Tuesday’s lunch was delayed by a stop at Egypt Beach, where I tried a little surfcasting. October’s early days are among the most enjoyable here, with their easy pace. The office phones ring far less often, the urgent calls of public relations people reduced to a trickle.

    With the letters to the editor checked for grammatical consistency and put in some semblance of coherent order, it seemed okay to extend my usual run for food a little. The bass had not yet begun their run along the ocean beach, this I knew, but giving them a try just in case seemed a reasonable excuse.

    It’s hard to describe, but fellow anglers know this: Sometimes the water just doesn’t look “fishy.” This was one of those times, but I cast awhile anyway — more just for the doing of it than in the expectation of catching anything.

    The ocean is notably warm for the beginning of fall. This, a surfcaster friend tells me, is the reason there are no fish to be found, except at Montauk. Few birds passed overhead, and few sandpipers or plovers could be seen picking for a meal on the sloping foreshore.

    It was, now that I think about it, my second trip to the beach of the day. My wife had an early class to teach, so I had our toddler, Ellis, and some time to kill before work. We stopped first at Main Beach, then went to Wiborg’s. There, a small knot of people and dogs stood off to the west, the dogs digging and barking, the people chatting.

    Ellis “asked” to put on his rain boots, the ones with the smiley faces on them. We walked hand in hand down to the wrack line, where he picked up sticks and poked at the tangles of eelgrass.

    As I recalled, at his age each of the children began to have an interest in throwing things. Ellis, in his turn, found each of us a proper piece of driftwood and beckoned me to follow him toward the water. I did. We threw our sticks in several times until a bit of current took them away.

    The wide ocean beach is a wonderland for a child. For an adult, too, those of us able to steal a few minutes to enjoy it.   

    By the time I got home from the Hamptons Marathon I felt as if I’d run one. Standing for a long time trying to find recognizable faces from whom to cajole quotes in a crowd of 2,000 can make you feel like you’ve hit the wall.

    My time was four hours and change. Coffee stops at John Vassilaros’s stand in the parking lot got me through it.

    He and I talked a bit about tennis and about how a fellow player with two knee replacements — as is the case with me — had been persuaded to get a new shoulder too. That gave me an idea. We should have an all-prosthetic tournament! Scott Rubenstein once phoned to see if I’d be interested in being the fourth in just such a grouping, but I called back too late, they’d already found somebody. I forgot to ask if he was whole or modified.

    The marathon, half-marathon, and 5K weren’t the only sporting things going on that day. There were a whole bunch of other contests scheduled as part of the high school’s homecoming, not to mention the rugby team’s fall debut here — too much excitement (or ennui, as the case may be) for a septuagenarian who’d been told recently by his mother-in-law that he was stooping again.

    She was right. I had been feeling as if a weight were pressing down. I couldn’t wait, frankly, for Carolyn Giacalone’s men’s stretch class at the Y to begin again in mid-September so that I could resume my fight against gravity.

    I not only did so through that hour and a half of stretching, I did so on the tennis court when I turned to my partner and asked him if he’d heard the one about the shrinking man.

    This guy, I said, goes to a doctor and tells him he’s shrinking. “You’re shrinking?” says the doctor.

    “Yes,” says the man.

    “Well, you’ll just have to be a little patient.”

    (I owe that one, by the way, to Mary.)

    The only other joke I know that’s worth telling is the one about the Dalai Lama and the hot dog vendor, but you’ve probably heard that.

    Thinking about Buddhists reminds me of the laughing boat that was supposed to sail all over the world promoting laughter. Perhaps it’s been torpedoed or hit a mine. I don’t know, I haven’t heard about it lately. It sounded like a good idea.

    Certainly we need more of that kind of thing. Everyone knows laughter’s good for you, releasing the endorphins that running long distances releases, but in much less time (and without running the risk of hyperthermia) so that you can do other things. Like take a nap.

    Women hikers and campers are as common as men these days, or so it seems, but 100 years ago? My grandmother-in-law was one, a concept I could not imagine until I saw the evidence that didn’t fit my stereotype of Edith Banister Cordes — until someone dropped the notion in my lap. Ede, as she was known by her friends at the time, was the older sister of Jud Banister, the East Hampton Village mayor from 1936 to 1954.

