Traffic between East Hampton and Bridgehampton just after 4 one afternoon this week was heavy west of the Stephen Hand’s Path intersection with Montauk Highway. At this time of year, when it gets dark so early, the roads fill up at dusk, the day over for those who work outdoors, while others are rushing home or to the market.

    I was headed to pick up one of our daughters at a play rehearsal, and as I turned onto Woods Lane, a light rain began to fall. In Sagaponack I turned off onto the back roads to avoid the backup from the Bridgehampton light. I am one of those who, even if it’s going to take the same amount of time to get someplace, would rather be moving than creeping forward in a stop-and-go line.

    The difference once I got in the woods north of the highway was remarkable. Instead of the multitude of red taillights, there was only one other pickup on the road. It was as if I had driven somehow back in time, or to another, less-crowded place. The trade parade, as some call it, is more than that really. Whether tending oceanfront mansions or keeping a restaurant going, many jobs in East Hampton are held now by people who live somewhere to the west.

    I was looking this week at the Census 2010 data for East Hampton Town and was struck that despite all the building during the past decade, the number of year-round residents had not grown all that much. The population has moved around, abandoning East Hampton Village to second-home owners, for example, while filling in the outlying areas.

    Three decades ago, when I was in high school here and lived in a house behind the Star office, I had school-age friends in the neighborhood and an ample supply of other kids with whom to gin up rivalries. I doubt there are more than a dozen kids within a half-mile of the office now, even though the school population has grown. December’s onset tends to make me nostalgic.

    I loaded my daughter in the truck, and we headed east. The westbound traffic had not let up, but it was light going east. By the time we left the Amagansett I.G.A. with something for dinner, there was only one other vehicle on the road.

    If you’re looking for a job you would do well to contact the companies that install scaffolding. Scaffolds are everywhere in Manhattan (even at St. Patrick’s Cathedral during this holiday season), and every time scaffolding goes up, there seem to be dozens of people involved in the installation. Men, almost exclusively — this is dirty work, lining up metal rods, affixing corrugated aluminum ceilings, putting up lighting fixtures, and often fencing and mesh sheathings are involved . . . and this really gets me: those small, square blocks of wood propping up the rods to accommodate the slopes of sidewalks.

    In an age when you can talk into an iPhone and ask, “Where can I find boobs?” and a message comes instantly back to you as to where the nearest strip clubs are from right where you’re standing, you’d think there would be a higher-tech way — hydraulics? pneumatics? telescoping rods? — than those small, square blocks of wood, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three or even more of them underneath those rods to compensate for sidewalk height differentials. Look closely at those blocks of wood next time you walk under some scaffolding and I’m sure you’ll agree with their low-techness.

    Scaffolds.

    The building where I live on lower Fifth Avenue has been swathed in scaffolding for two and a half years now, and these scaffolds are destined to remain indefinitely, blocking out the sun, killing the circular drive landscaping. But more about my building later; this is a Hamptons piece — wait a minute, isn’t that iconic windmill just as you pass the heart of East Hampton headed toward where I also live in Amagansett also shrouded in mesh and scaffolds and repair, with that cute, miniature replica of a windmill alongside? My partner, David, says that miniature is there so they can have something to decorate for Christmas.

    My building, the semi-iconic 2 Fifth Avenue, at the foothills, as it were, and as it is, of Washington Square Park, toward which Occupy Wall Streeters, this sloppy, uneven, stock market rise and fall autumn, marched in protest of . . . what? And then returned Zuccotti Park and now . . . where? One weekend they passed my place on their way to Union Square while David and I were in the Hamptons. If I had to put myself in the 99 percent or the 1 percent I would have to say it’s the latter, but you don’t feel it much of the time. My house in Amagansett could have fetched a cool 3 mil just a few years back. Now, if I can get 1.8 for it, I’m doing well.

    Well. I digress.

    Scaffolds.

    Remember the Women’s House of Detention? A building with a tower, towering over Sixth Avenue at 10th Street? Now it’s a library, dim and bleak and peopled as this sad one is with old men dozing off in front of worn paperbacks and someone twirling around a rack of DVDs. A joyless place, now dim and bleak also on the outside as black mesh, like a loose-fitting see-through gown a hooker might wear, covers the building, the tower, the clock. And scaffolding — yes, scaffolding — dark and forbidding with crisscrossing metal rods above the vertical ones, the corrugated tin ceiling, the suspended bulbs surrounded by black plastic cages, and, yes, those blasted blocks of wood! The mesh is not really so see-through; you can never see the time anymore on that clock at the top — the clock never worked much, anyway, when it was exposed to the light of day or lit up at night: 2:30 when it’s 9, eternal midnight sometimes, stopped dead in the night. Now, it’s completely obscured by black mesh. Well. It’s just as well.

