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.

    Having grown up in the metropolitan area and spent childhood vacations in the Catskill Mountains, it comes as a surprise to me that I have enjoyed being on the water sailing more than other summertime pleasures here.

    As a kid, my friends and I hiked and ferried across the Kill Van Kull in good weather from home, in Bayonne, N.J., to Staten Island, where we followed an unsanctioned path along a brook through residential backyards to a large city park. In later life, explaining my new love of sailing, I would say that I had been afraid of rowboats in one of the lakes in Clove Lakes Park. I never learned to row very well.

    Sailing became a pure local pleasure. Even before I married into the Rattray family, whose forebears included inshore and offshore watermen as well as farmers, my husband-to-be introduced me to a classic breed of boat — an antique catboat made by the Crosbys of Osterville, Mass.

    For 20 years, sailing and cruising in the waters of Long Island Sound were prime. Catboats, with beams about as wide as the boats are long, are stable enough for kids, and for a while we also owned a boat with freeboard high enough to keep them doubly safe. We did frostbite racing for a number of years, too, in small, devilish boats of the Penguin class, but I never got to do more than hike out, playing second fiddle to the helmsman.

    I’d have to think hard to remember how many old wooden boats we owned over the years, but the last was a less traditional catboat made in Yugoslavia, which I sold for a song after my husband’s death. I had no idea that the buyer, Sanford I. Weill, had his photo on the cover of The New York Times Magazine after he sold his company, Shearson Loeb Rhodes, to American Express at just about the time I offered the boat for sale. (I’ve paid closer attention to Mr. Weill’s business acumen and philanthropic activities since.)

    It took about 10 years before I found myself on sailboats again, and I have my second husband, Chris Cory, to thank for it. Together, we eventually indulged ourselves in a 32-foot Pearson sloop and in summer cruising to what, for me, were such faraway places as Martha’s Vineyard. I reconciled myself to our owning a boat made of “plastic” because it got us where we wanted to go and had such amenities as hot water for showers. I also discovered the joy of being at the helm on a broad reach in a respectable wind with the sails full.

    Sailing was on my mind this week after the hot weather disappeared and fresh, sweet breezes came in. We don’t own a boat anymore, but I’ve promised myself that we’ll go sailing again before long.

    A crew from Town and Country magazine was here a couple of weeks ago, and, at the end of the day, the young reporter appeared at my door.

    I confessed right off that I had spent most of my working life, 44 years, at The Star, that I had only quit twice, and that I, now in the 2,200 range columnwise, had only been censored twice — “Points Of View” on the pursuit of happiness and on Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which the redactors feared would, in the case of the first, alienate the gay community, and, in the case of the second, alienate the Catholics. Though why only them, I don’t know. Rather than biblical figures, it had more to do with celebrity worship and my antipathy for it than anything else.

    Inevitably, I was asked, along that line, about the Beales, who I thought were traduced by overweening officials and a prurient press, of which I am, of course, an outlying member.

    “One quote I can give you,” I said. “I remember Edie Beale saying at the time, ‘Oh, Mr. Graves. East Hampton is so beautiful on the outside, but so ugly on the inside.’ Or words to that effect.”

    I’ve since thought about what she said — true certainly when applied to her and her mother’s case — in light of the many examples of community-wide efforts here over the years in which the grief of those who have been particularly battered by Fate has been, if not lessened, at least conjoined with the knowledge that East Hamptoners generally do care for one another and wish each other well.

    I said I didn’t know why the collective we were racked periodically with foaming-at-the-mouth seizures of self-righteousness, but it seemed to be so. “Maybe there’s something in the water. . . . Very soon after the Beale affair, my landlady-to-be’s nursery school was raided. She walked when the mothers testified n justice court that it was not a moneymaking concern.”

    He asked what the quotes on my windowsill said. It was the first time I’d looked at them in a long time. “One says to stay out of Iraq,” I said, looking back at him. “One says to stay out of Iran . . . and this one, by Peter DeVries, who was generally known as a humorous writer, says it all.”

    “ ‘The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life ‘means’ nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque ‘mean,’ or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all these, knowing himself to be no more — a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. . . . It seemed from all this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.’ ”

    “Well,” I said, with a shock of recognition and with a sense of affirmation, “that’s what I’ve done!”

