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.

   I was trying to persuade Mary to look at the big picture during a recent late-afternoon ritual at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central, but she, whose compassion can be worrisome, demurred.

    “Of course it’s not so hard for me,” I said, “because I don’t care as much as you do.”

    “I wish I could be like that,” she said.

    “Don’t be fooled by my equanimity, though — it’s simply self-absorption. That and the fact that I’m a bear of little brain.”

    We were at the end of our Big Day, a day in the city during which we had spent four hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mostly with the Steins of 27 rue de Fleurus, and were, in the Campbell Apartment’s large dark-paneled room, inclined to be reflective, if not elegiac, and relieved to be off our feet.

    A half-hour later, on our way on from Grand Central to our Jitney stop at the side of the New York Public Library, I said that the teatime glass of wine had been restorative.

    “I’m no longer twittering with the swallows in the skies — I feel like trilling again. You know, like the nightingale.”

    “Better that you trill than twitter — it sounds happier.”

    Her derailed sleep cycle had impelled me a few days before to buy for her a bag of valerian root at Mitad del Mundo, an Ecuadorean store on North Main Street.

    She was immediately repelled by the smell. Cooking it up that night as she slept, our augmented Cape was transformed into an odoriferous hut high in the Andes.

    I added a good bit of chamomile and honey, as our daughter Georgie had instructed, to make the valerian root more palatable, and left beside the cup a note saying, “Drink Me . . . If You Can.”

    I didn’t think the valerian was that overpowering, but of course I thrill, nay trill, to runny Camembert.

    The next morning I learned that a sip of the tea — she was touched by my concern — along with the warm milk she usually takes had been effective. But, boy, did it stink up the house. And what dreams she had had!

    “And all for only $3.50!” I chimed in, full-throatedly. “But perhaps I ought to get the gel caps.”

   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.

   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.

   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.

   In the weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which I wrote about on Feb. 9, East Hampton Town was considerably better represented than in 2011. My own participation was less than I had hoped, however, as I was laid low with a stomach virus that is going around — the less said about that the better.

    The count draws on the contributions of thousands of birders across North America, who are asked to spend a minimum of 15 minutes over the course of three days, usually during Presidents Day weekend, jotting down what they see and submitting results online. Taken together, the data provide a snapshot of the distribution and variety of birds, as well as of the birders. This year, 10.6 million birds were identified, though participants have until March 5 to submit reports. More than 75,000 checklists have been logged so far.

    I had hoped to birdwatch each day, with one session on the Montauk bluffs counting scoters. This was not to be; Saturday morning, after breakfast and some chores, I was taken ill and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.

    But at least I beat my 2011 total, returning to Lazy Point on Friday afternoon, where I tallied black ducks, mergansers, golden eyes, and herring gulls — 249 in all. Coincidentally, in each of the three years I have taken part, I have identified the same number of species: eight.

    Perhaps because of the mild weather for the count, reports from within the Town of East Hampton exceeded those of 2011. There was but one filed from Montauk last year; so far in 2012 there have been 13. There were 15 from the East Hampton ZIP code, mine alone from Amagansett, and none from Wainscott. The town’s top bird this year was the Canada goose, which numbered 994.

     Montauk’s 62 species put it in the In the weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which I wrote about on Feb. 9, East Hampton Town was considerably better represented than in 2011. My own participation was less than I had hoped, however, as I was laid low with a stomach virus that is going around — the less said about that the better.

    The count draws on the contributions of thousands of birders across North America, who are asked to spend a minimum of 15 minutes over the course of three days, usually during Presidents Day weekend, jotting down what they see and submitting results online. Taken together, the data provide a snapshot of the distribution and variety of birds, as well as of the birders. This year, 10.6 million birds were identified, though participants have until March 5 to submit reports. More than 75,000 checklists have been logged so far.

    I had hoped to birdwatch each day, with one session on the Montauk bluffs counting scoters. This was not to be; Saturday morning, after breakfast and some chores, I was taken ill and went back to bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend.

    But at least I beat my 2011 total, returning to Lazy Point on Friday afternoon, where I tallied black ducks, mergansers, golden eyes, and herring gulls — 249 in all. Coincidentally, in each of the three years I have taken part, I have identified the same number of species: eight.

    Perhaps because of the mild weather for the count, reports from within the Town of East Hampton exceeded those of 2011. There was but one filed from Montauk last year; so far in 2012 there have been 13. There were 15 from the East Hampton ZIP code, mine alone from Amagansett, and none from Wainscott. The town’s top bird this year was the Canada goose, which numbered 994.

