Shellfish fans in the Town of East Hampton got a reminder this week of just how lucky we are — for now. The State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered a huge swath of Shinnecock Bay closed on Tuesday until further notice after the detection of a powerful biotoxin there.

    According to a press release, the D.E.C. found saxitoxin in mollusk samples from Weesuck and Penniman Creek in Southampton at levels that could lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning. The ban covers 3,900 acres. Some 90 acres in Mattituck Creek were closed after the biotoxin was detected on April 3.

    Saxitoxin is dangerous, and can cause death in untreated and extreme cases. It gets into filter-feeding shellfish during some algae blooms. And when certain predatory fish, crabs, and snails feed on contaminated clams, mussels, or oysters, they accumulate it, too, and it can climb the marine food chain. In 1985, 14 humpback whales that died during a five-week period off Cape Cod were found to have symptoms associated with saxitoxin.

    Algae blooms of the sort that carry saxitoxin and other harmful single-cell organisms may or may not always be linked to excess nutrients in road and septic waste runoff into surface waters. It appears to researchers that weather changes that lead to temperature and/or salinity spikes could play a role.

    Shinnecock Bay is no great distance from East Hampton’s surface waters. While residential and commercial development there exceeds that development here, conditions are similar in some places, so we cannot assume we are not also in danger of harmful blooms. Saxitoxin can be detected only in a lab, and the D.E.C., which has suffered deep budget cuts, is really the only line of defense.

    Semi-stagnation, for example, othe sort that could occur if Napeague Harbor’s east inlet remains closed this spring, could be a risk as well. Lake Montauk, which is under tremendous environmental stress and has low rates of tidal exchange at its southern reaches, might be another place the toxin could emerge, particularly as the climate warms. This is something that regulators need to take very seriously.

   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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “I’ve heard that before,” I said.

    “I’ll prove it to you,” she said.

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

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

   It’s winter. The summer people are gone. But I still go around town expecting to recognize faces in the crowd. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way anymore.

    Let me give you an example.

    Figuratively speaking, Guild Hall’s simulcasts of classical music — world-class operas and symphony-orchestra performances beamed into the John Drew Theater, live in HD — are right up my alley. But they are also, quite literally, right up my alley: The hall is a very short stroll down my lane, which runs next to the Star office, and across Main Street. I love classical music, and it would make sense for me to know quite a few people in attendance at these programs, but I recognize very few.

    It’s always more than a bit dismaying when you realize — as we constantly keep doing, around here — that the familiar community you knew and loved is gone, has slipped into the past.

    Still, Guild Hall should be congratulated for drawing new audiences.

    Like other South Fork institutions, the Parrish Art Museum and Southampton Cultural Center, for example, it is broadening its reach. (Guild Hall’s HD series has been so popular that the programmers even considered — but eventually decided against — showing the four operas in Wagner’s Ring when they are performed one after another at the Met in the spring.) I should add that, as might be expected, the new audiences for these classical-music events don’t include many young people; I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that attendees under the age of 50 are few and far between.

    Many of you reading this — who remember the small-town mood that lingered even into the 1990s — have certainly experienced something similar: There you are at Rowdy Hall, say, or on line at the Sag Harbor Cinema, craning your neck to say hello to old acquaintances, but . . . they’re just not there.

    When I was The Star’s editor, I was often called by city journalists to comment on trends or anything intriguing in the local news. Once upon a time, Bonackers were able to divide the world into two categories — “from aways” and locals — but I remember sharing with some magazine reporter or other the familiar bit of humor that there were three categories of residents here: year-round people, summer people, and year-round summer people. Back then, I thought I knew or could make educated guesses about how most everyone fit into these categories (as did we all). But in the new East Hampton, it would take an in-depth demographic study to identify who’s who.

    The next time anyone from away asks me what my town is like, I am going to beg off (unless they are interested in hearing about the geography, the flora, or the fauna, which, I’m happy to say, haven’t changed all that much).

    The idea that the John Drew would attract a big audience for an opera on a snowy afternoon in midwinter would have been incredible even just a few years ago. This change is really to my benefit, if I can only come to think of it that way. Perhaps I’ll meet a few friendly opera lovers at intermission.

   Tonight we’re going to see Alec Bawdlin try to lin the mayoralty of New York City on “30 Rock,” and after that we’ll dial in one of Mary’s c-lin-ical shows, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

    This, of course, after The PBS News Hour has delineated for us ma-lin-gerers the appalling failings of the de-lin-quent.

    You could have knocked me over with a shuttlecock when the night before at the badlinton Lynn Baldwin asked me who Jeremy Lin was. “He’s only the linchpin of the New York Knicks, the lingua franca of the world, in fact,” I said, blinking.

    “I’ve heard of him, I just didn’t know his first name,” she said consolingly. “A gremlin made me do it.”

    “That was like asking Larry Penny who Linnaeus was,” I continued.

    But, of course, it wasn’t quite the same. After all, a week before Lin had been l’inconnu. Now, words like linseed, alkalinity, all-inclusive, and lingo linger in my brain as I try to go to sleep each night after the Knicks play, following yet another lin-vigorating display.

    When my eldest daughter called yesterday to say my 5-year-old grandson was playing point guard on his team, and seemed to be liking it, I said, “You’ve got to get him to a doctor to have his peripheral vision checked out! We must know how well he sees the court.”

    “Dad, I just want him to have fun. . . .”

    “And dribble. He’s got to dribble, dribble, dribble. Crossovers, behind the back, through the legs . . . all of that.”

    “But I can’t let him dribble in the house.”

    “Why not?”

    “Because somebody lives downstairs.”

