Who is Shear Ozeri and why would I want to follow her on Twitter? The reason I ask is that Twitter thinks I would. Never mind, I can look her up on Google if I really want to know. The question arose when I got the following e-mail: “We’ve missed you on Twitter, Helen S. Rattray.”

    I had only been to Twitter once, so I was flattered. I clicked to find out what else it had to say. After all, Twitter has helped topple repressive governments, hasn’t it? Who was I to ignore it? That’s where Ms. Ozeri came in.

    She was among three “people” Twitter thought I might want to follow, the others being the White House and CNN News. I don’t know why Twitter picked them. I do know that Big Brother Internet has a way of keeping track of and letting marketers know the e-mails we send and Web sites we go to, but I had never met anyone named Shear Ozeri and don’t think I have ever corresponded with the White House or CNN News.

    Apparently, Twitter didn’t like my not having visited it since August — and that once was only because I clicked on a tweet, at the horse show’s Web site, about how the Hampton Classic Horse Show had taken down all its tents and postponed opening day because of Hurricane Irene. I gave myself a user name and put in a password and then tweeted the word (with an exclamation point) “whew!” It was the first time in a decade that The Star was not publishing a newsletter called The Daily Classic for the show, and, given the power failure and all the rain and wind, I was relieved.

    I’m something of a late starter — at least age-wise — at this Internet game, but my skills are improving. Spending a few days last weekend in my husband’s New York apartment, I decided to stop trying to figure out how to get where I wanted to go on the subway by looking at an old, tattered, fold-out map. Going to the computer, instead, I was successful. I used four different trains on three lines, transferring between two of them, and wound up exactly where I wanted to go, feeling a bit smug.

    I have been getting better at choosing the right search words to dig up information and articles (something kids today learn in, I suppose, second grade). To give an example, I had for a long time been in the habit of searching for things I might want to buy by entering their general category (“rain boots” or “vacuum bag”) and then clicking on the companies Google presented.

    I’ve finally realized that you can fine-tune the search by being absolutely specific. If I want another pair of Levi’s petite mid-rise jeans, well, I enter the brand, the size, and the style . . . and, presto, here are several outlets that have what I’m looking for, and without shipping charges.

    Back at my desk in East Hampton, I turned back to the Twitter question. Okay, so I looked up Shear Ozeri. But Google just directed me to . . . Twitter, where I read one of her tweets, a coarse remark about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s taste in women. Meanwhile, this column will be live on the Web by the end of the week; I wonder if Shear Ozeri will friend me on Facebook? Help. I think it’s time for a classic novel and a nice cup of Hu-Kwa.

The annual onslaught of ticks is in full swing around here now, which has prompted talk of drastic measures. Each of the members of our human family on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett has pulled at least one of the horrifying little pests from his or her person recently, and our animals have been playing unwitting hosts as well.

Leo the pig, whose pink skin and white bristles make it easy to spot ticks, seems to enjoy being examined each night. The dogs, with thick, darker pelts, are more difficult to groom and have both been diagnosed this year with various tick-borne diseases. Weasel, a Lab mix, stopped eating anything other than the softest foods, and Lulu, a long-haired mini-mutt, is finishing off the last of her prescription pills after first being given a big dose of antibiotics in a shot at the veterinarian’s office.

My wife, Lisa, has had enough. With good reason, she worries about Lyme and the other illnesses ticks can carry, and is nearly beside herself about the Powassan virus, which is fatal in a 10th of its cases. If it were up to her, she would have the lawn sprayed with something noxious as soon as possible.

I, on the other hand, am loathe to poison our surroundings, especially since we live surrounded by marsh and boggy places and birds and amphibians of all manner. According to its manufacturer, Ortho, one of the leading home-use products, kills more than 150 kinds of insects, including ants, bees, caterpillars, grasshoppers, moths, and, presumably, butterflies, and one of its key components is highly toxic to fish.

