Looking at the official Web site of East Hampton Town recently, I was taken aback when I  learned that town government has sanctioned 11 appointed boards, 13 advisory boards, and 19 free-standing committees, in other words those not exclusive to town board members. For some reason, the list did not include the village and hamlet citizens advisory committees that have been in a hot spot with Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson lately (although they may have been listed somewhere else on the site that I missed).    

    So I called Joanne Pilgrim, who has covered town government for The Star for ages, to find out if the committees and boards indicated were active or if any were moribund. Almost every one was bona fide, although a few had broken into two parts and a few had been combined. (Talk about what is called institutional memory: Joanne’s got it for town government.)

    Committees often get a bad rap, and I’ve thought myself lucky for being able to avoid them as a writer and editor for this paper. Committee chairs often fill organizational rather than leadership roles, which means issues are batted about endlessly and decisions and calls for action can take eons to reach. People willing to participate for the general good deserve our thanks.

    What Supervisor Wilkinson was angry about was the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee’s drawing State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. into an issue rather than doing what, in his opinion, it is supposed to do: gather information and report back to the town board.

    Like the Montauk group, several other of the town’s appointed boards (the zoning board of appeals, planning board, and architectural review board, for example) make news on a regular basis. Their decisions weave the fabric of the community or poke holes in it, depending on your point of view. Others, such as the Lake Montauk Watershed Sustainability Committee, are working to solve ongoing environmental problems, while still others, such as the anti-bias task force and board of ethics, function when called upon.

    But these quasi-official groups aren’t the half of it. New committees and boards seem to be springing up on a regular basis. If you haven’t been paying attention you may not know about two relatively new citizens organizations that have become active in Springs: Springs Concerned Citizens and Springs Home­owners Alliance. And most of you probably haven’t heard of the newest group in the easternmost hamlet, Montauk Citizens Voice.

    There’s no doubt in my mind that citizen participation of this kind is the basis of a healthy civil society. It is burgeoning these days as more residents than in the past — perhaps inspired by political protests around the world,  the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Wall Street movement? — are becoming advocates of change. The clashes here at home have been verbal rather than violent, thank goodness, but I wonder if the range of wildly diverse opinions often made evident will in the end be productive, or if the kind of consensus necessary for communities to come together will be harder and harder to achieve.

    In any case, this is civic involvement of which we can all be proud. And I am also proud of The Star’s letters pages, which provide a forum through which opposing factions of involved townspeople can get to know, and perhaps understand, one another a bit better.

   I’m going to take the long way around to laud Kindle and the other e-book platforms as a few of the purest advances born of the digital revolution. But first:

    I want to know how it’s possible for the normal homeowner, the one who takes on the clerical responsibilities, to wield his or her mental machete through the tangle of ever-changing insurance policies, mysteriously increasing Verizon bills, mind-numbing tax laws, junk mail disguised — “we’re pleased to inform you” — as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. And don’t forget the camouflaged cons aimed at getting your Social Security or bankcard number.

    We’re talking a major bookkeeping challenge and one often complicated by the Internet. True, banking and some bill-paying is easier online, but getting online answers to tax or insurance questions is like trying to follow the “easy assembly” directions written by the manufacturer of a hanging-file stand who is both dyslexic and new to the English language.

    I continue to believe that an informed human (and I hear there are a bunch of them looking for work) is better able to explain a complicated issue than an online tutorial written in Googlespeak. Don’t get me wrong, Google is a deity as far as I’m concerned. It’s his apostles who often muddy chapter and verse.

    I’m not an Occupy Wall Street kind of guy, per se, but it’s clear the executives of some of our largest corporations are able to walk away with more annual treasure than the combined lifetime earnings of a hundred or more middle-class folks by using some of the oldest tricks in the book.

    It’s either the old bait and switch — “you can get a new cellphone for free if you sign up for a new plan that will cost you tenfold the cost of the phone by the time the plan expires” — or (and this is far more cynical) they bury us in paper (or megabytes).

