Talking with Kenny Mann, whose film “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” about her ancestral past, will be shown at Bay Street on Sunday, got me thinking about identity and, of course, how it relates to me.

    But after I suffered from a weekend of tryptophan-induced writer’s block, my husband, the beautiful Eric Johnson, suggested that I get in touch with Who I Am by describing the stickers on my car. And you know what? As his suggestions go, which usually include all sorts of naughty stuff not fit for print, it’s not half bad.

    I drive a white 1998 Volvo with 190,000 miles on it. You would know it if you saw it around town, because it is covered with colorful magnetic flowers and insects, and is frequently pointed at and commented on. I have emblazoned my last three cars with magnets, which make me smile every time I see them.

    But what sends me over the moon is the giant-size magnetic Band-Aid I recently added to the front driver’s-side panel over a big boo-boo that I can’t afford to fix. What a great idea. Thank you, magnetic car Band-Aid inventor. Almost makes me want to go out and sideswipe another one of those invisible yellow cement poles.

    “Bonac Football” — I found this in an overstuffed desk drawer I was cleaning out at The Star. My daughter, Jo, is now a sophomore at East Hampton High School. I sport the Bonac colors with pride.

    “We’re Not Going to Guam, Are We?” — From the fifth season of “Lost.” The pilot, Frank Lapidus, an island escapee, notices that his planned flight to Guam is filled with familiar unplanned guests, namely the folks who are now trying to find the portal that will get them back to the middle of their ocean paradise by crashing Frank’s plane. In a very serious show, it is one of the lighter moments. Losties honk their horns at me when they see this sticker.

    “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” — literally “I honor the mystic law of cause and effect through sound vibrations,” the chant that my family of Nichiren Buddhists repeats twice a day, morning and evening, for about 15 minutes. “Renge” is the lotus flower, which has its roots deep in the sludge of a pond, but produces a beautiful blossom, symbolizing the Buddhist tenet of “changing poison into medicine.” It also is the only flower that simultaneously blooms and seeds, and therefore symbolizes the simultaneity of cause and effect. I know, I know — that’s a little long for a bumper sticker.

    “Leave the World a Better Place Than You Found It” — the most recent arrival on my back bumper. I got this one last month when I visited my best friend in the whole world, Jenn Dwight, down in Virginia Beach. Virginia Beach is also the home of the Edgar Cayce Institute, practically the originator of the New Age movement, with a fabulous store chock-full of crystals and chimes and books and healthy snacks and more, including this bumper sticker. The sentiment is something my mother has tried to instill in me. So when I look at this, it reminds me of Jenn, of my mother, and of the serenity I feel when walking the labyrinth in front of the institute, with the Atlantic Ocean twinkling in the distance.

    “SPG” — I finally succumbed and got one of those elliptical European stickers. My home hamlet of Springs.

    “The East Hampton Star” — It’s where I work.

    When this car finally conks out — years from now, let’s hope — I may choose to drive an anonymous, unadorned vehicle simply reeking of class and status, and save my precious viewpoints for long and deep conversations over dinner with a trusted few. But for now, my car is an extension of Who I Am, and Who I Am is sort of a mess and always in a hurry. But cheerful, just like my Volvo.

    I have no problem expressing myself with shallow, pithy aphorisms, at least for now, and especially if the flowers and butterflies on the sides of my car, or the person who’s driving, can make someone smile.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    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.

    My late dear friend Joanne, who was always with us for Thanksgiving, wouldn’t let anyone else supervise the mashed potatoes, back in the days when we had as many as 30 people, big and small, sitting for dinner. You weren’t allowed to cut the potatoes into small pieces to hurry the boiling along, because they would get watery, you had to cook them to her exacting standard of doneness, and you had to use old-fashioned mashers. I can still see her, hard at work, in the corner of our kitchen between the stove and sink.

    Joanne would have a fit if she knew we were going to eat our mashed potatoes without butter and milk.

    Because two members of our family are allergic to dairy products and red meat, we’ve forgone these things at Thanksgiving in recent years. To be honest, we haven’t missed them at all. The idea of slathering a turkey with butter before roasting it now seems not only unnecessary but counterproductive: It’s better without the butter, and so is our gravy.