    “Oh, yes . . . Is he there all the time? I know! He could dribble in your room in the attic.”

    “On that thick carpeting?”

    “. . . You’ll have to rip some of it up. Nothing must stand in the way of this boy’s career. How’s his first step?”

    “His first step? He took that when he was a year old.”

    “No, no, I’m talking about the first step he takes when he blows by the defender on his way to the rim.”

    “No wonder no one played sports in our family, Dad. I just want him to have fun, to enjoy the game.”

    “He’s got to develop that explosiveness, and also a quick release on the perimeter. . . . What shall I offer him as an incentive, a lin-centive. . . ? Tell him I’m sending him a Jeremy Lin shirt. How about a visit to Harvard, a consult with a sports psychologist?”

    “A visit to a shrink might do you good, actually, Dad. He’s 5 years old.”

    “Now don’t be lin-solent, Emily. I’m chillin’. I’m chillin’. It’s just that I’ve got lin-somnia. I’ve been taken, as they say, to lin-finity and beyond.”

   Three big does are concentrating on tufts of early grass at the left side of the front yard this evening. They, or their sisters and brothers, have already dined on the snowdrops in the backyard, although they haven’t eaten up the small daffodils that are just budding, at least not yet.

    Sitting at my computer at the front of the house, I can see what they are up to. I spy on them as they come and go, mingling among what remains of the many-decades-old rosebushes they decimated last summer.

    These three does are probably the same ones that watched me drive away from the house early this morning. They’re a wily bunch. A few nights ago I spied 6, hiking diagonally across the yard, and, about 10 days ago, I counted 12 marching through, moving quickly.

    I wonder where all these animals go when they aren’t in my yard. The adjacent properties are protected by deer fences; are the deer slinking across Main Street to some secret deer reconnaissance site?

    As I sit looking out the window I am eating an early supper of asparagus and a vegetable chili made with . . . venison. How do you like that, deer?

    (The recipe, on an old yellowed clipping, comes from The Star’s “Long Island Larder” column, which was written for many years by Miriam Ungerer. Miriam, who lives in Massachusetts now, told me the other day that someone was interested in publishing another book of her recipes, using that title. Miriam has four cookbooks to her name and it’s time she added a new one. I hope it happens.)

    It must be obvious that I am not squeamish about venison, or wild fowl, or any wild edibles, for that matter, having been treated to these local foods from the earliest days of my marriage to Ev Rattray. He was brought up here and had hunted most of his life. One day, though, after our first child was born and John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he decided to put away his shotgun. “There has been enough killing in the world,” he said.

    That didn’t keep us from enjoying others’ quarry. We rationalized it, telling ourselves that it would be worse to waste something that had already been shot. For about 10 years, we were the recipients once a year of a deer that had been hunted on Gardiner’s Island. It would hang in the barn for a time before being taken to a butcher. We liked to make venison stews, and most of the recipes are still around. I am pretty sure we never made venison chili back in those days.

    The chili, with zucchini and peppers and carrots and, of course, beans, was really good. If you told anyone it had been made with beef, they wouldn’t have known the difference. The venison arrived in three huge frozen patties from a friend of a friend of a friend. I guess the intermediaries are a bit squeamish.

    In a Star editorial last week, David Rattray blamed deer for destroying the understory of the woods, suggesting that hunting might be the only practical way to bring their population into balance with that of other woodland creatures, including birds. This week, we will publish a letter from Bill Crain, president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, who argues against hunting and believes that immunocontraception would work and should be tested.

    I’m of many minds about what would be the right thing to do. Clearly, something must be done. Maybe there is more than one solution. But although tonight’s juxtaposition of does on the lawn and venison chili in my dinner bowl was rather startling — if admittedly somewhat amusing — I am not going to become a vegetarian any day soon.

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.

   After getting my new hearing aid, and phoning Mary, I told her she didn’t need to shout.

    “But that’s the way I always speak when I’m talking to you,” she said.

    “Well, just tone it down a bit, I’m not deaf.”

    And then it occurred to me that, indeed, I am no longer deaf. The technology — though pricey — has finally caught up with me, and I can no longer plead hearing impairment when it serves my purposes to do so.

    “It’s all a cacophony,” I said. “The peanuts squeak between my teeth as I’m chewing, I look like ‘The Scream’ whenever the toilet flushes, the stairs groan unbelievably when I tred on them. . . .”

    “Welcome back to the real world.”

    “But I preferred my own. Despite what I used to say about participating in the dance — dance, it’s more like a stampede — of life. Things were quieter then, I was less tuned in, and rather liked it. For instance, the office, which I used to think was utterly silent, with everyone staring at their computers, is far more distracting than I thought.”

    Of course I can always shut my door — I am one of the few so privileged — but that would be a retreat into the nostalgic past. No, I must face the music. I no longer am in the world yet not of it. I must communicate — a strange imperative to come from the lips of one who’s been in the communications business for as long as he can remember, even when he was in the Army tapping out “Ben’s best bent wire” in Morse code in a Fort Bragg classroom.

    But how can one think with all that’s going on, to my left and right, before and behind, above and below, inside and out — plaints, scratchings, squeaky chairs, rumbles, phone conversations, the incessant traffic, the slurping of soup, the ingestion of sandwiches. . . .

    Accepting the fact that I’m now like everyone else will take some getting used to. It doesn’t quite fit my otherworldly persona. All of a sudden, within the span of a few weeks, I have a laptop computer, the first I’ve ever owned, and a professional-looking case to put it in, and a hearing aid that . . . will you shut up out there! . . . won’t abide my evasions anymore.

    And I thought these were supposed to be the Golden Years.