    That someone was Everett T. Rattray and the vehicle was his book “The South Fork: The Land and the People of Eastern Long Island,” the paperback version of 1989. One of many sources for our research on Banister, my wife, Carol’s, great-uncle, it carried a number of stories by Everett’s maternal grandmother, Florence Huntting Edwards. He dedicated the book to her for passing on the urge to story-tell. The stories he tells are wonderful and those about his grandmother contain the connective tissue to Carol’s family, as Ede first married Jeremiah Miller Huntting, Florence’s cousin.

    When the “Oh my God” passage hit me, Florence’s character had been well set. She had a personality that Everett strongly admired, with good reason. He was relating an encounter with a new resident of the Hampton Waters subdivision near Springy Banks, an area historically important to the native Indians. He told about childhood family picnics on what he and many assumed was public land. He concluded by relating, “My grandmother had camped there with her friends in the early 1900s . . . a group of women in their late twenties with children already entering their teens, smoking cigarettes and digging clams and singing around fires in an attempt to regain the girlhoods abruptly ended when they had married a decade or so earlier at sixteen and seventeen.” As soon as I finished the sentence I knew I had seen pictures of these women.

    Eleven photos of women camping, including annotations identifying Ede in most, were in Carol’s family documents. The young lady who went on to become principal of the Hamilton School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., who lived and loved the city life, was smiling and enjoying the company of her female companions on the west shore of Three Mile Harbor in the early 1900s. Carol never knew her as anything other than a city-loving lady who retained a great fondness for East Hampton, and yet she was in every camping photo.

    Tents with taut guy ropes draped with swimming suits say, “This is camping.” So does cooking gear, a big wooden picnic table under a large shade tree overflowing with cups, plates, glasses, and, oh my, that looks like a wine flask, and a pie with just two slices left. Some pictures with husbands and bench swings set up reveal a little help from their friends. But photos of women in below-the-knee bathing suits in ankle-deep water, or climbing aboard for a boat ride, or doing a cheerleader pose for the camera with the harbor in the background, these reveal a camaraderie built from the bonds of camping.

    A small dog with a black left eye patch belonged to one camper but loved them all. Full-length dresses, ties and hats, and really big hats were the dress code of the day if the women weren’t swimming or clamming. Six women — rarely a seventh or eighth, and sometimes one or two men — were in most photos. A studio picture taken at another time has eight camping club members smiling and posing for the photographer. Who were these women? We know Ede was one, Florence Edwards another, but the rest remain a mystery.

    Ede, the only married teacher, began her final year at the Union School on Newtown Lane in September 1909, giving her time and attention, once again, to the sixth grade. She assigned grades to 42 pupils during the February 1910 reporting period. Students included Bennetts, Fields, Fithians, Goulds, Hunttings, Hedges, Kings, Lesters, Mulfords, Parsons, and Pharaohs among the longtime East Hampton families, and many newer but established names like Collum, Grimshaw, Loris, and Ross, names that played important roles in East Hampton’s history.

    As the school year ended, the June 1910 federal census found Ede, her daughter, Beryle Huntting, and the entire Banister clan boarding at the Christian Schenck house on the corner of Main Street and Newtown Lane. The family included Jud, his wife, Harriet, his sister Stella, brother, Howard, mother, Lucy, and grandmother Wealthy Burrows. The 1910-11 East Hampton-Southampton Register’s September 1910 survey listed Jerry Huntting, Ede’s husband and Beryle’s father, as a clerk in New York City, no longer an East Hampton resident. By summer’s end, probably sooner, Ede had no husband and Beryle no father at home.

    “The camping club, consisting of seven young women of East Hampton, returned yesterday from its annual week’s outing at Springy Banks. The ladies report that they enjoyed themselves immensely, crabbing, fishing, boating, and entertaining picnic parties of friends, and all have acquired a fine coat of tan and enormous appetites.” The Star’s final August 1910 edition closed the loop on Everett’s story, the 11 family pictures adding flesh to the paper’s description and spirit to the camping trip’s worth to the young women at that time in their lives.