     I used to make a cornbread-and-sausage stuffing in the old days. It was good, but hardly imaginative. The alternatives we’ve experimented with in recent years are certainly more interesting. With plenty of herbs — brought in from the garden, and by Thanksgiving, in pots on the sun porch or, of course, from the supermarket — you don’t need sausage to give a stuffing oomph; and I’ve no quarrel with chicken sausage, provided you remove the casings carefully. Other family favorites, like a roast-oyster with sorrel recipe, have been altered to address the allergy situation in recent years, too.

    But some things never change. I always make gravy the way Miriam Ungerer told us to do it in The Star decades ago now, and it is terrific every time. You do, however, have to start it the night before you roast he bird. Like all good cooks, Miriam finessed her formulas as she went along. She wrote about turkey for The Star more than once, and I’ve found slightly different versions of her gravy in old clippings.

    The basic idea is to cook the giblets well ahead, so you can refrigerate them and the broth overnight. The recipe is below. It’s a winner.

    We are so damn fortunate to have so much to choose from for our holiday feast, aren’t we? One other Thanksgiving tradition that I think could use an update is our concept of it as a holiday that is really only about consumption (and thankfulness for what we’re consuming). Maybe we should think about foregoing something by choice this year — particularly something costly — to remind us of the economic disparities among our neighbors here on Thanksgiving. Our food pantries are busier than ever. Why should Christmas be the only giving season? The time for giving is now.

    In that spirit, here is an abbreviated “how-to” for Miriam Ungerer’s “perfect” gravy. Even though it’s delicious enough that you might be tempted to claim it as your own secret recipe, this isn’t a recipe to hoard. It’s one to share:

     Put all the giblets except the liver in a deep pot, along with any wing tips or turkey bones you can scrounge from the butcher. Add the usual carrot and celery, an onion stuck with two cloves, two bay leaves, thyme (more if it is fresh, less if dried), and crushed garlic and salt and pepper, as desired. Pour on a pint or half-bottle of red wine and enough water to cover it all with an inch or two to spare.

    In one recipe, Miriam suggests simmering this for three hours, another time she says six. (In my case, it depends on when it is time to go to bed.) Strain the broth and refrigerate it along with the giblets, which you will chop to be added to the gravy the next day.

    The following afternoon, when the turkey is done and resting on a platter before being carved, pour off as much fat from the pan as you can and set it over low heat on the stovetop. Add some of the broth to the pan and scrape up the drippings. Be vigorous. Add the chopped giblets. Let the brew simmer, then add cornstarch, which has been made into a slurry with water, and more of the broth. Do this a little at a time, checking for the desired consistency. Enjoy.  

    At about midday on Monday, I took a walk into the East Hampton Village business district just to get a little air before changing gears at the office. There was the beginning of an east wind, a bit of chill in the air. The elms lining Main Street were almost entirely denuded of their leaves.

    Downstreet, as the old-timers call the downtown area, was bare in spots as well. As everyone knows, many shops are closed and the ones that remain open, with only a handful of exceptions, seem to be selling things of no particular interest or usefulness to ordinary people.

    In past winters, readers have written in to suggest that, at the very least, the papered-over stores display work by South Fork artists to bring some color and visual interest to the bleak facades, which now are broken only by real estate for-rent signs.

    The most bitter pill of all, at least as far as this community’s children are concerned, is the “closed for the season” banner across the window at Dylan’s Candy Bar near the movie theater. The New York-based store shut down just after Halloween.

    Since school is out this week, my older daughter and a friend were hanging around the office, bored and with nothing to do, when I got back from my walk. After rejecting a couple of my suggestions, they perked up when I said they should make some signs, go to Waldbaum’s or CVS to buy some treats, and hand out free candy as a form of protest in front of Dylan’s. This they did, hand-lettering messages on cardboard and lining up another out-of-school kid for their mission.

    I wasn’t there, but my wife reported that they had a hard time getting any takers for their candy among the few people who hurried along. My daughter and her comrades thought this was amusing; whether any passers-by caught the unspoken message I can’t know.

