Jamie and have been doing my very best to wash the taste of raw crabs and seaweed and loneliness out of my brain-mouth ever since.

    I hope I never do get marooned on some faraway strip of sand in the sea, but whenever I travel, I will be sure to take the “family album” with me, to chase away feelings of despair until help inevitably arrives. Let’s just hope there’s plenty of coconuts there.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter for The Star. If she were on a deserted island, she would choose “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by The Beatles as the song she would most like to hear over and over and over and over.

    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.

   East Hampton Main Street will be strangely silent Monday morning. For a brief hour the hissing rumble of a three-day weekend’s traffic will cease as a modest line of veterans assemble to parade north toward Hook Mill and the war memorial.

    The mill, which has just this year been put back to rights after a long restoration, will stand by mutely. The veterans will be joined by members of our local fire departments, ambulance volunteers, and police, each dressed in their best uniforms, for a ceremony honoring this place’s war dead. Time, like Main Street’s relentless hum, will seem to stop.

    For visitors and weekenders, East Hampton may not seem the kind of place that has contributed its sons and daughters to the United States military. But if they would take the time to walk in one of its cemeteries or stand at one of the several monuments and read the names on them, they would see that c.

    Recent wars have produced new veterans. Some will walk in Monday’s parade; others are still serving at bases across the country or in overseas deployment. East Hampton’s young men and women have come under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, even as these engagements end and fade from the news.

    East Hampton’s war dead will be recalled Monday. So too, should the community think of and honor those remaining in the military that day. The names are familiar. Among them, Matthew Behan is in the Marines. Two members of the DePetris family are in the Army. Drew Forsberg is a Navy Seal, as are several other local young men. Ryan Burke is an Army engineer. Francis S. Gay is in the Air Force. Richard McMahon is a member of the Army National Guard. The list of those from here in service to the country today is long.

    Monday, as the traffic stops, it will be these young men and women who, for me, come to mind.

   Almost all the grandparents I know contradict themselves when they talk about their grandchildren. They love them dearly, of course, and say they don’t see them enough. But, almost as reliably, they complain to anyone who will listen about how absolutely the kids wear them out.

    I am lucky that three of my grandchildren live here and that I get to see them often. Nevertheless, I still always catch myself carping that I only get to see that bunch on the run, not long enough for what is supposed to be quality time. I have two more sets of grandchildren who don’t live in town, and I don’t see them as much as I would like — period.

    So imagine my delight when all of them converged at my house on a recent Saturday in overlapping waves.

    Being with the kids reminded me of the Riddle of the Sphinx. You know: What is born with four legs, grows up with two, and ends up with three? I might not have grown that third leg (a cane) quite yet, but on Saturday — marshaling my platoon of emphatically two-legged, hyperkinetic grandchildren — I probably could have used one.

    The 2-year-olds are the easiest to be with, as well as the most difficult. They are easy to be with because they play charmingly for hours with whatever toys are around. They are difficult because they never run out of energy, even if it is supposed to be nap time.

    I was thrilled when Ellis, one of the two 2-year-olds, got bored with the wooden train tracks and sat down to let my husband read him a book. I was thrilled when Teddy, also 2, kept himself amused for ages trying to make every single one of the many, noisy talking and music-making plastic gismos in the playroom work. He busied himself so thoroughly, in fact, that I had time to put all the old dollhouse furniture — which some of the others had piled in a heap — back in place in all the tiny rooms.

    How ironic: Most of the time when the grandchildren are around, I am frantically racing after them trying to put my own house back in order! But I have to also admit that it isn’t easy for me to keep up with these little boys, especially Teddy, who just loves running along as fast as he can while pushing anything on wheels.

    The house was ringing and shouting with grandkids, and, yes, I was delighted to watch my 9-year-old and almost-8-year-old granddaughters grooving on let’s-pretend games And, yes, it was great to watch them play big sister to their 4-year-old cousin, who lives in faraway Nova Scotia. But even when the girls were fully engaged in make-believe, I wasn’t off the hook. At some point, a grown-up always is required to take on a supporting role in the action.

    You know what? This isn’t always as much jolly good fun as you might think. How long would you, yourself, really relish standing at duty in a doorway as keeper of the imaginary hotel? Or crouching to play jungle hideout?

    For me, the rather grueling part of grandparenting is not the level of energy necessary for keeping up, but the decibel levels the kids generate. And, then, if you decide to quiet things down by letting them sit in front of the boob tube, you are subjected to the nerve-wracking din of Put Down the Ducky or Go, Diego, Go! (I don’t like Dora, either.)

    It’s been said that being a grandparent is bliss because you have all the joy that children can bring but none of the responsibility. The problem is that as a grandparent you are running on half-empty — if not on three legs.

    If last weekend was any indication we’re going to have to set some ground rules here for the summer. The Montauk Music Festival brought a large crowd to the hamlet and it reminded me of summers past and the things that people do that I don’t like.

    Who the hell am I to judge? Well, after 40 years of living out here in Montauk I consider myself a local. I’m not a native like my husband and three children, but I also don’t have the blue eyes they all have, so does that not make me local? Do I not bleed salt water? After reporting for this newspaper for over 15 years, I believe I am local enough to write this list for our summer visitors.

    Living on the East End year round should entitle us to a bit of seniority when it comes to behavior we frown upon. And while the gale winds blow outside and a fire burns in the woodstove, it also gives us a lot of time to think about things that people do that irk us.

    Rule Number 1: You do not need to stop at every pedestrian crosswalk if there are no pedestrians in sight. For some odd reason, vehicles, mostly those with out-of-state plates, are stopping at every street corner rather than yielding like the signs say to do.