No way do I want to put that sort of stuff into our environment. Besides, the dogs are likely to bring ticks into the house from farther afield anyway. For now, I think I have prevailed in arguing for monthly applications of Frontline to the pets and nightly tick checks for the kids.

Next, of course, will come the mosquitoes. But that is a discussion for another day.  

    God forbid that the super-rich should pay at the same rate as the middle class — a terrible thing for investment, never mind the fact that businesses are said to be flush with cash and that a slight hike in the upper rate in the Clinton years produced no slowdown at all.

    The fact is there are many in this country with more than enough and too many with less than enough. You can call it class warfare if you want, though doing so is specious because the war, as it were, was long ago won by the wealthy — down through the ages, in fact. The plebeians, as far as I know, have never run the show for very long. Yes, occasionally a man of the people gets in, only either to be assassinated or suborned by the ruling class or by his own lust for power.

    Someone said the other day that this country had been more amenable to the creation of wealth — and to the attendant disparities — than Europe because of its “no taxation without representation” birthing cry. Well, the rich nowadays are well represented — overrepresented probably — by those who lobby for them, and by the congressmen whose campaigns they influence.

    It’s not as if anyone’s trotting out Dr. Guillotine’s efficient device on the Mall — there’s simply been a call for some fairness. I think the chances of the 20 million poor in this country rising up and throwing off the corporate yoke are within the range of what you could have expected in Friday’s satellite fallout, one or so in two trillion.

    (Note to Kathy: If I was one of those hit, go with it anyway. It will serve as a fitting envoi for an innumerate ironist.)

    Is not fairness one of our founding principles too? As in all for one, one for all? Recently, the vast majority of those surveyed — Republicans and Democrats alike — thought the pie chart in which the upper fifth controlled 84 percent of the wealth (ours) belonged to a third world country, and that Sweden’s, in which the upper fifth controlled 36 percent of the wealth, was America’s.

    Fine then, let’s work toward that end. Stop sticking our military arms into hornet’s nests, stop paying chief executive officers at rates an obscene number of times that of their companies’ workers, stop bashing unions (which produced a middle class in this country that bought the things it made, thus promoting stability), stop worshipping false idols, and stop putting up with all the malarkey.

    When I moved to the East End 30 years ago, I never intended to stay. In my post-high school hippie days, I had left Long Island’s suburbs behind, eventually headed west, and embraced a life different from the one my parents lived. Access to wilderness, an alternative culture, and a rural setting were key. But after two years in Washington State, following one in Maine, I got sick and somehow it made sense to return.

    I bypassed New York City and the heart of its ’burbs and came straight out here, where the well-documented wiles of this area — the beaches, the light, the subtle turn of nature all around us through the seasons — worked their charms.

    For a long time, I was a tenacious malcontent. And then I realized this place had what I needed. Quiet, with whales and birds. Proximity to the city. And now, three decades on, I realize that what holds me here most strongly is the web of our community.

    For me, that includes the families of dozens of children I once taught, as well as the kids themselves, now grown up — a few are teachers themselves. It’s my colleagues at numerous jobs, and my family of friends from the Talkhouse, where once it was my generation that held court. It’s my neighbors in Springs, and the other close friends with whom I’ve shared decades of birthdays and a trail of everyday and annual occasions.

    It’s the people I don’t really know, too — familiar faces that I’ve shared geography and routine with all these years, unknown to me only, perhaps, by chance or one degree of separation. Sometimes it’s the continuity, not closeness, that matters.

    As someone who writes obituaries and covers events in our town as news, I sometimes have to protect myself against emotional involvement in losses or dramas in which I’m not personally involved. But on some level, everyone’s losses are my own — when a neighbor loses her mother, when the friendly woman you talked to at the bank is suddenly gone. The sudden absence of that person you always saw walking through town.

    A community’s heart expands and contracts according to the people within it, and the loss of one member ripples throughout the whole community.