    Make them march through mud. It’s what the Russians did to Napoleon. Drown them in small print: interest-rate changes, plan limits, expirations, deadlines so complicated and time-consuming that they’ll just give up and pay it.

    We’ve played along, of course. Much of our “necessities” are more convenient than essential. We buy something to save time, or play with it (I’m thinking of the iPhone here), then spend the time we saved looking for ways to squander more of it until the bills come and we realize that all that time has, presto change-o, turned into money.

    The point is, devices that allow us to tap into the Internet or cellular technology are either extremely helpful or are destructive Trojan horses.

    It seems to me that Kindle and the other e-book platforms do what the Internet originally promised. I understand it when people say, “I prefer to hold an old-fashioned book.” I do too, but it’s not an either-or thing. For a curious reader, a traveling reader, a student, a researcher, having instantaneous access to original, unabridged material for a pittance is a world-changer.

    And, for a writer, e-book publishing, which has in many ways bypassed the cumbersome traditional publishing system while often working in concert with it, is a godsend, I mean Googlesend.

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   We were marveling the other night at how the ancient Greeks knew every­thing when it occurred to me that they had nothing else to deflect their inquiries, no video games, no televised debates or movies to make demands on their time. No wonder they were so smart, they — and the Egyptians too! — had a lot of time to think and observe the heavens.

    Speaking of thinking, I’ve been reading “Thinking Fast and Slow” lately and have found that almost invariably I’m a fast (System One) thinker and thus almost invariably wrong. I struck out so many times on questions such as, “If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost,” that I thought it would be better to put the book down for a while, until my ego revived.

    I turned instead to “The Odes of John Keats,” a very thoroughgoing study of them by Helen Vendler, and am having a better time with that. Keats, while he likes flowers and knows their names, doesn’t ask questions like, “If roses are flowers, and if some flowers fade quickly, do some roses fade quickly?”

    As I said to Mary after reading his odes to Indolence and Psyche, “I may not be very intelligent, but I know what lovely writing is.”

    My problem is I’m not skeptical enough, I’m too credulous. For instance, when The New Yorker’s movie reviewer said “Wanderlust” was “funny,” I took his word for it and suggested to Mary that we go.

    We did, on a recent Sunday afternoon. (I could have suggested instead that we try to figure out the circumference of the earth, or ponder the conclusions to which the atomic theory can lead, but ancient Greeks had already done that.)

    “Wanderlust” was a slog, as it turned out, a “Wanderbust” in our book, and so we left about a third of the way through, just in time to see Olivia de Havilland undergo electric shock therapy on television in “The Snake Pit.” Now that was funny. We were on the floor. Especially when the post-shock therapy reports kept noting, much to the doctor’s dismay, “patient still unresponsive.”

    Schlock therapy, I concluded, could also serve as a powerful corrective, a means through which we can divest ourselves of all these diversions and return to a more contemplative state — one that is probably far, far away from New York.

   The spring peepers had started their annual chorus by the time the family got home from a vacation on March 13. We had been away for the preceding week, so if the frogs had started singing before that, I was not around to hear it. This bothered me a bit, since I have been recording the date on which I first hear them every year since 1998. As it is, however, March 13 ties for the earliest I have heard the peepers since I started taking note.

    Such a short sample is scientifically meaningless, I know, and cannot be taken as an indication of a trend. In fact, though my other March 13 notation was in 2008, in most years the date jumps around during the last two weeks of the month.

    More notable news about possible warming of the winter atmosphere comes from Richard J. Hendrickson of Bridgehampton, who has been observing the weather, carefully and officially, since 1930. Mr. Hendrickson submits a monthly report to the local newspapers, and in the latest one, he wrote that February, 2012, was the mildest he has recorded. He is cautious, of course, saying, “Is this just one freak year? Or, are we in the trend of 20 or more years in this warming pattern?”

