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.

   Maybe I decided to take part in a recent chain letter — by e-mail, of course — because it came from a cousin a couple of times removed, or maybe I’m just a recipe hound. I’ve got manila folders full of them that date back 30 years or more.

    The chain letter came with a suggestion that participants forward to friends a recipe they know so well they don’t have to look it up. The idea being to make it easy and keep the chain flowing. The instructions didn’t say the recipe had to be original, so I contributed one of our own Laura Donnelly’s easiest recipes, putting it in my own words and changing its name to Lazy Chicken. All you do is shake up a whole bird of, say, three pounds in a bag with a cup of Bisquick, take it out, put it in a heavy iron skillet, and bake it in a 450-degree oven for an hour.

    I didn’t come up with the 20 people I was supposed to send a recipe to, and several friends politely declined to participate. But, still, numerous recipes have been arriving in my inbox, and I have been fascinated by the fact that most of them come from strangers — who clearly inhabit entirely different worlds, culinarily speaking. Only two of the batch I received came from people I actually know.

    Rather than simple, two of the recipes that came my way were for bread! One sender called his pumpernickel rye bread easy to make, if time consuming. The other was a white soda bread that didn’t sound hard, although I’m not, well, ready to start baking bread. I might, however, try the baked chicken with cider, apples, applejack, ginger, cinnamon, and brown sugar that came from an East Hampton couple.

    One recipe threw me for a loop. Taco Soup called for a particular commercial chili mix and a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes. I hadn’t heard of Ro-Tel products, but have since been informed that they are a staple of the advertising pages of magazines like Ladies Home Journal. “My wife and I used this recipe often when our three athlete sons were in high school,” the sender noted.

    Because one of the people on my chain list works at The Star, I also got to check out the recipes she received. She was more diligent than I, and got more back. One came from England. Another was a holdover from the dark ages of the ’40s and ’50s: a chicken casserole made with frozen chopped broccoli and two cans of cream of chicken soup. This dish might actually be pleasant, old-fashioned comfort food, except that it also called for cheddar cheese and curry powder, and I am not convinced. But I might try a third, pork roast with dried apricots and prunes.

    One of my colleague’s responses took the cake — literally. Parsonage Cake was said to have originated with a minister’s wife who “swore she could see a parishioner at the end of the block and have [the] cake ready to serve by the time the doorbell rang.” Now that’s a keeper.   

Parsonage Cake

Ingredients

2 Tbsp. good cocoa

3/4 cup flour

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

1 egg

1/4 cup shortening, melted (or use half butter, half Crisco)

1/2 cup cold water

1/2 tsp. vanilla

Method:

     Mix everything together at once. Pour into 8-inch greased and floured pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.

   Cat lovers, maybe more so than dog lovers, enjoy having more than one cat at any given time. I am one of those cat lovers. One is just not enough.

    Sometimes the Other cat presents him or herself with no effort on your part at all.

    Years ago in New York, the first cat I had as an adult was delivered to me at my first apartment. My friend Carol thought a first apartment should have a cat, so she answered an ad for kittens in The Village Voice and “Archie” (gray tabby) arrived at my door. That was in 1968. I had Archie until 1982, when I was a new bride.

    Archie needed a friend when I moved to a larger apartment in 1969, so I went to a cattery (I know, a bad thing to do) and got my first Maine coon cat. Her name was Motley (brown tabby) and she had pushed her way toward me on a table full of cats. (Reader, she wanted me.) She became the Other cat.

    During the ’70s in Manhattan, living in a rent-controlled apartment on upper Central Park West, I rode the AA and CC trains to get to work. For three consecutive years I found teenage kittens on the subway platform at 103rd Street. So I (and my then boyfriend) acquired Rita (dark tortoiseshell) and Theo (mostly brown tabby with white belly) and happily found a home for the third foundling.

    In four years Archie had been joined by three other cats. Even I had never bargained on four cats. That boyfriend made me promise, please, not to find or let myself be found by any more. I did not and they did not. We stayed happily for many years until the boyfriend, rather than the cat, strayed and I moved farther downtown.

