And now a few words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated recently, and who, in 1967, had the following to say in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

    “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”

    “Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order? . . . The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities.”

    “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed [livable] income.”

    “The contemporary tendency in our society is to . . . compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity.”

    Dr. King was mindful that we were all in this together; thus his desire to mix individualism with collectivism to produce a more healthy society. That kind of thinking would probably be labeled — mislabeled — “the politics of envy” today, though, given America’s heightened conscience at the time he wrote “Chaos or Community,” there was reason for many to think that a more just society was within our reach. We had, as he said, only to choose it.

    But we didn’t. And here we are, 45 years later, with even more below the poverty line, even more of the overfed — if they are gagging on the superfluity within their gated communities, you don’t hear them — a presumptive Republican candidate who has been called by his fellow candidates a  “vulture capitalist,” and a Dem­ocratic incumbent who turned out not to be a bird of a different feather after all.

    “. . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. . . .”

    “. . . There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. . . .”

    His book makes for good reading at this time of year, at any time of year for that matter.

   On the Jitney, headed to New York City, doctors appointments all in a row. Equipped with allegedly waterproof boots and an umbrella. Rain is inevitable.

    Two women across the aisle; it is clear that they are heading to the city for fun. They mention the Museum of Modern Art and talk about lunch, whether at the museum or at a restaurant suggested by a friend.

    I should be working on my column, but I can’t help but let my mind wander back to my first decade on the South Fork, when it was yet to become “the Hamptons,” and the family car and the Long Island Rail Road were the only options for getting to Manhattan.

    Like almost everyone who grew up here or who has been around for a while, I constantly think — and carry on — about the changes time has brought: the woods that have been suburbanized, what shops used to be where, how parking on Main Street and left turns off the highway were no problem once upon a time. The idea that I would someday carry a laptop to and from New York, and actually use it while traveling, was beyond my ken.

    Many of us remember the first Jitney, a van with a trailer behind for bicycles that carried people between the hamlets and villages, and we remember Jim Davidson, who started the company in 1974. I knew one of the investors and thought she had made a good move. Then, in the ’80s, as development began in earnest, I secretly started blaming the Jitney for making it all too easy for an onslaught of newcomers to commute and commune.

    I admit my anti-Jitney thinking was silly. I have always taken advantage of the bus, too, and the only people who have a legitimate beef about “newcomers” are the Montauketts and Shinnecocks. Though I still do take pleasure in calling it a bus.

    By now, I’m an old hand. I buy the Jitney’s bulk Value Pack tickets, and scheme to assure a seat by myself. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, I was a member of the now-defunct frevquent-roller program, through which you could earn free trips. (I miss that, as I miss the Perrier and the oft-eulogized smoked almonds.) I know enough to generally avoid traveling at peak times in summer, when you have to prove you have a reservation to get aboard. But I’m not truly a regular. I’m told some customers actually go to and from their Manhattan jobs on the bus.

    Having been around since its start, though, I sometimes think us old-timers deserve recognition. Membership in a fan club, perhaps? A cloth patch, which we could sew onto a baseball cap or the sleeve of our jacket? Maybe just a tote bag?

   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.

   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?

   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.

   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.

   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.