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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   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.

   Following a minor medical procedure recently, I had to be slapped awake from what was presumably a slightly overlong stay in Never-Never Land.

    Throughout the flurry of pummeling (during which my left hearing aid may have been broken, though its demise later that day or the next could have been a coincidence), I kept saying, “Blissful . . . blissful.”

    Oblivion wasn’t such a bad thing after all, I thought as I lay stretched out afterward in an adjacent room, wondering what kind of anesthesia I’d been given and making a note to request it should I ever make that one-way trip to Switzerland.

    Later in the week, another health care professional I know said he presumed it was Propofol, “what killed Michael Jackson.”

    “You can’t beat it,” I said.

    Soon after, reality, in the form of my addled hearing aid, began to impinge. I took it for examination to my audiologist, who pronounced it dead on arrival, as I had feared, and, of course, that begged . . . no, not begged . . . raised the question as to whether I should be beggared by the cost of a new one.

    She told me, with a smile, that the new ones, albeit they cost around $3,000, were so good that “people are always bringing them in asking me to tone them down.”

    That was good news, in a way, for I’d given up ever hearing really well. And, despite what I occasionally say, and despite what my interlocutors occasionally think, I would very much like to participate fully in life — except when on those very rare occasions I’m blissed out on Propofol.

    The prospect of anteing up three grand for a hearing aid was anything but blissful, of course, painful in fact. I told Mary I really ought to be able to write it off as a professional expense, rather than have it lumped in with my medical bills, inasmuch as my job depended on it.

    But I could hear (well, see) the I.R.S. countering at my audit that since I habitually misquoted people— even myself! — they were denying the claim. And then they’d probably tack on a fine.

    My audiologist said that my wife, for one, would be happy that I could hear better, presumably inasmuch as I would no longer have recourse to plausible denial.

    She handed me the silenced hearing aid as I got up to leave, saying hopefully, “Maybe it will revive with some C.P.R.”

    What will it be like to hear with clarity? Stay tuned.

    Or will I be like the guy who bragged of his new one and who, when asked by his friend, “What kind is it?” replied, “Three fifteen.”

   Wednesday was Ellis’s second birthday and, like most mornings, the day started with his yelling “Da-deee” at about 5:20 as I was on my first cup of coffee. And, like most mornings, he settled back down. That was good; I had a column to write before the girls were supposed to get Ma  up for school.

    History is destiny or so they say. Like both Lisa’s parents and my parents before us, we have three children. The house we live in seemed big enough when I was a child here, but now I spend many weekends sorting toys and kids’ clothing, trying to figure out what to take to the dump, what to save, and what to give away.

    Ellis already has shirts, shorts, pants, and shoes to last him through about third grade. While engaged in a never-ending battle to make order out of the chaos that is our basement, I built a high wall of bulging bags of clothes people have given us. As perhaps the last of our friends to have a baby, we are sort of at the end of the line as far as this goes.

    For the girls, now 7 and 10, the great hand-me-down stream has begun to dry up, but they are at its headwaters now. Bags of the things they no longer fit into or can’t abide have flown out far and wide.

    I enjoy the puzzle of assembling stuff to give to different children to appeal to their nascent aesthetics. Ravenel gets the blue and navy frocks, simple one-color sweaters; Lola gets the dresses with frills, pinks, busy prints. Other things go to a woman we know who is taking care of a granddaughter, still more to charity.

    Much of the girls’ wear has come from the Neuberts, a Sagaponack family whose fast-growing children have been a boon to our slightly more diminutive kids. The mom, Adeline, says she enjoys it that the things she gives us are in turn passed to others. The other day when she came by the office with some bags of outerwear that no longer fit her kids, she said she sometimes will be out somewhere and see a child wearing something she thinks she recognizes.

    No doubt when Ellis wakes up today and Lisa or I put him in an outfit for his birthday, something he will wear will have once belonged to another child. He won’t care, and neither will I.

   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.

   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.