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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

    Our house has been full of kids this summer, or at least it feels full when, say, three grandchildren are around.

    “Three?” a friend asked with what sounded almost like a snicker. “All 11 grandchildren were here,” she said. “We’ve got a big house, but you have no idea what shopping for food, which we did every day, was like.”

    The image pleased me. I don’t envy the mayhem that having so many kids under one roof, not to mention their parents and caretakers, has to cause, but it seems only right that the big houses hereabouts, and the wherewithal that makes them tick, should be shared by families.

    Of course, there is the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. When teardowns were a relatively new phenomenon here, I sometimes defended the McMansions that replaced them as similar to, if less lovely than, the Shingle Style summer “cottages” that define the Summer Colony (with capital letters) area of East Hampton Village — Ocean Road, Lee Avenue, Lily Pond Lane, and some of the connecting streets. (The Star even had a column of social notes headlined that way.)

    The real problem I have had with the new oversized houses is sociological: They were likely to be owned by couples much too young to have large families to fill up all those rooms, let alone grandchildren. I imagine those early 20th-century summer people arriving with big trunks, filling up their houses not only with family but a hierarchy of staff, and staying put for the season. Today’s summer people may not always be resident and too many of their big houses are occupied only occasionally.

    One night this week, every possible bed in our house was full and every bedroom, except one, had more than one person sleeping in it. One of my son’s two children had arrived for the rest of the summer. My daughter and son-in-law and their two children were here from Nova Scotia for half of August, with one of the Amagansett cousins adding to the mix a lot of the time. Having everyone’s company is making this summer a real one for me. And Labor Day will come all too soon.

On Channel 13 the other night the economics reporter, Paul Solman, was standing outside a theater in New York City showing people pie charts of three countries’ economies and asking them to pick America’s.

    In the top one (which didn’t exist), there were five equal slices. In the middle one, the top 20 percent had 36 percent of the wealth. In the bottom one, the top fifth controlled 84 percent.

    As I recall, no one picked America’s pie except two laborers, who had no trouble at all in pointing to the economy that to many appeared as if it were a third world one as ours.

    Why, I wondered, were all those people so dumb? Had they been reading the papers at all lately, they wouldn’t have mistaken Sweden’s economy (the middle one) for America’s.

    Actually, it just wasn’t the small group standing in front of the theater who were dumb. Seven thousand Americans sampled by the pie charts’ progenitor, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke, proved to be equally as clueless.

    “Ninety-two percent of the Americans picked Sweden over the U.S.,” Ariely told Solman at one point in the “PBS NewsHour” piece. “When we broke it by Democrats and Republicans, Democrat, it was 93 percent, Republican, it was 90.5 percent.”

    Ah, there’s the answer, I thought at first: Nobody (Congress included) knows anything in this country! But, wait, maybe we’re all on to something inasmuch as we secretly think of ourselves as Sweden!

    Warren Buffett, of course, knows we are not, and so I was drawn to his Op-Ed piece in The New York Times — and to his comments on the Charlie Rose show — in which he told of how he and his super-rich confreres, all of whom, he said, owe some measure of their financial success to this country’s fostering of the entrepreneurial spirit, continue to be coddled. Please, raise our taxes, he said, and is saying.

    Leveling is not the answer, nor, by the same token, is grossly unequal wealth distribution.  

    Taxes should be raised on the wealthy, and that money should be used by the government to put people back to work. Then, once our mammoth foreign adventure drains have been stanched and the economy has revived somewhat, the budget deficit should be addressed.

    Meanwhile, that Swedish pie looks tempting to me — and apparently to the great majority of those Democrats and Republicans surveyed.    Jack Graves

    P.S. Last week’s column had a major error. (Aside: I couldn’t have made it, could I?) I was not saved from fun by Ev Rattray, Barbara Johnson, and Mary: I was saved for it! Oh well, it’s summertime and the proofreadin’ ain’t easy.

It was only last Thursday that Barbara Strong Borsack, deputy mayor of East Hampton Village and a recent addition to Southampton Hospital’s board of directors, set her eagle eye on me as I sat waiting to scribble my notes just prior to the East Hampton Village Board meeting.

    I noticed, as a few people came into the room, that Ms. Borsack was handing out pretty blue T-shirts. I wanted one, and let my wishes be known.

    “They’re for my Ellen’s Run team,” she said. “If you want one, you have to join my team.”

    A little background here. In 2007, I participated in Boston’s 60-mile, three-day Walk for the Cure, which raises money and awareness for the Susan G. Komen Foundation and its involvement in fighting breast cancer.

