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.

   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.

   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.”

   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.

   The girls were sick this week with one of those things that were going around, and so I got to spend a fair amount of time at home. With one child throwing up and another confined to bed, I stayed close, but that did not keep me from paying attention to the wildlife in this early spring.

    It would have been difficult not to. A pair of wrens decided early Monday to start nest-building in our stove exhaust, thumping and clunking in the sheet metal. As sorry as I was to have to shoo them away, I cleared out the grass and skeletal oak leaves, shut the vent properly, and hung a birdhouse in a tree nearby.

    The pair, one mate far larger than the other, hung around for a while, then moved on. As I watched from a kitchen window, a chickadee inspected the birdhouse.

    An osprey arrived a while later, soaring a couple of hundred feet up and whistling shrilly. A cardinal sang from the top branch of a tree. Red-wing blackbirds uncoiled their metallic, spring-like voices in the swamp.

    On an unrelated note, Stuart Vorpahl phoned Friday to say that an old Bonac word, “muxing,” had been changed in his letter in The Star on March 29 to “mixing” somewhere along the way. Muxing, he said, came from mux, a Colonial-era term for a drill that was traded to Long Island’s native residents for making wampum.

    In my grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies,” she wrote, “ ‘Mux’ is an old Long Island word meaning to putter, to do odd jobs. . . . Anyone familiar with this neighborhood has heard that.” Stuart more or less made the same point.

    Prominent in the 1648 deal that the English colonists made for much of what is now present-day East Hampton Town was the payment of 00 muxes in an arrangement with Wyandanch, the Montaukett chief.

    Reading Stuart’s letter as it was readied for print a week ago Monday, I paused at the phrase — “On this day we were mixing around with Harvey and Jonathan in the chicken coops” — but did not take the time to find his handwritten original to check.

    What’s called a captain’s chair has been in the kitchen of the Rattray house in Amagansett since the 1960s. I’m not sure of the exact date it arrived, but I have never forgotten how it got there. My first husband and I had sailed over to Gardiner’s Island one summer’s day and gone ashore for a wander without being detected. The chair was in a small, tumbled-down building, exposed to the elements. I guess I must admit we pilfered it, yes, but at the time it seemed only right to save it from ruin.

    We owned a cruising catboat at the time (one of several we had over the years). They are centerboard boats with shallow draft and relatively broad cockpits. So it wasn’t particularly difficult to carry the chair aboard and take it home. Now, so many years later, I am amazed that it hardly shows any signs of wear. Visiting my son and his family, who live in the Amagansett house now, I couldn’t help but ponder how well built the chair was. It wasn’t new 50 years ago, and I don’t believe it has ever had to be repaired.

    Gardiner’s Island loomed large in our lives in those days, in part because the house is on Gardiner’s Bay and in part because the island’s future was uncertain. Robert David Lion Gardiner, who fancied himself as the Lord of the Manor, was the principal beneficiary of the trust that owned the island. He said contradictory things about what should happen to it. Because he had no heirs, his niece was in line to own the island, and, to thwart her, he went so far as to try to adopt a man named Gardiner from the South who may or may not have been a relative at all. It was all quite dramatic, and rather entertaining, too.

    One of my happiest memories of those summers long ago involves Gardiner’s Island, or to be more precise, Cartwright Shoal — a sort of sand archipelago that stretched into the bay from the south side of the sland — where we would go for picnics. We took a few friends there several times in a small Beetle catboat that we kept just offshore of the house. Beetles, which are raced in season on Georgica Pond, are uncommonly commodious and sturdy small boats. Ours was the only boat I was truly confident of sailing by myself. I remember the joy once of being at the tiller, heading back to shore with a grown man, his young son, and our big dog aboard.

    Cartwright was little more than a low stretch of sand with a lot of seagulls and a nice view; it used to come and go, disappearing under the water, depending on wind and weather. But I was shocked recently to learn that it is now totally gone. Storms and the rise of sea level have put it three to four feet under.

    There are other furnishings in the Amagansett house besides the Gardiner’s Island chair that I am sentimental about. There’s a heavy-duty hutch in the kitchen that we bought the year my son (who lives there now) was born. There’s an oil painting in questionable shape and in a simple black wood frame of a woman holding a bouquet of red and white flowers. An older generation had discarded it, and we needed something for the living room walls. There are lightweight chairs with remarkably short legs, and what may be a Dominy blanket chest that was badly refinished before we were given it. There’s a trypot, belonging to my late husband’s maternal ancestors, the Edwardses, which I believe was used to render the fat of whales caught off Amagansett.

    I am beginning to think it is time to put the history of these things down somewhere for the youngest generation. I was about to say put the history down on ink and paper, but that would have dated me.

    Time has flown. Sea level is rising. But family roots just grow longer.

   What a long strange trip it’s been.  

   I’m talking, of course, about Mary’s uncanny success in The Press’s N.C.A.A. tournament pool.