    The nothingness of East Hampton Main Street in the off-season has become a self-fulfilling reality. Shops that cater only to a certain transient clientele scare off locals and others not interested in Juicy Couture and the like, and it grows ever more lonely.

    Saturday is the second annual Support Local Business Day. I’m all for it. But except for books, hardware, skateboards, sneakers, and drug store items, there isn’t much I’d want to buy in this village anyway. And that’s a pity.

    I’m sorry, of course, that Steve Jobs died, though, perhaps unlike many, I can’t say he’s improved my life. Well, maybe some, for I do like going onto Google when in need of a trenchant quote or some such. And Wikipedia can be fun, whether the articles are peer-reviewed or not.

    But when it comes to the rest of it, Facebook, texts, tweets, twitters, titters, and the like, you can have it. I remember my son, technologically conversant — as I guess he must be — saying once that I ought to blog and invite feedback. “But I’m not interested in inviting feedback,” I said, “I’m just interested in the sound of my own voice. If I need dialogue, I can make it up. Or, if I feel argumentative, I can create strawmen or strawwomen.”

    Interacting with Mary is fun, but I shun elbow-rubbing on the Internet. I am, in that respect, an antisocialist. Were I living in Russia I’d call it the Internyet. I don’t want to be reminded through old-tie connections of my shallow, pimply past, nor by my peers of my sallow, wrinkly present. I’ve moved on, on to bitter things, such as railing against iPads, iPhones, Kindles, and PCs, two of which we drowned this summer. Yet they keep coming back.

    I’ve seen in my own family how addictive these things can be, as in this imagined cellphone conversation: “Hi, dear, I’m about ready to yawn . . . . Aaaahhhummm. . . . So, how’s it going with you. . . ? You’re sleepy also. . .? So much time and so little to do. Well, I better cut this short and get back up on the treadmill . . . . I’m stepping up onto it now. Yes, yes it’s moving along at a rapid clip. Can you hear it? No, no, of course I’ll be careful, of course I won’t fall, I . . . Oh shit! . . . !”

    Ignore what I said about having so much time and so little to do: One does want to be productive, one wants to improve — it’s the American way — but one also doesn’t like being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century when one has been perfectly happy in the 19th.

    Yet it is sobering to recall that in the first third of that century the mother of all computers, they now know, was invented.

    I’ve almost done an end-around around technology, though it’s hard to dodge altogether despite my stiff-arming. And, being an American, I am programmed — as I said before — to keep my nose to the grindstone (it’s a very pointy one as a result) and my skills up -to-date lest I fall hopelessly off the pace.

    I sense myself slipping back and back into the abyss. . . . Yet somewhere a typewriter clacks and clacks and dings. Somewhere a quill dips into an inkwell and scratches out a line on parchment. Somewhere a musty tome spreads its leaves out upon a lap and is fondly perused. . . Somewhere. . . somewhere. . . some. . . .  [Shut Down.]

We are a nation of gullible fools. We swallow everything advertisers tell us to. Not only are they telling us to shop tomorrow on “Black Friday,” but they also want us to participate in “Cyber Monday” by shopping online. I say we ignore the mind-control tactics they use and spend the day eating leftovers instead of shopping. We could call it “Fat Friday” instead.

    Hey, I’m all for shopping. In fact, I’m pretty good at it. But driving UpIsland, fighting crowds, and traipsing through overheated stores is not how I want to spend my holiday weekend. I want to eat, drink, and be merry!

    And speaking of merry, I also don’t like how the retailers now make people work on Thanksgiving. Some stores open their doors at midnight, so the poor employees can’t even get a holiday buzz on.

    It took me quite a few years to learn how advertisers work, and until then I fell for every line they fed me. The expensive face cream that would halt the aging process — I bought it. The cereal that would make me lose weight — I bought it. And those 100-calorie cookie packs — I bought them, and always eat more than one at a time.

    The television commercials are the worst, especially the one in which they target older men with a little blue pill that once swallowed will allow you to fornicate for up to four hours. Please! Unless you’re just dating or newlyweds that doesn’t happen in real life. I mean, c’mon, there’s laundry to be done, dishes to wash, dogs to be walked, and floors to be vacuumed. Who has time to lie around in bed all day?

