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.

    The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  I bet that’s a truly ancient proverb: People have been coveting what their neighbors have since the dawn of time. But when the phrase pops into my own mind, it’s usually because I’m looking not at grass but at pictures of gardens.

    It’s hard not to feel at least a little envious in a place where so many people have exquisite and expansive private gardens. Adding a little extra sting of the green-eyed monster is that I’ve been involved in The East Hampton Star’s gardening supplements for a good number of years, and they invariably remind me of how much time — and money — some people have to lavish on their peonies and pergolas.

    Truth be told, I don’t think you could quite call what I have at my house a proper garden at all. But the grounds here on Edwards Lane don’t look half bad, if I do say so myself. Sure, many a flower and bush I’ve planted (notably, the bottom third of a pair of April camellias) have been nibbled up by deer; and the David Austin roses my daughter chose years ago never quite thrived, catching too much shade in their spot between the brick patio and the sun porch. But the camellias continue to bloom valiantly, as do the old lilacs, and the old bleeding hearts, and the ancient shrub roses. As for the equally ancient beds of tiger lilies, we’ll see if the deer devour them again.

    We have an unusual groundcover here on the lane: Bright yellow flowers that open and shut with the sun and emerge every spring to do their best to choke out other plants. They are gone, now, for the season, and the grass is green again. Gardeners I have asked about this mystery flower say it’s marsh marigold, but I am convinced it is a rarer variety, which doesn’t require a wet environment. Some might consider it a nuisance but I think it’s a treat: What better way to bask in the end of winter than by having a rug of yellow flowers all around your house? Someone once remarked that I don’t have a lawn, I have a meadow.

    There are also wonderful mature viburnums on the grounds — which I can’t take credit for, either, come to think of it; they were planted sometime before the Second World War, most likely. The loveliest, a fragrant, old-fashioned snowball, bloomed earlier than usual this year, undoubtedly because of the mild winter, and then was beheaded in heavy wind and rain. I missed the chance to bring some snowballs in, but, no matter, there are other viburnums near them, including an expansive one with large, flat white flowers (shasta, perhaps?) that is in full bloom now at the back fence.

    The viburnums are what you might call gifts from earlier residents of this place, as are a host of yellow Dutch irises, which are also now in flower. A cluster of more delicate Japanese irises, which were transplanted from Amagansett, should be coming along soon, too.

    And then there are the narcissi. A good variety of bulbs were a birthday gift several years ago, and, although not all have survived, many of them brightened the sides of the backyard for weeks. Two more varieties seem to have arrived by chance, perhaps from a neighbor’s property. A few days ago I noticed an especially delicate flower with an orange ring at its center; and now, randomly punctuating the yard, there is a double white one that is very fragrant.

    Someday, perhaps, I’ll find the time to learn more about these plants and to take better care of them. Perhaps I’ll plant some things deer don’t find tasty. Perhaps, some day, I’ll even be able to say I have a real garden. For now, a delightful yard will do.

   When I was a kid, I hated writing thank-you notes.

    Christmases and birthdays would come along with presents in the mail (always welcome) from my Alabama grandmother, my poet aunt and composer uncle in Pittsburgh, and my two sets of godparents in New Haven and Woodstock, N.Y.

    I would open each package with glee. My grandmother in Alabama was notorious for stashing little things in the corners of a larger cardboard box, so we combed through every scrap of paper to make sure nothing got missed. What fun, what joy — the oil painting set when I was 8 years old, the pink outfit when I was 11, the art books when I was in high school and college, and the heirloom silver frames with old photos when I was a young adult (and they were, maybe, cleaning house). The stuff never failed to please me. I was a happy girl, until my mother would say, “Have you written your thank-you notes yet?”

    As a child and young teen I would put it off. I would embrace homework and kitty-litter changing, make phone calls and take a bath and even clean my room to avoid writing the little notes.

