It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since I was running down the street with a building chasing me. Ten years. While it feels like a long time ago, I can close my eyes, and it all comes roaring back in a second.

    On Sept. 11, 2001, I was teaching high school 100 feet away from the World Trade Center. Conjuring that day — the sounds, the smells, the taste, the feeling of time suspended, the homeless man covered in ash pantomiming something on a park bench — is a blurred rush, but it is the fear that I carry with me the most.

    Even writing this, my breath quickens, and I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. That day fostered a culture of fear, or rather, as time allots a more critical perspective of tragedy, we simply caught up with the rest of the world. Previous generations of Americans are familiar with this uncertainty, having lived through world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, and the cold war. But as recent years have been relatively devoid of conflict, terrorism, and its prankster element of surprise, has finally permeated our culture on a grand scale, and has presented an entirely new threat.

    How this fear shapes future generations remains to be seen. For now, we comply with the national defense tactics in place at our airports and dutifully take off shoes, endure an inappropriate grope, or smile for the full-body scan that renders us naked to a Transportation Security Administration agent. It is questionable whether all of those photos really make it to the trash. Sure, these measures are preventive, but have they made an actual difference or are they now just mundane? When I go through security checkpoints, I always look for flaws and think about ways to thwart the system. But experience has resigned me to the fact that if someone wants to do something, they will.

    Heightened awareness is supposed to be the first step to combat an unpredictable attack. There has been a consistent public transportation campaign in Manhattan for the past 10 years with signs in subways and buses that read, “If you see something, say something.” This mantra is embedded in the city’s consciousness, and when you live there, you feel it. But time has softened the urgency, or is it that we have become more accustomed to it?

    After Sept. 11, 2001, I walked everywhere for as long as I could. Friends who were with me that day did the same. We wore sneakers, and shoved money, keys, and licenses in our pockets; we were ready to run again if we had to. When walking to work was no longer a viable option, I convinced myself the bus was safer than the subway. As we rolled along First Avenue, I realized how ridiculous my decision was, and had a panic attack. When I got to work I was coated in sweat, but I made it.

    Conquering the subway was next, and then it was routine. Until an unanticipated stop in the middle of a tunnel or a sudden flickering of lights brings it back in a flash. Over the years, my reaction to subway malfunctions has lessened, but a lone sneaker on the subway this past spring gave me pause. No one else seemed concerned, but I could not shake the narrative in my head that it was a bomb. Torn over what to do, the calm around me won out, and I kept my paranoia to myself. The pragmatic reality of a dirty lost sneaker under some seats on the subway trumped my fear, but will that be the right choice next time?

    Have Americans elsewhere absorbed the nuances of terror, and are we prepared to live in this cultural landscape? Proximity is everything. My experience on Sept. 11 was one layer, with each person who was closer to the buildings another, and then another. When we ran out of land and were standing outside in Battery Park, I remembered a movie on TV when I was younger about a nuclear holocaust and the end of the world. My parents would not let me watch it, and suddenly I realized why.

    In that moment, I visualized a future where people fought over canned goods in a permanent blown-out gray background. However, throughout the rest of that day, and for many months after, New Yorkers came together to demonstrate the more positive aspects of human nature.

    Sept. 11 changed me. An ex-boyfriend said it takes a lot to jar me, and he is right. I am considerably more mellow, and when a situation gets out of hand, I am able to maintain a true level of calm. After my school was displaced for six months, we returned to work downtown. The building next door was still covered in soot, and you could taste a layer of dust in the air. Our building was not cleaned properly either, and recently, I have developed asthma. Loud noises used to bother me, sometimes I still jump once in a while, and I am always surprised when I do.

    But it is a touch of disaster that really throws me off. When the Con Edison building on my block in the East Village had an explosion a few years ago, and smoke wafted into the air, I was gripped by a flashback of fear. It was the same thing when I saw the smoke from a fire on 42nd Street. It does not last long, but the feeling of panic and uncertainty is an exact replica of the fear I experienced on that day. As my family lives in Maryland, minutes after the recent earthquake here on the East Coast, my mom forwarded me an official government e-mail and said everyone was okay. I was taking a walk and thought my bout with vertigo had returned, but her e-mail flooded me with fear, and there I was, stomach churning, and shaken for an hour.

    I always want the drama surrounding Sept. 11 to hurry up and be over. While I understand the commemoration aspect, I feel that it is personal, and I cannot stand the media hype and patriotic verve. Most important, though, while I know it is childish and unrealistic, I just want my fear to go away. In another decade, hopefully this fear that exists for me and so many others will be vastly diminished, and we will no longer feel so susceptible.

