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.

   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.

   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.

   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.”

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.