     Montauk’s 62 species put it in the state’s top four areas, behind Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ithaca. Fifty-four species were counted in East Hampton, which came in at number seven. The numbers can be found online at gbbc. birdsource.org, where you can discover nuggets like the astonishing 80 crows listed on Sagaponack’s lone 2012 entry, which contained only this species. Southampton (ah, Southampton) contributed a mere 11 species in three reports.

    For the third year in a row, New York took top state honors, with 4,471 checklists so far, and it ranked fifth in total number of birds.

   “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn,” was a six-word short story composed by Ernest Hemingway to win a bet. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when placing a classified ad to sell two bass guitars and an amplifier.

    Since my husband, Phil, died of cancer almost five years ago, I had been confronted with the instruments during my weekly laundry chores. After a death, there is an immediate culling and distribution of the possessions of the deceased, but often a holding back of things that have more complicated emotional ties.

    Someone much wiser than I told me that I was finally ready for the next level of clearing out. It had been a long time since I had seen those instruments as anything other than a rebuke to my “to do” list intentions. In the new year, something about their presence began to haunt me, and it became important that I give them a new life.

    It wasn’t until I had taken them out of their cases to photograph them that it dawned on me that one of the basses was around Phil’s neck the first time I laid eyes on him. He was playing with a not terribly good band of law school buddies, who decided they needed something more to sustain them than simply their outsize lawyerly salaries. I went to their first performance, across from the old CBGB as they were proud to tell you, with my best friend, Priscilla, whose brother played with the band and had gone to law school with Phil. She wanted me to meet Phil, because she had already predicted that he and I would fall in love.

    I remember him clearly that night. He was tall and stoic, but a little wild looking, a true bassist. His friend and band-mate Harold recalled at the memorial service that Phil had forgotten much of what he was supposed to be playing from stage fright, but he looked so cool up there that it hardly mattered. His T-shirt was royal blue and had one of those plastic adapters for 45 r.p.m. singles printed in yellow on it. It impressed me as an incredibly cool statement of protest for the loss, recent at that time, of vinyl LPs.

    Still, we didn’t speak much aside from introductions, and he wasn’t my physical type. I tend toward the more Anglo-European and he looked a bit like John Malkovich. Phil didn’t end up staying in law or in the band for much longer. It would be some time before I would see him again and even longer before we would exchange more than a couple of words. At a party several months later, he was so sarcastic when I made pleasantries that I resolved never to speak to him again.

    One cold night in January, that would change. He and his friends were celebrating both Elvis Presley’s birthday and the engagement of two of their friends. Priscilla and I met the group at an Irish bar in the East 20s. This time, we would bond over music, film, our childhoods in New Jersey, inside jokes that only few people would understand. He asked for my number. On the following Tuesday, the official night for men to call women, he rang on schedule and we made plans to meet that Friday.

    I had another first date that week, with a writer who played goalie on a hockey team with Tim Robbins, which is all I really remember about him. He was very nice and took me to a lovely dinner, but it wasn’t meant to be.

    After six hours of nonstop conversation and laughter with Phil, we were inseparable and remained so up to the moment of his last breath. I will miss him until my last breath, but I’ve had enough time to realize that his possessions will never be stand-ins for him and have no more talismanic power than my memories. Although he had the guitars at our house for several years, I don’t remember him playing them again.

    About a week ago, I ended up selling the three pieces to Crossroads Music through the kindhearted assistance of Zach Zunis, a Star sales rep, superior blues guitarist, and all-around awesome person. I hope they gain a few more remarkable memories during their useful existence.

    I have tried to devise a six-word summary to capture what meaning or allusions these objects might have in the larger picture I have of Phil’s life, but haven’t been too successful. The best I have so far: Once played well, then never again.

    Jennifer Landes is The Star’s arts editor.

   There were flowers, balloons, hugs, and a wind-up jumping plastic frog Friday at Bucket’s. Friday was the day when Everett Griffiths’s 33 years of running the place came to an end and the still youthful-looking deli man and his wife, Angela, got ready to take life a little easier.

    At lunchtime friends hung around the door to Everett’s tiny kitchen waiting to wish him and Angela well. It was from here that he had served up thousands of egg sandwiches, made the salads, and provided a willing ear to those who had something to say.

    The jumping frog, according to the regular customer who brought it in, was intended to remind Everett that he was no longer going to be doing the back flips for others, that it was going to be someone else’s job to wait on him for a change. Hearing this, Everett and Angela erupted with laughter and wiped the mingled tears of sadness and amusement from the corners of their eyes.