—

    Heather Dubin, a reporter at The Star, was an English teacher at the High School of Economics and Finance on Trinity Place in Lower Manhattan in 2001.

    It was a late-summer morning as I sat facing the bay in an Adirondack chair, drinking my first cup of Barry’s Irish tea. I was at our summer rental cottage. It was the beginning of the hurricane season. The temperature ominously dropped 10 degrees and the wind picked up, indicating an approaching storm. I could see what looked like a tornado enveloping me in its dark fury, its funnel shape passing directly overhead.

    The Weather Channel said there might be a hurricane coming up from Florida. The charcoal mass of trailing clouds was threatening and had blocked out the scorching sun a few minutes earlier. The wind blew the umbrella into the bay. Then raindrops fell on my head like sharp exclamation points. I got wet but it felt good in the heat.

    It turned out to be just a summer storm, not a tornado or hurricane, but I was scared by its intensity. It roared quickly over and around me. It was good to be in the weather, surrounded by it, and not just watching it from a window. But of course hurricanes are a very real danger to this narrow peninsula of land. Last year the water rose six feet above normal, stopping inches from the backdoor. The cottage could easily be flooded.

    One morning while in bed I thought we were under an air attack, but it turned out to be seagulls dropping shells on the roof to break them so they could eat the succulent clams inside. The seagulls make a racket with their “Aawk, aawk, aawk” announcing their arrival or departure, and the geese at the end of the summer honk in unison.

    The cottage doesn’t have air-conditioning, but with the lively cross-breezes from North Sea Harbor and Davis Creek it doesn’t need it. The antithesis to the hermetically sealed McMansions air-conditioned to an arctic chill.

    Sometimes small is better. The Latin phrase  “multum in parvo,” a lot in a little, tells the story. This cottage is perfect for the summer. It’s what the Hamptons used to be: a small paradise. The rustic hunting and fishing shacks were used only in the summer during the 1920s and ’30s to hunt wild turkey and Long Island duck and to fish the plentiful waters and harvest oysters, clams, scallops, and crabs. The simple cottages were passed down from generation to generation of the same family.

    I keep a large rubber inner tube with a rope that I tether to the steps so I won’t float away. In the afternoon I sit in the water and read in my bikini, rear end in the water, legs draped over the edge. I wear a big straw hat for protection from the sun as I bob in the water. The rhythmic sound of the bay lapping against the dock lulls me and I doze.

    The front yard of the summer cottage is beach grass, so no lawn to mow. A rabbit family, maybe the Flopsy Bunnies, lives in the tall warren of spiky leaves. A baby bunny poses like a garden statue and then flicks his ears and wriggles his nose as if to receive a satellite transmission. The soil is too sandy to grow much so I fill pots with thyme, rosemary, basil, chives, oregano, and mint and use them as my kitchen-cutting garden. Terra-cotta pots of red geraniums on either side of the front door add color.

    Out the back of the little house is a weathered wooden deck bleached by sun and wind to silver-gray. Wooden steps to the bay. The backyard is fenced so my dogs won’t go marauding in the neighborhood, stealing steaks off neighbors’ barbecues. Clammers appear in small boats every Tuesday, and sometimes we buy right from the baymen to throw the clams on the barbecue and watch them hiss open. This year blue-claw crabs were back in force.

    A swan family comes every day to be fed. I give them multigrain pita and leftover scones and old sourdough bread. They gobble it all up. The huge father hisses at the dogs and fluffs himself up to an imposing height. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. The mother is more sedate and hisses delicately. There are five cygnets, three white and two gray. I’ve heard that swans mate for life, an appealing thought, being a long-married person myself.

    Another afternoon I was watching the tide go out and people wander in, playing on the sandbar. I could see a golden retriever sloshing through the water, shaking off a stream of wetness and making a water rainbow. A seagull’s footprints in the sand looked like scratchy Egyptian hieroglyphics. Small motorboats were anchored to the shore, people clamming with strenuous strokes to find the bivalves for a dinner of linguini with clams. Bodies walking in and out of view like a William Merritt Chase painting come alive. Then I looked up and the tide was in and the people were out. Gone.

    Across the bay is Conscience Point Marina, so watching the boat traffic on weekends is theater. I saw a Lab sitting proudly at the prow of his boat, ears blowing in the wind, guiding its master to shore. Flotillas of red, orange, yellow, and blue kayaks come close enough for the paddlers to say hello as they pass.