    My mother was a stickler about those notes. There would be no perfunctory “Thank you for the lovely gift, Love, Me.” Oh, no. My mother, who then would check my childhood spelling, would insist that if the gift was money, I spelled out what I planned to do with it, and maybe include a drawing of the thing to be had. If the present happened to be clothing, I needed to say how well it fit, and where I was going to wear it. In other words, I really had to give the giver the gift of my time.

    Not a big deal, when I think about it now, but it was an ordeal then. I saw these relatives and semi-relatives once a year, and didn’t really have a deep personal relationship with any of them day to day. In the mid to late ’50s, long-distance phone calls were not thought of in our house. When I was 10, it was sitting down the day after Christmas and taking nice paper and a pen (not a pencil) and being the well-brought-up nice girl they knew (thought) I was and just doing it.

    A few years later, I sometimes had to prompt my teenage swains to write their obligatory (to my mother’s thinking) bread-and-butter notes after a summer weekend in Orient. This lasted through college. My mother sort of kept score. Nice boys wrote notes. Nicest boys wrote long notes. She would save them. The note writers would be invited back.

    But then came the Mother of All Thank-You Notes, the wedding-present thank-yous.

    By the time I married (at age 36), I had my notes down. No more whining about what I would write to the Alabama grandmother I hadn’t seen for three years. (“Just tell her about your day,” my mother used to say. “She will love to know what you do.”) She was right and so I wrote.

    When the wedding presents started arriving — oooh, Tiffany! — I opened each one, memo pad in hand. At that moment, I would write down my immediate thoughts. Won’t this look great on the dining table full of cherries! We will enjoy the champagne flutes every Sunday, when we have the mimosas that we so enjoy! That kind of thing. Then when I got around to actually crafting the note, it would at least seem spontaneous and fresh. No “Thank you for the gift” for me. Oh, no.

    The biggest wedding present thank-you challenge came when the antique brass candlesticks arrived from my mother’s club members. I knew that a single note to all of them would be met with raised eyebrows. I decided to write to each woman, 15 in all, not allowing myself to repeat a sentence since I was quite sure they would compare notes. I managed to make the ladies happy, and patted myself on the back for the many ways I found to say “ We love the candlesticks, thanks.” A challenge well met, and a lesson shared. My mother beamed with pride.

    Fast-forward to today, the present of presents, when I am the one mailing stuff off — to grandniece and grandnephew, stepdaughter, and various buddies far and wide across the United States. Now, as my relatives did when I was a kid, it’s me waiting to get their thank-you notes.

    I realize how much more blessed it is to give than to receive and all that jazz, but I really do want to know that the package arrived. That’s another function of the thank-you note, by the way: Don’t fret, it got here.

    Since I myself was never allowed to write the generic “thanks for the present,” I really love getting special thank-yous (e-mail is fine, by the way). A friend of — can it be . . . 40 years? — who lives in Texas makes a comment on everything I send her, including the wrapping paper if it is particularly special. What fun to relive the opening of my carefully chosen and wrapped gifts with the note writer! That I send her more than one thing in a birthday box is a legacy I cherish from my Alabama grandmother. (Thank you again, Danna.)

    I think that a thank-you note is itself a gift. It is a gift of time and effort, of enthusiasm and connectedness.

    Thank you, and you are very welcome.

    Durell Godfrey is The East Hampton Star’s contributing photographer.

   Michael Heller, who walk­ed away with pretty much every photography prize at the recent state press association contest, said in walking up to me at Herrick Park the other day that he’d seen only one other rugby game and therefore knew practically nothing about the sport.

    “I’ve seen hundreds of rugby games,” I said, “and I know nothing either. Though what you want to do is zero in on a maul — that’s when they’re standing up with the ball and pushing and shoving — which ought to nicely fill up your frame. Lineout plays, where the ball is thrown in from the sidelines and where you are confronted with a tower of graspers who either want to catch it or tap it back to their mates, also are pleasing. . . . It’s hard not to get good pictures at a rugby game.”

    Violence and grace . . . truth and beauty. . . . They make such sports nuts of us all.