    By the end of 1940, in America or New York or Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan neighborhood running approximately east to west from the Harlem River to the Hudson River and north to south from 190th street to 160th Street — someone decided the children of Washington Heights needed a Brotherhood Week celebration.

    The national poll at the time that revealed a sizable number of Americans believed that the Jews in Hitler’s Germany must have done something wrong to be treated the way they were being treated — did those findings trigger the event? Who knows? But a Brotherhood Week celebration was announced in the schools, both religious and public, and in the polyglot collection of houses of worship in Washington Heights. Houses of worship! Was that euphemism for churches that embraced synagogues as well, I wondered, made up as an inclusive concession to togetherness?

    The event was set for a Saturday morning — the Jewish Sabbath and day of rest. Observant Jews couldn’t travel or hold money on the Sabbath. Even though I was 7 years old, I was a precocious only child, a third grader, and I knew that choice of day was problematic. Something that made you feel even more like an outsider. I was uncomfortable with this brotherhood concept.

    Washington Heights was a map of Europe, and its multitude of churches reflected it. Within a five-block radius of my home near the George Washington Bridge there was a Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch church, an Episcopal church, a Greek Orthodox church, and an Armenian Orthodox church. The Catholic church, the Church of the Incarnation, was a little farther away, servicing mostly “shanty Irish, as opposed to lace curtain,” that national group’s own distinction, and Spaniards, not Latinos. (No Baptist churches, no African-Americans in Washington Heights.)

    As to houses of worship, synagogues, that is, there was the Y.M. & Y.W.H.A. across from the George Washington Bridge, mainly a Conservative form of Judaism, and there was Congregation Mount Sinai Anshe Emes, which my grandmother attended, two blocks east of the Y. It was primarily Orthodox (men and women were separated for praying, for example).

    Washington Heights had its own “south of the highway.” West of Broadway, closer to the Hudson, was better than east of Broadway, closer to the Harlem River, with Riverside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue representing the best and the worst, respectively, the outer limits of both. There were two subway systems, trolleys to the Bronx across the East River, and Fifth Avenue buses that took you downtown, all the way to Greenwich Village. Some on the west side of Broadway were double-deckers. Some of those had open tops on the second tier. That was a helluva 30-cent round-trip ride.

    Jews essentially lived west of Broadway. How high a street number was was directly related to an economic ladder, with the more affluent (garment center Jews) living above 181st Street. Irish and Spanish Catholics lived east of Broadway, mostly on or near the boundaries before one hit the East River.

    Protestants, sprinkled west of Broadway and mostly above 178th Street, were near their Reformed and Episcopal churches. They were in a kind of shock, surrounded as they were by their churches, with dwindling populations and all of these foreigners. Their children — with names like Robert Ames, Martha Martin, Harry Harvey — still wore shirts and ties and plaid skirts with cardigans to school.

    There were a few Chinese families in the neighborhood — the Gwons, the Chins — with brothers who soon would be quietly killed fighting for America in World War II. They lived near their Chinese laundries.

    Only my Orthodox grandmother would daily sit on her wooden grocery crate with the Chinese grandmothers on their wooden grocery crates in front of the six-story apartment building. They didn’t speak English. She didn’t speak Chinese. And there they sat together, shunned by other old ladies. After all, they were clearly of a different race.

    All of this didn’t escape the precocious 7-year-old third grader that I was. So when the planned Brotherhood Week celebration was announced at my Hebrew school at the Y, I admit I wasn’t thrilled.

    Except for Hebrew school and my cousins, I had little contact with Jewish children. My friends on the block, the block that was across the street from the Dutch Reformed church, were all Protestant. The boy from the one Catholic family on the block was always mistaken for Jewish. He was short and fat, and the Irish gangs that would occasionally wander west of Broadway would always verbally abuse him.

    He said to them once when they called him a dirty Jew, “I’m not Jewish. I’m Spanish.”

    “Okay, you’re a dirty spic,” they shot back. And then they moved on, safety in numbers.

    So I guess Brotherhood Week, celebrated for a few hours on the morning of the Jewish Sabbath at the majestic Loews 175th Street, the grandest and fanciest second-run movie house in the neighborhood, was thought by those who organized it to be a step in the right direction. I didn’t like the idea but had to go. There was something wrong with the concept, the remedy itself. How could a few hours in the dark make everyone love one another?

