I couldn’t sing, but that didn’t stop me from being a lead singer.  

    It was the early 1980s, and New York City was the coolest place in the world.

    There was danger and sex and excitement, crime and punishment, one-night stands with someone you just had to sleep with, and anarchy everywhere.

    And if you didn’t have a band, you were nothing.

    I lived at CBGB’s. It was the only place to live. I was working at the club as a bouncer. The pay was $15 a night and all the Screwdrivers you could drink.

    When I wasn’t bouncing or drinking, I was writing lyrics. I needed someone to write the music. I went to see Mike Paulin, a friend from growing-up days in Queens, who lived a few blocks from me in Chelsea. He was a good guitarist, very clean, his idol being Eric Clapton.

    Every day when Mike was done with work, we’d work on the songs. We put an ad in The Village Voice and found a good bass player, Richard Badenius, who had a great look and a good sound.

    Drummers were always an issue. They came and went, rehearsal after rehearsal. We started gigging, and the drummers kept rotating.

    And still, I could not sing.

     We gigged at small bars and clubs, any place that would let us play, running around the East Village, SoHo, and Tribeca when we weren’t playing, pasting our posters on abandoned buildings and lampposts.

    We were the Detours.

    Some of our gigs worked, and some didn’t. Rich had great energy and stage presence, and he and Mike were musically tight. Mike’s stage persona was aloof. His clean sound might have been a bit too clean, but he sure had the chops. The drummer was always a crapshoot.

    When the audience dug what I was doing, we were cool, when they didn’t, not so cool, but it was working.

    We finally got a date at CBGB’s that wasn’t just an open mike. We would have one set.

    The next day, at rehearsal, Mike told us he had been putting too much time into the band and had to drop out. But we still had the date.

    Rich and I hooked up with a guitarist named Steve DeMartis. In his leather jacket, he was wild and energetic. We had one rehearsal, going over the songs. That night, we hit the stage.

    It worked. Far from being aloof, Steve was wild, having fun, we all had fun, and the audience dug us.

    Performing onstage when the audience is with you is a super high, especially when it’s rock and roll. You tingle all over, electric, every moment making sense and then not mattering. You sweat, you’re wet, you come off stage dripping, alive, sit down for a moment in the back dressing room, every pore breathing, some girls come over to look at you, be with you.

    We got an offer to go up to Toronto to do a gig in a hot club. Steve didn’t want to go. He had a couple of other bands he was playing with. Mike had been in the audience that night. He wanted back in.

     We rehearsed with our drummer du jour. He had good drive, but was nervous. We had to keep things straight and easy for him, or he’d get the jitters.

    The deal in Toronto was we’d have second billing. We’d use the drum kit and amps of the headline band. We sat in one of the hotel rooms, going over a new song. The drummer was picking it up. We felt good.

    Things started falling apart at sound check. The headliner’s drummer kept lurking around, telling our drummer not to hit his kit so hard. Our drummer was getting nervous.

    When we hit the stage, the place was packed. They were not there to see us, we were an afterthought. We started playing “Driven to the Rhythm,” our drummer started hitting, when the hometown drummer jumped up onstage behind our drummer and said something. Our drummer fell apart. The set fell apart.

    I looked out at the worse-than-uninterested  audience. There was a pause, the kind of pause when you’re onstage where you understand that anything is possible, and I said, “Toronto is a beautiful city, but not enough people piss in the streets.”

    I have no idea why I said it or what it meant, but I could feel, at that moment, the incredible power of the stage, as the entire audience turned on us.

    We got out of there alive, how, I do not know.

    Rich holed up in his hotel room that night with a girl he’d picked up. Mike and I talked and drank for a while, and I went to bed.

    They all split the next morning. I stayed in Toronto an extra day. They have a lovely indoor botanical garden there.

    I headed back to New York that night, changing trains in Buffalo. I walked through the Buffalo Central station, built the same time and along the same lines as New York’s Grand Central. It had become an empty, unused mausoleum, a tomb for Buffalo’s past.

    I smoked a joint and boarded the train for New York.

    The detour was over.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.