    Rita and Motley kept my mother company in Orient when I moved from that rent-controlled apartment to a half-floor in a tiny brownstone in the Village (not large enough for four cats and one person). Archie and Theo, who were willing to travel by car, stayed with me in the city and both got married to my husband, John, two years later.

    When Archie went to cat heaven, Theo needed a pal and once again I went the breeder route for another Maine coon cat, Grace. Again, she picked me from a pile of pale calico teenagers. Theo stopped being Other and Grace got that title.

    Grace lived a happy life with Theo and traveled back and forth from our midtown apartment to East Hampton every weekend.

    After Theo went to the great cat hunting ground we just didn’t get another cat to keep Grace company. And no stray or foundling presented itself either. In matters of cat, sometimes you have to leave things to kismet.

    Grace retired to East Hampton when my husband retired and did not miss the weekly commute. She joined her pals in kitty heaven after 15 years of Coon catness.

    We were catless for about six months. But my retired husband (I was still working in New York and going back and forth on weekends) needed a kitty. All the cats that had shared my world to this point had been kind of brown and murky in coloration. In 1999 we got yet another Maine coon, a kitten we called Jack. Readers of this newspaper may have seen pictures of Jack: a bright orange tabby. He was a solo cat for about a year while I organized retiring from my job of 32 years, selling our apartment, and joining my husband and Jack in East Hampton full time.

    Our 624-square-foot house was just not big enough for two adults and a very big kitten. We set about renovating our small house. During the renovations we (three) lived first in a rental and then in a grace-and-favor set of rooms in the house of our generous friend Marjorie. Jack grew to be a very big cat.

    Our house was finished after eight months and we figured that Jack needed a friend. While photographing a pet fair held by Elsa’s Ark, I met Dilly (torti-calico, semi-longhair). She picked me by reaching through the grid of the cage and taking a swat at the lens cap hanging from my camera. She was not a kitten, which was a good thing since Jack was so big. So Dilly became the Other to Jack. And they lived happily together until just recently.

    Sadly Jack went to kitty heaven at age 12 (not really old enough, but he wanted to go).

    Losing a pet is very, very difficult for any family and also for the family pets.

    Dilly seemed glum.

    When we were comfortable I set off to interview another Other. First I looked on the shelter Web sites, read the ages, and looked at the photos of the cats and kittens. I guess this is like online dating. I looked at Elsa’s Ark and on the North Fork, just to be fair. The old let-the-cat-pick-you thing kicked in. We did not want to burden the 10-year-old Dilly with an insane kitten. A young adult would do just fine, thank you. We figured any cat from the cat rooms at a shelter would know how to cope with another cat. But face-to-face is where love matches happen.

    I went off to ARF with a list in hand of possible kitty candidates. Sitting in a room of milling cats is actually my idea of heaven — all that purring, all those tails. After swooning with joy, I had to focus, identify the possibles, and see if they were interested in me. So many, and so cute. I did a little culling from my list. Some were asleep and I never really got to interview them, Some ignored me. One didn’t like being picked up. The folks at ARF know their cats and steered me away from some alpha males who would not work with my Dilly’s personality. This was not as easy as it had been with Dilly, to be sure! I went home catless but determined.

    The next visit my husband would be with me to see if any kitty fell in love with both of us or got a crush on him. Seriously, this is like blind dates. You sit on the floor or chair and hope that the one you liked in the photo will pay some attention to you. Isn’t it typical that the one you thought you would have a crush on ignores you. But then, over there, that’s the one who looked me in the eye the first visit (and I really wasn’t looking for yet another calico) . . . but then she rolled over, and rolled over again. And then we heard her name, “Lois.”

    So that was that. It actually took a few more visits just to be sure, but each time there was Lois, looking us in the face, rolling over and letting her tummy be scratched.

    Lois and Dilly are still working it out, but we are sure they will. We are wondering if Dilly will learn Lois’s hilarious trick of paddling her water in the water dish and drinking from her foot. It is really nice to have another Other.

—

    Durell Godfrey is The Star’s contributing photographer.

   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.

   Saturday’s snowfall was a pleasant surprise down on Cranberry Hole Road. After an extended dig through the basement, I found suitable snowsuits for Evvy and Ellis, and we went out. My wife and elder daughter preferred to stay inside.