    I walk to work. My office is in a neighborhood newly known as Hudson Square, where the West Village verges into SoHo. On the corner of Hudson and Houston.

    The building one block north on Hudson is in the process of scaffold building. The building itself is low, maybe six or seven stories. And the building is fairly new — built in the ’80s or maybe even the ’90s, but somehow it is under construction. From my walk from 2 Fifth to Hudson and Houston, I counted, one morning, 18 buildings with scaffolding. I found scaffolding covering town houses and doormen buildings, coffee shops and boutiques, pet stores and delis and bars. Who knows what exactly is going on above the scaffolding on the floors above, some wrapped in mesh, some not. I don’t know what is going on in any other scaffold-wrapped building except my own.

    I have lived at the aforementioned 2 Fifth with my aforementioned partner peacefully, even blissfully, since 1992. First, we rented, and how excited we were! Washington Square Park right at our elbow, tourists click-clicking away at the arch. We were so chic to live there, like it was Paris at the foothills of the Arc de Triomphe. Okay, Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth isn’t exactly heaven, more like a haven for funny business — shoe stores and drag gear and vacancies. Pimpmobiles and head shops and Papaya King. The larger neighborhood itself, however, can’t be beat. In 2006, we bought the place from the sponsor. Living and owning on lower Fifth! New York’s Gold Coast. Could we be any luckier? Turns out, we could.

    You see, this piece is about scaffolding, remember? It is my scaffold story, and here’s where it’s going: In 2009, July it was, reading The New York Post on the deck of our Amagansett home, David turns to me and says, “Hey, look at this headline: ‘Bricks Flying Off 2 Fifth,’ ” and the piece went on to say that due to a particularly rainy spring, some bricks, white bricks, dropped down off a building built 60 years ago, fell down onto the courtyard driveway. Luckily, no one was hurt. But from that moment on, now almost two and a half years later, the building has been wrapped in scaffolding and dismal, dark green chain-link fencing and thus securely confined and protected in case some other wayward bricks might loosen and rain down.

    And the windup is that it is costing me a whopping $100,000 — my assessment, my share of the $30 million dollar loan the building had to take out to fix this mess, my figure based on the shares of the co-op I own (a small one-bedroom). The building is to replace every last white brick, every single terrace — and this is a 390-unit apartment building a city block wide and half an avenue block long. There must be about a billion bricks to replace!

    Digression again: During one meeting at which the board of directors of the building laid out the plans for the renovations, the cost, the individual participation, how much per share — and you should know, a lot of the people who live there are on fixed incomes and retired — a woman, small and frail and uncomprehending, raised a hand to ask a question: “Excuse me. I’m 80 years old. Does this apply to me?” (It does.) But it doesn’t apply to shrewd renters, in whose numbers are two men each hovering around 80 themselves, Ed Koch and Larry Kramer. As renters, they are spared. Their bill will be footed by the management of the building, the sponsors, as they were, and as they are. Those folks, that firm that used to own my apartment until I was giddy and crazy enough to buy it.

    They say the work will take two years to complete, but I bet it’s closer to five. Or possibly eight.

    I will be living with scaffolding and mesh as I drift from employment to retirement, turning 70, sitting in my chair in what once was a sun-filled living room overlooking the Washington Mews and stately 1 Fifth Avenue, gloriously scaffold-free. (But then again, that could change, too.) For me, I will now be looking out at black mesh, suffering noise and dust and scaffolding forever.

    Welcome to New York City. And of all the buildings in New York whose reasons for scaffolding are a mystery to me, this is my scaffold story.

___

    Hy Abady, a creative director at a large New York advertising agency, is the author of “Back in The Star Again,” a collection of pieces that have appeared here over the years.

    Because I don’t pay much attention to fashion, I didn’t know who Tomas Maier was until the other day when, thumbing through an August edition of Vogue magazine, I learned he had designed a velvet-on-python satchel (read great big handbag) for Bottega Veneta.    