    The way I see it, my peeper observations may be of some value at some future time, when, if the predictions are right, New York’s climate will be like that of present-day South Carolina.

    In other frog news, researchers announced recently that they had identified a new species of leopard frog, living on Staten Island and in New Jersey. And it was the frogs’ love calls, a single croak instead of the more common southern leopard frog’s repeated cackle, that first drew attention. Samples of the frog’s DNA appeared to confirm the suspicion that a previously undocumented species was living in the metropolitan area.

    Spring peepers have yet to really begin their evening music, so there is still plenty of time to hear them. A slow drive down Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett at dusk with the windows down is an easy way to enjoy the concert. And what a concert it is. Try not to miss it.

   For me, it is St. Patrick’s Day when the Montauk Friends of Erin hold their parade, as they will on Sunday. It has always been a big day, from the very beginning of our family life. In my memory the weather back in the ’70s was always perfect, the floats lively and sometimes hilarious, and the crowds well behaved. My first husband, Everett, promoted the parade in the days when it wasn’t yet as well known up the Island as it is today, and he made sure the kids had a good spot for viewing.

    After his death in 1980, the Friends of Erin, knowing how much he liked the parade, planted a few shadbush trees on Montauk’s Main Street in his memory. In the ’80s, having become editor of The Star myself, I started being invited to take a place on the reviewing stand. It was the only formal occasion at which I rubbed non-official shoulders publically with local politicos, and I loved every minute of it.

    Our editor’s creed was and is to stay on the sidelines where organizations are concerned, so that we could be objective in our reporting. At the parade, though, we were a part of it all.

    I would be up there waving away with some of Montauk’s old-timers: Mary Gosman for one, Frank Borth for another. By that time, Eddie V. Ecker Sr., a former East Hampton Town supervisor, had become the master of ceremonies. He was tenured in the position for years, and was a jolly and welcoming M.C. He seemed to know exactly what and who everything and everyone was — either in the parade or just passing by in the crowd. I would recognize his voice and his laugh today if he were still alive.

    In those days, after the parade was over, I would join friends or Star reporters and head to a couple of the Montauk bars where the various bagpipe bands always make the rounds. How could that not be fun? These bars, like the Montauket, were outside my usual social routes. If there was a lot of drinking going on, it didn’t bother any of us. Droves of young people had started to come out on the train to make merry at, during, and after the parade, but it never seemed to get out of hand.

    The crowds have gotten larger and unrulier in recent years, as we all know, and so the Friends of Erin will, for the first time, start the parade this Sunday at more family-friendly 10 a.m., instead of the traditional 12:30 p.m. The idea is to thwart the marauding. Godspeed to the Friends of Erin!

    The next generation heads our family contingent at the parade now. My son David really got in the spirit a few years ago, creating a terrific East Hampton Star float featuring lobsters on roller skates and in a giant boiling pot. With a little help, he made fantastic lobster costumes, both adult and child-size. They weren’t green, but they sure were Montauk. Some of the fake claws and the red lobster heads are still knocking around. Occasionally, one of the grandkids will pop out of a doorway with red antennas bobbing.

    Why, exactly, is the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Montauk always so much fun? Why are my memories of it so happy — fine weather and hearty laughs? I certainly can’t pretend to be Irish. It may be that when I was a student at Bayonne High School, in New Jersey, a singular and exciting St. Patrick’s experience imprinted itself in me. I was one of the twirlers, and we were invited to be in the Manhattan parade. That year, I had been made a drum majorette and positioned out front. (I was promoted because I was shorter than everyone else, I’m afraid, not because I was particularly skilled with a baton.) I remember that we were really cold that March day, in our short skirts and bare legs, but that it didn’t matter. We had a ball as we marched down Fifth Avenue.   

   One of my first assignments for The East Hampton Star was to collect recipes from Montauk locals for a St. Patrick’s Day supplement. I, being the very eager little cub reporter, approached every Irish person I knew for recipes and turned in about 20 of them. The Star used one.