    “There is such a thing as a free catch in rugby, I’ve been told,” I said later to Isabel Carmichael, one of our hawk-eyed proofreaders. (She’ll catch you out if you don’t watch your grammatical step.) “But I doubt if you said, ‘Mark!’ any in the phalanx of onrushers would pay attention. You’d be interred where you stood — in deep doo-doo.”

    And then I went on to say that because the ball’s always live when it’s in-bounds, and because blocking’s not allowed, and because there’s no spearing with helmets, as in football, serious injuries in rugby are far fewer than in football. “It’s mayhem with a difference,” I said, “and afterward they raise a glass to their antagonists, their bloodied buddies. . . . It beats suicide bombings by a long shot. Though if rugby were to become the vehicle for settling international disputes, we’d no longer be King of the Hill — we’ve got a ways to go in that regard.”

    Even so, the madness is fun to watch, whether you understand what’s going on or not.

    And so, godspeed to our Montauk Rugby Club stalwarts as they head out this weekend to Pittsburgh, where they’ll clash — and later rub elbows with — their peers from the South, the Midwest, and mid-Atlantic. Good ruck to them all.

   Readers of this column may remember that a few weeks back I wrote about our family’s ongoing scuffle over whether or not to buy an expensive pet pig. The battle lines had this columnist on the “no” side, Mom and one daughter on the “yes” side, our 7-year-old daughter on the “sounds okay to me” side, and the 2-year-old oblivious and looking for his finger paints.

    Since then, I have been on the receiving end of a full slop trough-worth of pleading and wheedling — and a forced march to visit Gone Local, a shop in Amagansett whose owner, Susan Seitz-Kulick, keeps what I have to admit is a cute piglet behind the counter.

    Twinkie, as I think the little thing is called, sleeps on a pile of blankets under a desk, goes for walks on a leash, and will do tricks for treats. According to Susan, her pet pig likes my daughters, and, Susan says, Twinkie does not care for just anyone. This is a woman for whom retail comes naturally, it appears.

    I should make it clear that Susan does not sell pigs. Gone Local is stuffed to the rafters with decorative objects and handmade crafts and do-dads of the sort that might appeal to gift-seekers and summer visitors looking for mementos. She adopted the piglet when her son decided he could not keep her. Oinking every now and then, the piglet startles unsuspecting customers. It’s all very cute.

    Despite vocal protest on my part, the pig-wanting side of the family continues unfazed. I open a computer in the morning to find that someone has been searching for tiny pigs online and corresponding with breeders — who can charge upward of $1,500 per porker. I think it’s a scam and a fad, but the family pays me little mind.

    Although my older daughter started it, my wife now insists she is getting herself a pig no matter what. Ellis, who has started nursery school, is increasingly independent, and Lisa says she wants something little again to care for. Maybe she’ll become a breeder, she says. I say if she does, the pig can live in the house; I am going to move into the shed.

    She says, “Fine.”

   Perhaps more disturbing than the hazing death itself — on Nov. 19, of a 26-year-old Florida A&M University student who was a drum major in its marching band — is the knowledge that brutality is ingrained in the culture of certain collegiate activities and Greek letter societies . . . and accepted by adults who should know better. It turns out, according to press reports, that a gauntlet of punches and kicks, called Crossing Bus C, was routine among band members, and that they felt it proved their strength and instilled pride.  

    I have not come across a good explanation of why it took almost six months for those allegedly responsible for Robert Champion’s death to be charged. But even if faculty members and administration did not actually conspire to cover up the killing, as a blight on the university’s prestigious band, we are certainly left with the impression that they knew about and tolerated hazing in general. That so many were on the bus when the hazing occurred, including a bus driver, is shocking.

    Compare what happened in Orlando, Fla., to the public outrage over the fact that it took authorities from Feb. 26 to April 11 to charge George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. During the six-month investigation in Florida, there were multiple incidents reported of hazing gone wrong. Among the 13 band members finally charged this month in Mr. Champion’s death is a 19-year-old who already had been accused of taking part in a hazing incident in which a 20-year-old woman’s leg was broken. That he continued to be an active member of the band indicates that hazing was condoned. Eleven of the 13 in the Champion case were charged with third-degree felonies and are facing no more than six-year prison sentences, if convicted. Is a crime less serious when it is committed by a group?