    Mr. Maier, it turns out, is the creative director of the company, a high-end clothing and accessories purveyor best known for the “luxurious sensuality of leather,” at least according to New York magazine. He has been experimenting with new interpretations of the company’s “intrecciato” pattern, which Vogue described as the label’s “signature weaving technique.”    

    Vogue also said it can take an artisan three years to learn how to properly do intrecciato. No wonder the satchel, made by aligning the python’s scales precisely on the velvet to create a “continuous serpentine pattern,” costs $3,450. The text trumpets that the handbag reaches “painstaking new levels of opulence.”    

    Snake and crocodile are all the rage this year, with crocodile out-pricing snakeskin, as far as I could tell by perusing a number of Web sites of notably spendy stores. The most expensive bag I came across was made for Tiffany’s in South Africa of glazed crocodile skin: It had a 24K gold-plated brass fastening and a price tag of $17,500. Elsewhere, a crocodile clutch (a small, hand-held purse, for you gentlemen readers out there) was $5,810. For the most part, however, if you’re in the market for a chic leather bag for Christmas, expect prices to begin just under $300 and hover in the $1,000 range.    

    The modest commercial building at the southeast intersection of  Sayre’s Path and the Montauk Highway in Wainscott bore Tomas Maier’s name until recently, although the property now has  an “in contract” real estate sign. Until the boutique closed, I hadn’t actually noticed that a Tomas Maier shop had opened there in the summer of 2010. Who knows what goods I missed, and at what prices? I’m told Mr. Maier is also a designer of sexy swimwear for both men and women, and I guess that’s what was being sold to the summer crowd. (Clearly I haven’t been in the market for a $395 twist-tie bikini.)    

    That handbags have joined watches and jewelry in displaying status and wealth is old news. I know it’s a pipe dream, but I still keep wondering when I see an adornment that costs in the five figures — when equally stylish inexpensive alternatives are available  — why no humanistic government has yet evolved that would get up the gumption to impose a hefty luxury tax on these decorative items for body building — a sort of Robin Hood tax that could come into play. So you want to buy a $17,000 handbag? How about an extra $1,000 for underprivileged kids’ school lunches?    

    My husband and I recently went to the new Islamic rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where extraordinary tiles, rugs, and gold jewelry, among other treasures of an earlier age, are on display. I am glad, and amazed, that such lavish and beautiful items exist. The question is, at what human cost?    

    The best I can do to frame such wild luxuries in a positive light is to think back to Reaganomics, the trickle-down economics theory. Surely someone in South Africa raised or captured that python, right? Someone tanned the leather, someone shaped it, someone designed what it was to become, someone executed the design, someone marketed the product, and someone offered it for sale. . . ? Perhaps Ms. Warbucks is justified in thinking the outrageously expensive bauble she wants for Christmas has done mankind some good?        She might very well think so, but I am not so sure.

    Well, I’ve gone and done it — joined Facebook — though I have an eerie feeling it won’t end well.

    Mary made me do it. She wanted me to play Scrabble with her. That way we can argue in the traditional fashion if we’re seated next to each other as to whether a word is misspelled or not, or even if it’s a word. You can cheat on the Facebook version by plugging things in and getting a “valid” or “invalid” answer posthaste. And then you make your play. It used to be more fun when the give-and-take (“Yes it is!” “No, it isn’t! Whoever heard of a ‘za.’ What’s a za. . .?!”) was settled by a visit to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in our living room, the Final Arbiter.

    In order to get together Facebook-wise, I had to confirm that I had in fact volunteered to join on my e-mail at the office. When I opened it the day after she’d signed me up, I found that Facebook had already chosen some possible “friends” I might want — none being Mary!

    I thought that was indeed strange until we discovered, while investigating the matter further, that there are 856 Mary Graveses known to Facebook at this moment in time, and there a whole lot of John Graveses, too.

    So today, having been told that Mary Graves wants to be my friend, and having clicked when asked if I’d like to see her profile, I was nonplused yet again to learn I had somehow befriended a Mary Graves who has urged that I let grace flow freely from my heart, a Mary Graves who has proferred a “verse of the day,” and a Mary Graves who has “just earned a score of 57,700 points.” Still no sign of my wife!

    Under “recent activity” it says “Mary is now friends with John Graves and 2 other people.” But, as I said before, given the fact that there are 855 other Mary Graveses on Facebook, and God knows how many John Graveses, I am not reassured.