    We met in front of the Y and marched the four blocks to the Loews, two by two and hand in hand, with Miss Reiner and Mr. Marcus, our Hebrew teachers, keeping order with Hebrew commands. Sheket! Sheket bevakasha! they would shout at us. All it meant to me was stop whatever you were doing. Be quiet!

    When we were inside the dimly lit theater, there were matronly matrons dressed in white, faded blond-gray hair drawn back in buns. They had large flashlights and stern, unfriendly faces.

    We were led to roped-off rows of segregated seats near the front of the theater labeled the “Jewish section.” Other areas had similar religious signs. I don’t know, was it some movie I had seen? “The North Star”? “Watch on the Rhine”? (Had they been released yet?) I was waiting for the German shepherd guard dogs to be brought out, teeth bared, struggling on their leashes to get at us huddled together in the Jewish section.

    I looked at the stage, the maroon velvet drapes pulled back. There were five or six chairs, a microphone, and a lectern. The chairs were for the members of the clergy. I saw our Rabbi Bogner, his round black yarmulke perched on his bald spot, short and round, a really nice guy who made you feel good even when you were bad. (Naturally the rabbi from the Orthodox synagogue did not attend — it would have been a violation of his Sabbath.) Seeing Rabbi Bogner chatting with the Christians made me feel better.

    The program started. Each clergyman had his clique that cheered when he got up to speak while others clapped politely.

    Rabbi Bogner was the third to speak. When he stepped up to the lectern and was introduced there was a loud and raucous round of boos and hisses from every part of the audience — the acoustics were marvelous at the Loews 175th Street — from every part of the theater targeted at the Jewish section. Only the priest from the Church of the Incarnation was able finally to stop it. He got up, grabbed the microphone, and intervened.

    I felt so sorry for my Rabbi Bogner.

    And, if nothing else, I had an experience to go by, to imagine how people felt, as that terrible war with its unthinkable events went on. That was the Brotherhood Week celebration in Washington Heights in Manhattan, in New York, in America in 1940.

    Lona Rubenstein is the author of “From Away,” a novel, and “Getting Back in the Game: Finding the Fountain of Youth in Cyberspace,” a memoir. With her latest novel, “Itzig,” set in Germany from 1900 to 1935, she will take part in Authors Night at the East Hampton Library on Aug. 13. She lives in East Hampton.

    This summer will go down, in my opinion, as the one in which the affluent finally burst the South Fork’s seams — and maybe the North Fork’s, too.

    Plenty of part-time residents here, or year-round summer people (as a friend described her own tribe years ago), are down-to-earth members of the middle class who live in relatively simple houses on wooded, quarter or half-acre lots. But from all appearances the East End is being defined by those who have redefined luxury in multimillion-dollar houses, used only occasionally, and those who are ready, willing, and able to put down six figures for a short seasonal rental.

    Tickets to glitzy, big-name benefits are selling like hotcakes, I’m told, but it seems to me that many of those who are so visible here are generally uninterested in hearing the specific problems and concerns of the community: the growing need for food pantries, the effects of the recession on the town, not just the nation.

    The Hamptons are where you see people at play, intent on making the most of what their money can buy; are they really fiddling while Rome burns, or is this a misapprehension? (Maybe, on the hush-hush, the visitors you see arriving via mega-yacht or strolling about with strings of luxury-goods shopping bags draped from their wrists are, indeed, making donations to, say, Meals on Wheels or the volunteer fire departments . . . but why do I doubt it?)

    Only the first week of August, and the pace gets more frantic. The gourmet markets are more crowded than ever, even though prices are astronomical. The number of standing-room-only events at Guild Hall has surprised its tab-keepers. And, as the tabloids like to report, more young partiers are heading to Montauk, where the scene has overflowed from one really hot spot to everal others. Everywhere you look another gallery has sprung up, so I suppose artwork is selling. There’s not one pop music festival but a couple, not one glossy magazine, but, well, you count them.

    We had a family party in the backyard on Sunday. I had thought about keeping up with the Joneses, of going to our finest food shops for goodies. In the end, though, it was turkey burgers and hot dogs with a few salads for good measure, along with a birthday cake from King Kullen and cupcakes from Duncan Hines.