    Being somewhat — how shall I put this delicately? — fat, I spent almost seven months training for that event, and as soon as it was finished, took up residence again in my comfy chair and haven’t moved since.    So a 5K, to my warped brain, sounded pretty easy, even though I had no idea how long five kilometers actually was. I just knew it was generally less than five miles. If I could do 20 miles a day (completely forgetting that I had ferociously beaten my body into shape and that four years of comfy chair-sitting then followed), less than five miles should be no problem.

    A pretty blue T-shirt was bestowed on me. I signed up that night for Ellen’s Run, which was to be held on Sunday. Then I took up residence in my comfy chair and thought no more about it until 7 a.m. Sunday morning.

    That morning, I met with my great good friend Gaye Campbell at Starbucks. I was in full race regalia (pretty blue T-shirt, fat girl yoga pants, socks, sneakers, and a powerful bra that could probably hold in the Hoover Dam). Gaye, as always, was dressed in an adorable workout get-up. This morning it was tennis wear.

    “Oh, I’m doing it with you,” she said.

    This coming from a woman who, in spite of the clothing, has told me that her idea of exercise was “having a brisk sit.”

    “I’ll follow your car,” she said. Then she was off.

    If Ellen’s Run were Ellen’s 500, Gaye would be the winner, hands down.

    We arrived at the hospital and met with Barbara Borsack and the rest of the “Strong Connections” team, almost 80 of us all together. Sheila Dunlop, known by many from the East Hampton Library, took our group picture.

    I was sweating buckets already. Not a good sign.

    When Gaye got back from registration, she was number 921. I was amazed at the level of participation in the race.

    There were over 1,000 of us at the starting line, ranging from ancient tiny women in straw hats to dog walkers, stroller-pushers, toddlers, people in wheelchairs, cancer survivors, those left behind by cancer, and regular folk.

    When the air horn blew, Gaye and I were immediately passed by old ladies in straw hats, stroller-pushers, and, not long afterward, toddlers and dog walkers.

    I haven’t decided yet which is more humiliating, being left in the dust by a 2-year-old or a Pomeranian.

    Gaye could have picked up the pace, but she stayed at my side. Because of the good conversation with an old, dear friend, it wasn’t long before we passed the one-mile mark. Then the two-mile.

    At exactly one hour, we were within yards of the finish line.

    There was a photographer there. “Let’s sprint it,” Gaye suggested.

    Using up the last carbohydrate in my body, I performed something between a sprint and a hobble across the finish line. Gaye looked the photographer head-on, flashing her pearly whites and  giving a big thumbs-up.

    The photographer almost rolled his eyes. “Okay ladies, you can stop now,” he said.

    I’ve continued to use the somewhat nebulous phrase, “I finished Ellen’s 5K Run” to my friends, which is ever so much more impressive than, “I barely finished Bridget’s three-mile walk.”

    But to be part of the camaraderie, the intention, the awareness, the help, the excitement, and the service of all the good people involved in raising money for Southampton Hospital’s Ellen Hermanson Breast Center was more rewarding than a trophy for first place (I can only imagine). And most rewarding of all was doing something worthwhile with a good friend, instead of filling our bodies with caffeine and pastries.

    I’m going to start training for next year right now.

    Just as soon as I get out of my comfy chair.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    I never played with my children. I took them to museums, plays, puppet shows, movies, and bowling and I read to them, but I never just sat down and played with them. My energy level fell to zero handling the everyday tasks of raising four kids after a long day in the office. I just couldn’t motivate myself to make forts with them out of Legos.

    As they got older I was an enthusiastic spectator at their wrestling matches, baseball and football games, and swimming meets. I clapped so vigorously at their school performances that the palms of my hands stayed pink for days. But that was the thing — I was always an observer, not a participant in their playing.

    I guess the truth was that even when I was a child I never really just played. I was always going somewhere or doing something with a purpose. I made potholders so that my family members and neighbors would ante up a few pennies for one of my creations. My friend and I produced and acted in little vignettes in my garage in the hope of receiving praise from an audience. I guess that was why when my son asked me to watch my granddaughter overnight I was extremely nervous at how we would spend the time together.

    After six days riding the waves, the beach had lost its allure. I feverishly racked my mind for things that a 7-year-old would enjoy. We started the day by playing miniature golf, followed by a visit to a toy store, and then lunch in a Chinese restaurant. I was tense as I realized it was only 12:30 in the afternoon. Half a day hadn’t even passed.