    Clearly Katherine Myers Penati, whose funeral Mass was on Monday, was a hub. I knew Katherine only slightly; I was not part of her large circle of close friends. But we were connected through her son Marcus, a young man who was a second-grade student in my class, through her sister, Marti, and through her parents, whom I got to know more than 20 years ago in Amagansett. And every time I ran into Katherine somewhere over the years, we had a warm exchange. After her death, so many people I know were bereft.

    I hate to say it, but some of the times over the past years when I have most strongly felt a sense of our community have been in a room at Yardley and Pino, when we have gathered for the funerals of lost members of the tribe. Along with sadness, we — and I know I don’t speak only for myself here — also felt a renewed sense of love for one another, and at those times lost any hesitancy about expressing it.

    After one too many wakes, two friends and I resolved that we should systematically hold “anti-wakes” — a sort of extra-special un-birthday-type celebration for the living friends we love, because it was such a shame that it was too late for those who had died to hear how special they were to all of us.

    As Joan Armatrading sings, “Obituary columns / are filled with love.” What a difference it would make, we thought, if we all knew, from day to day, how others held us in their hearts.

    Those celebrations never happened, but, especially as we get older and our years together build, my friends and I are less reluctant about showing our sentiments for each other. Nonetheless, it is often just too much, without an extreme reason, to wear our hearts constantly on our sleeves.

    But when someone is in need, the people of East Hampton mobilize to help and show their love. Katherine, when diagnosed several years ago with a seriously threatening cancer, inspired such action. If something should happen to me, I pray that I too might be held tight in our community’s hands.

    I am a single woman, no children, on my own. Morbid as it may seem, I sometimes imagine what would happen after my demise. I can only hope that my lifetime, a whole adult life here, might have made a mark and that a roomful of people might gather at the funeral home, at least. For me, that would be evidence of a life well lived — one that touched others, a wide circle of others, in a variety of ways, however peripherally.

    In recent years, economic pressures and the job market here have got me thinking that I must consider moving elsewhere. Besides my love of so much about East Hampton, the thing I’m most reluctant to forfeit is our community.

    As a new resident somewhere else, I would never have the standing, or the love, that I hope I might have earned after 30 years here. And this community knows how to pour it on.

—

    Joanne Pilgrim is a deputy editor at The Star.

    I have long looked at Judaism as a promise I try not to break. It is a personal matter, my religion, and an evolving one at that. I didn’t even know I was Jewish for the first seven years of my life. Our family celebrated Christmas, and every year when Channel 5 aired “The Little Drummer Boy” I would tie bongo drums around my waist, wrap the heads of two Tootsie Roll Pops in Kleenex (to simulate lambskin), and solemnly parade through the apartment mimicking the “parum pum pum pum” of this birth-of-Christ early claymation classic. When I would get to the “I have no gift to bring, parum pum pum pum, that’s fit to give the king” line, no one ever offered a dissenting viewpoint on the king concept, or mentioned that, as Jews, we didn’t actually believe we had one.

    Even my first school, the Church of the Heavenly Rest, belied any indication that I wasn’t Christian. I wore a plaid jumper-type school uniform topped with a blue blazer bearing an elaborate brocade crucifix under the school’s moniker. I attended chapel daily, thoroughly enjoying sermons, organ music, dim lighting, dank smells, and stained glass. I behaved with such solemn sincerity that my teachers routinely chose me for candle-carrying honors during services. If my mother, attending the holiday play, heard my impeccable Latin pronunciation during my solo of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” (“Venite adoremus, venite adoremus, venite adoremus, Do-o-minum!”), it didn’t prompt her to mention my Judaism.

    It was mentioned when I was 8. We were in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman and I was protesting trying on a string of way-too-frilly dresses. My mother, annoyed and exasperated, explained that I could not go “like a vagabond” to my brother’s bar mitzvah. “My brother’s bar whatzvah?” I said loudly. “We’re Jewish,” my mother said in a hushed tone to signify it was nothing I should continue to question in this semipublic setting.