    A reporter on the Orlando Sentinel sent me the ages of the 11 charged with felonies. In addition to the 19-year-old, three are 20, two are 21, two are 23, two are 24, and one is 26. Should they be considered adults? They are old enough, indeed, to serve in the military, to vote, to drive, to live where they please, to take out bank loans — to shoulder all the normal, everyday responsibilities (and benefit from the normal, everyday advantages) of being an adult.

    The Florida A&M Marching 100’s specific forms of hazing, apparently, are somewhat atypical. The rites of passage of the average collegiate team, fraternity, or sorority most frequently hinge on requiring new members or pledges to imbibe insane quantities of alcohol, even when the risks and consequences of alcohol poisoning have been drummed into incoming freshmen’s heads during orientation week. Those who allow themselves to be subjected to dangerous hazing rituals are complicit in their own dehumanization, it seems to me.

    Florida A&M suspended four students and fired the marching band’s director, but then reinstated them. Students protested when some called for the university president’s resignation. An anti-hazing committee has been set up and a $50,000 fund established for faculty research into the nature and extent of hazing on campus.

    It will take a lot more to stop to it, to convince young men and women — in Florida and elsewhere — to find something better to do than degrade others and themselves.

   I often wonder when people pass away if they can still hover a few days and get a closer look at what’s happening down below on earth. Like our creator, can they see all? My mom passed away in April, and if she can see that I’m not wearing lipstick, allowing my animals on the furniture, and not always styling my hair, then I’m in big troubles, as one of my children used to say.

    “Let me ask you something, and tell me the truth,” my mother said, standing in front of my mirror one day. “Does my bosom look too big in this sweater?” She was 89 and getting ready to go to the nutrition center at the Montauk Playhouse, where she would be the only woman at a table of men. “I don’t want them to think I’m showing off,” she said of the other guests, most of whom were at least 75. The statement says a lot about her; yes, she was vain, but she was also very kind and cared about other people’s feelings.

    Mother’s Day is on Sunday, so how can I not write a column in her honor? But I promised David, my editor, that it wouldn’t­ be a sad one. She died on April 6 at 92 years old, after living a good, long life that should be celebrated. And my mom loved celebrations, especially if she was the center of attention, which she often was, mostly when she got up and sang around a piano or took to the dance floor.

    Whenever we had family gatherings out here in Montauk, a bunch of us would inevitably head down to the Shagwong late at night, with my 80-something mother in tow. She flirted with the waiters and even had a crush on one of them, whose nickname is Hollywood — for his good looks. She also befriended one of the chefs, who occasionally sent her greeting cards on her birthday or gifts for no occasion, one a Yankees shirt after he learned of her favorite team. After she passed, he was one of the first ones to come to my house and offer his condolences. She would have loved that!

    While consoling me recently, an older resident of Montauk told me to just keep hearing her voice in my head, and I immediately thought, Do I have to?

    There was a wake for her in the Bronx on her 93rd birthday on April 9. My sister, brother, sister-in-law, two grandchildren, and I were with her when she passed away in the hospital. As I looked down upon her, I couldn’t help but think what beautiful, unlined skin she had. She was always the first to tell her children and everyone else to use sunscreen, and was a walking advertisement for it. Her proudest moments came when people, especially doctors, expressed shock when learning her age. She was a looker, my mom.

    As much as we loved her, though, her advice wasn’t always wanted. She was in show business, a professional dancer, and her words of wisdom always had a bit of vanity to them.

    She hated my naturally curly hair, which is long and can sometimes look quite wild. In my teen years, she bought me a fall, which was basically a long blond fall of fake hair, similar to what these days would be called an extension. I wore it once in public and was teased unmercifully by my Bronx friends, so back on its Styrofoam head it went, never to be worn in public again. But don’t think I didn’t preen in private before my mirror while wearing that long, fake hair.