    The thing is I don’t want to be friends with anyone but Mary (well, maybe my children). I fear that this is spinning totally out of control, as I knew in my heart it would (which is why I’ve been resisting for so long), and that before you know it I will be linked in with half the people on the planet and feeling I should converse with them.

    This, of course, is the deepest fear of a professed compassionate secular humanist.

    Under “recent activity” the “Facebook Team” also says — oh God — “Mary is now friends with Victory and Dominion Church and 10 other people,” and “Mary is now friends with Grateful Of Plantersville and 10 other people,” and “Mary Graves went to Lee Williams & QC’s (!).”

    I’m shutting it down. I’m shutting it down.

    Maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine curling up with a Kindle on a cold winter’s night. Its slick, hard surface has no cuddle factor and just doesn’t appeal to me, not like a much-loved, well-thumbed book, and it never will. I’m a bookworm, a lover of books — printed, bound and glued, paper-covered books.

    There I am as a toddler in an early photograph, gazing at a picture book. I have dozens of my childhood books stashed on my bookshelves, complete with raggedy pages, rips, stains, creases, and crayon marks. Most of these are Golden Books — “I Can Fly,” “Our Puppy,” “Robert and His New Friends” — and cost 25 cents in the late 1940s and early ’50s. I still can’t bear to part with them.

    Story time was one of my favorite things about school, and my teachers presented the classics: “The Story of Ferdinand” by Munro Leaf, “Caps for Sale,” “Make Way for Ducklings,” and tons of other great books for kids.

    In Iowa, where I grew up, our neighborhood school, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had a small library in an upstairs converted classroom, but the highlight of the week was the arrival of the bookmobile, a traveling library serving the Des Moines schools, a huge truck stocked with all kinds of books that we could check out and take home.

    Back then, not that many people had cars, and a bus trip downtown to the main library was daunting, especially during the bitter Iowa winters. My family didn’t own a television, either, so we spent lots of time reading, not knowing, at the time, that a love of books and reading is essential to a child’s educational development.

    Books and reading were a natural part of our lives, our culture. Even today I can recall the excitement I felt when I received my first official library card. We lived in Ames by then, and Friday nights were reserved for weekly trips to the library. I read all the preteen fiction I could carry home in my arms.

    Oh, how times have changed!

    I went to Pennsylvania for a few days recently and scheduled a trip to the Antique Car Museum in Hershey to meet the young son of my friend’s co-worker. I took along a few kiddie books for him. He barely glanced at them or me as he clicked away on some sort of technical device about which I hadn’t a clue. He jumped around, high on cookies and soda, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the room. (Are all kids today hyperactive monsters with BlackBerrys, iPads, or Game Boys glued to their fingers, or am I just out of it?)

    This past summer I exerted a lot of energy trying to create buzz for my first published children’s book, “Hush, Little Beachcomber.” I did readings, gave away copies by the carload, and joined Facebook to promote my book. I might have been better off looking for a real job.

    No one, but no one (except Mom and a few folks counted on one hand) could have cared. When I asked the woman across the street what her youngsters thought of my book, she said, “My daughter liked it, but she likes books.”

    Anyway, the other night I saw an ad on TV for a Kindle. Did you know they can be had now for only $79? (I’m not that brain dead, because I remember when they cost $300!) I wish gasoline prices were plummeting that fast.

    No matter how cheap Kindles become, I’m not about to buy one. And Santa, take note, I don’t want a Kindle for Christmas.

    My holiday photo will show me sipping a cup of homemade hot chocolate, buried under the covers in my cozy bed alongside a couple of furry friends, reading the newest Ruth Rendell mystery, a memoir or three, and Calvin Trillin’s latest, reveling in the beguiling dust-jacket graphics, the scent of new paper, and the whisper of flicking pages.

    Cheers to books and book lovers, libraries and librarians everywhere!

__

    Dianne Moritz is a longtime Star contributor. She lives in North Sea.

    Something fell from the ceiling in the Star building’s front office Tuesday morning, nearly striking Russell Bennett in the head.

    Things coming from above in the Star office take on more than a metaphorical significance when you consider that the first-floor lobby, if you will, has a ceiling made of glass panels held in place with a criss-crossing lattice of wooden slats. The ceiling presumably dates to when the building was put up by Everett J. Edwards, who was my great-grandfather. E.J., as he was known, opened the East Hampton Pharmacy here in 1901.

    I have long suspected that the interior woodwork, the mirrors, and the ceiling were not made locally and that E.J. ordered them up from a catalog of such things. Ours is a family that rarely throws anything of significance out; there probably is a receipt around somewhere that could shed some light on the building’s interior.