    My parents’ Judaism existed in a hushed tone. My somewhat blond-haired, entirely green-eyed family passed through the corridors of our upscale lives without anyone assuming we were Jewish. And my parents liked it like that. What I took in as a child as confusing, I understood as a teen to be anti-Semitic. Somewhere in college I promised myself I would correct my parents’ transgression and not hide who I was. I would even embrace it, since I continued to have an affinity toward religion and its general traditions and trappings.

    The execution of that promise I made to myself is consistently imperfect. For instance, on my way to joining the Hillel club at college, I lost interest because the club’s outreach to “any Jewish students who . . .” seemed exclusionary. Also, during college I continued to date my high school boyfriend, Hank, who came from a large, religious, Catholic family. When we would spend weekends at his family’s Connecticut compound, there would always be a priest in residence as well. Mass would be conducted Saturday evening before dinner courtesy of Father Tim or Father Mike. I would assist these clerical family friends prepare what would become “the host” during communion by cutting up into small squares the same Wonder Bread Hank and I would toast for our beloved B.L.T. sandwiches.

    I attended these services in the living room and happily participated, from the “Our Father” opener to the “Peace be with you” closer. I didn’t do communion. Once that Wonder Bread had metamorphosed through the miracle of transubstantiation, I opted out. I also didn’t make the sign of the cross. And, after I read in a Bernard Malamud story that Jews don’t kneel (who knew?), I stopped kneeling.

    I was keeping my promise to myself, but I was also constantly reminding the small group I was otherwise a part of that I was an outsider. I fantasized that my efforts went unnoticed, that my Judaism was merely a quiet presence, like the wallpaper set back 15 feet behind the sofas. I desperately wanted not to make a statement, yet I was making a huge one. Ten people would rise for communion and I did not. Ten people would kneel and I remained sitting. Was this what my parents were trying to avoid?

    After college I got a job in advertising, and work immediately took over my life. I worked, without question or complaint, early mornings, every night, and many weekends. I worked on my birthday, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving. I never worked on Yom Kippur though. Even the Yom Kippur before the Seiko watch pitch, when it was “crucial” that I be there. I didn’t break my promise — especially because not breaking it seemed reasonable.

    Yom Kippur was called the Day of Atonement. I was not supposed to work or spend money or see a movie or do anything else I would normally do. I also wasn’t supposed to eat from sundown the night before to sundown that day. No commerce, fun, or food. It was intense and demanding and bordered on extremist in concept — but it was one day a year. During Ramadan, Muslims fast all day long for an entire month. Christians of all denominations seek forgiveness for their sins weekly. But Judaism offered a way to wrap up piety and contrition into 24 hours. I could do this. I was hungry, but my promise was intact.

    Christmas was hard for me to give up, and it didn’t happen overnight. The first year that I didn’t buy and decorate a tree, I instead strung lights on an incredible 25-foot spruce that grew in the center of my backyard. A close friend, seeing my outdoor illumination, intuitively sensed my internal struggle and gave me a menorah.

    When my son was born, I knew it was a moment to embrace and begin traditions that would keep my promise to myself, by making one to him. I joined a local temple, which helped me with the structure of holidays and added a sense of fun and community to the December season. I liked the simplicity and continuity of Hanukkah’s eight-night candle lighting. Phonetic Hebrew was as simple to recite, I found, as phonetic Latin had been. My son would grow up spinning dreidels instead of drumming out “parum pum pum pums.” My promise was being kept. With one small exception.

    I was reluctant to deny my progeny the myth of Santa. I have, frankly, always liked this world-famous holiday lie. Its absolutely innocent and temporary suspension of truth in order to foster a universal sense of belief for no practical reason whatsoever appeals to me. When I tried to imagine not partaking of that suspension of truth, it simply smacked of segregation. I imagined myself explaining, “That big jovial guy in the red suit who keeps popping up and offering candy canes and promising presents? Oh, he’s for other kids, but not for you.”