    Now to my fellow locals, even those with brown eyes like me, you know exactly which out-of-state plates I write of. But since there is a lot of mafia in the Garden State I cannot criticize it for fear of getting whacked. And I don’t want to get whacked right before summer starts, as it’s one of my favorite seasons.

    Rule Number 2: At the beach, do not plant your blanket or chairs or sun tent or fighting toddlers, or crying babies, or testosterone-fueled adolescents right next to us. If only for a day, this is your chance to own a prime piece of beachfront real estate in the Hamptons, so why, why, why would you want to be so close to your neighbors? And if you’re blasting music (I was going to write your boom box but that’s just showing my age), make sure you grab a corner of the beach far away from those of us who go to the beach to relax, unwind, and, quite frankly, get away from tourists and the noise of a seaside tourist town.

    And don’t even think about throwing a boccie ball over our heads or flying a kite! Once, while I was sitting with my children on the beach at Ditch, a guy with a heavy French accent came down to show off his kite-flying skills, which it turned out weren’t very good. The kite, a big one, kept swooping down upon the heads of beachgoers, none of whom were looking to get a gash on the forehead.

    Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and told him he was endangering my children and that he should move farther down the beach where there were no people. The rest of the beach applauded me. Okay, maybe I used stronger wording than that and threw a couple of cuss words in there, but he did move. Actually, I think I scared the hell out of him.

    Rule Number 3: If you are in a restaurant and the hostess says there will be a 20-minute wait, go have a drink. Walk away from the hostess stand. Lingering there while you wait, looking too eager for your table, will only annoy the hostess and not get you that table any earlier. The hostess will find you when your table is ready because that’s how she makes her money. They want to move you in and out to accommodate the next table.

    Oh, and if you’re done dining and the dessert plates and coffee cups are cleared and you notice a line of people waiting for your table, please relinquish it. Restaurants and their employees need the turnover to make the money that allows them to enjoy the sound of those gale-force winds blowing through the bare-limbed trees while they snuggle down for the winter with a fire burning in the woodstove and a stack of novels nearby. Ah winter, you swept through too quickly this year.

    Rule Number 4: Do not throw your cigarette butts in our streets or on our beaches and sidewalks. As I was enjoying some good outdoor music over the weekend, I watched in horror as several visitors dropped lit cigarettes on the ground before entering an establishment — even though it’s hard to miss those large, weird-looking cigarette extinguishers outside each place. I watched a young woman who should know better (what with all this talk about saving the planet) chuck a lit cigarette into the street on Montauk Highway. Not a good move, honey.

    Rule Number 5: This one pertains to serious bike riders. I didn’t want to include this in the list because I wrote of it once before and got some flack. But the bike riders in their little tight shorts and colorful shirts who rode four abreast last weekend on two busy Montauk arteries while cars backed up behind them set me off again.

    Hey guys, we’re not all on vacation. And though the view from behind (literally) was a fine one, those of us who live and work here are usually in a rush and cannot afford the time to join your little bikers’ clique. Get off the road! That’s what the shoulder is for, bike riders, joggers, and moped riders.

    Rule Number 6: Do not talk on your cellphone while waiting in a sandwich line. We do not need to hear your conversation or what Johnny said to Isabella, who told Sophia, who told Addison, who told Madison, who told Jackson, who picked a fight in the bathroom with Jacob.

    We do not need to know who’s bringing the clams for dinner, or picking up the cheese and beer. We do not need to know much other than the fact that you like our little area and promise to respect it. Now go out there and have some fun. Just behave, and remember — somebody’s watching you.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   “Which one are you — the Tin Man, the Lion, or the Straw Man?” Mary asked as our granddaughter, Ella, sat transfixed in front of “The Wizard of Oz” at our house Sunday evening.

    “Well, I’ve got no heart,” I said, “so I’m not the Tin Man, I lack courage, and I haven’t a brain. . . . But,” I said, brightening, recalling my Kentucky Derby pick the day before, “I certainly am lucky.”

    I was referring not only to the fact that I’d married her a quarter-century ago, but to the money I’d won in a random drawing after my brother-in-law, a wondrously self-taught auctioneer, had in his living room bid up beyond reason the prices of the entire Derby field, leaving his hyped-up guests penniless but washy as we made our way to the gate.

    Mary and I had been very quickly divested of the $100 we had taken to John’s annual party, some having gone to Hansen, the white horse, some to Gemologist, which she liked, and some to El Padrino — all long shots.

    The race, except perhaps for Bodemeister, who went off at 4-1, was a crapshoot, which was good for the pool, whose $1,310 was destined for the winning bidder.

    I happened upon the side bet in the kitchen a few minutes before the Derby began. Though penniless, as I’ve said, my $20 marker was accepted, after which I felt around in a bowl full of folded-up pieces of yellow paper, coming up with “Post 19, I’ll Have Another.”

    In rushing out to the deck a few frenzied minutes later to claim my winnings, I failed to notice that one of my sisters-in-law, who had bet a bundle on Bodemeister, the front-runner overtaken by I’ll Have Another in the final yards, had her head buried in her hands. Greed trumps compassion most every time.

    I couldn’t believe it when John, holding out a wad of filet mignon thickness, said I’d won $380!

    With no little pride, I presented it posthaste to Mary, who — or so it seemed . . . self-interest trumps fair-mindedness most every time — began to shower chunks of it upon her mother and my other sister-in-law, with whom, I learned later, she’d shared in the betting.

    In the end, I netted $100, which was fine, and in keeping with the periodic allegiance I pay to socialistic ideals — the live-and-let-live kind, not the totalitarian kind — and went out to play in the driveway, with Mary and another couple, a whirling, giddy, no-holds-barred basketball game in which wrist-clinging, bear hugs, strangleholds, and tackling — though no ankle-biting — were allowed.

    I still smile when I think about it. . . . Fun trumps everything all the time.