    George A. Eldridge, who rebuilt Clinton Academy, and Custis Lawrence, who designed the Hand building at 78 Main Street, were responsible for the Edwards Pharmacy building itself. In its first incarnation, there was room for a soda fountain and a telephone exchange with a back-room switchboard and a cot for the night operator.

    The glass ceiling itself is made up of somewhere on the order of 120 separate opaque panels with white and green swirls, Tiffany-like. The only other one like it around here that we know of was at what old-timers like me remember as Kelly’s Liquors on Main Street, most recently a pop-up art gallery.

    Our ceiling is in reasonably sound condition, but there are a few places where the building’s gradual lean toward the East Hampton Library has opened up narrow gaps between the lattice and the glass. A few of these spaces at some point in the past were bridged with small pieces of sheet copper, with scraps of lead type of the sort last used here in 1974 wedged in for good measure. It was one of these dropping with a thwack to the floor that got Russell’s attention.

    Russell is the first face most visitors to our office see when they step through the door. His desk is to the right, immediately behind a long table on which we stack the week’s copies for sale. He would have been missed had the lead and copper missiles laid him low.

    The shock over, he and I fetched a ladder and resecured the glass. Then I went back upstairs to write this column.

    I counted the number of players who had their shirts off following American Samoa’s first-ever World Cup soccer win the other day, a singular victory reported on in The New York Times, and there were six. All happy fellows in good shape. Nothing to offend as far as I could tell, though if partial disrobing becomes the norm one shudders to think what will happen should it extend to boccie, bowling, shuffleboard, and bridge.

    All by way of saying that I found the shirt-waving glee that followed East Hampton’s first-ever county championship in boys soccer not in the least offensive either.

    Nor did the school’s athletic director, Joe Vas, who, having coached state-champion teams in boys and girls soccer in his career, is well acquainted with the rules. Nor did the team’s head coach, Rich King, or his assistant, Don McGovern. All were outraged — and justly so — when Bonac’s star center midfielder was red-carded, and thus banned from playing in the Long Island championship game — a game the Bonackers could well have been expected to win were Mario Olaya in the lineup.

    That’s why it was a bit galling to learn not long afterward that Jericho, which had defeated East Hampton 2-1, went on to win the Class A state title as well.

    There was no objection to Olaya’s initial yellow-carding for having delayed the restart of the county championship game after shirtlessly celebrating what proved to be the winning goal that he scored with 34 seconds left on the clock.

    But there was to his postgame red-carding, which followed upon the team’s brief celebration with its fans at the far end of the field, nowhere near Sayville’s bench.

    East Hampton’s athletic director has said the excessive-celebration rule, whose purview is confined to the time in which a game is contested, was in this case “misapplied.” And he has asked the state’s soccer rules committee to confirm this contention.

    To have merited a red card after the game, Olaya, he maintains, would have had to have been found guilty of unsportsmanlike conduct of some kind. Yet that clearly was not the case, he and King have said. Olaya was not taunting Sayville’s players, nor was he rubbing their noses in it, nor was he showboating. He had merely, along with his teammates, rushed over to share the historic moment — for just a few moments — with their schoolmates, their parents, their teachers, and other well-wishers.

    While time cannot be rolled back, a clarification of the rules, Vas and King say, should prevent such an injustice from ever occurring again in Suffolk.

    In one sense, my basement flood couldn’t have happened at a better time. With Christmas approaching, the drive to accumulate (or should I say, more generously, “to give”) more worldly possessions grows ever stronger. The wanting is magnified. Consumerism calls. The pent-up demand begs for release.

    But then I look to every available upstairs storage nook in a house with few closets. I look to the steps leading downstairs, piled high now with stacks of boxes that once lived in the basement. I look to the Portable on Demand storage unit on one side of my driveway, the Dumpster on the other, and to the still surprisingly full basement and the boxes upon boxes that made the journey from one house or another to our house, rarely if ever to be opened since. I think about how I’ll have to move it all again, and probably again after that before all the damage can be made right. And I ask myself: Do I really need more crap? Because when you have to schlep it upstairs into your livng room, then back onto the steps, then out to a storage unit in the driveway, only to eventually lug it back to where it started, even the prettiest heirlooms start to seem like a bunch of junk. If I were a turtle, the weight of this shell would be crushing me.