    One of my children, a grown man now, pointed out that there were three generations out on the lawn. He was nostalgic, he said, as he watched one of the youngest of us off by herself trying a few improvisational yoga positions. Can you remember, he asked me, when you were a kid and lolling on the grass was what summer was about?

Birthdays come but once a year, which is a drag because on that one day I’m treated like a queen and even get away with not having to cook dinner. Mine was yesterday, and I’m sure by the time this is published I will be basking in the afterglow of a wonderful day. Do not fret, however, if you missed it, because in my house we have birthday week, which allows me to get away with a lot for the week, except preparing dinner. I will graciously continue to accept gifts, and if you need a hint, I’m still waiting for my Rolex watch, preferably in rose gold.

    One of my jobs here at The Star is to write the holiday “Relay” columns. Since August is devoid of national holidays and the only ones I could find online were Water Quality Month, Admit You’re Happy Month, and Eye Exam Month, I thought my birthday would present a good excuse to write a column.

    And since my license expired on my birthday, I did commemorate Eye Exam Month by having an eye exam at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Riverhead on Monday — a big mistake, as Monday, I learned, is their busiest day of the week. Instead of celebrating and drinking champagne in honor of Eye Exam Month, I sat on those wooden benches waiting for my number to be called for almost two hours! And don’t even get me started on what the traffic was like.

    At times I’ve hated having a summer birthday. It meant there were no cupcakes in school or a special crown to wear for the day. I really wanted to be queen for the day at my Catholic school just to see if the nuns would be nicer to me.

    When I was in St. Thomas of Aquinas High School in the Bronx I had a nun who absolutely hated me for no reason. She was a mean, nasty old bird who I’m sure is long gone by now, so I can talk about her. I was blond and usually smelled of the cigarettes we all sneaked in the back of the public buses we rode. She was ugly and forced to wear a black-and-white habit every day, which I’m sure was uncomfortable, as she constantly wore a pained, pinched look. We were bad little high school girls and wanted to ask her if her panties were in a pinch but knew we’d get a good smack across the face for it. It still amazes me that they were allowed to hit us.

    She told me I was disgusting and made me move to the back of the class so she wouldn’t have to look at me or smell my 15-year-old tobacco-stained fingers. To this day my self-esteem suffers from her cruel remarks. I guess I should be glad my birthday was in summer, as she may have made me sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap to celebrate. Yes, she was that mean, and a dunce cap never would have worked with my naturally frizzy hair.

    When we were kids, birthdays were a big event. I got to pick out whatever I wanted for dinner that night and usually chose lobster or spaghetti and meatballs. As we got older, on our big day we wore special corsages that were decorated according to our age with things like bubble gum, Tootsie Rolls, lollipops, or dog biscuits. They were supposed to remain pinned to your shirt for the whole day. But when a line of hungry-looking dogs started following me on my 14th birthday, I gave up and tossed them the corsage and ran like hell all the way home, with two of them following me the whole way.

    Okay, maybe it wasn’t a pack, but there were three of them. Okay, maybe two of them were mine and the third my next-door neighbor’s dog, Buffy, but they were gazing longingly at my dog biscuit corsage, and I wanted to make it to my 15th without being torn apart by hungry dogs. Oh, and did I mention I was a bit of a teenage drama queen?

    Having an August birthday usually meant good weather. I remember waking up in our beachfront home on City Island and smiling because it was my day and not one I had to share with my three siblings. The sunny, cool days were the best. I could always tell if it was a windy day from the sound of the sailboat riggings clanging against their masts from the boat club next door to us. To this day when I hear a sailboat rig clanging, I smile a little smile, and look over my shoulder for a pack of dogs.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.

    On a brilliant afternoon at Mecox Bay, while one of our friends made lunch, the other offered to take my husband and me for a spin in their Boston Whaler. We three walked barefoot to the end of the dock for a short, unserious outing.

    Feeling like 12-year-olds on the lake at camp, we shed our septuagenarian identities. We were practically singing, we were so happy. For about 15 minutes, we followed a flotilla of swans — equal in elegance to the estates along the bay.

