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.

   It’s impossible for me to think about the Academy Awards without remembering the night that I was lucky enough to attend.

    1976. That year was full of celebration for our country’s founding, fireworks, and tall ships, but no fete was more exciting to me than accompanying my father to the 48th annual Academy Awards to see my gramps, Mervyn LeRoy, receive the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award.

    This was back in the day before the music swelled to usher blabbermouths off the stage. Part of the joy of watching the awards was to see who would go on too long and embarrass themselves.

    It was back in the day when they said, “And the winner is . . .” instead of the totally pussified “And the Oscar goes to . . .” (What, are we all in kindergarten here? This is Hollywood, where there are winners and there are losers. Get used to it, Mr. Big Shot, and maybe you’ll get your crack at Oscar again next year.)

    It was back when the Oscars were the most important awards show, and — that year — the first to be internationally televised. Obsessed with the book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” I pictured real Oompa Loompas (not the ones from the movie version) sitting in their trees, munching on cacao beans, and adjusting the rabbit ears on their black-and-white TV while settling in to enjoy tonight’s musical numbers.

    I was 12 years old, sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion surrounded by movie stars. Some of them I knew. I got hugs and kisses from Hollywood greats, but remember very little about the night once it began. Keith Carradine sang. Jack Nicholson wore sunglasses and pumped his Oscar in the air. One of Gramps’s best friends, George Burns, won for best supporting actor, a happy moment for our whole family.

    Then it was time for the Irving Thalberg award, which had been handed out periodically to producers with a memorable body of work. My great-uncle, Jack Warner, had been a winner before I was born. As of today, there have been 39 of these awards given out in 83 years of Oscars.

    “I want to thank the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for giving me this beautiful award, voting for me, believing in me, because they’ve done so much for the world,” Gramps said. “And tonight I think they’ve done more for the world than ever by showing what Hollywood does and running all of these beautiful acts and beautiful scenes on Telstar — of which I am a stockholder.” That got big laughs.

    Another meaningful night came four years later, when my stepdad, Tony Walton, took home the golden statuette.

    Since I was home alone (the “rental units” having skipped off to Hollywood for the night), I had a high school Oscar party at our apartment on the Upper West Side. One of the happiest moments of my life was when they announced Tony’s win. I, and all my friends, who were frequent visitors to the world’s most friendly kitchen and knew my mom and Tony intimately, shrieked as Tony took the stage, jumping up and down on my bed, the floor, the couch.

    Several years later, while in the graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the Arts, I loved bringing my fellow budding thespians back to the apartment, where we would take turns hefting Tony’s Oscar around and practicing our acceptance speeches.

    That was a long time ago. We don’t even have a television now; it’s been years since I’ve watched an Oscar broadcast. I find it too painful to view the remnants of a Hollywood long past shuffling up on the stage for their requisite lifetime achievement awards, only to be gently removed by tall beautiful women as the music swells, and then swells even more.

    Fitting aged greatness between commercial breaks to come in at under four hours just doesn’t seem right. I’d like to see those tall beautiful women show up on a baseball field when an inning has gone on too long, escorting the players around the bases to speed things up, but that will never happen.

    Nowadays, covering a school board budget workshop is a big night out for me. I’m the reporter in the front row, scribbling away in my steno notebook, a far cry from the glamour girl I have been. But this realization doesn’t make me sad, it makes me take a look around and wonder what moments of greatness others may have experienced.

    No one is really as he or she appears, you know. We’ve all had our Oscar moments. Here’s to yours, and enjoy the show.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter for The Star.

   Just as I lunged to put away a shot at the net, the sole such I’d hit all night in our weekly doubles league, the lights went out.

    And of course I cursed the darkness, and Tim Ross too, though, as I learned after we’d felt our way off the courts, he had had nothing to do with it. It was LIPA’s fault.

    It almost always is LIPA’s fault, though double faults must be borne. Pretty much everything else you can blame on your partner. Any partner really.

    I turned on our way out to see if anyone I’d been playing with would attest to the fact that my shot in the dark had indeed landed well within the baseline, but they had all vanished.

    I couldn’t blame them. I am not easy to play with, a 72-year-old teenager who, when things go well, preens, and who, when things do not, wails on in the marvelously resonant steel structure in which we play as if only he were Fate’s whipping boy.