    Although this is written before the final outcome is known, I think she’s already merited accolades. I told Cailin Riley, The Press’s sports editor, the other day that it was “the sports story of the week.”

    The fact is neither Mary nor I was eager to take part in March Madness inasmuch as neither of us knew what we were talking about. But don’t let that dissuade you, said my mother-in-law, who will bet on absolutely anything, and whose best results were achieved in her inaugural try, when she knew nada.

    With the deadline for submissions fast approaching, I ripped out the predictions of Newsday’s sportswriters and followed their advice down the line, including the upsets they’d forecast, and made out my bracket just to get it done and over with. Meanwhile, Mary deputized me to fill out hers also.

    I did, but later that day she called to say she was making some changes.

    Apparently, she was having second thoughts. And, as her suitable-for-framing final entry, replete with erasures, smudges, and X-ings out attests, she was having some third thoughts as well.

    This, I should add, is all well and good, for as the book on the brain I’m reading now says, our gut instincts are often wrong, and that it is only upon reflection that we can be said to be really thinking.

    In contrarian fashion, then, Mary went with the teams I hadn’t. And that was how she came to be at the top of the heap, bestriding numerous prostrate sports-savvy males, as Kentucky and Kansas prepared to meet in the championship game Monday night.

    “My father used to say that a $2 bet would get you off the fence mighty quick,” she says as we settle in for yet another televised roller-coaster ride.    And then, of course, there’s the head and the heart. Her heart said Chapel Hill and her head said Kansas in the quarterfinals, “though N.C. State was the key.”

    The downside to all of this is that I, an early casualty, have watched her undergo three — nay, four — meltdowns ending in utter despair in the past couple of weeks. On Sunday, I was left to keep vigil after she had, in her words, used her head (“Ohio State’s a better team than Kansas”) and had gone to bed.

    Around midnight, my partisan passions having been further inflamed by draughts of triple-distilled tequila (a birthday gift from my mother-in-law), I joyously took note that there was not a dry Buckeye eye to be seen throughout the Superdome and ran to give Mary the news that Kansas, which had trailed by as many as 13 points near the end of the first half, had come back to win 64-62, but she was sleeping the sleep of the blessed.

    What a long strange trip it’s been.

   Even though the “Mast-Head” this week is about the editor’s household and backyard pets (see below), I can’t help but get in a few words about how I wound up with a 23-pound cat named White Boots.

    About seven years ago, my oldest granddaughter, the pig-wanting girl in the “Mast-Head,” happened to be taken to the Animal Rescue Fund’s kennels for a special afternoon adventure on the occasion of her fourth birthday. That she might fall in love there with a kitten had not really been considered by her mother, who happens to be allergic to cats.

    Thus began my granddaughter’s first tearful campaign for a pet of her own. She begged her aunt to adopt the kitten for her, but that wasn’t practical: Her aunt was working in New York City and wasn’t often in her small apartment. She pleaded with her maternal grandmother, who lived in a Manhattan apartment and, well, didn’t know from cats. Then she got to me.

    I like to say I am more of a dog person than a cat person, but our family had had plenty of cats over the years, and I was between pets at the time. So, aware of what was in store, I went back to ARF with her to take a look. Although there was some question about whether he was the same kitten my granddaughter had fixed on originally, we chose a gray tabby with a luxurious white bib and tidy white boots. She gave the kitten the kind of name a 4-year-old might choose, White Boots, and she promised to visit all the time to take care of him. How could I say no? It not only meant a pet, but visits from a grandchild.

    As might have been expected, her cat-tending visits and interest waned. Besides, her parents had more to do than to make sure she kept her cat appointments. As time went by, she was treated to a dog of her own, the shaggy Cavachon mentioned in this week’s “Mast-Head.” And it was she, who will be 11 on her next birthday, who recently decided she wanted a pig.

    I had forgotten how old White Boots was until he started showing signs of indigestion and was taken to the vet this week. His age had been duly noted when he was neutered and information about him was still on file. That’s also how I learned what the formidable White Boots, the largest cat I’ve ever known, weighs. (I’ll resist the urge to insert a pig joke here.) A simple, over-the-counter remedy and a change of diet were prescribed. I have every reason to expect him to thrive. With all this talk of pets, though, I can’t stop thinking that it is time to get another dog.

    After my last dog, Goodie — named for colonial East Hampton’s reputed witch, Goodie Garlick — died, I decided that I couldn’t get another dog unless we put in an invisible fence, and I had qualms about those. Now, I’m beginning to think I might find a dog who wouldn’t mind spending some time by him or herself in a portion of the backyard that has a conventional fence. We do already have such a fence, but I’ve been afraid that a dog would howl in despair at being left there or would be able to dig out.

    As I imagine it now, I ought to have a dog that is neither too small nor too big. Although if someone offered me a Newfoundland, like the lovable Meg — the first canine of my adult life — I would have a hard time saying no. If anyone wants to take this as a hint, they’re welcome.