    The Clearwater Beach Property Owners Association is a formidable organization. Unlike many homeowners groups, which tend to evaporate after their first few years, the Clearwater association spread its wings, taking under them what was originally known as Lion Head and the neighborhood farther east.

    There are 870 homeowners who are eligible to be members, and 550 have paid their dues! When they do, they have first dibs on a 119-slip marina at Hog Creek and access to a gated and protected bayfront beach and a barbecue and picnic area.

    The group’s president, executive secretary, and dockmaster each had messages in the association’s recent spring newsletter, and it is clear that they feel lucky to live in a special place. The newsletter encouraged residents to participate in Earth Day last weekend, to volunteer at a forthcoming barbecue, and even to try a few recipes. But it also asked its members to do something about “illegally overcrowded single family homes.”

    Our challenge, the newsletter says in big bold letters, is to “UNOCCUPY SPRINGS.” The slogan is more than eye-catching. Standing the Occupy Wall Street movement on its head, the words strike a foreboding tone. They have aroused concern among a few readers who brought the newsletter to The Star.

    That low-wage workers and their families are more often found living in Springs than in other hamlets in East Hampton, that many houses there are overcrowded, and that East Hampton Town has not been able to do much about the situation is a serious problem for our community as a whole. However, urging residents to turn in their neighbors, to “file complaints . . . and follow up with [the] Freedom of Information Law” is, in my view, a bit too reminiscent of the sort of message you might expect in a repressive regime.

    As the newsletter indicates, governments have a responsibility to protect the environment and to make sure that living conditions are safe. The association is correct that stuffing more people than the law dictates into houses is dangerous as well as illegal. But the association, in its newsletter, also makes the rather inflammatory assessment that overcrowded houses “are destroying our school, raising taxes . . . and diminishing our quality of life.”

    We all know that most of the overcrowded houses in Springs are occupied primarily by Latinos — but I will refrain from interpreting the newsletter’s rallying cry as an example of bias. It is always unwise, in the heat of the moment, to ascribe the worst motives to those who take strong positions in civic controversies.

    Instead, I want to point out that new immigrants have become a needed and necessary part of our community. The Latino demographic in Springs is, largely, part of a labor pool that many long-time residents have come to find indispensable. Grade schools, like the Springs School, have an obligation, moral and otherwise, to educate the children in the district — and to help these students learn English, if need be. Having classmates who are only just learning English isn’t something for kids or their parents to be alarmed about; it is at the core of the American experience. (Who taught your Polish or Persian grandfather how to say “chalk,” or “chocolate bar”?)

    Dealing with this situation constructively and creatively is in the interest of all of us. First and foremost, municipalities ought to take the responsibility of trying to provide housing opportunities for all those among us who have a hard time finding decent, legal places to live.

    Ten or 12 years ago, East Hampton was host for a while to Study Circles, organized gatherings that occurred nationwide as a response to instances of discrimination. The idea was to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other and develop trust. Instead of spying on one another, instead of calling meetings that serve mainly as a forum for venting rage, instead of fear-mongering, community leaders might try to bring people together.

    Perhaps if the good neighbors who live in Clearwater were given a chance to learn, firsthand, about the problems and needs of those who live nearby in marginally acceptable quarters, practical — instead of simply incendiary — solutions might begin to emerge.

    One of the benefits of the very, very mild winter just past is that outdoor chores that would be still hanging over my head are more or less done.

    A couple of weekends ago, in fact, I pruned the grapes and brambles around the edge of the property and cut back branches along the driveway. This was well before the ticks were again afoot and the poison ivy had begun to grow.

    Since then, the garden beds have been turned and the compost spread, though nothing has been planted in them yet, pending better deer fencing and the time to install it. I had designs on a stand of bamboo at a friend’s house, good for cutting and building a lattice-work barrier, but a divorce and a quick sale of the property put an end to my plans. It can wait.

    With the must-do list shortened, I was able to turn to something I’ve really been meaning to do. On Sunday I drove to East Moriches on the chance that the Henry Leuthardt Nursery had a few apple trees left. It did, and I spent an enjoyable hour talking to John Leuthardt about business and how times change, as rain and a cold wind tapped at his barn roof.