    Luckily two children’s movies were playing back to back in the theater in town. Comfortable that more than four hours could be taken care of, we nestled into our seats to watch talking animals and wizards. We gorged on junk food and emerged from the theater in time to wolf down some slices of pizza before stopping at the supermarket to buy a last sugar rush. Finally, we headed for the video store to finish our day with one more mind-numbing movie.

    After trying several times to start the DVD player, the realization hit me that I wasn’t behaving like the grandmother idealized in storybooks. I always said I would teach my grandchildren the proper foods to eat and entertain them with scintillating interactions. The fact was that I was selfish and bored with the idea of building sand castles and drawing pictures. I had my first child at 19 and still had one at home. I had been a school principal and had spent my entire life with children. Is it possible to be burned out on all things relating to children? I was feeling guilty and decided to do something about it.

    It was still too early to sleep, so I virtuously asked my granddaughter if she wanted to do a puzzle or read together. Unfortunately, I had picked the two things that she least liked to do. I resisted the temptation to spend the evening interrogating her about her mom and dad. Memories flooded into my mind of my mom baby-sitting for my children and then chastising me about the “bad” things she had discovered about me from my kids.

    Suddenly, an idea popped into my head. We could talk. She could tell me about all the things she loved, and maybe there were some things in my life that she might find interesting to hear about. She had gone clamming with her dad the day before and was less than enchanted with the experience. At the end of the week she would go fishing with him on her first party boat.

    It occurred to me that both of these events had been significant milestones in my own children’s lives. To a 7-year-old the word “tradition” is fairly meaningless. I held her close as I told her how her daddy’s grandfather and later his father had taken him on a fishing boat many years ago. Someday she would have a child and someone special would take him or her on a fishing boat or clamming. She will tell her child about the first time that she went with her dad, and a family tradition will continue.

    As she listened to me she became very quiet and snuggled even closer to me. We kept telling each other stories until I looked at the clock and realized that it was way past her bedtime and I hadn’t actually played with my granddaughter once. As I was tucking her into bed she looked at me and said, “Nana, I had so much fun with you today.”

    Maybe my idea of playing was too limited in scope. If it simply means having fun, then I guess that I’ve been playing for most of my life but I just didn’t know it.

    Sandy Camillo, a previous contributor of “Guestwords,” spends summers at her house in East Hampton.

    Mayor Kenneth Wessberg, a man with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, was the first local who befriended me when we arrived in East Hampton from Pittsburgh in 1979. As mayor, he had a vested interested in the success of the Maidstone Arms, the venerable inn we had purchased, and he also had a special fondness for the place. When he was young, he and his friend Shep Frood, whose parents owned the hotel during the ’30s and ’40s, used it to expand their body of knowledge. Others might have frowned on “window peeking” had they known what the boys were up to, but Kenneth and Shep thought of their activity as being strictly educational.

    After learning of my planning background in the heavily Democratic city of Pittsburgh, he warned me that locals controlled East Hampton politics, and locals were Republicans. Tapping my chest with his middle finger, he clarified: “You’ll never become a local. If you join the Republican Party, that’s the closest you’ll come to being a local. Someday you’ll need a variance for your hotel, and, in East Hampton, Republicans get variances.” Then he reiterated, “Even if you give up being a Roosevelt Democrat, you’ll never, never be considered a local.”

    When you’ve been excluded from a club, it makes you want to join, even if it’s a club you’d never aspire to get into under normal circumstances. But it wasn’t possible to be a local so I lived with the longing, while at the same time I adjusted to the fact that I was an outsider.

    Years after my conversation with the mayor, after we had sold the Maidstone and bought the J. Harper Poor Cottage, on a Sunday evening in August, my wife and I pulled out of the inn onto Main Street, forced to travel southwest when we wanted to go northeast. The traffic going the way we wanted to go was bumper to bumper. Drivers were hunched over their steering wheels with enough menace to prevent any attempt to crowd in front of them, so I drove our dented station wagon to the first left turn at the head of Town Pond, where I’d have only one line of traffic to buck, and furthermore where I’d not have to ask anyone to give up 12 feet of asphalt so I could be in front of them.

    We sat there with the turn signal blinking. Annoyed drivers behind us honked then slid into the ditch to pass on the right. I tried to make eye contact with the approaching drivers, but they avoided me to make sure no one, especially me, violated their right to that 12-foot piece of tax-funded pavement.