    What was it Paul Weinhold, the sports psychologist, said in our recent interview? That the great players had long ago “incorporated into themselves the knowledge that they will not always be perfect. . . .”

    He’s got a point there, but, as I said to Mary later, I was too dumb to empty my mind.

    “Do you say to yourself, ‘Bounce . . . hit,’ as they tell you to in ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’?” she asked.

    “ ‘Bounce . . . shit!’ is usually what I say.”

    “He’s right. You’d be smart to lower your expectations, not put so much pressure on yourself. And just have fun. It’s smart to have fun. You’ve got that down to a science in other areas. You’re a happy person. That’s what Mom and I love about you.”

    “That’s just the way I am — except when the best shot I hit all night is blacked out and nobody sees it. I don’t know though, I might give up this Thursday night league. It starts too late . . . I keep you up too late when I come home. . . .”

    “I’d think twice about that. You know you love tennis. I’m not sure you could do without it.”

    “You’re right. . . . Not even death would keep me from playing!”

    “Now that’s the man I know — cautiously optimistic perhaps — but the man I know.”

   A dozen eggs were on the counter waiting for me when I walked into Crossroads Music on Monday night. Michael Clark, the proprietor, had read a recent lament in these pages in which I had observed that my home hens had taken the winter off.

    Lisa and I take our older kids to the shop one evening a week for music lessons, and Michael had resolved to share the bounty of his younger birds. I can sympathize; when our flock was in its first laying year, we had so many eggs that we tried to give them once a week to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

    Those were the days, though our hens’ decline is not unexpected. Having had chickens as a child, I remember that after a couple of years production trailed off. They freeloaded out their days, pecking at their feed and offering us only the entertainment of watching their regular squabbles.

    Even if impractical and expensive, there is a certain satisfaction in keeping a flock of chickens around. As a side result, I have become much more aware of our neigboring ecosystem. I fret that predators will somehow get through the wire fencing. All of a sudden in the last few weeks there have been raccoons about, knocking over the garbage cans and slinking along Cranberry Hole Road after dark. There are signs that mice hang around the shed where I keep feed, searching for fallen grains. Hawks greedily drift by overhead. A weasel’s tracks show up in the snow.

    The two roosters begin to crow before dawn. We have gotten used to their noise. I let them out when it’s time to wake the kids up for school, then refill the water and feeder.

    Well before nightfall, the birds will hop to their roosts. I release a ring on the outside of their yard to shut their steel-lined door, keeping varmints out and the cocks’ racket inside. It’s a nice routine. Sometimes lately, I’ve been getting eggs; mostly I just play farmer.

    On Tuesday I fried two of Michael’s dozen for breakfast. By coincidence, there were four eggs in our coop. It was as if our birds were trying to tell me something.

   Making room for a better desk for my husband, shifting and sifting through towering stacks of papers, rearranging upstairs bedrooms where grandchildren sleep when they visit — and doing something about the heaps of toys, books, and games, which are clogging what is called the playroom — isn’t a bad way to begin a new year.

    Chris has semi-retired, going from full-time work at Pace University in Lower Manhattan to two days a week. After having what he refers to as a weekend marriage for 16 years, he will be here most of the time, now, and we have to find physical space for him to have a proper home office.

    I wouldn’t call us hoarders, exactly, but we both do have a penchant for keeping and accumulating things that really aren’t necessary: brochures detailing last season’s opera schedule, newspaper clippings about sled-race dogs that we never did send to that grandchild, binders filled with warrantees for small appliances that broke years ago . . .

    We spent Sunday going through boxes and files that had accumulated, mine and his. It will feel good when things fall into place again, I am sure. Actually, it feels pretty good already, especially when I look under the bed and around the corner of the bedroom where we have two computer tables and see them uncluttered and swept clean.

    Of course, I’ve been officially semi-retired myself for some time — ever since my son David took over as editor of The Star. But in my case (what with the office right down the lane and the responsibilities I continue to have there), I have continued to work most of the week. Furthermore, even though I have one desk at home and another at the office, I haven’t found it possible to confine the work I do to the logical places. It tends to spread all over the house.

    I’m afraid my husband and I are workaholics, which is going to make organizing our time together more difficult.