    Mr. Leuthardt did indeed have a couple of trees for me. I bought six bare-root, dwarf saplings, three for our property and three for my mother’s. It is difficult to say how my three will do at our place down by the beach. I am willing to experiment. Our tiny raised garden beds do well by tomatoes, leeks, and lettuces; carrots, for one, do not grow at all. We will know in a year or two whether apples will thrive protected in the lee of our house.

    Already, I see trouble in the form of nearby cedar trees showing signs of an orange fungus that may be apple rust. This appeared before I brought my saplings home. Mr. Leuthardt suggested I try two disease-resistant varieties, the patriotic-named Freedom and Liberty, as well as the iron-skinned Roxbury russet.

    I planted my mother’s trees at her place in the village on Sunday afternoon. One went in the rear dooryard and will eventually replace an apple of unknown variety that was planted long ago and shows the signs of age.

    I did not get around to putting mine in the ground until after work on Monday. Then, the following morning, I dug up the russet and moved it to another location, one that should allow it more room to spread.

    We’ll see how it goes.

    When Georgie wrote on her twin sister’s wedding poster last weekend that “a life without love is a life half-lived,” I asked who had said that, figuring the reply would be Ovid, or Dante, or Calvin Coolidge, but her smiling answer was that the quote had come from the movie “Strictly Ballroom.”

    That put me on the spot, for when it came to us Mary had demurred, assuming that I, being “a writer,” would know just the right words that ought to be inscribed to the young couple on our behalf — wise, pithy, unforgettable.

    Panicking, I, who have lately been likening myself in lighthearted conversations with my wife to Keats’s “immortal bird,” lurched like a beheaded chicken in the general direction of a computer in the well-padded office with a pen and some crumbled paper in hand to summon up on Google “Ode to a Nightingale.”

    Now, you know, this ode is not entirely about untrammeled ecstasy — the poet at one point, in the bower, finds himself “half in love with easeful Death,” and at another observes that merely to be conscious is “to be full of sorrow.” But I was on a mission — a wedding is not a time for such temporizing — and Keats’s nightingale is indeed joyous, singing of summer “in full-throated ease.”

    Full-throated ease. I would use that.

    “. . . It is with full-throated ease that Mary and I. . . .” But what could follow the immortal bird? Ah, the Immortal Bard!

    Before you could say the Earl of Southampton, I had brought up on the screen Sonnet 18, which begins with the poet asking whether he should compare the Young Man “to a summer’s day.”

    I read on. . . . “But thy eternal summer shall not fade. . . .” That, of course, is what we wished for Johnna and Wally on that happy day in Palm Springs; that their eternal summer should not fade, although it was spring and although our lease was only for a week.

   And so I wrote: “It is with full-throated ease, Johnna and Wally, that on this blessed spring day we wish you an eternal summer that shall not fade.”

    “How’s that?” I said to Mary a few moments later.

    “Perfect.”

    “Would you write it then? Your handwriting’s much better than mine.”

    It was only after she’d done so that I confessed I’d largely lifted from Keats and Shakespeare, adding that I trusted she agreed that my lifting had been uplifting.

        When I was young, I loved to travel. Not the flying part of it, no, not that at all, just the idea of going to a new place. And, well, whatever it took to get there. Which is, generally, flying.

    I never boarded an airplane as a toddler or even as an adolescent, unlike all parents now who haul their infants with their paraphernalia and their noise on board every flight, all the time. My parents took cruises and flights to Paradise Island and Las Vegas, but the children were never invited on vacations with them except once, just me, on a driving trip to North Carolina, after my siblings got married or were too old to be interested. Durham, N.C., was the destination — I remember my stepfather, fat cigar in his mouth, drove us down there from Brooklyn in his 1965 Oldsmobile Starfire as my mother, smoking cigarettes, pushed the buttons on the radio, searching for Sinatra.

    What I also remember of that car trip was where we wound up — “the cigarette capital of the country,” where my mother loaded up on packs and cartons that ultimately contributed to her downfall.