    I struggled hard with it. And lost. When my son was 4, I asked a really lovely neighbor of mine if he’d come into my house, late at night, wearing a Santa suit, and make just enough noise rustling around and leaving presents to awake my son. I asked him to do it on the first night of Hanukkah. The plan worked, and my wide-eyed son ran to the door of his bedroom to watch that red-suited mensch of a neighbor wish my son a “Ho, Ho, Happy Hanukkah!” before departing. It was sweet and memorable, but I am not proud of this moment. And of course that night I broke my promise.

    It is hard to keep a promise one makes to oneself. The difference between that and making a promise to someone else is the difference between a cavity and weight gain — weight gain the whole world can notice; a cavity is an entirely personal and internal matter.

    Last Yom Kippur, for the first time in many years, I didn’t fast. A week before, during Rosh Hashana — the Jewish New Year — I had spent a few hours in temple out of tradition and obligation and found that the former didn’t balance out the latter. This is the eternal struggle of my promise. Some years it’s easy, some years it’s not.

    At the end of Rosh Hashana, there’s a tradition of throwing bread into the water. Years ago, during the early manifestation of my promise, I mentally rewrote the reason one does this. In reality, the bread is supposed to be symbolic of sins from the past year, which are then cast off. For me, the act embodies my embrace of fresh starts. I like that the Jewish New Year begins when the weather shifts from hot to crisp, the leaves hint of change, and the school year commences. It makes perfect sense to begin again, each year, during this time.

    Sins are a harder concept for me. I err, without fail, every single year, all year long, in myriad ways, from artificially lighting a huge outdoor tree to reinventing Santa Claus to imagining myself pious because I don’t eat for a day.  But sins? I don’t know . . . I instead cast off various debris from my past year — an altercation with another human, a mistake in business where I let someone down, or a family eruption in which emotional loss resulted. This is what my bread symbolizes to me, as I cast it into the erratic ocean at Main Beach in East Hampton.

    The resolve to try to learn from my history and do it better each year is largely how I interpret my religion. It has become a practice, and remains a promise. And when I break it, I try to forgive myself and move on.

____

    Jennifer Brooke is a writer and filmmaker who lives in Sag Harbor.

    With the clothes dryer failing to turn on, the kitchen wall phone delivering heavy static, and then the furnace shooting a stream of water onto the cellar floor, it was one hell of a weekend.

    I wasn’t complaining, exactly. Bad things come in threes, don’t they? So the siege was over, right?

    Following the change in the weather, on Sunday, I had been headed to the basement to put away two electric fans when I saw the flood. I put on my old yellow rubber boating boots, ventured down, and saw water pouring out of what I assumed was an overflow pipe. Why was it doing that? I got a bucket under the pipe, but at the rate it was filling, I figured it would need to be emptied every 10 or 15 minutes. Plumbing emergency!

    It wasn’t so bad with the dryer. I had pushed the start button to no avail several times on Saturday, and then given up hope. But by the next morning, the confounded thing seemed to have fixed itself. Our guess was that the dial had gotten out of sync in some way, but had been moved back in place when, on the umpteenth try, I turned it around. That repair was removed from the emergency list.

    We pretty much knew what was wrong with the phone: You could look out a kitchen window and see the old, cracked wires. But at least the other phones in the house were working just fine.

    In the basement, though, the water poured out of the furnace while we waited for the plumber to call back. By 6 on Sunday evening, when he did, the stream had become a trickle and was on its way to stopping. We agreed after hearing the plumber’s quick diagnosis that he could wait till the next day to come over.

    He arrived two days later, followed in short order by the telephone man.

    After fixing the furnace by replacing two valves, the plumber, much to my chagrin, delivered the next bad news: If he were I he would get a new fuel tank put in as soon as possible, as well as a new hot water heater.

    “It could go at any time,” he said, sounding grave.

    The silver lining, such as it was, was that the flue wasn’t dirty, so at least I didn’t have to call a chimney sweep.

    It’s an old house, to be sure, but the furnace and the dryer and the telephone are all relatively new. Superstition notwithstanding, I couldn’t help worrying about what could go wrong next, and decided to put up three new smoke and fire alarms, to replace the old ones that had died.

    Now, maybe, we can face the equinox with equanimity.