    Swallow the pill and your wife is suddenly in her 20s again and 15 pounds lighter. Swallow the pill, and you’ll have sex whenever the mood strikes, even if it’s just as your wife is setting the turkey down on the table.

    If we believed the commercial, my husband, who by the way does not take the little blue pill, would get turned on watching me sweat over a hot stove with my hair piled in a rat’s nest on top of my head. With a look of pride upon my face, I would set the poultry platter down, sweat dripping from my body, and he’d give me the look.

    Secretly I’d think, “Damn, he’s been into those pills again.” But if we were being filmed I’d have to say, “Excuse me kids, Daddy’s in the mood. We’ll be back in four hours.”

    I love turkey. I’ll be starting Fat Friday with a turkey sandwich on white bread with mayo, lettuce, and salt and pepper. My mid-morning snack will be a brownie. For lunch I’ll eat a turkey wing that I’ve hidden from everybody else in my bottom crisper drawer with a side of celery, radishes, and black olives.

    My mid-afternoon snack will be a slice of pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream. And if there are any of my famed stuffed mushrooms left, I’ll tuck them away too during Fat Friday. For dinner we’ll have turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and turnips heated up in gravy on top of the stove. For dessert it will be more pie with a serving of vanilla ice cream on the side. Fat Friday, indeed. We’ll show them.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.

    Thanksgiving time is a powerful season — so powerful that it inspires in me a Will to Grow Up, which in turn has the superpower to vanquish my usual non-cook stance. My non-cook stance is a no-confidence, can’t-style configuration that includes a lot of cooking avoidance and a lot of apologizing for the food when I do have to cook. But every Thanksgiving, I give it up.

    Once upon a time, there was the Thanksgiving of My Dreams. The Thanksgiving of My Dreams was the Thanksgiving I’d spent with extended family at my Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Seth’s home in Cleveland before my parents were divorced. We had to get all the way to Cleveland from East Hampton, so that was a big deal to begin with, and then the actual Thanksgiving was impressive, too — a large gathering with all the Cleveland people on my dad’s side, even the ones who were normally a little bit marginalized.

    There are photos of my cousins and me dressed up in Pilgrim-girl dresses. I remember people watching “King Kong” in the family room. They were the kind of family with a family room. I have zero memories of the food or who cooked it, but I know there was plenty for everyone. This Thanksgiving wound up becoming a kind of idealized holiday with a lot of yearning/longing/missing/hoping attached to it. In the years following my parents’ divorce, my access to this gathering felt fragile, tenuous, and distant. Aware that the Harris Family Thanksgiving was happening, I looked in at the warm, vibrant scene through the window of my memory.

    Not that mine was a childhood without any stuffing! To be sure, my mom and I attended perfectly good Thanksgivings each and every year with family on Mom’s side or good friends. Turkey was served and eaten up, my mom always did her parsnip-and-pear purée, and I never turned down a dollop of cranberry sauce.

    Yet for me no gathering we visited stuck, no tradition really connected. Stubbornly attached to the Thanksgiving of My Dreams, I became a girl with no turkey to call her own. For many years, a forlorn gobble-gobble echoed in my heart! But let me move quickly to the empowerment part.

    The first year my beloved husband and I lived in our house on Three Mile Harbor Road — this was back in 1999 and actually we were not married yet — I finally decided to take the Thanksgiving matter into my own hands. Non-cook notwithstanding, I was going to come up with the whole turkey dinner. Since my beloved husband is from Japan, and there is no such thing as Thanksgiving in Japan, there were two things at play on the upside:

    He wasn’t going to know if the food didn’t taste how it was supposed to taste.

    He wasn’t going to be measuring the event against the Thanksgiving of his dreams.

    On the downside, my beloved husband (an excellent cook) wasn’t going to heroically step in and make the meal.

    In any case, I cooked.

    I made the turkey and the stuffing and the corn dish and the cranberry sauce and the sweet potatoes and the pearl onions and the string beans and the pumpkin pie. I think I even tried to make the gravy that year, though in the future I would fob it off on someone else — an unsuspecting guest or the unsuspecting boyfriend of a guest.