    Okay. This is meant to be a fun (sort of) piece.

    The first time I got on an airplane was when I was 19 years old in 1967, when some friends and I jetted off to Acapulco, me puffing away in the smoking section at the back. Nervous all the while, wondering whether the plane, with its bumps and swoops and crackly P.A. announcements, was destined to go down.

    You do feel vulnerable on a plane. Admit it, everybody does. Up there in this lonely silver tube in the sky with its rattles and its lunges and the ever-present possibility of it going down. Going down in the middle of a silent, dark, moonlit ocean in the middle of the night on the way to Europe. Going down on a commuter flight. What with my often going to Cincinnati to make presentations to the Procter & Gamble clients I work for — meetings that don’t always go so well — I often think, If the plane is going to go down, let it go down on the way to a bad meeting versus on the way back.

    So far, none of my planes have gone down, thankfully, after hundreds and hundreds of flights mostly for business but often for pleasure. A blessing. But, can we talk? How insane is flying now?

    (I wasn’t fully prepared to be this open about what happened to me on a flight I took 10 years ago, but it’s certainly relevant to my story.)

    During one American Airlines flight just around New Year’s 2002, tan, happy, relaxed, and still dressed for the beach in shorts, a Lacoste polo, and flip-flops, unprepared for winter in New York and still hanging on to the aura of St. Barts, where I had just spent two glorious weeks with my partner, David, I got into some trouble. Trouble? An understatement. I got arrested for causing a disturbance on the flight, appearing threatening and terrorist-like. I have Arab roots — my biological father was born in Syria, and I did tend to resemble a terrorist, especially when I had thick black hair and a full-on black beard — but I’m the furthest thing from a menace, except if you ask some people.

    That flight was just months after 9/11 and days after someone had tried to light up his shoelaces, of all things (on an American Airlines flight, by the way), and years before the averted underwear bomber and the forbidden liquids and all. It’s unfathomable to me how all this explosives business no longer involves a wick and a cartoon-like black ball bomb. Everything is so different now.

    Anyhoo, I needed to use the loo. I have this problem with pissing. Nothing serious, it’s just that I drink a lot of liquids and have a high level of anxiety that provokes the pissing, which is further accelerated on a flight. I just had to use the john. The plane was beginning its descent and I really, really had to go. One lavatory was out of order, another one locked, so I wandered into first class, where I was told by a flight attendant (remember when they were called stewardesses?): “Sir, you must take your seat! You have to sit down and fasten your seat belt, and stay seated until the plane lands!”

    When you gotta go, you gotta go, and I really hadda go, so I ignored her and entered the restroom. And I did go, then got back to my seat, but not long after, over the crackly P.A. system, as the plane landed and taxied to the gate: “We have a situation here. Please, everyone stay in your seats until the situation is resolved.”

    “This means you. You’re the situation,” David said to me. Now, this was long before the Situation from “Jersey Shore” became known as the Situation. I was the situation? Boy, was I ever, as I was greeted by a copse of cops as I deplaned. I eventually learned that I had been aggressive with my bathroom urge and had threatened the flight attendant who’d stood in my way.

    I went, all right. Straight to a holding cell at Kennedy for a few hours and, blah, blah, blah, $12,500 later to a lawyer and three months after that, I was gratefully cleared of whatever the charges were. “Threatening to a flight attendant.” Done in by my burgeoning, bulging bladder.

    Profiling? (Check out my Arabic last name.) Nervous flight attendant in the aftermath of increasing airplane terrorism? Perhaps either. Perhaps both. Perhaps something else. I insist I was treated unfairly — the ride from the plane to the holding cell, handcuffed behind my back yet, overhearing the two police officers in the front seat complaining about their jobs, cursing and complaining, wow, did I get an earful and a lesson. And a further lesson not to drink alcohol on a flight no matter how much one’s nerves need calming. It will only make you need to use the men’s all the more.

