Somewhere in the archives here at The Star, perhaps in the myriad “Looking Them Over” columns written by the late Jeannette Edwards Rattray, are stories about how the Atlantic sturgeon was caught here and made into caviar.

    In “Men’s Lives,” Peter Mat­thiessen’s elegy for the traditional baymen of the South Fork (which accompanies a stunning book of photographs), he reports that Capt. Frank Lester of the Amagansett Lesters, who was born in 1890, set nets for sturgeon.

    So I called Milton Miller, who at the age of 96 is one of the last of the old-time fishermen, to ask whether Captain Frank made caviar. Yes, he said. As a boy Mr. Miller watched Captain Frank bring in sturgeon. He described the sieves used to separate the roe. It was, for a time, he said, a money fish for Captain Frank, more so than cod. “I wouldn’t have eaten it,” he said of the caviar.

    The Atlantic sturgeon, one of more than 20 sturgeon species, is endangered. Adults of the species are known to be as long as 12 to 15 feet and to weigh up to 800 pounds. It is among the oldest of aquatic animals, and its appearance is said to offer a glimpse of what fish may have looked like in the time of the dinosaurs.

    Mr. Miller told me a funny story about a friend who, upon seeing one at Lion’s Head Rock in Gardiner’s Bay, thought it was an alligator.

    My interest in what had become of the sturgeon here was aroused recently when I read in The New York Times that Abu Dhabi, one of the seven of the United Arab Emirates, “is talking caviar on a scale that would make czars blush.” It is developing a $120 million indoor sturgeon farm, the world’s largest, and by 2015 expects to have 35 tons of roe, more than a quarter of the worldwide quantity, to turn into black gold.

    The best caviar used to come from the beluga sturgeon of the Caspian Sea, but overfishing, destruction of spawning habitats, and pollution have caused its decline, if not its collapse, there. Companies in Russia, second only in caviar sales to Iran in the past, have branched out to partner with technologically sophisticated enterprises in such countries as Germany, Uruguay, and Argentina. But in the Emirates, they do things in a bigger way.

    According to The Times, the demand for caviar far exceeds worldwide production. Sturgeon in Abu Dhabi “are coddled in the piscine versions of five-star luxury,” The Times said. And Persian Gulf residents are “increasingly seeking the roe . . . as a symbol of their wealth.” Everything is in place in Abu Dhabi to satisfy, as The Times put it, “the growing appetites of the newly wealthy in Far East markets, especially in China.”

    I have never been to Abu Dhabi, but we spent 24 hours last month in its neighboring state, Dubai, on our way to Ethiopia, where many people are hungry. From what I could see, Dubai has elevated conspicuous consumption to an astronomical level. And I read that in Abu Dhabi ATM machines dispense gold bars.

    Single-color flags on poles along the ocean beaches in Amagansett and Montauk are part of a new program this summer initiated by the Town of East Hampton and the local lifeguards organization to broadcast surf conditions. Also part of the program are numbered signposts along the beach at Beach Hampton and Napeague, which are intended to help anyone calling for help direct emergency responders to the correct location.

    Trouble on the beach of one sort or another is inevitable once the days get hot and the water reaches a swimmable temperature. Just Tuesday, listening to the emergency radio scanner on my desk, there were two simultaneous calls at Indian Wells in Amagansett and another at about the same time in Montauk.

    There was a good swell running that day — yellow flag, which signals caution — and the injuries, a dislocated shoulder and some sort of knee issue, could well have been from the victims’ being tossed around in rough surf.

    I had been up at Georgica Beach myself a little before noon. Jumping into the water to cool off at one end of the area set off for guarded swimming, I dived under a couple of waves, body surfed a few more, and within just a few minutes had been swept all the way east, past the lifeguard stand and out of the protected zone.

    Not that I was particularly worried; I am a confident ocean swimmer, having taken the town’s lifeguard training course lo those many years ago, and I have been surfing now for more than 30 years. Still, the thought crossed my mind that I had drifted out of the lifeguards’ line of sight and, if something did happen, I would be on my own with a hard fight back to the beach. (Nothing did.)

    It is remarkable, frankly, how few really bad incidents there are at the ocean here. I took our 10-year-old for a surf lesson Sunday at a beach where there are no lifeguards and was alarmed to see parents allowing small children to go into the waves on body boards as the adults, half paying attention, talked to one another under umbrellas.

    Of course, of the recent ocean drownings I remember here, the victims were adults. Perhaps kids have the inherent sense not to go outside their depth. Perhaps Poseidon just watches out for them.