    Then a silver sport coupe was in front of me, and the driver was looking down — tuning his radio, stroking a small pet; I’m not sure — and he failed to claim his part of the roadway so I swerved in front of him. He looked up just in time to see the rear of the station wagon, with a taillight dangling from its wires, drive over his space. In the mirror, I saw him stand up in the seat, poke his head out the open sunroof, and, with his middle finger thrusting toward heaven, he shouted, “You fucking goddamned local piece of shit!” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was stunned.    

    “What did he say?” I asked my wife.

    “You fucking goddamned local piece of shit.”

    “That’s what I thought.” I slammed the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. It vibrated like a guitar string as chills went up my spine. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to be a local? I wish Mayor Wessberg hadn’t died. I’m going to his grave tomorrow and tell him what that guy said.”

    “That driver’s not really qualified to confer any status like that,” she reminded me. “He has Jersey plates. He’s from New Jersey.”

    “I know, but still. He thinks I’m a local.”

    By then we had made a second left turn and were headed north in a new line of traffic beyond the green, where Main Street becomes four lanes wide. The houses and stores facing Main had been set back on purpose by the original locals so their cattle, herded communally, could be driven down it and kept at night in the pasturage around Town Pond.

    “Look, there’s our boy,” I said to my wife, pointing at the coupe five or six car lengths ahead. “I wonder if I could get him to say it again.” She looked skeptical.

    “That is so not you,” she said. “You don’t like confrontations.”

    “Yes, you’re right. I had no idea he’d react that way when I turned in front of him back there. Totally out of character of me to do it on purpose.”

    By then, we were only two car lengths behind him. My heart fluttered; I felt a little sick in my stomach, as if I were being possessed by another power. And just like that, we were beside the coupe. From the corner of my eye, I saw the driver looking down again, and then there was the 12-foot gap, and, as if the devil himself were driving, the steering wheel jerked left, a foot pressed the accelerator, and the station wagon jolted over in front of the guy from New Jersey in the silver sports car. I put my head out the window so I wouldn’t miss a word.

    “You piece of local dog shit!” he shouted. I pulled my head back inside and slumped against the headrest, closing my eyes for a few seconds as the traffic moved ahead and the horns honked behind me. I couldn’t believe how good I felt.

    In East Hampton Village there are no leash laws. So Ruxford, a dog of mixed heritage owned by a man who was then head of the planning board, often visited Main Street and has his paw prints in the sidewalk near the fancy shops because he failed to observe the sign, “Wet cement.” Every two or three years, some outsider in a new pair of Guccis stepped in a little dog doo-doo, got riled, and started a petition to control dogs, but so far those efforts have been defeated.

    When asked why he opposed a leash law, one local board member responded, “If people insist on being people, I believe dogs should be allowed to be dogs.” The fact that I was not just a generic piece shit but a piece of local dog shit seemed to magnify the honor given to me by the guy from New Jersey. I opened my eyes in time to see him open his car door.

    He was a heavy man, late 30s or early 40s, red-faced, in a suit and tie, undoubtedly on his way to a fund-raiser. He could tell his compatriots how some “goddamned fucking local piece of dog shit” had delayed him. And everyone could have a good laugh and agree that all you needed locals for was to fix your air-conditioning, clip your privet, and take your unwanted guests into the hospitality of their B&Bs. Some of the people around him might secretly check their soles to make sure they had not stepped in anything, because what was that odor, anyhow?

     “You better get out of here,” my wife said, “he looks really mad.” But it was too late. He was outside my window. Before he could say a word, with more ferocity than I thought possible for a timid man, I blurted out: “Thank you, sir, for the honor! I’m proud to be a local!”

    I gunned the old wagon, and she did not hesitate. We rounded the curve toward the post office, squeezed in front of a dark-green Bentley, and headed out Accabonac into the heart of Springs, where the locals live, where I felt welcomed, although I was still an outsider. Where no one in a silver sport coupe would find us, no matter how angry he was.

_____

    Gary Reiswig is the author of the novel “Water Boy” and “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s.”

      The grandfather clock is ticking again. A clock expert, an East Hampton summer resident, cleaned and adjusted it this week and set it going for the first time in three years.

    It had stood with its pretty old face askew all that time after some hapless housepainters, clearing the furniture before setting to work on the living room, had laid it down, flat, on the floor. We were dismayed that it had been damaged, but hadn’t acted to get it fixed till now.