    She always told my sister and me that we should go to a stylist to get short, layered haircuts. My hair being what it is, which in all fairness is genetic and mostly her fault, a short, layered cut would make me look like Bozo the Clown, or worse.

    When we were younger, she hauled us off to Mimi de Paris for perms, as if I needed a perm, and short haircuts. I remember being dragged kicking and screaming because I didn’t want my hair cut. And Mimi was a fake, a girl from the Bronx with bleached blond hair.

    As I got older I let my hair grow in defiance. But she never let up. When I picked her up from my sister’s house to take her to my house for dinner, the first thing she would do when she got in the car was reach over to tuck my hair behind my ears. “Why don’t you pull it back into a ponytail?” she would ask, with a bewildered look on her face, as if I hadn’t wanted long, straight hair my whole life. As she got on in years, I learned to ignore her hair comments and tell her I was getting it styled next week, which always made her smile in anticipation of my new short, layered hairdo.

    She was a pip, our Marie, and said the damndest things. But we loved her, deeply and thoroughly, even though, quite frankly, she often drove us crazy. My siblings and I are nothing like my mother. She never left the house without a swipe of red lipstick. I don’t wear lipstick, always gloss or balm, my sister doesn’t wear lipstick, and thank God my brothers don’t wear lipstick.

    She always had her hair coiffed and sprayed, and she dressed in what she called one of her cute little outfits. If a couple of pounds were gained by one of her children, she had no qualms about letting the culprit know and always commented on our outfits before an event.

    If Mom is looking down on us from above, she has probably already made a lot of new friends, all males I’m sure, and might attempt to send us a message. I just hope it’s not about my hair. I’m imagining walking into my bedroom one of these days and finding a levitating hairbrush hanging in the air. That might be all it takes for me to make an appointment with Mimi de Paris just for my mom.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

   Having snapped when I should have buttoned my lip, I thought the next day of ways I could make amends, how I could patch things up, as it were.

    I would begin by fixing the liquor cabinet door that’s remained awkwardly ajar lately. Step one in working my way back into her good graces.

    “It’s not perfect,” I began in alluding to my good intentions a half-hour later, “but it’s better than it was.”

    Her gentle reply led me to believe that I was beginning to be cut some slack. Encouraged, I returned to work to find that I, the screwup, had spoken too soon — the door still remained askew. But things were better than they were.

    I alit next on the blinking fluorescent lights over the washer and dryer in the dim basement. I would go to the hardware store and replace them!

    This task I was to carry out to perfection, and while I was down in the village getting the lights, I thought of something that she might really like. I would go to BookHampton and get her that new book of E.O. Wilson’s she’d spoken of, the one about how the rapid evolution of the human species could be traced to how well we’ve gotten along!

    A repentant flippant fly, I was sure she would not miss the irony in this.

    Once home, after having put in the lights, I took the wet things out of the washer, put them in the dryer, and brought up the dry things and folded them on the dining table. Then I put the new book atop the washer and turned out the lights in the cellar.

    When she got back from her mother’s, I said I’d gotten the new lights but had forgotten — this she found entirely credible — to put the wet things in the dryer.

    Not to worry, she would do it, she said, descending the stairs.

    The discovery of the book atop the washer had been a pleasant surprise, as had been the fact that the wet things were tossing about in the dryer.

    I was on my way to being forgiven.

    How perverse, I thought, that I’d been inspired so to act after saying something mean.

    And so the at-times out-of-sorts sportswriter, the emotive votary, made himself resolve not to play this game again.

   I had meant to close off the kitchen exhaust vent so the wrens could not get inside.

    About a month ago, while sitting in the living room at home, I was startled by a metallic thumping from somewhere within the walls. The racket, it turned out, came from a pair of what I think are Carolina wrens. They had begun stacking sticks inside an open vent louver on the exterior of the kitchen.

     Feeling somewhat bad about having to chase them out but relieved that the female had not yet begun to lay her eggs, I cleared the sticks and hung a birdhouse nearby. Next, I closed the vent and made a mental note to do something to make sure it stayed closed when the fan was off. Apparently the note should have been put down in ink.