    You see, that first year it was just my beloved husband and me and our cat, Neko, but the next year and all the years that have followed, we invited guests: friends who did not have a connected Thanksgiving or whose connected Thanksgiving was on the other coast and an expensive plane ticket away. We also invited friends who are not American and would not have known a connected Thanksgiving if it gobbled at them, forlornly or otherwise, which helped to lower the pressure with the cooking.

    Now, naturally, the day includes our children (what will Thanksgiving come to mean for them?) and, also very happily, my mom and her parsnip-and-pear purée (this year there’s also talk of a coconut cake).

    Every year my impulse to create and claim Thanksgiving conquers my impulse to shy away from the complex responsibility cooking both is and implies. Believe me, if I could do the Thanksgiving without cooking, I would. But that wouldn’t be taking the matter into my own hands. Every year I suspend my non-cook pathology and stop worrying that I can’t cook competently, stop fretting that I have failed to achieve this hallmark of the grown-up — and jump in with superpowered turkey feet to cook as I do.

    Several years ago, a couple of days after Thanksgiving, one of our guests called to thank us for the dinner. I think he also might have been looking for a scarf he left behind. Someone always leaves something behind. I said you’re welcome for the dinner, and then, because the Thanksgiving charm had worn off and my no-confidence, can’t-style non-cook stance had taken over again, I apologized for the food.

    He was surprised by this. He told me that there was nothing wrong with my cooking. He told me he liked what he ate. Outrageous! I protested, and we went back and forth for a while. Finally, he disarmed me with the following question: “Why do you think you can’t cook?”

    This is a question of some depth. Was he offering me a key? Or at least a keyhole through which to look? Was he gently suggesting that I might take matters into my own hands at other times of the year? After all, the Will to Grow Up doesn’t have to be seasonal. Why do I think I can’t cook?

    I told him no one had ever asked me anything like that. I told him I’d have to think about it, and I have been.

    Meanwhile, it’s time to get out the baster and start cooking for the Thanksgiving of my reality.

___

    Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” She can be found online at pickygrouchynon-cook.com.

    My memory for numbers has always been good. I know the phone number at the house we lived in for most of my childhood. Just now, I discovered that it is a working number in the 631 area code. I rang up to see who would answer, but the call was “forwarded to an automatic voice message system” and the number was “not available.”

    When my kids were little, I was the walking directory when they wanted to call friends. (This was before cellphones, of course.) But the proliferation of  area codes that no longer immediately describe where the call originates, and of unfamiliar exchanges, is giving me pause. It was easier to remember phone numbers when their origins were instantly identifiable, and, even before that, when exchanges began with words, like Butterfield 8.

    As far as I know, the 324 at the start of original East Hampton numbers stands for EA-4: EAst Hampton 4, like the MUrray Hill 5 of “I Love Lucy” fame. But perhaps someone out there will correct me if I’m wrong.

    I called Verizon this week and a media relations person laughed when I said how nonplused some people here were when they were given a 329 exchange rather than 324. They thought the older exchange had a certain cachet, while the newer number seemed to imply you were new, too. (Using this criterion, The Star has the most glamorously old-old East Hampton number of all: The numbers reveal that it was the second phone number ever assigned in town: 324-0002.) The Verizon spokesman said he had been around when lots of its customers were upset that their area code had been changed from 212 to something they considered démodé.      

    “There used to be a lot of excitement over exchanges and area codes,” he said, “but because of technology that’s gone.” He rattled off a bunch of area codes for different parts of New York City: 646, 917, 718, 347, and 929.  I had encountered only three of the five. He pointed out that you can keep an area code regardless of where you make calls from and that for a fee you can get another number tied to the one you use.   

    In the old days, I would get annoyed if I forgot a phone number and had to look it up. Wounded pride. But now that so many people are giving up their land lines, and there are no cellphone listings in the white pages, I’d be happy to have that option.    

    The Verizon spokesman said the company had lost significant revenue from the move away from land lines over the last 10 years. “Historically, families had two or three lines in a home and teenagers had their own,” he said.    

    Well, I’m not about to feel sorry for Verizon. It signed up 882,000 wireless customers in the last fiscal quarter, with profits doubling. And did you know that 2,000 employees marched from the company’s downtown headquarters on Oct. 21, circling Zuccotti Park and supporting Occupy Wall Street? Their beef is with corporate greed and the fact that five Verizon executives combined were paid $258 million over the last four years.     