    Unfortunately, when Stan Bitterman, the expert, first arrived, the door of the clock case was locked, and the key, which we all remember as being attached to a Champagne cork that was left in a hiding place at the top of the case, was nowhere to be found. After a few days’ search, and after trying several ancient hollow-ended skeleton keys from antique dressers and such, I gave up and called a locksmith.

    Bob Bennett, the locksmith, wasn’t home, and his mother wasn’t encouraging about whether he would be able to help. I thought of trying someone else when I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, but made another call to the Bennetts anyway. This time, Annamae Bennett said she was about to go to the village on an errand and would stop by.

    Stop by she did, bringing three big bags of old, hollow-ended keys. Mrs. Bennett suggested we try them. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I brought out a small white table, and we began spreading out the keys. There were perhaps 200 of them. With a laugh, Mrs. Bennett suggested I work on it and left them in my care. She didn’t tell me how long I might be able to keep them.

    Daunted, I nevertheless tried two. The first didn’t slip into the slot. The second broke off in it.

    That was it. I would need to call Mr. Bitterman, who, I hoped, would be able to make a professional distinction between them. But later the same day, Mr. Bennett himself arrived. He had the clock opened in short order. He wouldn’t sell the key, though, saying it might come in handy elsewhere and, anyway, there was really no reason to lock the clock.

    Then came another hitch, however. In the years that the clock stood without ticking, I had forgotten that it has to be wound.

    “Do you have the crank?” my new friend the clock man asked, gently. He was able to wind the clock with a crank of his own, and promised to find me one of the correct size when he was next in New York.

    Just how I could have misplaced, or more likely hidden purposefully, the original key attached to a Champagne cork plus the original metal crank with a wooden handle, is unclear. But meanwhile, the clock, which may be 150 years old or more, has been put to rights.

    You sometimes hear complaints from city folks about local tradesmen here. The fact is, I was glad I had chosen to call a locksmith with a local name. Where else but in a small town with colonial roots — and from whom but a locksmith whose family, on both sides, goes back to its founding in the 17th century — would you be lent three big bags of antique keys? (Who else would even have them?) I was enthralled, and have been telling the story ever since.

    There is something about grandfather clocks that makes people wax poetic.

    The clock man put it simply. “It’s a matter of the heart,” he said.

    My family had a chance to see the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in existence, at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut last weekend. We had been to New Hampshire to pick up Adelia, our oldest child, at camp, and made our way back to the New London ferry by way of a water park, a visit to the college I went to, an amusement park, the Mystic Aquarium, and the Seaport.

    I did not think about the personal significance of the old hulk until we were there, but it dawned on me that the Morgan was about as close as my kids were going to get to the life that their East Hampton ancestors knew. And this is true not just for us, but for quite a number of South and North Fork families whose forebears went to distant seas as whalemen.

    A son of Amagansett, Joshua B. Edwards, the kids’ great-great-great-grandfather, shipped out of Sag Harbor in 1850 aboard the Ontario. He did not return until April 1854. Later the same year, he sailed on the bark Oregon out of Greenport. Another voyage began aboard the Susan in 1857, and another on the Parana in 1860. His final trip, on the Jireh Perry, began in 1864. By December of that year, he saw icebergs off the south island of New Zealand, and was at Pitcairn Island in February 1865.

    Exploring belowdecks on the Morgan, the girls were fascinated by the cramped sleeping quarters and impressed by the captain’s almost-posh accommodations by contrast. I told them that Joshua was a tall man by the standards of the day but that he, like the rest of the crews of which he was a part, had to cram into the bunks as best he could. It was clear that a four-year voyage on a ship like the Morgan was something well beyond their comprehension. They get fidgety on a four-hour car ride.

    In all honesty, I think it is difficult for contemporary observers to really place themselves in the shoes of these whalers — the monotony, the lack of privacy, the dubious bathing options. Still, as the girls tromped around the ship, I could see sparks of understanding.

    A photograph of the Morgan hangs in our house. It was taken by Joshua’s son Everett J. Edwards south of Noman’s Land, off Martha’s Vineyard, in August 1913. The Morgan was en route to Bedford, Mass., that day when it passed E.J.’s bunker steamer. In its holds were 3,000 barrels of sperm-whale oil, the oil of one right whale, and a quantity of ambergris. The ship made its last commercial whaling voyage in 1921, when, for the eastern United States, the pursuit of whales was beginning to fade into memory.

    Today, the Morgan sits on dry land, a three-year, $5 million restoration ongoing, masts resting prone in the shipyard. I hope to take the kids to see it when it has been returned to the water.