    It was for colcannon, basically a mash-up of potatoes and cabbage, given to me by Peggy Joyce, the longtime kindergarten teacher at the Montauk School, who taught me more about nature on my children’s field trips than I learned from all my years of schooling in the Bronx.

    It’s been just recently that I started liking potatoes and bread, and I have the extra weight to prove it. Growing up, we were often forced to eat lima beans, and sometimes when my father was in a mood, which meant he had partaken in a wee too much Irish merrymaking, we weren’t allowed to leave the table until we did. I often gagged on the slimy beans and tried to slip them to the dog, but even she, a big fat Labrador that ate anything, wouldn’t eat them. My children have probably never even tried lima beans, as they weren’t served in my house.

    My husband has always loved potatoes. He’s a Montauk native who grew up in a house where the chickens that were served for dinner were also the pets that romped around the large lakefront yard. One of his chores was to hold the chicken’s head while it was killed, and he never could bring himself to eat it, so he filled up on potatoes. I love chicken and serve it often, but I try not to meet it first. It’s been just recently that he started to enjoy it, which I attribute to the loads of garlic, parsley, and sea salt that I sprinkle on it before I pop it in the oven.

    There were also rabbits and pigeons served at his dinner table, and instead of eating the small animals, he filled up on the sliced white bread that was a side dish. As a child, one of his favorite meals was a mayonnaise sandwich, and to this day he even puts mayonnaise on his hot dogs. I can’t imagine anything tasting worse, except a garnish of lima beans.

    In my home, my father was king and certain foods were set aside just for him. There were icy cold cans of Coke in the fridge and pistachio nuts in the cupboard that we could only look at with longing. As I write this, my fridge is full of Coca-Cola and two bags of pistachios sit on my nightstand. Why is it you always want what you can’t have? While my teenage friends were hoarding cigarettes, I was hoarding cans of Coke and tiny packages of nuts that I had bought with my lunch money. Maybe if my mother had refused us lima beans I would be salivating for a taste of them, but I doubt it.

    This weekend the Friends of Erin will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Montauk. There will be plenty of green — green beer, green condiments, green potatoes, green faces, and loads of corned beef and colcannon. It’s a fallacy, though, that the Irish brought corned beef and cabbage to America.

    When the Irish migrated here, most without much money, they found they could buy the cheapest cut of meat, brine, it and boil it to death. After they threw in a handful of spices, cheap potatoes, and a chunk of cabbage, they learned it didn’t taste too bad. This, of course, was way before the invention of ramen noodles. It makes me wonder what they could do with lima beans that would get me to gobble them up.

    On Monday, as I was visiting my mother in St. Francis Hospital, an Irish nurse with a brogue told the group of us that there were two types of nationalities — Irish and people who wish they were Irish. I have a wee bit of Irish blood running through my veins, but this weekend I really wish I were a full-blooded Irishwoman.

   About this time 25 years ago, in a fit of pique prompted by what I thought was an untimely weekend invasion of city folk seeking summer rentals, I wrote a column whose envoi, “go home scumbags,” sparked a six-week firestorm of reproval, each letter writer apparently thinking I’d been referring to him, when, in fact, I had been more enamored of the delightful rhythm of the phrase than put out by anyone in particular.

    And, as my wife has reminded me many times since, the point of the column was that, in the end, I, the so-called nativist, advocated ear­nestly in behalf of a weekend visitor who’d arrived too late to be served dinner at a restaurant whose owner I knew, and had begged leave to serve as his and his wife’s guide to the area’s chief points of interest.

    But the enraged, I think, didn’t read that far, put off, I suppose, by a fanciful vow to take up arms against the invading horde. As if I could do anything about it. Subdivide it and they will come.

    And now, dear reader, an intimate revelation: I’m a scumbag! A wretch and no less an arriviste than anyone else whose surname’s not Miller, Bennett, Osborne, Osborn, Lester, or Talmage.