    Meanwhile, I hope some folks who are technologically brilliant will figure out how to create a directory of cellphone numbers. I’d say their megaprofits would be well earned.

    This is the time of year when many of us who live around here can actually get things done. Just why summer and early fall seem so jam-packed that little things like paying bills, keeping up with repairs around the house, and socializing with friends become so difficult is hard to say. But when the clocks change and the days get dark before 5 p.m., once again we find a chance for dealing with it all. It is a paradox that the shorter the days, the more time we seem to have for what needs to be done.

    This week, for example, my friend Jameson Ellis and I managed to get together for a quick dinner out, my treat, something I had been promising since June. We ended up at Sen in Sag Harbor, eating matched bowls of fish and rice, talking about this and that.

    Just recently, I also got around to putting up some interior window casing that a contractor had inexplicably left undone a year ago. And I placed an order for some copper weather-stripping to seal up some leaky doors, which had been bothering me for nearly as long.

    At dinner, Jameson and I talked about not having enough time and just why it was that the frantic energy of the summer season seemed to sap one’s ability to accomplish goals. We came to no diagnosis, though we agreed on the symptoms.

    One of the positives of this time of year is that I have both time and the interest in getting back into the kitchen. A few years ago Harvey Bennett gave me a pair of scoters he shot in Gardiner’s Bay, and it seemed I had finally cracked the code of cooking these strongly flavored sea ducks.

    Over the course of several meals I fiddled with a wild goose recipe from the “L.L. Bean Fish and Game Cookbook,” changing the cooking time and adding additional liquid to make the duck more palatable and tender. Basically, it is a stripped-down coq au vin, the classic French method for preparing chicken in a satisfying tangle of onions, thickened stock, and red wine. I used a bottle of Wolffer that was left from a summer party we never had. It seemed fitting.   

My eldest daughter, Emily, who is a 10, celebrated her 11-11-11 birthday this weekend with a dinner in D.C. where we were dressed to the nines, slapped high-fives, and thanked our GPS systems that we weren’t at sixes and sevens.

    Champagne flowed, and all of that, which is by way of saying that this resurrected column — of 11 years ago! — will have to do this week:

    When Emily phoned recently to tell me of her first case of writer’s block, I sympathized. “That’s why I went into journalism,” I said. “The stories are already there. You don’t have to make anything up.”

    “Give me a break, Dad. When you write about us, your children, our words are stretched, we’re taken out of context, and sometimes you flat-out lie.”

    “But that’s my creative side, Emily, my column.”

    “No, no, you needn’t speak. Having had a case of writer’s block now, I know why you write about us and twist things and embellish for humor. To understand is to forgive.”

    Her assignment, for a 12-page paper, had been to critique the methodology of research and the assumptions behind it that went into a book about working-class women going back for their graduate equivalency diplomas. “It wasn’t about the content, the women’s stories, which interested me, but about how the researchers framed their research. Was it credible, was it not — that kind of thing. Boring stuff, frankly, but I needed an A to keep my 4-point. That put added pressure on.”

    “All work and no play makes Emily a dull girl,” I said.

    “Exactly. Chicago was having a St. Patrick’s Day parade and DePaul, where I go, was celebrating its N.C.A.A. bid when I was in the library doing research — three eight-hour days. I had all these notes and quotes. I felt very prepared. Then I sat down to write, and nothing came. I had nothing to say, and I usually have quite a lot to say.”

    “The trick,” I said, “is to empty your mind.”

    “But you weren’t there! Seriously, I thought I’d lost my mind. I threw myself onto my pillow and cried, and told Anderson to take all the books away, then I told him to bring them all back. I cut up a handout on oral history research into tiny little triangles. We still haven’t got them out of the rug yet. I had violent dreams about the professor. . . . It was a total panic attack, a nervous breakdown. Then, finally, Anderson suggested I forget about it all, have a glass of wine and some cheddar cheese and crackers, and call in sick the next day and do the paper.”

    “So?”

    “So, we drank the wine . . . chardon