    Flash forward: Stephen Slater, remember him? The JetBlue flight attendant? Activating the chute and saying something like, “I’m outta here,” beers in hands after a nasty exchange with a passenger about the overhead bins? When I fly coach with my carry-on, I feign a limp so I can get on early as someone needing special assistance and secure a spot for my carry-on. Those carry-ons: one more cause of pressure in the cabin — so many bags, so little space.

    In the last six weeks, two stories were of particular interest to fliers, be they frequent or occasional. First, the woman: the flight attendant on American Airlines who freaked out and screamed something about bombs and terrorists and crashes while the plane was still on the ground. That wobbly video over CNN with sound is chilling. The screams! The aisle of confused passengers, her being restrained. And then escorted off the plane and straight to a hospital for mental evaluation.

    But wait. It gets worse.

    Later last month, there was that JetBlue pilot who also snapped and also screamed on that crackly P.A. about bombs and terrorists and crashes. He had to be locked out of the cockpit, restrained, and this time the plane was 35,000 feet up in the air! One could only imagine the panic on board during the long minutes of that tirade. He, too, had to be whisked off to a hospital, but unlike the female flight attendant on American Airlines (I wonder if it was the same crazy one who blew the whistle on me 10 years ago), the pilot might be charged with charges. As well he should be.

    I hate flying. I strap myself in and pray that I get to my destination alive. I hope that my luggage is not rifled through and that I am not humiliated by being felt up or X-rayed to nudity or any other degradation. Now I have to fear that a flight attendant may go berserk and decide to open up the cabin door midair, passengers and seats, tray tables, and carry-ons hurled out into the stratosphere to land, splattered, God knows where. Now I have to worry about pilots who will take it upon themselves to scream, “Yahoo! It’s kamikaze time!” taking all of us captive customers with him to kingdom come. Now I have to wonder if I should wear a Depends adult diaper in the event I need to take a whiz while we are warned, and warned rudely, “Get to your seats!”

    Bette Davis’s famous line in the 1950 movie “All About Eve,” remember? “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” That line was never so applicable to flying in 2012.

     Hy Abady is the author of "Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End." A creative director at a New York advertising agency, he lives part time in Amagansett.

    Earlier this month I was invited to travel from New London to New Orleans aboard the Coast Guard’s training ship Eagle. A story appears elsewhere in this issue about Eagle under sail.

    I first joined the ship in 1994 as a journalist, crossed the Atlantic, wrote a story for Smithsonian magazine, and joined her again in Hamburg, Germany, in 1996 on the anniversary of her 1936 launch from the Blohm & Voss shipyard. She was christened Horst Wessel in the presence of none other than Adolf Hitler.

    He was the product of a paranoid, hateful mind. She was born of a proud shipbuilding tradition. She escaped World War II. Fortunately, he did not. I wrote about her first nine years as Horst Wessel, and her next 56 years as Eagle, in a book titled “The Barque of Saviors.” Eagle turns 76 this year.

    I’ve spent a lot of time on the ship and learned a great deal, but I had never tackled celestial navigation until now. Fortunately, Eagle is supplied with an ample number of sextants, navigational almanacs, and a bible known as Bowdich, a tome written by Thomas Edward Bowdich, a boy genius born in Bristol, England, in 1791.

    Also on board were a number of people willing to pound into a mathematically challenged mind the concepts, the first being that Ptolemy was right all along, the earth is the center of the universe with the sun and all the other celestial bodies revolving around us.

    This is a necessary mind-set if one is to understand the geometry of celestial navigation — quite simple once you see it. Computing LAN, or local apparent noon, was not difficult. More challenging was using the sextant to fix one’s position using stars when they first become visible at the time of day known as civil twilight (great title for a murder mystery), that is, when the sun is just three degrees below the horizon.

    Getting the angle from the sextant is relatively easy, but identifying the stars and doing the computations using corrections printed in the navigational almanac gets a bit dense.

    So there I was, reveling in my new knowledge aboard a wind-driven vessel, finding my place on our watery sphere using the sun and stars, no stinking GPS, no man-made satellites — aaargh. At the same time I was forced to admit I was still flummoxed by the jungle of calculations.