    Soon, the sound of the engine changed. When it stopped, our host tossed an aluminum oar to my husband and said, “Paddle.”

    At the nearest bulkhead, we tied up and went to get help, as if this were a perfectly ordinary and sane thing to do on a Saturday in Water Mill. But wait, it’s no longer precisely Water Mill; it’s part of The Hamptons, a name that obliterates the distinct charm of each village; a name that merges them into a conglomerate.

    The Hamptons, home to celebrities — some of whom are first rate at making themselves well known rather than well known for making themselves first rate.

    The Hamptons, where it’s impossible to find a shoe repair shop. Or, for that matter, any of the ordinary services enjoyed by those who have lived and vacationed here from the end of the colonial era to the beginning of . . . The Hamptons.

    Nevertheless, our friend, a Mecox resident for decades, and my husband and I, who have been local homeowners for 40 years, thinking we were in territory we knew, climbed out of the boat.

    All of us were without wallets or cellphones or shoes. I can see that we might have appeared crazy to anyone who goes down to the sea in ships; but, to us, this was a toy boat in a bathtub.

    We hoisted ourselves onto the bulkhead, amazed that our well-used bones could accomplish this feat and still stand upright. We approached a house with six separate entrances resembling those in a row of town houses. Four sports cars were placed like compass points on a circular driveway. “Oh, good, someone must be home.”

    I suggested we call out, so as not to surprise anyone, especially a dog! “Hello! Hall-ooo-ooo.” Through a screen door, we saw a plush but empty sitting room. We continued to call.

    After 10 minutes, another door opened and a handsome man with white hair, a white mustache, and sky-blue eyes emerged. A dark apron was tied around his slim waist. Its bib protected an expensive blue-and-white-striped shirt with a starched collar. He was the butler, he said, and in just a few minutes, Brian would be coming to help us.

    “Please, we’ve been waiting for a while. Could you call a taxi for us, so we can get some gas and motor off?”

    “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. You’ll have to wait for Brian.”

    “Our friend’s wife will worry. She expected us back for lunch half an hour ago.”

    “Sorry,” he said. “You can’t leave the premises until security has a chance to check you.”

    Security? We’re neighbors. We told him our names and our host’s address, directly across the cove. We apologized for intruding. We just wanted to fix our problem: no gas.

    “I’m sorry,” he said, quite genuinely. “I truly am, but now you’re here and now you’ll have to do things our way.”

    Another man, sweating in his tie and jacket, raced toward us, demanding, “Who are you and just what are you doing here and how did you get in?”

    We told our story again. On his walkie-talkie, he discussed it with Brian. He hurried us to the end of the driveway, telling the butler to keep us there until he returned. Then, quite abruptly, he jogged off.

    My husband nudged me, patted his hip, and gestured toward the departing jogger. I noticed a bulge. My husband whispered, “Gun!” This rude fellow was packing heat! Was this a movie or my life? Security? I felt extremely insecure.

    The butler assured us that the addled interrogator was only an assistant to Brian. Brian will take care of everything. By now, Brian had become purely mythological. No one, I’m sure, awaited Zeus with more fervor than ours, waiting for Brian.

    In his charming French accent, the butler apologized for his co-worker’s demand that my escorts and I scurry along the gravel in bare feet. Then he added, “You came at the worst possible time. The owner is in residence. You really don’t want to know who he is or where you are. You have no idea what you stepped into.”

    “No, no,” I said. “You’re right. I really don’t want to know. I just want to go home. Please, call us a taxi.”

    “Sorry, I can’t.”

    By now, I was sure my blood pressure was about to blow a hole in one of my veins.

    “Well,” he said, “I don’t care who knows, so I’m going to tell you anyway.” He smiled like a good friend who’s about to tell you something no one else will. “It’s _____ _____’s house,” he said with great pride.

    Then, his cellphone (which he wouldn’t let us use to call a taxi) rang. I leaned against my husband and whispered, “Who is _____ _____? I never heard of him.”

    “Shh,” he said. “Tell you later.”

    “Now!” I commanded. “Right now!”

    “Okay, okay. He’s the C.E.O. of ________. Probably one of the richest men in America. A billionaire many times over.”