    Walking into the Seafood Shop in Wainscott, for a moderately obsessed recreational fisherman like me, brings to mind the fans of the New Orleans Saints in the bad old days, when the team stank so much people in the stands took to wearing paper bags over their heads to avoid embarrassment.

    Not that there is anything wrong with the Seafood Shop. On the contrary, it is high on my go-to list. It’s just that for all the thinking and talking about fishing and messing with gear I do, I should be able to put a few fillets on the table without suffering the ignominy of paying for them.

    I have a good excuse or two, at least this year. First off, it is difficult with a toddler in the house and two girls at different campuses of the Ross School to make time to go fishing. The second is that my boat has been out of the water since the middle of August, first for engine repairs, then because of Hurricane Irene, and then for more repairs. I haven’t seen the bill yet from my friends at Gone Fishing Marina. I assume they are keeping it from me for my own good.

    Last I heard, the yard had sent the outboard’s fuel injectors out to be rebuilt. Once they get returned to the yard, the boat will go back in the water. With any luck, the weather will cooperate, and I will be able to enjoy a minimum couple of days into October and beyond on the water.

    Good intentions and dreams of glory lead me to keep the boat operational deep into the fall. There is the last of the false albacore run to be chased, bass to target, herring some years. One of these days, too, I am going to figure out the blackfish game. But probably not this year. The way things are, Lisa and I are basically running two parallel households. One parent deals with the 18-month-old, the other with the girls, ages 7 and 10. Given that each of us has a full-time job, there’s little time for boating, chores, paying bills, or much else. A quick predawn run to the ocean beach with a surfcasting rod remains do-able, though I have to be back by 6:45 to help get everyone up and make breakfast.

    Like it or not, if I want seafood for dinner, I have to go shopping. And the paper bag over my head? I can use it to carry home what I buy.

After having drunk deep of some amazingly smooth White Lightning corn liquor that my wife’s cousin, who was visiting us for a few days last week, had brought along from Virginia, I managed after a while on the first night to attain to such a level of incoherence that he, suddenly fixing me with a quizzical gaze, asked what exactly my point was.

    “. . . Whaaa?”

    “What’s your point? What are you trying to say?”

    “Ahhh . . . I . . . Uhh. . . .” (What a question to pose, I thought, to one who has delivered himself so cogently of more than 2,300 points in columns written for this newspaper over the years. The nerve.)

    But I had to confess he had caught me out. I had been exposed for the bullshitter I was. As I continued to stammer, he hugged me and said it was all right, and I, chastened, said that it was probably time to go to bed.

    Earlier that evening, we had talked of Seneca, Socrates, Aristotle, of the need to practice the virtues you admired, and of the importance of a good death, subjects that interested both of us, but as I increasingly cloaked myself in self-regard — thus distancing myself from him — he became increasingly put off.

    I was glad that he had called me to account. Too few, aside from Mary, have over the years. It reminded me of the letter to the editor the Southerner who worked here briefly wrote after I’d written a sneering column on the South whose assumptions he found offensive.

    Two days later, unmasked, yet not wholly reconstructed, I told my wife’s cousin, whose 30th high school reunion is nearing, that before he and his wife left for a wedding in Rhode Island he might like to read something I’d written for my college’s 40th reunion book. I couldn’t find it when I went to look, though I told him it probably represented my apotheosis as a Pollyanna.

    “A classmate,” I said, “took quite the opposite tack. He wrote of suffering, about caring for his mother, who died of Alzheimer’s, about his father’s death, his best friend’s. . . . Our essays made an interesting pair.”

* * *

    “Tom [now that I’ve found the book among the ones I have in the office], I talked about how lucky I’d been, in life, in love. . . . The other guy said that ‘the world’s an abattoir, a fucking mess,’ and that all we have is each other.”

    It’s something I should remember the next time I, the bullshitter, begin to don my cloak of self-regard.

    My daughter, Katie, went back to school on Aug. 30, her senior year at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Speaking to some of her high school friends’ parents the other day, we cannot believe how fast the college years flew by. It seems like they just graduated from East Hampton High School! Where did the time go?  

