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.

    I have in hand the LIPA newsletter that accompanied this month’s bill, and I want to share some of it with you (especially you who have been without power these last six days, as has been the case with me and, from what I can gather, numerous other working stiffs in Springs).

    Interestingly, the newsletter has as its heading, “LIPA Is Prepared for Hurricane Season, Are You?”

    And so to begin: “LIPA prepares year round for not just hurricanes, but all storms. Our preparations include; numerous storm drills, reviewing and updating storm emergency procedures, enhancing customer communications, and a continuous ‘tree trimming’ program to identify and trim tree limbs in rights of way and along easements that could potentially cause outages during or after a storm.”*

    “Last year, LIPA aggressively implemented a new communication program in order to better inform customers about outages and restoration times. . . .”**

    Well you could have fooled me.

    I asked a neighbor, a Verizon retiree, what the matter was in our neighborhood, and he said a circuit breaker at the corner had “popped” during the storm. Not a big deal, I should think, and yet since 10:20 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, until 4:15 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 2, we had no electricity and no water.

    I have a radical proposal — actually, several. Aside from the obvious priorities, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and public gathering places, fix first the easy things, especially in neighborhoods which have private wells, as most of Springs does, before tending to those who know by the visual evidence — trees draped over power lines, splintered poles, and downed wires — that they’ve been screwed.

    Then, really do trim the trees, with an augmented work force if necessary, in the non-hurricane months.

    Or let them flourish and exfoliate and bury the power lines. Of course, the cost would be sky-high, but would it be so out of sight compared to the costs incurred by periodic emergencies such as this one that cause LIPA to augment its maxed-out work force with crews from far-flung places? Bring the actuaries and climatologists in. Are more and more storms like this in store? If so, then maybe burying the lines would not prove to be so unthinkably onerous in the long run.

    A neighbor with whom I stood on line at Starbucks last Thursday morning, and who was as baffled as I about the lack of attention to the aforementioned circuit breaker, said relatives living in the Outer Banks, where the lines, he said, are buried, had had no outages.

    And remember, “LIPA Is Prepared for. . . .” No, no, I’ll not belabor the point.

_____

    *Mary said she saw many limbs hanging on the lines along Springs-Fireplace Road before the storm hit.)

    **On day five, Mary got through to a LIPA spokesperson, a Mrs. DeVito, she thinks, whom she described as “a very attentive, very empathetic listener deserving of a raise,” but who, in the end, could offer little more than solace.)

    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.

The city was killing me. I had lived in five suspended-in-the-sky Brooklyn boxes in five years. And had commuted through Grand Central Station for three of those years, navigating the sweltering shuffle of feet in a kind of fish-feeding frenzy, darting between sharp elbows and swinging suitcases, muttering halfhearted “Sorry”s as I stuffed myself into the subway car before the doors slid shut with that metallic bing bong.

    And then there was my office, tucked into Midtown East. A gray-on-gray cubicled affair, filled with the pallid faces and fluorescent-lighted sighs of my co-workers, whom I loved, but kind of pitied, along with myself. The dull click of everyone’s computers — we were all writers for a trade publication — was the droning buzz of a hive. I just couldn’t shake this nagging feeling: I needed air, light, space, the heady stench of dirt. Slowly, like a sheet slipping from my legs, it dawned on me. Gardening. That was it!

    My great-uncle had bought a house in Amagansett in the 1960s. My family and friends visited periodically, but our country jaunts were basically limited to Indian Wells Beach, the I.G.A., and the occasional bacon run to Brent’s on Sunday morning.

    We had always rented the house during the summer, but this year it was empty and beckoning, its gray shingles and sun-dappled roof singing its siren song. A house by the sea, a house in the forest, a house!

    I gave my two-week notice and started combing through the classifieds of the newspapers in the Hamptons. The general reaction to my decision to flee the teeming streets of N.Y.C. was one of pleasant confusion. “Gardening, really?” they’d exclaim, nodding their heads slowly. “Wow, yeah, I think that sounds great.” They thought I was crazy. Yeah, crazy like a fox.

    Meanwhile, my boyfriend, a day trader (he’s not that “type” really, honest, he’s just excellent at math; he wears Megadeth T-shirts), had managed to convince his company to let him trade remotely.

    We gave away everything we could, packed up the rest in appropriated bodega boxes, stuffed them into my Volvo, and headed east. And then suddenly — well, as suddenly as a storm you see rolling in that spills its sodden belly from the sky — we were living in Amagansett and I was working as a gardener.

    Dressed in jean shorts and a T-shirt, slathered in sunscreen, and padding about in sneakers, I was at “the yard” by 8 a.m., greeted by a team of men, some Hispanic, some surfer-type college kids, some from the Shinnecock Reservation, but all humble and hard-working. The air was cool, the sun low. We’d lug the day’s tools into various vehicles — personally, I was in charge of the black pickup truck with a slipping transmission — and head into the fray.

    Federico and I were almost always together, tending to the yards of seven or eight houses a day, pulling weeds, pruning rosebushes, planting a kaleidoscope of peonies, lantana, impatiens, cosmos, and morning glories. And, of course, staking a slew of hydrangeas whose heavy heads would languish in the mud following any rainstorm.

    Bouncing along in the truck with the wind rustling my hair, the radio spilling out some classic rock, and Federico swilling horchata in his sun hat, I was happy. I savored the dirt beneath my fingernails and my aching back. I fell asleep to the winged roar of insects and awoke to birds. And my boss? El jefe? Kind, gentle, forthcoming, and lanky. He was frazzled but funny, strict but sweet. It was a pleasure working for him.

    Then, at a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, I fell off my bike. Hard. Road rash covered my entire left thigh, and my back was so thrown out I could hardly walk. I don’t know if it was crouching in the sun or slamming my spine onto gravel, but whatever happened, I couldn’t garden anymore.

    Strange but true (and isn’t that how life always tends to be?), the same week that I tumbled from my bike into a bed-ridden state, The Star offered me a part-time position, elevating me from freelancer to reporter, complete with my own desk. And window! If Midtown East could see me now.

    Here a new chapter has fluttered open its pages and I’ve been just as happy. It’s a different kind of stress; no longer do I fret over overtrimmed bushes or broken-necked tulips. Instead, it’s deadlines, fact-checking, parsing the correct hamlets for the police reports, and convincing a rather ancient Dell to print out my stories for editing.

    I’m not sure what’s next; I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of winter here, to be honest. What I do know is that my seemingly irrational, fly-by-night decision to uproot and upend my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. I only hope I can keep trusting my instincts.

—

    Catherine Tandy is a reporter at The Star.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.  

    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.