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.

   This is the season in which the parents of grade-school children put entirely too many miles on their vehicles. There are year-end dance recitals, music and theater performances, sports league playoffs, and the like to ferry the younger set to and from. Lisa and I have been spending what seems like hours every afternoon tooling between Amagansett and points west with one or more children in the back seat.

    Since I drive a lumbering pickup truck, my trips from the office or home base add up to real money. Moreover, I can just about feel the planet getting hotter from my contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

    A while back, when Lisa was looking to lease a new vehicle, we drove a sporty Volkswagen Jetta station wagon which, with a turbo diesel under the hood, got something like 40 miles a gallon. She opted for a Chevy instead, but I haven’t gotten over my case of mileage envy for those who drive cars that do better. My Toyota, at least according to the estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, gets an embarrassing 14 miles to the gallon.

    What with gas prices being high (and higher still on the South Fork the farther you go east) it probably runs me more than $8 to make a run to Bridgehampton to pick up one daughter after her dance lessons and drive home again. But, the Volkswagen I covet is expensive, my truck is paid for, and there are plenty of household and child-rearing expenses to be dealt with. So I keep chugging along in the gas-guzzler, reluctantly doing my part to keep the oil drillers and gas refiners in clover.

    I like to think about the day I can ride a bicycle to work. It is seven miles door to door from our house. The late Marvin Kuhn, who worked at The Star for many years, would make the round trip from Amagansett on his blue 10-speed in almost any weather. I always admired him for it.

    Once the kids are in gas-guzzlers of their own, perhaps.

   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.

   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?   

   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.”

   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.

   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.