    Meanwhile, the clean-sweep impulse took me upstairs, too. I got help moving two bookcases, one bed, a crib, and a dresser from one place to another on Sunday. We have books here from three generations of children. Since my own kids were small, I’ve loved having all sorts of interesting old hardcovers around,  especially from their father’s generation,  but enough is enough! It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff and give away at least a few boxfuls. There’s a big bookcase upstairs of children’s books handed down in my husband’s family, too, and I suppose it’s time he figured out a better place for most of them.

    The living room is also in flux, or, I should say, it’s pretty much empty. A couch and three chairs have gone off to an upholsterer, and I’m not sure when they will be back. That encouraged me to have the floors waxed, however, and they’ve never looked better.

    To be honest, I’m not sure whether it was Chris’s new schedule that prompted this passion for reorganizing everything I can get my hands on or whether the mild weather this winter has fooled me into doing what might be called spring cleaning.  Whichever — it’s about time.

   It’s Valentine’s Day as I am asked to write this “Relay,” and as I listen to “That’s the Way Love Goes” by Janet Jackson on my “love” playlist, chosen for inspiration, I assume today will be standard: Single female goes through the day trying not to be repulsed by those who get excited about a silly holiday.

    No, I am not bitter about not being in a serious relationship at the moment.  Even when I was, for example, when I was married for 13 years, I never comprehended the day. Why do people need a day to show each other how they feel and go out to dinner? I guess I was always fortunate to be involved with men with whom expressions of love and dinners out were a fairly regular event, without a calendar or Hallmark telling us how and when.

    I will admit the holiday was fun when I was little. My dad would place four small heart-shaped boxes of chocolate on the dining room table, in front of me and my three sisters’ designated seats, with a big heart-shaped box at one end for my mother. It was reliable and consistent, as is his love and support. “The only guy a girl can depend on,” so they say. I don’t really believe that entirely, but my dad surely was always there when I needed him, and I can’t say that for many other men.

    Back to present time though, or actually last night, when tales of dread were posted on Facebook about “V-Day.” I tried to help those in need and imagined today would be more of the same. This morning, however, when I checked in to the all-telling social media Web site, I found the inspiration I really needed. I was “invited” to a Share the Love fund-raiser at which those who attend choose a charity and donate to it.

    Finally, someone is making sense of this holiday. I immediately went to wingsoverhaiti.org, donated through PayPal within seconds, and felt very satisfied. (Funny how Barry White came on as I wrote those last words — oh, the universe has such a great sense of humor.) Feeling grateful for the opportunity to use the day for good, I was then ready to start my regular Tuesday activities. What I did not realize was that it was time to begin the receipt of several unexpected text messages and e-mails.

    The first was an offer to visit from a guy I met on vacation in Florida last month, complete with flight dates and numbers. I am not sure if this is what led to a slight loss of breath, or if it was my fear of commitment, or the fact that the e-mail was followed immediately by a series of texts from an ex-boyfriend who hopes I am “okay” and misses me. I had deleted him from my phone intentionally, so I was not aware of who was wishing me the happiest of silly days. I responded and then got caught up in his charm and his picture of his abs, which he said he had been working hard on at the gym.

    I told him I hoped he was working on his brain as well and tried to salvage the joy of my morning ferry ride from Shelter Island, looking forward to arriving at work to go into my headphone-and-Mac writing escape world. Funny, the playlist shuffle just chose a song that he burned on a CD for me, back when we were dating, “They Got Nothing on You, Baby.” Oh, there were some good times.

    Now it is starting to make sense why I’m excited about my evening’s Valentine’s Day plan of attending the Sag Harbor Village Board meeting and then writing about it. This plan is reliable and consistent, like my dad.

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   Rusty Drumm wrote recently in the praise of fish and fishermen, likening their tales to love sonnets, and to Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .” in particular.

    It was a really wonderful piece, and yet among the 154 sonnets Shakespeare wrote, there are few that are as transporting as number 18.

    After reading them — the first 126, including “Shall I compare thee,” written to a Young Man, and the remaining ones to the Dark Lady, who appears to drive him crazy — one can be forgiven for concluding, although we’re warned not to treat the sonnets as a diary, that they show Shakespeare, an adept when it came to treating of love, to have been a rather unlucky lover.

    The Young Man (the Earl of Southampton?) was apparently willing to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, and the Dark Lady’s fooling around drove Shakespeare to feverish madness and to conclude that she was “as black as hell, as dark as night.”