    Scumbag, scumbag, scumbag. There, I’ve said it. It’s just a word, though shitballs remains my favorite.

    I should, I suppose, have fully owned up to my scumbagginess in the neiges d’autant 25 years ago. That was my error, what I think led to all the furor.

    But on this unutterably blithe springlike day at the end of winter, on this gentle day in which Henry and I have drifted like clouds, I feel at peace and at one with all who live or visit here. I never really meant to give offense.

   Traveling with children, as my wife and I did last week, is, for those of you who have not experienced it, anything but relaxing. A man in the San Juan Airport departure terminal Tuesday, noticing Lisa chasing after our 2-year-old, Ellis, remarked out of the blue that she looked tired. I am sure I am looking tired, too, as I write this on a Delta flight back to J.F.K. After we land, we have at least two more hours on the road.

    The trip to Puerto Rico was our first time on a jet plane since we became a family of five. We had waited until Ellis was past the infant stage to pack up and go. Even then, we almost chickened out.

    Beyond the obvious logistics of counting enough diapers into the carry-ons and cramming everything else into rolling suitcases, getting away with the kids is an exercise in diplomacy. I’m not talking about peacemaking with fellow travelers back here in the cheap seats, but brokering the young ones’ differing desires and internal clocks.

    Ellis, being a boy, has two speeds: off and supersonic. The girls, now 7 and 10, are harder to read. A sunburn or a hungry belly can change the tone of a day in a flash from happy to melancholy. One girl may want to go the the beach, the other the pool. Evvy decides she misses her school friends. Her sister doesn’t want to go home.

    Lisa and I spent most of our week away in management mode, ironing out the conflicting moods, packing the Jeep for a ride to the surf, shuttling to another spot for a lunch of chicken pinchos, a kind of kebob.

    The division of labor broke down roughly like this: I took the girls snorkeling while Lisa watched Ellis on the beach. Then we switched; Lisa could take a dip and I’d chase the wild toddler around on the sand. Back at our week’s rental, I’d make dinner; Lisa would get Ellis washed up and into pajamas. The next day, we repeated it all.

    The hours flew past in a blur. In all, Lisa and I had no more than a few minutes when all three kids were occupied and we could hold hands and catch a breath. Not that I am complaining. Being a parent is what it is.

   The  campaigns of those who hope to become the Republican presidential nominee keep reminding me of the Democratic primary in 2008, when I almost lost a friend or two. I had expressed a personal preference for Hillary Clinton as the nominee, and gone to an event in her honor. I admired Ms. Clinton, thought she was brilliant, and found the idea of a woman as president exciting . . . but I had a change of heart and let it be known.

    There was a single compelling reason: I was sure from what she said and from her background as first lady that Ms. Clinton was, to put it bluntly, a hawk; I wanted a president who disapproved of the war in Iraq and was able to articulate diplomatic approaches to the world’s conflicts. Little did I know how things would change.

    Like the Norwegian committee that awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, I was naive. That he chose Ms. Clinton as secretary of state was politically expedient, to be sure, but  it also drew them together as decision-makers. The new president appointed the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to be secretary of defense. He increased the numbers of our troops in Afghanistan, and then he escalated the use of drones on killing missions. A peace president? Hardly.

    After Sept. 11, it was said drones would help us destroy Al Qaeda and stop imminent attack, if necessary. Since then, some 60 deaths have been caused by drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan — where Al Qaeda were said to have set up shop — with others reported just this week. The drones have been sent over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia, been used in Libya and Syria, and in the Mexican drug war. The Obama administration not only shrouds how targets are determined and strikes approved but it refuses to make public its argument for how drones are justified under international law.

    The hope had been (in my case, it was expectation) that President Obama would reverse what many of us believed were violations of the Constitution under the Bush war on terror. He may have stopped the practice of torture, which the former administration endorsed, but he has approved a law that seems to violate the Constitution in another way: He signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows anyone, even an American citizen, whom the government considers to be “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force‚” to be held in military custody indefinitely “without trial until the end of the hostilities. . . .”