    Friends come for dinner by boat and then sail off into the sunset afterward. Our cottage comes with a two-person kayak that we use to explore and pretend we’re Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on the African Queen. There’s a nature preserve just opposite, and we launch ourselves on its waterways and listen to birds talking. No people-sounds at all. We are only 10 minutes from Southampton Village but we could be on a remote island off the coast of Maine.

    One evening at dusk I walked to the end of Towd Point Road and saw clusters of prickly pear cactus. I thought they grew only in the desert in Arizona. The land is a nature preserve, so no one had planted them — they must be indigenous. But how could they survive the harsh winter? A protective microclimate must shelter the cactus, because when I walked by in June, I saw big, showy yellow blossoms thrusting themselves into the salty air on the prickly pear plants.

    The interior of the cottage is all whitewashed beams and studs. There is no insulation or heat. There’s a downstairs bedroom and a loft bedroom upstairs where we set up his and her offices with dual computers. A simple wooden farm table with a bench and a couple of chairs is all that’s needed if we want to eat indoors. A small, light-filled living room has windows on three sides for a constant breeze. You can smell the marine life. Some days it smells very salty and fishy and other days it smells clean, like the inside of an oyster.

    The cottage has one and a half bathrooms but my favorite is the outdoor shower, one of the greatest luxuries of summer. This one’s not fancy, just functional. There are hooks on the outside to hang a bathing suit and a towel. It’s rustic looking but fully enclosed, with a marine hook-and-eye.

    It is my sanctuary, my outdoor temple and shrine to the pagan gods. I bow my head to apply shampoo. I suds up in a religious frenzy with bubbles bursting, water splashing everywhere, frightening the resident spiders. In my devotion and liberation I celebrate the ritual of getting clean.

    I love the feel of the air on my body. It reminds me that I am alive in my summer chapel. I am free. I can be naked during the week when no one’s around. I am a druid dancing around the monolithic stones at Stonehenge on the eve of the summer solstice. I can splash and sing. The vibration in my chest empowers me and resonates through my head.

    The light changes every day and sometimes fog veils the opposite shore in a hazy cocoon. I marvel at the glorious sunsets and toast them with a glass of white wine. Some evenings it looks as though someone took a paintbrush dipped in raspberry jam and streaked it across the sky. As I watch, the colors change into abstract compositions.

    Votive candles are used for outdoor lighting, and I prepare simple suppers of local corn and grilled whole fish. In the sandy backyard we made a stone circle. I feel atavistic, like a cave dweller, as I gaze into the driftwood bonfire. A few conch shells decorate the perimeter. For dessert we roast marshmallows for s’mores and talk late into the night with the full moon illuminating the water. Stars tell us when to go to bed.

* * *

    Summer’s over. It’s the end of showering alfresco. The church closes its doors for the season. I pray for an early spring. The spiders take over and build their webs with abandon, knowing I won’t be disturbing them until next year. It’s back to the old tub for me. But all winter long I can remember my freedom and look forward to that first warm day at the end of May when the weather changes and I can revel like a sybarite in my outdoor shower at Camp Paradise.

    I only hope the cottage isn’t washed away.

    Joanne Pateman is a former advertising art director. She has an M.F.A. from Southampton College, and her writing has appeared in The Star and The Southampton Review.

    The story was supposed to begin here at an illegal poker hall in Hicksville called the River, but the River ran dry and I was left staring at a blackened door with a mailbox next to it that said Fish. It must have been a marker or tag for new players to locate the building. Fish swam in the river, right? More than likely, the River was flowing somewhere else, but I had no idea where to find it.

    My contact at the casino wasn’t old enough to buy beer, yet he’d been sinking and swimming in the River for over a year. He wore an ace of spades charm around his neck and had been counting the days until his 21st birthday since he was 16.

    “I just can’t wait to get to Vegas,” he said, toting the latest poker bible around and quoting random passages. “It’s a game of skill,” he insisted. “I could make a living off this if I didn’t have to go to school.”

    “Ace” just completed finals at a college in the area and was willing to take me to watch a tournament. He said they’d have a few games running at once and that there would be no problem getting in. If there were, then a guy named Pretzels would tell us. Pretzels ran the house at the River and worked the door. Pretzels was a problem-solver and I couldn’t wait to meet him. I was actually en route to the place when I got the call.

    “No good,” Ace said. The casino was dark and no one was returning calls. “They must have been shut down. Sorry.” Ace said he’d try to find another game, but I haven’t heard back from him.

    The River had it all and I wanted it back. I needed to see how a tournament was run. I wanted Pretzels to size me up. Without Pretzels and Ace, all I had was an idea.