    A failed marriage, a very large family in one house, a new teaching job in New Jersey come fall, and leaving her only child and special friends behind was the emotional milieu Ede carried into her final trip with the camping club. A summer’s end trip with friends provided the ingredients to put a smile on Ede’s face in those photos. Everett’s reminiscence provided the context for the other women in the camping club images. Precious images to our family.

--

    Steve Rideout comes to East Hampton a couple of times every off-season to research family history. He lives in Shutesbury, Mass.

    We’ve all heard of, and possibly heaped scorn upon, stage mothers who push their children into the theater or onto the TV screen. Of course, more recently, stage fathers have been in the news, too, pushing daughters onto the pop charts and tennis courts.  

    The tendency may be hard to control. Parents want to, and should, encourage their kids to do well, but it is sometimes difficult to separate children’s own interests and talents from what their parents wish them to be. Trying to get your children to fulfill your own dreams is an obvious mistake.

    I am pretty sure I wasn’t a stage mother. In fact, I may have erred by neglecting to praise my kids enough — by being engaged with my professional life at their expense. Be that as it may, this is all moot now that I’m a grandmother. Yes. Yes. I plan to be a stage grandmother.

    On Columbus Day, a day off from school, my Amagansett granddaughters, pursuing their own interests, filled me with delight. One of them is learning to play the viola, and she brought it along when they came over for the afternoon. Did she catch on to how thrilled I was while listening to her practice “Jingle Bell Rock”? The other showed off her two-handed prowess at the piano — after only one lesson. They both love to sing. And one, I must admit (if I’m going to be a stage grandmother I might as well go all the way) is quite magical when she dances.

    I sometimes carry on about not having pursued music as a career. There was even a time, in the 1970s, when I entertained the idea of going back to school for a master’s degree in music. Instead, I took voice lessons and courses here and there in theory.

    At a recent piano recital sponsored by Music for Montauk at the Montauk Library, however, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  (Fortunately, for me and everyone else, I did neither.)

    Konstantin Soukhovetski, a Pianofest alumnus, is, at the age of 30, an astounding pianist. His pyrotechnics in Ravel’s “La Valse,” for example, won a deserved ovation. He also is a graceful interpreter of quieter pieces. One of them, Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor, struck an emotional chord (if you’ll pardon the pun). My husband couldn’t believe I had once been able to play it, let alone at about 12 or 13. I know how young I was because I stopped studying the piano at 14 when more effort and time would have been required to move ahead. I still wish someone had convinced me that I would eventually find the piano more important than hanging around listening to Frank Sinatra with my girlfriends.

    No one has to push either granddaughter toward music now. They are excited about what they are learning.  And it sounds good. Living vicariously, I can’t wait to watch and listen as the beat goes on.

    The miracle that is September after Labor Day is upon us, and what might have seemed impossible a few weeks ago is now within the realm of possibility.

    A week ago Friday, I had Ellis, our nearly 20-month-old, in the truck, going along on North Main Street in East Hampton. Noticing that the farmers market in the lot next to Nick and Toni’s was open and that there was a parking spot directly across the street, I pulled over.

    Had this been August, not only would there have been no parking space but the thought of carrying our brawny toddler into a crowded market would have been unappealing. As it was September and a gloriously crisp day, and with drivers seemingly magnanimous about jaywalkers, Ellis and I made it across two lanes of traffic unscathed.

    I don’t know how the morning went for the vendors, but for Ellis and me, the relative absence of other shoppers was a pleasure. I was comfortable letting him down to wander a little while I chatted with several people I knew. Having spotted a stand with cartons of fat, bright-yellow-and-red peaches, Ellis led me by the hand clear to the other end of the rows of stands and pointed out ones he wanted.

    The ease with which you can get through the day at summer’s end, I think, helps social interactions, too. At Bucket’s Deli one lunchtime this week, I fell into conversation with someone who in July might have been too harried to talk. The idea of visiting friends in Sag Harbor no longer fills me with dread about driving over there.

    I notice more tables set up in front of private houses selling this and that. I stopped at one on Middle Highway in East Hampton the other day and, for $10, bought two jars of preserves — blueberry and blackberry — which will help make up for the fact that I didn’t manage to put up any of my own this season.