    My husband announced last week that all he wants for Christmas is for someone else to come clean our house. What I find myself wanting after a broken washing machine hose filled our 1,400-square-foot semifinished basement with half a foot or more of water are things that make other things go away. A really powerful wet-dry vacuum. A DustBuster. Waterproof containers. Santa, give me organization! I want my storage spaces to look like something out of a Martha Stewart Living magazine.

    It’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of holiday buying. This year, when I feel the pangs of desire for something I’ve seen on TV, I consider whether I would still want it once the thrill of getting it was gone. Would I have to have it if I had to keep it in the middle of my living room, for example? Anything that needs to be stored and does not also clean or compress something else is not on my holiday wish list this year.

    The basement flood has given me perspective on my worldly possessions, many of which are not nearly as worth saving as I once thought. Or are they? That question has held me hostage for some time now. Why are we keeping my dearly departed mother-in-law’s college and grad school diplomas, and would we be sorry if we let them go? She worked so hard for them. More to the point, why do I hold on to the contents of a large plastic container labeled “Purses and Shoes”? Each time in the past that I’ve attempted to cull, I’ve taken detours down Memory Lane and never found my way out.

    Do we just continue through life like human Velcro, picking up more and more and more as we go? In a world where so many people go without, is it okay to just throw things away?

    And, not to be all bah humbug, but do the kids really need any more toys? They have so much more than they can enjoy, and more toys equal more cleanup. Still, I love to watch them open presents. And I like something new to play with, too.

    What we all need is a purge.

    I’ve started to sneak out the toys that Jasper and Jade have grown tired of, and I’ve gotten incrementally more realistic about my own things. More than a few times since our basement flood I’ve asked myself: Do I hoard? We have just the right amount of stuff for a house of 2,000 or so square feet, but our house is much smaller, and with the basement temporarily taken out of the equation, it’s been hard not to feel like we’re living in an episode of “Hoarders,” despondently walking the trails between the piles trying to justify why we can’t get rid of anything.

    Part of this tendency to gather, to bring home the best of other people’s castoffs, comes from living through lean times. I hate to waste. I don’t love that sweater, but it is a wool sweater and if I’m cold enough and all the other clothes are dirty and I’m not going to be seeing anyone I care to impress I might wear it.

    In last week’s paper, we had an interview with a professional declutterer, Chucky Bologna, and it got me thinking. She advised that if you haven’t worn something for two years, you should get rid of it. I love the idea so much I am tingling with excitement. I can’t wait to go through every piece of clothing I own with that in mind. She also said, “Step away from the yard sale.” She’s right, and I have, but there’s a history to overcome in that basement of mine.

—

    Carissa Katz is an associate editor at The Star.

    The bathroom scale started sending unusual messages as soon as the unusually pleasant and warm fall weather began to turn. I have a pretty small frame, and I’ve kept fairly slim in recent years due to a regular yoga practice, so when my weight varied by a whole 10  pounds on the digital screen one day a few weeks ago, I was more befuddled than alarmed.

    Was the scale broken? Or had I really been, unconsciously, fattening up for a cold winter like a prize goose?

    It turned out that not just was the scale’s aging battery dying, the whole scale was going on the fritz. I have put off getting a new one.

    It has always been my habit to weigh myself every morning. Whenever the scale goes up two pounds from one day to the next, I decide it is time to pay attention to what I am eating. Now that there’s no device in the house to sound the alarm, I’ve thrown caution to the winds and eaten whatever, whenever, all through Thanksgiving and over the last two weeks since. It’s going to be interesting to find out what the new scale will tell me — one way or the other.     

    All during my adult life, I have devoted a lot of time to experimenting with different diets, from the scientific to the ridiculous. At least twice I have come under the misimpression that I had invented a unique brand of weight control and should write a book about it.

    The first method had to do with the difference between glucose and sucrose, which contains fructose. I can’t remember how I thought it was supposed to work, but I was a real enthusiast for my pet theory for a time.  The second “diet” was a simple matter of imagination: Instead of going for an actual helping of mashed potatoes, for example, I would conjure them up in my mind and visualize myself eating them.  This actually worked for a while, but, in retrospect, it’s hardly an original approach.

    Then there was the time I went on a protein-and-water diet. My doctor told me not to do it for more than two weeks. Obviously, if you lose weight on a two-week, get-thinner-quick regimen, it’s hardly likely to be permanent. But I did learn something from it: Protein in the morning fends off hunger. (But I guess you knew that?)