    I started to see Long Island as a map with an enormous deck of cards flexing over it, waiting to burst across two counties. It didn’t take long before I stumbled on the right Web site. Long Island popped up within the New York listings and I was on my own. Many of the locations described their atmosphere as “friendly,” which meant I could probably visit their club or tournament without being robbed or kidnapped.

    I made several picks based on proximity to home and desired buy-in range ($300 to $500), steered clear of the contact who called himself Goodfella, then admitted my total beginner status to everyone. I had half a dozen offers by the end of the day.

    The clock on the wall says 8:30, but the time here is always now. I’m somewhere in the heart of Suffolk seated at a poker table in somebody’s basement. I’m absorbing my new surroundings and waiting for the goose bumps to settle. The Internet may have changed the world, but it will always be a bit creepy. One minute you’re on your way to play poker with total strangers, the next you’re hanging upside down in somebody’s dungeon.

    I’m not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. The inside is decorated like any other suburban basement: wood paneling, support pillars, a pool table opposite the bar with pictures of Marilyn and Elvis swooning back at me. I could have had my first kiss in this basement. I could have gotten drunk here in high school.

    “Relax,” the dealer opposite me says. “We play a friendly game here.”

    Of course you do.

    The dealer is a big guy in his 40s who we’ll call Mike. This is Mike’s basement and everyone here is his guest. He runs the game from his wheelchair and pays himself 5 percent of every hand. His guests can play cards until their money runs out, drink as much beer and coffee as they like, or wait for Mike’s wife to serve her lasagna in catering tins warmed over a Sterno flame.

    I pay my buy-in to the dealer and he slides me my chips. I just handed Mike grocery, gas, and rent money, but now I’ve got all these wonderful chips stacked before me and anything is possible. There are seven other guys at the table thinking the same thing, only they’re totally serious about their chances.

    The conversation revolves around the evening’s possibilities, all possibilities of the past and any in the near future. There are tales of going bust in Atlantic City, beatings taken at Foxwoods, and last-minute winnings in Vegas, baby, Vegas. Someone mentions the remote chance of a casino being built on the Island’s East End by the Shinnecock Indians and the room falls silent with possibility.

    “Hey, you gettin’ a job for the summer or what?” a heavyset lifer asks the fresh-faced 20-something to my right.

    “Me?” he says. “A job? Why would I do that when I can be checkin’ and raisin’ all summer long?” Laughter spreads across the table like a free round of chips, the type of guffaws shared by men with similar addictions. A cellphone goes off three heads to my right. A deeply tanned guy in his 30s answers, tucking his chin into the phone to speak.

    “Yeah,” he says. “You knew this is where I’d be. . . . I told ya I was workin’ tonight.”

    It’s probably time to admit I’ve never played a true hand of poker in my life. I came looking for a story and have more interest in the players than the game. My subjects, however, are into winning money the way I’m into stories. I’ll get what I want eventually — and so will they.

    There is one thing I did in preparation for my first card game. I made a poker starter kit for myself. Since my knowledge of the game began at zero I went with the obvious choices. I bought a copy of “Poker for Dummies,” rented “Rounders” with Matt Damon, and found a decent memoir on the underground game called “Poker Nation” by Andy Bellin.

    My kit was heavy on atmosphere, but details of the game were still whizzing past me. Damon loses the girl but comes to terms with what he is, heading out West for the World Series of Poker. Bellin introduced me to the underground life and taught me some important jargon, and chapter one of “Poker for Dummies” is just plain hysterical: “Poker has always been a microcosm of all we admire about American virtue. . . . Call it the American Dream — the belief that hard work and virtue will triumph. . . . It is an immigrant’s song, a mantra of hope; it is an anthem for everyone.”

    Back in Mike’s basement, the first hand is about to begin. I’m peering around the room, taking in all these proud Americans and sons of immigrants and realize the true hunger of the place. Mike shuffles the deck and lays down the button.

    My first two cards come sliding toward me. I have two pair of something or other, but I’m not sure where it falls in rank. There’s a crumpled piece of paper in my pocket that lists the hands, lowest to highest, but I don’t dare sneak a look. Mike realizes my rawness by the way I hold my cards out in the open like some Hollywood cowboy. He catches my ineptitude by the way I repeat the phrase, “Hit me,” like Danny DeVito’s character in the poker scene of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

    Mike tacitly agrees to become my interpreter, letting me know when it’s time to check, raise, or fold. After each hand is played, he tells me whether I made the right choice. Through some fluke of nature, I end up winning the first two hands. Then the razzing begins:

    “What kinda beginner’s luck is this?”