    I had gone in to get one last sandwich and offer my thanks to the Griffithses and their staff. It is impossible to get close to an estimate of how many lunches I got there over the years, but considering that I went several times a week while in high school, missed about a decade due to college, work in New York City, and other things, but got back on track in 1998, it is safe to say the total is in the thousands. In the last decade alone, as I calculated today, I probably had 1,400 Bucket’s sandwiches, which, with a bottle of seltzer and perhaps some pretzels, cost me about $10,000 in all.

    Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, extolled Bucket’s in a poem we printed in these pages last week. Mr. Schultz wrote, “When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign / on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself — / he already knows things change and sometimes disappear.”    In a place like East Hampton, change is not all that often for the good, which is one reason Bucket’s ending is so bittersweet. There are fewer family-run businesses here every year. Losing one, especially this one, reminds us of what helped define our sense of place.

    I’ll miss the food, I’ll miss the laughter, and I’ll miss Everett, Angela, and all of those who made me my lunch over all the years.

From time to time, when someone asks why, given my age, I haven’t retired, I explain that I really enjoy editing what others write. The truth, though, is that the pleasure waxes and wanes. If a story is good enough to require very little editing, my work is easy but not much fun. If a narrative is jammed full of extraneous words and ideas — or if the most compelling information is left for the bitter end  — editing can be tough. On those rare occasions, however, when a writer and I work together to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the job I do is very gratifying. (One of those occasions occurred last week, but I’m not going to tell you which story it was.) 

A nice result of having been an editor for a long time is that I’ve learned a lot about language from experience and others. Staff members have offered helpful tips. One, for example, is how to know when to spell stationery with an “e” rather than an “a.” All you need to remember is that envelopes are stationery.

Not long ago, one of our writers sent along a clipping about the difference between “bring” and “take.” Not everyone goes around mulling over such things, but the editorial “we” enjoys doing so. “Bring” denotes motion toward something while take refers to motion away from something.

Someone also set me straight on the difference between further and farther by simply pointing out that East Hampton’s Further Lane was incorrect. Farther is correctly used for physical distance; further for occurrences or thought.

Language is always in flux, of course, which makes writing and editing a challenge whether or not the task at hand is fun. Everyday speech will sometimes just take over the grammar books. At The Star we hold to many of the recommendations in Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Some may think this old hat, although the fourth edition of the book was published as recently as 2000. Like The New York Times, The Star follows Strunk and White in forming the possessive singular of a noun by adding an apostrophe and an S. The Times ignores at least one other rule, about the serial comma (a.k.a., the Oxford comma), that we adhere to.

I am not sure whatever happened to parallel tenses, i.e., using “has” when it should be “had.” Jack Graves, our sports editor for lo, these many years, used to try his best to get everyone here to use parallel tenses, but I’m afraid he gave up. And don’t get Irene Silverman, another longtime Star editor, started on the importance of using active rather than passive voice.

Then there are some recent changes in usage that befuddle us; when matters are in transition, rather than settled one way or the other, all bets are off. For example, younger writers often drop the word “the” where I think it is necessary. The subject of a story this week “was on unpaid leave of absence from her job at Springs School.” I would have stuck in “the” before the school’s name. Quicker and snappier is perennially the trend.

Paul Friese, our advertising production manager, whose linguistic skills cannot be faulted, recently sent me a poetic treatise on disparate English spelling and pronunciation, but that is a topic for another day. Meanwhile, you might enjoy looking up “The Chaos” by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenite. Be forewarned: It runs to more than 3,000 words. 

I do not know if you can ever understand loss, no matter how many times you experience it. In most things in life, repeated experience is a teacher, but each time you experience true loss, the circumstances are always unique, so the lessons are limited in use.  

    The second time in my life I experienced loss was in 1963 when I was 7 years old.

    There was a little patch of dirt on the side of our house on Lexington Avenue in West Hempstead. Every day that summer, I took my dump truck and my cement mixer and my bulldozer and I built a road in that patch of dirt. My roads may have led to nowhere, but they took me on a daily journey.

    I would speak for the imaginary men involved, who always seemed to be named Joe or Mack.

    “Hey Joe, better dig that hole right there,” Mack would shout.

    “All right, Mack.” And the hole would be dug, only to be filled in and redughe next day.