    One of my volunteer instructors was a young merchant seaman not long out of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy for whom navigation of all sorts had become second nature.

    Seeing I was having difficulty with the computations, Phil blurted, “But you don’t have to do all that. There’s an app called Starfinder. You just point your iPhone to the sky and it identifies the stars and planets, then you take your angle with the sextant and plug the numbers into a Web site that does the calculations for you.”

    What? An app? Is there no end to it? Does Apple have no sense of propriety? Why not just find my position on a hand-held electronic global positioning gizmo and the hell with the sextant? I could feel the great navigators — Bowdich, James Cook, William Bligh — sniggering. What happens when an asteroid wipes out the man-made satellites that GPS and Starfinder depend on, they ask?

    In my case I’d be up that creek without a paddle, so I have vowed to either learn it the old-fashioned way or sail well within sight of land.

—

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   The other night Mary realized she was missing the news.  “That’s good news,” I said, knowing that for her but to think is to be full of sorrow.

    (Keats said that by the way, not me, but I like it.)

    We are, as this is written, about to be transplanted temporarily in the ersatz environs of Palm Springs, where one of our daughters is to be wed. The weather ought to be good. Of course, it’s good here too, as it’s been all winter, inclining one to stay put, but at the end of the day filial ties win.

    In regretting an invitation to our college class’s 50th reunion recently, I said I rarely made it over the Shinnecock Canal anymore, and while that may have been a slight exaggeration it is true that I feel more and more at home at home. Bluebirds at the backyard feeders would make it perfect, but Bruce Horwith told me they prefer open areas such as you find around the airport and Napeague Meadow Road to the woods. We do have woodpeckers, though, goldfinches, flickers, nuthatches, and soon, I expect, irrepressible Carolina wrens that often nest in our flower boxes or in the outdoor shower.

    There are so many moles in the front yard that it would take a weapon of mass destruction to rid us of them, and so they, making themselves very much at home, continue to fluff things up. Walking on our mossy lawn is like walking on a lumpy mattress, a not unpleasant sensation.

    While I won’t be at the college reunion in body, I will be in spirit, in the form of a rather cheery essay on the passage of time. I should rail against it, but, for the moment, I can’t complain. And, as a result, I’ve begun to call myself the Pollyanna of the class of ’62. I told one of my college roommates that to remind me life was not all wine and roses I have a copy of Kafka’s short stories lying on my bedside table, and that, of course, I’d not yet read them.

   Out of the blue, our older daughter announced last week that she wanted a pig — sorely. This was not an ordinary pig, mind you, but some sort of supposed mini-breed she learned about on the Internet, which could be hers for $850, shipping from Indiana, or wherever, extra. I said no, of course, which set off a fit of wailing unprecedented for its length, if not for volume.

    My rationale against adding to our household in this way is simple: I don’t want any more responsibilities. When it comes to animals, the fact that I get up at least an hour before everyone else in our house means that I end up taking care of the three dogs: a pug, a small, curly-haired mixed breed, and a rangy Lab mix. Next it’s outside to the chicken coop to check the eight birds’ water and feed, and to open the door to their run.

    For whatever reason, it’s my job to pick up the poop in the yard, trim the dogs’ nails and the shaggy one’s coat, put the anti-tick stuff on them once a month, and so on. I collect and wash the eggs the hens produce and shovel their bedding a couple of times a year into the compost heap, which I drag over to the garden. Though I’ve managed to turn the garden, it has yet to be planted, and I have no idea what I am going to do to keep the deer out of it this year.

    The foregoing more or less was what I told the pig-wanting daughter, and her mother, who was somewhat sympathetic to her pleas. Moreover, it always had been understood that the middle child was the next member of the family in line to get her own pet. I had to draw the line.

    But the pig talk continued unabated. “I’ll take care of the pig!” our daughter howled. “You won’t have to do anything.”

    “I’ve heard that before,” I said.

    “I’ll prove it to you,” she said.

    So a couple of times this week, I have not had to feed the dogs. Lulu, the shaggy mutt (or, in other words, a Cavachon — half cavalier King Charles spaniel, half bichon frisé), has been given a bath that I did not have to initiate. The keening pleas have diminished somewhat.