    “Maybe he was too taken up with his writing,” Mary surmised when I’d finished Helen Vendler’s “The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

    But, by the same token, these unrequited, or periodically unrequited, loves provided plenty of stimulus for his kaleidoscopic brain, and the sonnets that resulted are intricate, complex, and reflective, anything but Johnny-one-note paeans to Venus.

    Time’s bending sickle, though, is the real villain, summer’s lease having all too short a date. Yet we are urged to bear it out even to the edge of doom.

    Well I shall, and gladly, having been blessed with the love of a woman of infinite variety, generous to a fault, and rare to find it (though when she does, watch out), who, as I began to inch my way back from the doghouse not long ago, asked if I still had that quote of Dante’s that I had pinned to my office wall almost 27 years ago.

    I did. A beacon to blithe lovers such as I, it warns, “How brief a blaze a woman’s love will yield if not relit by frequent touch and sight.”

    “. . . If this be error and upon me proved / I never writ, nor no man ever loved,” Bub.

   Looking ahead to Presidents Day weekend, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is getting ready to tally North American birds in what it calls the Great Backyard Bird Count. Unlike the almost invitation-only Christmas counts for experienced birders, this one draws on the willingness of even the most casual observers, so it appeals to me with my middling identification skills.

    Last year, I took a crack at it, submitting a checklist along with more than 92,000 others from all over New York State. Observers counted 11.4 million birds of 594 species. I was responsible for logging 224 birds of 8 species, mostly gulls, although a fair portion were goldeneye, black duck, and mergansers, which I saw in Napeague Harbor.

    My home hamlet of Amagansett should be better represented by birders I concluded after seeing in a list on birdsource.org that the 83 herring gulls I counted that day were just about the only ones for which numbers were submitted by only three people. Submitters from the East Hampton ZIP code coincidentally produced a mere 83 herring gulls in five reports.

    There was a lone checklist filed from Montauk in 2011 from a single observer who counted 59 birds, with 14 red-winged blackbirds the high-species winner. A single observer put in a list in 2010 as well. It’s wide open territory for the ornithologically oriented to make a mark.

    The process of taking part in the Great Backyard Bird Count is simple enough. Participants are asked this year to tally birds for at least 15 minutes on at least one day from Friday, Feb. 17, to Presidents Day, Feb. 20. You can count in as many places as you like, so, for example, I might peer through my binoculars at Lazy Point for a while, then head to Montauk to look at sea ducks at the Point.

    Regional checklists can be foundon the birdsource Web site, which is where results are entered daily. One of the features that I appreciated in the online form was that I could rate my birding skill as fair, good, or excellent. Presumably, this allows the lab to mash the results using a sophisticated mathematical formula to account for the fact that from a distance, for example, I find it hard to tell a hen mallard from a black duck — and forget about me and sparrows.

    This year, I hope to get at least one of my daughters interested in helping out. Provided it is not too cold or windy and that I can set up in my truck where the viewing is good, I may get some help from youthful eyes. Maybe we will beat last year’s gull count.

   How is the civilized world going to survive without books you can hold in your hand?

    Will a subgroup of educated elite stick with bound paper copies, even though the same texts are available electronically?

    I made a terrible face when someone (who shall be nameless) gave me a Kindle for my birthday last fall. It took months, and a trip by plane, before I gave it a try. Now, having read two books and a bit of The New York  Times on my Kindle, I remain reluctant to become a true convert.

    I’ve always cherished the many books, of various vintages and for children as well as adults, that abound in my house. I can’t imagine the living room without the shelves full of books on either side of the fireplace; in my opinion, they also make the room look pretty.  For the most part, our books are arranged by happenstance, or just dropped on the shelves helter-skelter. I’m not one of these people who treat each volume as a precious object. I’ve been known to dog-ear.

    So why do I hold on to them?

    When I was in college, a friend and I got excited when — in a used-books store we frequented — we came upon a handsome, dark-green set of 24 books by Honoré de Balzac. I can’t remember why we were so enthralled by Balzac at the time. It’s possible that we were more motivated by the idea of being the sorts of intellectual, worldly young women who own things like that. Neither of us had enough money to buy the set,  so we decided to split the cost . . . and the books. We promised each other to exchange them some day. Of course, we never did.