    The younger kids and I first took turns sledding down the minor rise that passes for a hill on our property. That broke down to a snowball fight in short order.

    Ellis, who will be 2 next week, piled into the battery-operated plastic Jeep and got stuck in a snowdrift, shades of what was probably going on up on the highway about then. Then it was time to make a snowman.

    We went inside, however, without giving the 5-foot-high fellow a face, scarf, or hat, because Ellis was beginning to get cold. When I went out later that day to see how it was faring, I was surprised to see he had fallen over, the victim it appeared of a close pass by a Highway Department snowplow. A shower of gravel and dirt from where the blade scraped up the roadside lay atop the snow. 

    In other seasonal news from Amagansett, I found my favorite hen dead in one of the laying boxes in the coop the other day. We called her Cupcake, one of only a few in the flock that the kids bothered to name.

    She was a mostly white mixed breed of some sort. She laid brown eggs, not too large, not too small. She was popular with the roosters, broody, and had hatched one or two clutches of eggs in her time. Brave in just knowing where the feed came from, she would come to the door of the pen to greet me in the morning.

    The day before she died, I had noticed her sitting in a box she normally did not use. Thinking little of it, I did not bother to check on her, the following morning, her head was drooped in an odd way, and I knew she was gone.

    There were weasel tracks in the snow the past couple of days around the coop, but I didn’t see any evidence that they were responsible for killing her. More likely, her time had just run out. I’ll miss her though. She was a good chicken.

   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?

   I just returned from my annual “girlfriends” vacation to Vero Beach, Fla., which began, true to tradition, with an open suitcase on the concrete at the curbside check-in at Long Island MacArthur Airport.

    This year, I had the added bonus of having two airport employees help me remove several pounds of clothing to avoid a $50 overcharge. After then filling five bins with carry-on baggage at security, removing layers and shoes, a computer and a bag of liquids, and then putting it all back together, I began to recuperate from the stress and embarrassment of having the public see my untidy packing, along with my bras and underwear.

    I boarded the plane, feeling fortunate to see a window seat toward the front, unaware that it was time for the next annual event — a child kicking my chair for two hours. I did my best to ignore the repeated jams to my lower back, thinking of those worse off than I. I knew that I would be basking in the sun in a matter of hours, and jabs to the kidney are nothing compared to what I wrote about last week — people starving to death in Haiti.

    I successfully released the stress of both scenarios for a few moments with the appearance of palm trees through the warm and sun-filled plane window. I snapped some shots with the traditional new technology, purchased in anticipation of stimulating views and a few undistracted moments to learn how to capture them.

    This year it was the iPhone 4S, which I was hesitant to buy, but did so saying a prayer for those who live eight-to-a-room and are paid $.31 an hour. “The Justifier,” as my friend Matt refers to me, decided that the purchase was acceptable because I promised myself to help solve the Chinese worker exploitation issue at a later date. I needed an iPhone, I told myself. I am a reporter, a technology addict, a Mac user, and I am relied upon by many to share photographs and happenings. Also, my Yogi tea bag said “the purpose of life is to enjoy every moment,” and I figured the phone certainly would help me to do that.

    I learned a bit about my new friend inside the phone, Siri, whom I have heard many good things about, and looked forward to exploring the ways she might assist me. I imagined she would decrease the time I looked down while driving, since I could just tell her what I needed, another way I justified the purchase. Siri was unable to assist with the increased frequency of kicks from behind while aboard the plane. What did help, however, was the innocent voice proclaiming upon our landing, “Mommy, I can’t believe we’re going to see Nana and Pop-pop in a few minutes.”

    Upon arrival at my friend’s oceanfront condominium, it was time for the annual realization that my toiletry bag did not join me. Asked why I didn’t bring an extra bag to avoid having to omit items from my suitcase, I explained that I already had two checked items and two carry-on bags, and then noticed that was no longer the case.

    Where I leave the toiletry bag fluctuates each year. This year it was the airport in Orlando. Replacing these items may be a simple fix for some, but not for me. It’s taken me years of trials and piles of money to find the natural body care products that work for my hair, skin, and health. Small stuff, again, compared to those eating mud cakes in Haiti, so I sucked it up and spent the traditional $80, replacing the products at a natural food market that sells many personal care brands I trust, but not the recycled, non-animal tested razors, or any razors for that matter. Returning from the store and borrowing a razor, it was time to wonder if I would be able to take the newly-purchased items home, due to the weight they would add to my suitcase.