    Back to school catalogs have begun to arrive, and summer, the season that when you’re young you think will never end — Labor Day being barely visible on the horizon — has barely begun. We are pulled into the future even as our darting eyes try to catch a glimpse of the present and reflect upon the past.

    “Did you see that. . . ? At the feeder. I think it was a vireo. Let’s go to the book. . . . Wait, what’s streaking across the lawn? A chipmunk? What do you call the color of the shirt you’ve got on? Magenta, puce. . . ?

    “Dark raspberry, I think.”

    “Ah, dark raspberry. . . . You’re very beautiful. Don’t you think the honeysuckle in the outdoor shower smells wonderful. Seductive. And that clematis vine’s so pretty, and the hydrangeas by the fence have bloomed. . . . You’ve got to go. . . ? Drive carefully. Come back. . . .”

    Come back and we’ll dance to an ever-faster tune and dream we’ve awakened to a winter’s fire from whose ashes spring will poke, whisking us through golden backyard summer evenings to autumn’s silver, slanted light and on to talk at holiday tables of other moments when we’ve felt blessed, moments when we stopped to look before we were called away.

    “Wait, what streaked across the lawn. . . ? The twins! The day they played hooky from school. My mother, paying us a rare visit, got a glimpse, she said, of their shadows darting between the trees.”

    And I got a glimpse of her, and of my forebears. Glimpses made on the run, whose tender moments we reserve against the time when, ennervated, we approach the speed of light. . . . Archaean Pre-CambrianCambrianOrdovicianSilurianDevonianCarboniferousPermianTriassicJurassicCretaceousTertiaryMesozoicPleistocenePaleolithicNeolithic. . . .

    “I remember that Christmas morning when the living room was a veritable mountain range of presents from Aunt Kate and at the far end, by the tree, a two-wheeler. . . !”

    “Wait. Look! At the feeder. . . . A flicker.”

    This is the thing about jet lag. You become two people. There’s you, the one other people can see, and then there’s the you who looks out at the world and back at you in the mirror.

    The first one is right on time, while the second you lives in another zone. This double vision increases, of course, according to how far you are from home. I recently made a short trip to Hawaii and back. Short, relatively speaking.

    The 50th state is 6,000 miles away. That’s not the short part. Short refers to the length of stay. For a trip of that distance, a week or less is short because the second you barely becomes reunited with the first you by the time he has to bid him adieu once again.

    There is a six-hour difference between East Hampton and Hawaii this time of year. On the day after my arrival, clusters of pink-skinned tourists, Japanese wedding parties, tattooed surfers, tattooed delivery men, tattooed road workers, tattooed schoolchildren, tattooed everybody were going about their business on Kalakaua Avenue, Waikiki’s main drag. They might have noticed me shuffling along, paying for a cup of Kona and looking out at the turquoise waves, but I was a facade. The real me was sound asleep within.

    Not even the Kona, that magical coffee bean, could rouse the sleeper, and by the time he did wake up, the external shell of me was ready for bed. Ahhh, sleep. Yes, but jet-lagged sleep is where the two yous battle for temporal supremacy until eyes spring open like hatch covers, look at the clock, and declare fatigue to be the only winner.

    Yes, I know about melatonin pills and not drinking alcohol on the flight (an oxymoron), but there’s no real cure for jet lag except to circumnavigate slowly. Just think, before jets, or even prop planes, the lag did not exist.

    I was terrible at physics. In fact, at the very start of one semester, my college professor took me aside and told me to go find another course. I do remember snippets about the theory of relativity like the possibility of flying off into space and returning to Earth a few years younger than when you left. Way cool, but as I recall you had to go really fast.

    No, the only real cure is to travel by ship, sailing ship if possible. Capt. James Cook faced many dangers and privations but jet lag was not among them. He had the opposite problem, the doldrums, which is interesting because when seriously jet-lagged, one slips into a doldrum-like state stuck between where you’ve been and where you’re going. Full circle to the doldrums. It’s the state I’m in right now, so I’m going

Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The East Hampton Star.

    After the divorce, I had to rent my house each summer in order to keep up with expenses and somehow get myself through college. So when it didn’t rent one year, I had to resort to renting a few rooms, which was almost as distasteful to me as renting the whole house, maybe even worse.

    When I placed the ad in the paper, I told the person on the phone that I wanted to rent only to women, to which he replied, “You can’t specify gender in the ad. You can handle that when people call you.” One more problem to deal with.