    After returning from her semester abroad in South Africa on June 20, she worked for Stacy Myers and the Cornell Cooperative Extension at the Marine Museum camp for the summer. Most of her friends have either left the South Fork and are living in California or Florida, or are living in the city and commuting out east on the weekends, so we got to spend a good bit of time together this summer, during the week, when she wasn’t giving swimming lessons and baby-sitting at night for the Welshes or the Lindenbaums in Montauk. 

    Our usual routine would be to walk over to Navy Road after dinner with the dog and walk the beach. She would always bring her camera, and she got some great sunset photos, many of which she posted on Facebook. We had a wonderful mother-daughter night with her good friend Shannon, Shannon’s sister Devon, and their mother, Joanne. We went to Cittanuova for dinner and then to the movies to see “The Help.”

    We also had many family dinners at my brother’s house with walks around his neighborhood after dinner. My brother was watching his neighbor’s black Lab, Nate, while his neighbor Andy and his fiancée, Flo, were in France, preparing to get married. My brother was leaving to go to France for the wedding when Nate started to fail. He spent a few days at the vet, where they rehydrated him and made him comfortable enough to come home. 

    Kate volunteered to stay at my brother’s house with Nate and Reece, my brother’s Chesapeake Bay retriever. She would take them for a walk before she went to work, someone came at lunch to let them out, and she got back to them in the afternoon.

    We were taking the dogs for a walk one night and decided to see if Nate could make it down to the beach, his favorite spot in Montauk. He loved to swim in the ocean and fetch one of those plastic bumpers. He made it down to the beach and into the water and had some sticks in his mouth, very happy to be there.

    I asked Kate to go home and get her camera to take some photos of Nate on the beach to send to Andy and Flo in France to ease their minds over his sudden decline in health. She did and they got them and felt much better about him, seeing him on the beach.

    We walked there again the next night, but the following day Nate was weaker and hardly ate a thing. Kate brought the dogs over to our house and they played in the pond. It was easy for Nate as he didn’t have too far to go, and he swam in the calm pond water, retrieving his bumper. I made some chicken livers for him and shared some chicken from Herb’s Market.

    Kate kept in touch with the vet and took Nate in when he stopped eating. They put him to sleep the next day. We were all so sad. He was 12 years old. He’d had a wonderful life and wagged his tail in appreciation right up until the end.

    Katie did a great job of taking care of him, and Andy and Flo were so grateful for all that she did in keeping him comfortable. A big grown-up call for her.

    I guess it’s time for “the bird to fly the coop.” She’s applying for a Fulbright scholarship and is busy with classes, rugby, and her baby-sitting duties in Fairfield.

    I checked my Facebook account this morning before work and she’s posted sunrise and sunset photos from her beach house in Fairfield. Have a great senior year, Katie B. We’ll be up soon to see you play rugby. Enjoy every moment, and don’t forget to study!

-

    Jane Bimson is an advertising sales representative at The Star.

    This year, with both of my boys now at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, one in kindergarten and one in the second grade, the back-to-school feeling I get every year — part of the meta schedule I carry around from my childhood, teen, and college years — is mixed with the sense of a milestone gained. Both kids in full days at the big kids’ school! Yippee!

    Getting ready was sort of fun. It was fun to go shopping with the younger one for a new red backpack. It was fun to go shopping with the older one for some new school pants. It was even sort of fun, in a checking things off the list, taking care of business way, to get the boys new lunch boxes. What I do not expect to be fun — what I am steeling myself for — is the actual lunch packing.

    I am a non-cook, and many aspects of food preparation give me anxiety and fears of failure. One of those things I dread is lunch. Not my lunch (crackers). Their lunch. Their lunch, which must be packed. The whole mix of hunger, pickiness, pitfalls, and plastic containers churns around in my anxious, fearful non-cook world.