    And every day our neighbor, Mr. Laurel, would stop by and lean over the white picket fence that separated my construction site from his driveway and ask me what I was doing. I would explain to him the various ongoing projects, and he would smile and nod his head as if what I was saying to him was real and meaningful. I enjoyed talking to him because he actually listened to me.

    Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had moved in that spring. They were an older couple. Mr. Laurel was the first adult I had met whom I considered a friend.

    One day I was digging, with Mack barking orders to the ever-compliant Joe, when an ambulance pulled up in front of the Laurels’ house. Two men got out of the vehicle with a stretcher and went inside.

    A few minutes later they came out, carrying Mr. Laurel. They put him in the back of the ambulance and drove away.

    I never saw him again.

    My parents tried to explain death to me, but it was a concept strange, foreign. I remember that Mrs. Laurel came over one afternoon to sit with me.

    I had experienced loss the first time more than a year earlier. It was not a person or a thing I lost, it was a place.

    My father was, and still is, a writer, a newspaperman who also wrote short stories and, recently, a book. Before him, his father was a newspaperman and a writer, a very successful short story writer, selling over 100 stories to The Saturday Evening Post. His name was regularly featured on the Post cover with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Booth Tarkington, Agatha Christie, and Ring Lardner. His success gave him something most writers don’t have: money. The McMorrows weren’t rich, but they certainly were affluent.

    He took some of that money in the early 1920s and bought the family a beach house in the newly formed village of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. The house sat on a dune at the end of Bungalow Walk, facing the ocean.

    My earliest memories are like glittering grains of sand, splashed across the floor. The ride to Bay Shore. Daddy parks the car. We get on a ferry, cross the bay, get off on the dock. We have a wagon, our wagon. If there wasn’t too much on the wagon I’d pull it, or even ride in it. Ice cream cone at John and Anne’s, head down Bungalow Walk, cross Midway. Midway was magic. We were almost there, the ocean, the house. Sleep at night, the sound of the waves, sometimes crashing, sometimes gentle, the lullaby of the waves.

    Breakfast in the morning, out onto the beach. All day on the beach. Me and my two sisters and mom and Tante Frieda and Mum-Mum, Dad there on the weekend, all women during the week unless my cousins were there, in which case there were three other boys to play and race and wrestle and fight with. Splash in the ocean, dig holes in the sand, run along the beach. Before dinner, we’d go back up to the house. Play around the house, but stay off the dune, never play on the dune. The dune was sacred.

    If it was just me and my sisters, maybe we’d take turns riding the wagon downhill on the Bungalow path from the beach across Ocean View. Or else they would do girl things and I’d get out my trucks and dig away.

    If our cousins were there, I’d play with Bunky. His name was Tommy but to me he was Bunky. We weren’t supposed to go under the house but one time we did, opening up the storage area, pulling out old toys our own fathers had played with.

    Dinner was fish, almost always fish. One time a bone got stuck in my throat. It hurt. The adults were concerned. There was a doctor nearby. We went there and he reached in and pulled the bone out. To this day I love fish but am phobic about the bones.

    At night, the adults smoking, laughing, drinking. Mum-Mum always had a little whiskey and ice in her glass, the sound the ice cubes made in her glass, a light clinking-clink.

    Then to bed, to sleep, to rejoin the ocean’s serenade.

    In my memory, those were the summers of my early childhood. In reality, they were the May and June and September, even October. The house was always rented during the season to pay the bills.

    March 9, 1962. The house in West Hempstead. Somber. Dark outside and dark in. My father, distraught.

    He was holding pictures of the beach house, where he’d grown up and then started to raise his own family, large photographs that a newsman had taken of the wreckage. Piles of wood were all that was left. Smashed by the ocean. Holding the photos in his hands, slowly tearing them up, one by one.

    A storm had hit, a powerful northeaster. It began on March 6, the same day as the new moon, the highest tide of the month. It battered the East Coast for three days, for five high tides.

    The Army Corps of Engineers had built a huge revetment to protect the houses on the dune on Ocean Beach. Over the course of five high tides, the ocean had breached the dune behind the revetment, forming a powerful pulsing wave of water running behind the dune, a stream that sucked in the homes that sat there, one by one.

    In the end, only three houses remained on the dune after the storm. Ours was not one of them. The land that the destroyed houses had stood on was condemned by the state, never to be built on again. 

    We went to Ocean Beach once that summer. It was strange, sitting on the beach in front of where our house had been — that beautiful two-storied shingled beach house, now just an empty dune, glistening sand — returning that night to West Hempstead.

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