    In classic Jewish mother fashion, my grandmother used to insist, especially when I was a teenager, that I needed more meat on my bones. She, herself, was quite thin, but I’m afraid I’ve always taken after the other side of the family, which isn’t.

    Notably, the mealtime traditions my grandmother brought with her from Eastern Europe did not include dessert. The only sweet I remember her making was a blueberry “pie” that wasn’t pie at all but deep-dish sponge cake over a layer of blueberries.

    My mother’s dessert offerings, such as they were, were limited to Jell-O and chocolate pudding. To this day, I’m her daughter. I would rather have a second portion of whatever the savory stew might be at dinner than ice cream and cookies at meal’s end. Wait, oh dear . . . I’m afraid I am probably going to have to eat my words. Christmas cookies are only two weeks away.

    Ah, well, the scale can wait till the New Year.

    When you’re watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” this Christmas season I hope you’ll note how much this masterpiece by Frank Capra has to tell us about the way we live now — and the way we used to live then, in a more rational and humane time.

    The Bailey Building & Loan Association helped to build Bedford Falls into a thriving community where even an immigrant like Giuseppe Martini could start a business, buy a house, and share in the prosperity of postwar America. Why? Because the economics of Bedford Falls was local, not global. George — and before him his father, Peter — knew the human beings their bank lent money to. They judged their reliability, their creditworthiness, by looking into their eyes. If someone slipped behind in payments, they made a human judgment: Will he recover? Or will he go under?

    I doubt George Bailey foreclosed on many residents of Bedford Falls. Most of those who had fallen on hard times would recover. Bailey Building & Loan had little to lose giving them some flexibility. If you can’t pay a 20-year mortgage, maybe a 30-year mortgage would help. I’ll bet George even took rent instead of mortgage payments from some of the residents of Bedford Falls. No way he wanted to see empty houses in Bailey Park.

    But that was then: a more personal, local, rational, real economy. This is now: a globalized, digitized, abstract, virtual economy. George Bailey’s Building & Loan was swallowed up by some international financial conglomeration when George died in 1982 and Zuzu and her siblings couldn’t come up with the cash for the inheritance tax. And the new bank doesn’t own the mortgage on Giuseppe Martini’s house — 100,000 investors own a sliver each (although none of them know it).

    Blame it on computers. When George had to write down each loan and each payment by hand he was forced to think about the people getting the loans, making the payments, living in those houses. Now we live in a shell-game economy where you never know which shell hides the pea.

    Mr. Potter would have understood this in a trice: What a great idea! Separate the money from the people, a little sleight of hand with the people, then market these “assets” sliced and diced to a huge crowd who have no idea about the people who owe them money!

    But in the classic movie, Mr. Potter didn’t win. When Uncle Billy foolishly misplaced the eight grand deposit (think Fannie Mae, or the S.E.C.), the people came to George’s defense with an outpouring of necessary capital. Perhaps that is what we are now trying to do (although so far, the capital has gone to Mr. Potter, not Bailey Building & Loan, or Mr. Potter’s victims).

    The question no one has asked or answered so far is this: Out of all these disastrous foreclosures, how many are the result of stupid loans that George Bailey would never have written, and how many are due to shell-game scams by the Mr. Potters of this world — mortgages that would otherwise work if Bailey Building & Loan took them over, at fair rates, on honest terms? My guess is that 90 percent of recent foreclosures would never have happened if a local, honest banker like George Bailey owned the mortgages.

    At one point, Mr. Potter observes, “Peter Bailey was not a businessman.” How true. When Peter and Potter were boys, 100 years ago, the great American economist Thorstein Veblen castigated “businessmen,” whom he defined as those whose only aim was to make money, and contrasted them with “industrialists,” who made products they were proud of. George and his father before him were in the banking service business — not the corporate profits shell game.

    And what would George (or Thorstein Veblen, for that matter) think of the current situation if Clarence brought them back for a visit? Didn’t we fight these battles a century ago when Veblen wrote? How did we erase the progress of the first 80 years of the 20th century so quickly?

    It once was a wonderful life — and it can be again. We just need to shift focus from the money to the people: fewer bailouts, more Baileys.

    (Clarence, can you hear us?)

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    James Monaco is the author of “How to Read a Film,” a new edition of which came out in 2009, and other books about film and media. A “confirmed localist,” he lives and works in Sag Harbor.