    The answer about the pig is still no. But I worry that some members of the household may be plotting to move me out into a sty.

   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.

   I’ve always been fascinated with all things medieval so I’m just as surprised as anyone that I had never even heard of a Renaissance fair until I was at least 35 and never attended one until I was past 40. Growing up in New York City exposed me to all kinds of people from all walks of life, but I don’t remember a lot of them walking around in armor or wimples. But maybe I just wasn’t very observant.

    It was about six years ago in New Hampshire that I became aware that the Society for Creative Anachronism was taking over the huge Hopkinton fairgrounds for a weekend. Since it was just down the road a bit, I took the kids to have a look. I had no idea what it was, but the name implied that the members seemed to be able to poke fun at themselves.

    By that time I had met someone who made “Ren Faires” her second life, or possibly her primary one, and she took it very, very seriously. But that was not what I found with the S.C.A.

    A visit to the Web site will tell a reader, “The S.C.A. is an international organization dedicated to researching and recreating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. Our ‘Known World’ consists of 19 kingdoms, with over 30,000 members residing in countries around the world. Members, dressed in clothing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, attend events which feature tournaments, royal courts, feasts, dancing, various classes and workshops, and more.”

    Although all of the people at the Hopkinton fairgrounds were in costume — or garb, as they call it — they wore watches. They answered cellphones. They smoked. In other words, they were being creatively anachronistic. Even though there was the occasional “What ho!” and “Good morrow” talk going on, it was said in a normal tone instead of a creepy fake British accent.

    One man in a tunic got out a pair of wooden swords and had a spirited duel with my then 6-year-old son. There was a staged battle to watch. There were vendors selling everything from period clothing to baby dragons to weaponry. There was a feast — smoked turkey drumsticks and bread rolls, I remember. Everyone was very friendly and wanted only to educate us on what they were doing to keep the Middle Ages alive. We expected to stay for an hour. We stayed for eight.

    But it wasn’t until this past summer when we watched the very funny movie “Role Models,” which features a teen­age dweeb who is obsessed with a re-enactment world called “Laire” with knights and elves and kings — that my son, Bingham Warner Lancelot Johnson (yes, that is his real name), turned to me and said, “Remember that sword fight in New Hampshire? Do they have something like that out here?”

    The answer is, they do. We have now been lucky enough to connect with the S.C.A.’s Suffolk County chapter, and on Saturday attended a “Spring Schola,” a medieval arts and sciences event in Centereach. It was focused on workshops, which were held on the subjects of spinning, weaving, belly dancing, archery equipment repair, and more, along with “a hearty day board,” faire talk for food. There were also introductory get-togethers for newcomers, like us, where we learned that we are now part of the Barony of An Dubhaigeainn, which is Celtic for “black abyss,” presumably what you would fall into if you were to continue past Montauk Point.

    Everyone in the S.C.A. has a group name and persona usually accompanied by a pretty detailed backstory. We newbies heard of an African-American member who likes to don Viking garb. His tale is that he was shipwrecked near a Viking encampment filled with blind Vikings, who raised him as one of their own.

    It may be a little over the top, but at least the members know and accept that, unlike some other festivals at which everyone just takes themselves way too seriously. On Saturday, young boys looked on in awe at the spears and swords grasped by men clad in leather doublets, girls admired the fine long-sleeved gowns and head attire worn by the ladies. Who cares if it was at an American Legion hall? We certainly didn’t.

    There is the upcoming “pennsic” in August, which we learned of this weekend. Apparently, this is the Cadillac of medieval re-enactments, held for a week in Pennsylvania with a cast of gabillions and several encampment sites. Since I don’t camp out no matter what the era, we may go and stay in a hotel, or “roadside tavern,” if you want to be cute about it.

    But for now, I doff my crown to the fine ladies and lords who leave their daily grind of work and families to create a sort of tangible magic for the rest of us. Chivalry is not dead. It’s alive in Suffolk County.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter for The East Hampton Star.