    Here’s how it works: I am afraid that my children will not eat the lunches I pack, that they will be hungry, that they will then be miserable and misbehaving at school, and that it will all be my fault because I don’t know how to offer the right food, food they will actually eat, to fuel them. That’s it in a nutshell, only no nuts in the lunch boxes because there are children with serious nut allergies in each of my kids’ classes.

    My thoughts reach back to my own experience with lunch at J.M.M.E.S., which I also attended. Since I have a memory of the milk table, where you could buy a little container of (Schwenck’s Dairy?) milk for 10 cents, and also a memory of the worn red plastic lunch tokens with edges in a petal pattern like stylized flowers, I know I must have sometimes bought my lunch.

    But I also know that sometimes my mom packed it. For the record, I will say here that my mom is a nifty cook, not at all uneasy with food or bad with food, practical but also enthusiastic in the kitchen. Plus, she makes the very best black bean soup! Still, I wonder if my mom might have once had a non-cook streak, now totally smudged out by years of her own good cooking. I wonder this because as a single working mom in the generally haphazard 1970s, her lunch-packing record was . . . uneven.

    I remember the sweet cozy triumph of the special notes in my lunch bag from the Lunch Fairy, a protectress, a magical presence in my corner of the J.M.M.E.S. lunchroom, then still tripling as the gym and auditorium, though now we have a beautiful cafeteria. Wisely, my mother sent her love with me to school in a tangible form, knowing I would take comfort in that. And look, I remember. It worked!

    Yet I also remember the Soggy Unwrapped Cream Cheese & Jelly Sandwich Incident. That was the time when I discovered the sandwich — cream cheese and jelly on an untoasted English muffin — huddled at the bottom of my lunch bag and fled the lunchroom in grossed-out distress. On my way out (where was I going?), the sandwich, heavy from the weight of its unwrapped sogginess, fell out the bottom of my sodden brown paper lunch bag and onto the floor, mortifying me completely.

    Recently, I had a full-out laugh-a-rama with my mom and my kids about the incident, during which I regaled the boys with all the incredible details. They couldn’t believe that the jelly was totally soaked through the bread. Gross. No way! They couldn’t believe that the sandwich was unwrapped. Unwrapped? No way! They couldn’t believe that the sandwich was the only thing in the lunch bag. That was it? No way! Well, that’s how I remember it.

    Later, it struck me that at this point in my life, as a mother and lunch packer, I can totally understand how circumstances might have lined up to place that poor unfortunate lone cream cheese and jelly sandwich in my lunch bag that day, creating the legendary lunch incident that would be remembered and rehashed for years to come. A lot goes into the lunch-packing racket. Communication, time, supplies, skill, the will to pack. It’s not easy to pull it off day after day after day.

    As a domesticated non-cook, I really feel how risky this lunch-packing thing can be. I might not put enough food in the box; I might put in embarrassing things, or things that get yucky when they’ve been sitting in a lunch box, only I don’t know that. I might think the salami and raisin bread sandwich is okay, when actually it is not okay. I might think the slightly overripe banana is fine, when actually it is an obvious sign of my lack of good judgment in all food-related matters. I might be running late, neglect to cut the crusts off the bad sandwich, and then fail to master the mechanics of proper wrapping procedure on top of it all. Every packed lunch box could be a lunch incident waiting to happen. Do I dare pack my children’s lunches? Who knows what will scar them?

    Fear and anxiety central! It is almost certain that my children will remember that I never was much of a cook, but will they emerge unscathed? With the help of my friend Courtney Garneau, a mother of three and an excellent cook who can definitely cope with the whole food thing, I have come up with this lunch-packing ideal: The Non-Cook No Trash Lunch.

    I am bravely attempting! The “no trash” part is optimism reflecting the hope that my boys will not toss their lunches, getting rid of the evidence in abject disgust. The “non-cook” part is to remind myself that you don’t have to be a great cook or a food person to pack a respectable lunch. Do you? Is packing lunch cooking?

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    Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” Her articles about being a non-cook have appeared in Edible East End, and you can visit her online at pickygrouchynon-cook.com.