    Perhaps Mr. Obama was naive, too. Maybe he didn’t foresee how being president would affect his views on war and peace; maybe he had no idea he would find it no longer possible to be (or  pretend to be) a dove. It’s true that he has made some dovelike gestures recently, cautioning against fanning the flames of war with Iran and, this week, reportedly reconsidering our military mission in Afghanistan. But would Ms. Clinton in the Oval Office have been any more hawkish? I doubt it.

   Yesterday marked the 14th birthday of our Jack Russell, Petie.

    Fourteen is pretty old for a Jack, and Petie is showing his age. Those formerly fiercely brilliant brain cells, which once allowed him the wherewithal to actually climb a chicken-wire fence to obtain the delicious decomposing deer leg on the other side (but not, unfortunately, to climb back and therefore Not Get Caught), have been all but extinguished.

    His eyes are empty. When you look into them, you can almost hear the static. He is also deaf. And his stiff movements confirm joint pain that baby aspirin and a soft dog bed cannot seem to assuage.

    Petie was one of a litter of six puppies we bred out of Jane Russell, our beautiful bitch, and Jackson, a Sag Harbor gadabout who was once profiled in Dan’s Papers as a village favorite.

    Petie was the last puppy out. Like Lucky in “101 Dalmatians,” I needed to assist with the birth; Jane was tired and done pushing. The little bag over his head had to be pinched with fingernails, but still there was no breath, no body movement. Only vigorous rubbing — which I learned from repeated viewings of that Disney movie — finally brought a little yawn to that tiny mouth and a brief mewing noise that let us know he was going to stick around for a while.

    We named him Petie for the brown circle around one eye, like the dog in “The Little Rascals,” a circle that has gone gray with age in the last few years. We needed to put down his mother four years ago, and it seems like that was when Petie grew up, and then very quickly, grew old.

    There are some things about Petie that haven’t changed.

    He will eat anything that falls on the ground. This includes all manner of food, except blueberries, which confound him for some reason. It also includes money, earrings, small bits of paper, and recently-swatted flies.

    He continues to hate the black Pug, snarling whenever Tobias G. Willikers gets within Petie’s personal bubble. They have been companions for over four years — and, in fact, share yesterday as a birthday (but the Pug isn’t very interesting to write about since he was obviously bred for beauty and not brains. In fact, it may be difficult to tell when he enters his own stage of doggie dementia).

    Petie still shows extreme patience when my children color him. Yes, the white dog gets markered up on appropriate holidays — black and orange for Halloween, red, white, and blue for Independence Day, and no doubt a deep Kelly green this weekend.

    Petie has always had the shakes. A lot of Jack Russells do. My husband, the beautiful Eric Johnson, calls it “Barkinson’s disease.” Lately, the shaking is almost constant. And he can’t quite make it through a night now without scratching at our bedroom door to go out. At least he still remembers to do that . . . most of the time.

    After those 4 a.m. moonlight rambles, when he sometimes can’t find his way back to the porch unless I flick the light on and off, I let him in and lift him gently up onto our bed, mindful of his arthritis. Being on the bed has been a no-no since he was little. But I want him to be comfortable. He has trouble breathing sometimes, and I stroke his head, mumbling, “Good dog, good dog,” under my breath.

    And I think of all the times in the past 14 years that he has been there for me, without complaint: acting as a sentry for my babies as they slept, always available for cuddles during scary movies and gratefully sharing popcorn, alerting me without fail to the appearance of mailmen and friends, keeping my kitchen floor spotless and my yard squirrel-free.

    And I look into those empty eyes, and whisper loving words to him that he can no longer hear. He gazes at something just beyond my shoulder, smiles, and weakly thumps his tail.

    I hope he sees his mother, Jane, standing next to a ripe and tasty deer leg, with no more fences to climb and no more black pugs to annoy.

    And, for his sake, I secretly hope he’ll get there soon.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.