    Small setbacks, a few dollars, and a little embarrassment are nothing that a friend-filled annual day on a kayak in “old Florida” trailing a guiding dolphin cannot overshadow. This year also included texted photographs from home of snow and ice, sent to my new iPhone, and the benefit of my new friend Siri, who provided guidance on such important matters as the exact times for sunset and happy hour.

—

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

   I forgot when writing of my resolutions last week, resolutions for the irresolute, to say that there were two things I especially wanted to do in the new year, first to be able to print out what I’d written on the laptop computer Mary recently gave me, and second, to avail myself of the latitude this might confer, enabled as I would then be to write of nothing in particular from wherever I found myself, whether scaling El Capitan without a rope, sipping absinthe in Montmartre, or twisting the night away in Moscow.

    But, because I am so slow on the uptake — and so nervous because of past disasters in which what I’d written and had not “saved” took flight for God knows where, the road to insouciance has been tortuous. A newly-arrived reporter here whom I’ve repeatedly beseeched, shuffling forward with piteous mien and muttered imprecations, much like Charles Laughton in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” has been patient and gracious, and yet. . . .

    Not wanting to bother her again, I hailed another co-worker, who used to teach computer courses at the late lamented Southampton College, and told him I couldn’t seem to get over the last hurdle of the transfer. I told him that when I put the disk that had been in my disk drive into the office printer, nothing would come out — nada, nada, nada.

    “Ah,” he said, “you’ve got to drag the icon on your desktop into the trash — that will make sure it’s properly ejected. I know it sounds weird. . . .”

    With me everything that has to do with computers sounds weird, but if trashing a story or column actually preserved it, I wasn’t going to argue. I opened a new “document,” wrote “yada, yada, yada,” named the file “Yada,” dragged it up into the disk-drive icon, dragged that icon down and into the trash, withdrew the disk, hit “yada.txt” after I’d put it into our printer, and damned if “yada, yada, yada” didn’t materialize on the page!

    Jane Callan, who gave me a thumbs-up (a fitting digital-age salute) as I ran speaking in tongues through the otherwise vacant office, everyone having gone home to be with their computers, understood immediately (she being quick on the uptake) that my getting from nada to yada spoke volumes, that it had been, for me, a big step, no mean feat, indeed a leap beyond the Pale — a grace note, if you will, to what had been otherwise a slow news day.

   For someone like me who has a home chicken flock, being caught at the Amagansett I.G.A. placing a dozen eggs on the checkout conveyor by a fellow poultry-keeper was highly embarrassing.

    The truth is that our hens, like many at this time of the year, take a break from producing. Egg-laying is somehow tied to the length of the day, and without artificial illumination of some sort or other, you either have to go to the store or go without for a few months.

    The age of my brood seems to have something to do with it as well. When they were in their first year of egg-laying, each one offered up close to an egg a day. Now, as they have aged, they have throttled back their efforts. And can you blame them? Eating enough to make all those eggs and then having to lay them, well, it seems like a lot of work.

    Right now, from 10 hens, I am getting about a single egg a day. This is a marked increase from the period from about Halloween to the winter solstice, when no eggs showed up at all. The most I’ve seen in the last few weeks was three one morning, but that was an aberration.

    So it was no accident that around Christmas, when baking was on my mind — and the kids’ — that I had to knuckle under and buy some. Note I didn’t say pay for some; have you checked the price of organic chicken feed lately? Oh, I pay all right.

    But I felt a flush of red come to my cheeks when Michelle gazed at the carton as I placed it on the belt. She then looked up with an expression of surprise and said, “You’re buying eggs?”

    Her hens have been laying all along, she said, which she attributed to a single lightbulb her husband, John, had placed in the coop to keep the birds warm. This, she suspected, was enough to keep the eggs flowing.

    I have thought about doing the same, installing a light and timer to extend our cluckers’ sense of day length, but it seems a little unfair. Everybody needs some time off now and then — even chickens.