    All of this can be symbolized by the fact that I can again make a left turn out of The Star office driveway. This simple act opens up a world of possibility. I might just stop by yet another farm stand on my way home.  

    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?

____

    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.

    There is a fellow who often has his hand out for a ride from Damark’s to the village on Thursday morning at the time I go to work, and perhaps he’s begun dreading the sight of me pulling over to give him a lift, for it gives me a chance to practice my Spanish.

    “Ah! Ahora puedo practicar mi espanol!” I said in opening the passenger side door for him this morning.

    He asked me my name and I asked him his, though it took a while for him to get his across. When he said ‘Roberto,’ I said, cheerily, “No puedo oir!” And when he then printed the letters on my sun-block tube, I said, “No puedo ver. . . . No puedo manejar tampoco!”

    I hope he took that as the joke it was meant to be. I’ve been cautioned in Spanish class not to play too fast and loose with the language, that in doing so I may risk putting my foot in my mouth. Of course I run the same risk in English. But I sweet potato what I sweet potato, as a Japanese character transplanted to California in a T. Coraghessan Boyle novel once said. I yam what I yam.

    At any rate, I told Roberto that I thought it was a fair exchange (intercambio) — to wit, that in return for lifts, he would have to put up with my butchering his native tongue. I hope he doesn’t come to think of me as a bit of a bore, as in Evelyn Waugh’s “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

    If he does, I may be the one beseeching him as he stands across the street from Sam’s holding a cup of coffee in one hand and sticking his thumb out with the other.

    “I hope I’m not imposing, Roberto, but could I give you a ride to the village?”

    “Are you going to speak Spanish?”

    “No, no, ni una palabra.”

    “You said you wouldn’t speak!”

    “Oh, lo siento. I mean, I’m sorry.”

    “No, no that’s it, that’s it.”

    “To Round Swamp then?”

    Of course I’m imagining all this, but I am determined to one day be insufferable in two languages, maybe even three, not just in one.

    I was practically speaking in tongues, in fact, when, after six days without it, LIPA restored our power last week. It was so exciting to resume our wonderfully boring lives that, to celebrate, Mary did three loads of laundry, restocked the refrigerator and freezer, cooked a gourmet meal, and ran the dishwasher as I sang “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir” over and over again in the shower.

    The East Hampton Library was my home away from home for six days last week while the power was out. I spent hours and hours there, writing, editing, checking e-mail.         Thanks to the library’s proximity to The Star and the generosity of its director, The Star was able to get out a paper despite the fact that our generator had only enough juice to fire up the most important equipment. We were able to run two heavy-duty extension cords from the library across the driveways that separate our buildings. E-mail was working at the office, but I wasn’t able to plug in my computer.

    If truth be told, I have had a problem with libraries since I was quite young. I can still see myself standing in front of a high desk being told I was too young to take out books from the adult stacks. (I don’t remember how old I was, but I had outgrown in the children’s room.)

     Although I worked as a library intern for a while in college, this early bad impression stuck with me, even affecting my choice of a major. It was going to be history, until I realized I would have to spend a lot of time in the library’s damp recesses searching for original sources.

    The East Hampton Library has changed all that. I have a family feeling about it, in part because the reference room is dedicated to the memory of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who had been on its board of managers.

    The library was jammed last week with people who, like me, had no electricity at home. It turns out that there are an awful lot of outlets available, although not as many surfaces on which to set up computers. At one point, seeing a man sitting on the floor while he worked, a member of the staff brought around some folding chairs.

    For the most part, I gravitated to an alcove not far from the library’s back door. Every carrel was occupied, and, anyway, I preferred being near a window rather than in a hidden corner.

    An unspoken sense of camaraderie developed among those using the library this way, and decorum was honored. People tried not to hog space, for example, and we stepped outside to use cellphones — although, I must admit, not everyone was with the program.

    One day, a gentleman in a nearby carrel made a call. He had a booming voice. Chat. Chat. The couple at a table in the alcove across the aisle and I exchanged glances. Then, the man on the phone, said, “Do you want to meet at Nichol’s for lunch?”

    Something got into me. I chimed in, loudly, with one word: “Sure!” He couldn’t have missed the chorus of laughter that followed.

    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.

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.