    Wouldn’t you just know that the first person to call was a guy. When I told him I was renting only to women, and added that he wouldn’t be happy living in a house with three of them, he countered with, “I have four sisters and am used to living with women.”

    “I’m really sorry but I’m only going to rent to women!” I said.

    I had one room rented to a friend, Diane, who lived in the city and would be out weekends and on her vacation. My daughter, Denise, was coming home from her own college experience, and she and I were going to share the large den as a bedroom for the summer. That left me with two rooms left to rent, my bedroom and Denise’s. I rented one of them to a friend of my sister’s.

    Then the crazies started calling: “I know you said no pets, but he’s only a little dog.” And, “Hi, I saw your ad and wondered if my two sisters and I could share a room.” My answer was always no.

    When I had just about had it, the guy called again. “Look, I know you said you wouldn’t rent to me, but would you please just let me come over and talk to you?” And to this day, I don’t know why . . . but I said, “Okay.”

    An hour later, the bell rang, and I opened the door to find a rather strange-looking man on my doorstep. Keith had a big, burly brown beard that was quite overwhelming. He came in and we talked for about an hour. And to this day, I don’t know why . . . but I rented him a room.

    Summer arrived, and Denise, who came home with an attitude to begin with, decided she shouldn’t have to be put out of her room. This was solved when Diane graciously shared the den with me.

    “I would just as soon sleep here,” she said. “It’s lovely with the sliding doors going out to the patio.”

    “Thank you, Diane, this way I won’t have to kill Denise.”

    Summer came and went. Denise continued to grate on my nerves. Diane had no patience with Denise, and my sister’s friend annoyed all of us. You guessed it: The only decent tenant was

Keith. He was pleasant, insisted on mowing the lawn for me, and as he got to know my family and friends, we became friends ourselves.

    One day, near the end of August, he approached me. “I know we’re all supposed to move out after Labor Day, but would you consider letting me stay and share the house with you for the winter?”

    I laugh now, because even though I was 38 years old, my first thought was, “What would my father think?” Well, I dismissed the thought, and to this day, I don’t know why . . . but I said, “Sure, you can stay.”

    We found that we were compatible roommates, and, after a crazy summer, we had a pleasant, peaceful winter.

    The next summer, I rented the entire house and moved in with a friend. Keith moved out for the summer but moved back in for the winter. This was the pattern for the next two or three years, and we became good friends.

    Now the time came that Denise finished college and found a place of her own, so my tenancy in the house ended, and, as agreed upon in the divorce settlement, it had to be sold so the proceeds could be divided. I was panic-stricken over where was I going to go. This had been my home for 21 years.

    One day, Keith stopped by with a big smile on his face and said, “Guess what I did.”

    “What?”

    He waved keys in the air. “I finally bought a house!”

    I knew he had been looking for the past two years. I was very happy for him.

    Then he said, “I’m looking to get someone to do a house share, and my friend John said he might be interested, but I wanted to ask you first.”

    Of course I said yes and moved in, but, ironically, now he was the landlord and I was the tenant, and I started paying him rent.

    It turned out that we really liked being together, started to travel a bit, and as if this story isn’t crazy enough, a few years later we fell in love and were married — 16 happy years in April.

    All the years that I was single, my mother used to say, “Why don’t you go out more? Do you really think some man is just going to show up on your doorstep one day?”

    Toni Hallock-Betts is a retired psychotherapist and a former adjunct professor of psychology at Suffolk Community College. She lives in Sag Harbor.

Family life in the digital age has added a dimension of complexity to battles over how much television and other distractions parents allow their children. In our household, we do without regular TV in favor of using online alternatives to give us a measure of control over what the kids watch and to avoid the intrusive commercials.

    This is a far cry from my own childhood, when we first got a TV set in the 1970s. It was a black-and-white unit, a Sony if I remember correctly, and could only get one or two channels reliably. These came from Connecticut and Rhode Island, places where the accents of the people who appeared in local advertising seemed odd and unfamiliar to us.

    My cousin Cleo was fascinated by a pitchman for a car dealership or furniture place far across Long Island Sound, Brewster’s, though the on-air talent with a considerable lisp mangled the name. Cleo thought the way he said the business’s name was so amusing that she began calling her mother, my Aunt Mary Rattray on my father’s side, Brewster. It stuck, and these decades later, when someone in the extended family refers to Bru, it is still understood who is being talked about.