    Some people know the statistics for every professional athlete, even gladiators in the Fortune 500 League. Numbers on the big board of Wall Street’s Coliseum are memorized with the same zeal as those on the scoreboard of each major sports stadium.

    At last, Brian! He’s real. He’s smiling. He’s friendly, actually. He said that another thug — or did he say “man” — would take us to the nearest gas station to get the right mix for the boat so we could leave the way we came, and fast! We told him that we needed to go home to get money for gas.

    “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything. We want to help you. We want you to get out of here as soon as possible, before the owner knows you’ve been here. It’s taken us so long because we were already on another surveillance when you arrived. We saw you on our cameras, but we couldn’t come right away.”

    No wonder The Hamptons are referred to as a war zone. In the summer, especially, simultaneous invasions overwhelm the troops.

    The butler called the driver. “Listen, these people are elderly. You’ve got to have some respect. You can’t just keep them here. It’s hot. They’re tired. They don’t have shoes.”

    Elderly! And here I was feeling so athletic, hoisting myself onto the bulkhead!

    The driver appeared and told us to get in the car; it didn’t sound inviting. He gave each of us a bottle of cold water and berated us for being out in a boat without phones or money or ID. As a cop from New York City, out here on a private security gig, he informed us that if we were in New York, he would throw us in jail. “That’s the law!” Like a big brother half our age, he advised us never to be without ID again.

    By this time, I was truly miserable. I felt kidnapped, held against my will in a car. I said I wish I could go home. My husband asked, “Would you please take my wife home, so she doesn’t have to deal with the boat again? Maybe it won’t start up. Maybe it will take a while to resolve things.”

    “Sorry,” said our straight-out-of-“The Godfather” chauffeur, “my instructions are to take you to the gas station and back to your boat. Nowhere else.”

    When we returned to where it is we don’t want to know we are, which belongs to him whose name we also don’t want to know, everyone was smiling and nice to us. “We’re so sorry. You just can’t be too careful these days.”

    They explained that their boss, who has gates and armed guards and cameras and who-knows-what-else, feels vulnerable to an attack by sea.

    We three elders in our baseball caps and bare feet probably met the criterion for his most terrifying fantasy. Meantime, his protectors must have checked our names. Apparently, we did not appear on a list of the most wanted. Nor were we on a roster of Navy Seals.

    The two tough guys filled up the gas tank. They helped us to our seats with the respect and care elderly people like us suddenly appreciated. They started the engine. Like twin James Bonds, they jumped from the boat onto the bulkhead in one smooth motion. They managed to do all the dirty work without mussing their hair or soiling their jackets. They wished us well. Up on land, above us, waving, they almost looked like cadets, saluting us for a job well done.

    “We’ll return with money for the gas!” we promised.

    “No. No. Please.”

    “Go home. Please, don’t bother to come back.”

    These good neighbors, without expecting anything in return, gave us three bottles of cold water and $6.09 worth of gas. Where else in the world could someone receive such treatment?

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    Fran Castan taught writing and literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York for 25 years. She is the author of "The Widow's Quilt," a book of poems, and "Venice: City That Paints Itself," a collection of her poems and paintings by her husband, Lewis Zacks.

    With the calendar flipping from July to August, changes come to the beach. Even before sunrise I can hear the difference in the wind, now coming from the north. It is a light wind, though, only a hint of what is to come as summer gives way to fall and then to winter.

    In the house, our oldest child was packed off to sleep-away camp for the very first time this week, another sign of time’s passing. Skittering hordes of sandpipers and plovers have been back for several weeks now, their numbers increasing each day as they arrive from breeding places in the far north.

    These small birds move through the seasons quickly, nesting in spring, staying only briefly in their tundra haunts before winging south, stopping along the coast in the usual places to gorge on the shrimp-like things and worms that live at the water’s edge. In the distance they seem to rise and fall like snow, flying out over the bay for a moment without apparent purpose, then returning to the same patch of sand.

    The very southernmost sweep of Gardiner’s Bay has been teeming with life of one sort or another this year. This is in stark contrast with, but perhaps related to, the savage and sweeping devastation of the late December storm that churned the beach and pushed the dune landward a dozen feet in some places. Huge schools of sand eels rise each day before dawn, drawing in predators above and below.