     I read two Balzac novels, Le Pere Goriot and La Cousine Bette, before graduating. At least I think I did. But I never read even one more novel by Balzac afterward. My half of the set decorates the top shelf of the bookcase to the left of the fireplace. I wonder if she kept hers?

    Some people I know have impressive libraries, reflections of their intellects and taste. I’ve admired them (the people and the libraries), but it may be that personal libraries of this kind are doomed. If everything you could possibly want to read is, or will be, available with one or two clicks and in a few seconds, book collections will surely turn into little more than antiques, accumulated to gratify the desire for collection. Or investments, like artwork, perhaps.

    The long, drawn-out controversy over the planned new children’s wing at the East Hampton Library seems to be over.  I’ve supported the wing, even though the building, and the library’s parking lot, are adjacent to my house. Given that books are becoming virtual — that children are learning to manipulate computers and other electronic devices in elementary school or even kindergarten — libraries with good children’s rooms seem more and more important. Who would want their child to grow up without knowing the touch, and the smell, of a favorite old book?

   Since I’m having surgery on that part of my leg that I promised in my last column I would never write about again on the morning after Valentine’s Day, it’s a sure bet that my husband and I will be spending Valentine’s Day at home watching “Jeopardy” while he cooks dinner.

    It will be even better if there is a storm raging outside and wind and rain thrashing against our windows, with a fire burning in the woodstove and my dog at my feet.

    We watch “Jeopardy” every night and our favorite part of the show is the little stories the contestants tell Alex to give the audience a peek into their personalities. If their stories are any indication, they might want to think about getting a new life.

    One guy, an adult, bragged about squeezing 13 people into a bathroom. Another whined that his favorite cereal was discontinued, forcing him to search all the local supermarkets for it. He finally found one that had four boxes left, so he scooped them all up.

    That’s the best they can come up with on national television, with all their old high school chums watching?

    Oh, the tales I could tell Alex. One of the best, though, is from when I was three months pregnant and visiting my mother on City Island in the Bronx, where I grew up. After a family dinner, I was suddenly doubled over with stomach cramps. Either my mother had just poisoned me or I was having a miscarriage.

    I was rushed to the hospital and it turned out my appendix was ready to burst, which is never a good thing to have happen when you’re pregnant. I needed emergency surgery, stat! At this point Alex would chuckle and say something comforting and move on to the next contestant. But I’d grab his arm and say, “But Alex, wait, you have to hear the rest of the story.”

    Because it was so early in my pregnancy there were no visible signs of a pregnancy and not enough time to run a test. They had to take my word for it, which, for some odd reason, they seemed reluctant to do. Jeez, I didn’t think I looked like a liar. Why would anyone lie about a pregnancy unless they wanted to trap the guy they’re with? I had already hooked him a few years earlier with my charm and good looks.

    They couldn’t knock me out so they gave me an epidural and told me I’d probably lose the baby, our first, and one that was desperately wanted. While I was on the operating table my brother, an anesthetist, was in the room. I could feel them cutting my belly open and flashed upon a fish being filleted with its guts running out. I was a bit wobbly from the sedation but aware enough to know that my brother was looking on. I didn’t want him to see my bits and pieces, so I asked him to leave.

    While all this was going on, my family called my husband, who had stayed back in Montauk and told him to get in there and bring whatever he thought I might need. When he arrived he brought with him his slippers that I often wore around the house and were about four sizes bigger than mine — not a pair I would wear in public.

    After the surgery I couldn’t laugh at all because it hurt so badly. My sister came in the room and as she went to kiss me tripped over the clodhopper slippers and fell right on my belly, which was stitched up like a zipper. (A bikini cut was out of the question for a pregnant woman.) Her fall, besides hurting me, made me pop a few stitches, but also made me laugh until tears ran out of my eyes.

    People are usually encouraged to walk around after surgery to expel the gas that is in their body after they’ve been cut open. My cousin Ricky, who was more like a brother to me since he practically lived in our house (my mother and her sister were married to brothers), pushed my intravenous pole while we walked the corridor with me tooting away, mortified, but without a choice.

    I’m having the surgery on the day after Valentine’s Day and I expect a bit more tooting on the car ride home. I hope it’s a nice day so we can keep the car windows open. But we’ve been married for 38 years and have been through an awful lot as a couple, what’s a little flatulence between lovers? Happy Valentine’s Day, honey! Toot, toot, toot-toot, toot.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.