    On Monday morning as I was getting some pancakes ready for the kids, I saw a brown shape flash by the window over the kitchen sink and heard a raspy cheeping sound from above my head. The wrens, I realized, had returned while I was not watching, and they had built a new nest.

    There is no way I am going to move the nest this time, and I’ll place a bit of tape over the vent switches to avoid disturbing the little family.

    Looking for details on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s remarkably complete Birds of North America online site, I was relieved to read that wrens take care of the business of breeding and fledging young relatively quickly. Assuming that the first nestling emerged Monday, we should be able to use the stove exhaust again by the week before Memorial Day.

     We are lucky, though, that at this time of year it is okay to open the house windows facing Gardiner’s Bay so that with a little cross-ventilation the smoke from morning pancakes can clear quickly.

   So many things were so comically awful at the restaurant we chose for Saturday night dinner in Pittsburgh last weekend that the consensus among our foursome was to give it the award for the worst restaurant we had ever been in — and the most pretentious.

    We had only an afternoon and evening in Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges, following two days on a Frank Lloyd Wright pilgrimage to the nearby countryside. We spent two nights in one of his late and most simple “Usonian” houses, which had been moved to Pennsylvania from Illinois, and were thrilled to tour his monumental Fallingwater and a smaller, elegant residence called Kentuck Knob.

    In Pittsburgh, a decision to take the funicular, known as the Duquesne Incline, to the top of Mount Washington for the fun of it, as well as the view and dinner, was preordained. But as for the restaurant we chose, which has apparently been named Pittsburgh magazine’s “best overall and most romantic restaurant for 2010 and 2011?” Ay caramba.

    We should have left when we learned there was no a la carte menu on Saturday nights. But after taking a rickety old car up the incline and a short but steep walk to the restaurant, on Grand View Avenue, we decided to stay put, hoping the expensive seven-course prix fixe would be a treat.

    The view of the city, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet the Ohio River, was spectacular, and fascinating. Lighted riverboats and a long coal barge inched along. What could go wrong? Almost everything.

    The most disappointing thing was that there wasn’t much flavor to be found despite highfalutin garnishes described for every dish on the menu. Here’s a small sample: stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, oyster crema, pecan gremolata, golden raisin jus, and ramp chimi­churri.

    As it turned out, the portions were from small to minuscule, which was okay with us because a taste here and there was all we really wanted. And when the $10 glasses of wine turned out to be poured no deeper than three-quarters of an inch we just shook our heads.

    Three choices were offered for the four principal courses (appetizer, fish, meat, and dessert), with an amuse-bouche, a sorbet “intermezzo,” and salad. The amuse-bouche was a tiny bean of some kind dusted with crushed sesame and accompanied by a frond of frisée. Not bad. But, as the meal progressed, we found that the descriptions on the menu were far more flavorful than the food.

    We were continually surprised; expecting jolts to the taste buds, we got, well, nothing much. Okay, so the ricotta-filled crepe I chose as an appetizer was crispy, but the best thing I could say about the warm octopus salad, which I chose for the fish course, was that the strands were chewy. (And I’m an adventurous eater, who loves to eat octopus.) Chris liked his appetizer, little chunks of sea scallop tartare, molded with rhubarb, cherry bomb radishes, and preserved lemon, although he couldn’t taste the rhubarb. You get the idea.

    The illumination was so low and the type so small that we had resorted to using an iPhone flashlight app to read the menu. The decibel level was so high that we had to lean over the table, get as close as possible, and then shout to be heard. When one of us, laughing, said, “I can’t see and I can’t hear,” another chimed in: “And you can’t afford it!” We roared.

    Aside from the view, which we saw first during daylight and then after dark, the only thing we took away from Isabela was the memory of a few good laughs and a photograph that the host took and presented to us.

    If, like us, you plan to go to Pittsburgh for the first time, take heart. It is filled with public buildings (museums, a conservatory) that are legacies from the titans of industry (Carnegie, Phipps, Frick) — and there are plenty of better places for dinner.