    Terns show up just as there is light enough to see them, hovering along the edge of the beach. It was pointed out to me by a brother-in-law who notices such things that, though their nesting sites were elsewhere, young-of-the-year terns assemble on the beach, waiting to be fed by the more able adults.

    Getting Adelia ready for camp has been reminiscent of the terns’ feeding arrangements, if somewhat more complicated. There have been bags to pack, things to buy and ship in advance. One morning this week, she will be sent on her way, in a van to New Hampshire, our own little bird, making her very first flight

    Having taken a peek at Geoff Gehman’s memoir before it went to press, before it went to print last week, I ran through the office saying I had been canonized.

    But, as Geoff later correctly said in an e-mail, in order to be canonized you’ve got to be dead.

    Damn. There’s no way we can get around it? Oh well, I’ll demur then when it comes to sanctification. Though it is nice to know that I once led a younger reader to think that you could have fun in relating facts, or at least in relating alleged facts. I do remember in recounting the theft at Truman Capote’s that I’d been dismayed by all the “allegedlys” Ev Rattray stuck in. They kind of broke up the rhythm, but they were necessary, I suppose, to fend off any claims that we might have been having too much fun.

    As for fun, a photographer from one of the big city dailies, who saw how enthusiastically I was covering Norman Mailer’s “Maidstone,” recommended that I eschew visions of journalistic grandeur in favor of having fun out here.

    And so I did, and not to my regret, though I had to be saved from fun three times — by Barbara Johnson, who took me in as a star boarder following a divorce, by Ev Rattray, who changed my beat from bored meetings to sports (what I call the joy department), and by Mary, who has said I’m the first man who waved to her in East Hampton.

    I remember when that was. I was running down Abraham’s Path one morning, by the softball field, when I saw her driving up the street. She waved back. Lucky me.

    That was some 27 years ago, and though she, a single mother then, put me off for a while, not wanting to risk loving again, I clung to my own invincible surmise and, in time, we leaped feet first into the unknown in the Quaker cemetery on Shelter Island as the twins, who had partaken of M&M wafers, grinned and said, chocolate at the edges of their mouths, “Kiss the bride.”

    That was on the first Sunday of March, 1985, and though we were formally married by the late Sheppard Frood in our backyard five months later, on Aug. 22, we agree that we plighted our troth when we married ourselves.

    I still wave to her when I set off in the morning and she’s at the window in the computer room. And she waves back.

    Lucky me.

    When the thought crossed my mind well before my family headed out to the Sag Harbor carnival last week to get a fishbowl ready, I should have acted on the impulse. Instead, we returned with a bag of three goldfish from one of the games of chance and had no place to put them.

    Chlorine-laced water from the tap does not really make a hospitable home for even this hardy breed. It was lucky, I suppose, that I had a small, unused tank and a bottle of water treatment from the pet store tucked away. So, before I went to bed, I set up what would be the fishes’ new habitat. Unfortunately, Evvy, who is 7, named each scaly new friend before she turned in.

    I fell asleep with the fish still in their plastic bag, though I had opened the top and clipped the bag to the side of the tank. In the morning there were but two. Actually, there were still three, but one was no longer moving. Into the trash it went. Evvy, used to fish mortality by this point, asked what had happened to Snoopy, or whatever its name had been, but was less upset than I had imagined she would be.

    At the carnival, kids and parents crowded around the goldfish game. The harried, ice-eyed guy who ran the booth looked ready to crack at any moment. He sold baskets of Ping-Pong balls for $5, which were to be tossed toward a low table covered with small-mouthed fishbowls.

    Winners took home fish in bags of two or three; there were plastic tanks available for a couple of dollars, and fish food. I wondered how many of the fish would survive until the next day.

    The odds are not good for carnival fish. We have seen them lost under a car seat never to be heard from again. Some, like Evvy’s short-kept Snoopy, perish quickly. Others, like the one that lived for several years and whose name I forget, are found on a bedroom floor and returned to their tank, but they never recover.

    Now, several days later, Evvy’s two remaining fish from the recent winnings seem to be doing well enough. Lisa, her mother, wants them moved from their spot near the cappuccino maker, however, something I will need to attend to. Time will tell how they do long term. If they don’t make it, there’s always next year’s basket of balls to be thrown.