    “He ain’t no beginner. This guy knows exactly what he’s doin’.”

    “I know. I think I seen him at Binion’s last week” (a hard-core casino in Las Vegas).

    “He’s probably a mechanic” (slang for a professional cheat).

    “Yeah, or workin’ undercover for the bunko squad!”

    “Hey, what exactly do you do?”

    I identify myself as an English teacher and the table automatically does its best to mind its grammar and syntax. When one of the younger players, who had been shoveling pasta all night, announces with a full mouth, “Yo, these freakin’ meatballs are retarded!” another player looks him over.

    “Is that supposed to mean good?”

    The kid wipes his mouth and nods.

    “Well, maybe you could speak English from now on so the teacher over here doesn’t have to shoot himself.”

    I’m learning the game, making fast money, and winning new friends. I start to relax and proceed to lose $350 in approximately 70 minutes. My chips diminish at a steady rate; the other players’ stacks grow high. Mike clinks another 5 percent after every single round. I take my beating quietly, thank the table for a nice evening, and leave Mike’s place for good.

    It wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own. I had shown very little patience, even with Mike’s guidance, and often stayed in just for the excitement, despite having junk cards. There’s a cherished quote that veteran players often repeat. It was used in the movies I had watched and the books I had read and it goes like this: If you look around the table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, then that sucker is you.

    But what do you call someone who volunteers for the job? I’d kissed that money goodbye long before I ever stepped through Mike’s door. It was story money, a well-spent investment.

    Mike, for his part, turned out to be a very good host. He was good at his job and seemed genuinely pained after I’d been wiped out. I wonder if he or any of the others could understand a guy who set himself up on purpose, someone who actually wanted to lose. I wonder if their psyches would allow such a notion.

    “Well,” they’d probably say, studying my empty seat, “every deck has its jokers. . . . Who’s in?”

_______

    J. Bryan McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, The Southampton Review, and Thomas Beller’s “Lost and Found: Stories From New York.” He lives in Brooklyn.

    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.

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!

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    Jane Bimson is an advertising sales representative at The Star.

    The Suffolk County Legislature is getting in on the nationwide campaign to get consumers to take along reusable bags when they go shopping (which is even touted on posters in post offices). A hearing is to be held today on a proposal to impose a five-cent surcharge on every plastic or paper bag distributed by a retailer in the county.

    That plastic bags are an environmental menace is understood; reportedly, only 1 percent of the many billions used in this country every year are recycled. That paper bags have a large carbon footprint because they take a lot of energy to manufacture is a problem, too. Municipalities around the country are trying to do something about all this, including East Hampton and Southampton Villages, which have approved bans on the use of most plastic bags.

    Suffolk’s Legislature has a long history of being first on environmental laws. It started the eventually widespread ban on phosphates in detergents years ago. It was the first county in the nation to ban electronic cigarette sales to minors. More recently, it was the first governmental entity to ban the toxic chemical biphenyl A in baby bottles.

    The legislation under consideration today comes from Vivian Viloria-Fisher, the legislator from the Fifth District. The Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy organization founded in 1985, is urging passage. A similar law — adopted in Washington, D.C., two years ago — has resulted, according to the group, in the use of 75 percent fewer plastic and paper bags.

    Still, it’s my guess that there is little chance the proposal will be approved, at least in its present form.

    Here’s why: Under the proposed law, if I’m reading the slightly complicated wording correctly, retailers would automatically get to keep one penny of every five-cent surcharge; if the store chooses to offer a carry-out bag credit program to its customers — that is, rewarding them for bringing their own bags — it will get to keep an extra penny. The rest of the money collected would go to the county treasurer to be put in a dedicated stormwater remediation  fund.

    So far, so good. But to make this work, retailers would be required to submit detailed reports on how much money came in and how much was kept. Fines of up to $500 could be levied for violations.

    It’s hard to imagine that this hassle will go over terribly well with the chamber of commerce. A federal ban with an amortization period for manufacturers to get out of the bad bag business altogether might work better, but that seems out of the question.

    Perhaps I’ve had my head in the sand, but the recent attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency by some of the would-be Republican candidates for president, which I probably should have expected, came as a shock: Has the recession really brought us to such a dire extremity that our politicians are campaigning on the premise that business interests are to be protected at any environmental cost? I’ve had an even gloomier reaction to President Obama’s and the State Department’s willingness to allow a 1,700-mile crude oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.

    If ever there was a time for environmental activism, it is now.

    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.

    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.