    These days, the subtle regional differences seem less obvious. Unless they went looking for it or we took them on a trip, it seems unlikely to me that my kids would encounter a Rhode Island accent. What streams in over Netflix or Hulu, two online sources of videos, is scrubbed clean of much in the way of interesting verbal qualities in favor of broad, obvious categories, Southern, New Yawker, generic American.

    I haven’t seen Rhode Island TV in years, but I doubt it sounds the way it once did. If the workers in call centers in Delhi can put on convincing United States heartland accents, so too, I’d bet, can the talking heads in Pawtucket.

    Of course, if you visited Rhode Island, you would still be able to pick out the distinctive sound in people’s speech, much as you would if you visited Baltimore or got into a conversation with an honest-to-goodness Bonacker. These speech patterns, long vowels, hard Rs, remain. They just aren’t on TV that much anymore. Certainly not on Netflix, and I wonder if my kids are missing something. Perhaps it’s time we took a trip across the waters.

It really was a steam laundry. Of course you already knew that if you were a Laundry restaurant patron during its 25-year run on Race Lane dating from 1980. The large industrial washing machine on the patio was a good clue.

    I had written to the Laundry’s owner, Stuart Kreisler, and its executive chef, Andrew Engle, that fateful October of 2005 just before the restaurant moved from Race Lane in East Hampton Village to Pantigo Road, where it closed a few years later. My wife, Carol, and I had dined there in April during our spring visit and planned a fall visit to show some historical steam laundry photos. Carol’s great-uncle, Jud Banister, later village mayor for 18 years, built the brick laundry on Race Lane in 1913. Patrons and visitors to the Laundry Web site were familiar with the masthead photo showing Jud and two young men and a boy standing by the laundry wagon in front of the prominently displayed “East Hampton Steam Laundry” sign.

    Others familiar with East Hampton history may recall the old Star photo, reprinted in “From Sea to Sea: 350 years of East Hampton History” by Averill Dayton Geus, of the original East Hampton Steam Laundry on Cedar Street in 1904. Opened by Jud and his brother-in-law, Jeremiah Miller Huntting, a k a Jere or Jerry Huntting, the Cedar Street laundry later burned, to be replaced by the Race Lane establishment. You might get the impression that they were the owners when it burned, but they weren’t.

    Jere married Jud’s older sister, Edith (Ede), in October 1903, arriving home from their wedding in Malone, N.Y., to a band’s “customary serenade.” Ede had convinced Jud to move to East Hampton from Malone earlier that year, bringing his considerable mechanical skills to the bustling summer resort on Long Island’s South Fork. He did, met her beau, Jere, and they decided to join together in building East Hampton’s first steam laundry on land owned by Jere’s parents, D.H. and Harriet Miller Huntting, and next to their house near “the Hook.”

    By March 1904, they were advertising on The Star’s front page as the firm of Huntting and Banister and expected to open for business April 1. Although many thought the name would be Banister and Huntting, by the opening the names had been reversed. And why not? The business was on Huntting land and the name carried a long and distinguished local history with it.

    Always eager to keep its readers up to date on the latest business activity, The Star within a year reported that the young men had installed a “new rotary washing machine and a big collar and cuff ironer of the latest design,” declaring the machine capable of ironing “collars and cuffs in a perfect manner [to] give them what is called the ‘dead finish.’ ” East Hampton’s business community and ladies were going to be as stylishly and freshly dressed and pressed as anywhere!

    Jud and Jere started running a small ad on the Business Directory page touting their capabilities. A smiling young lady with a full head of hair fashionably parted in the middle looked out at you, her neck surrounded by a high white collar, her right hand proudly pointing to the exquisite work of the collar’s finish. The ad proclaimed “Something to Be Proud of” and surely she was. The laundrymen said that “not even ‘the beautiful snow that caps Mount Blanc’ is whiter or finer in finish in its glacial smoothness than is the linen that we are doing up every day.” How could that not be good!

    But the good news reports, including the assisting of Tong Lee when his laundry was damaged by a nearby fire, could not cover up the growing problems in the partnership. Soon Jere sold his business interest to Jud, then Jud sold out to him. Each sued the other. The court threw Jere’s case out, and a jury found no cause to support Jud’s, with the judge splitting court costs between them. So much for the partnership.

    Jere didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer, nor, it seems, was he much of a laundryman. He had to install new equipment to get “everything in good working order” again, apparently the result of customer complaints. And with Jud out of the picture, he hired a Mr. T.B. Whitney to be his laundryman.

    The big 1907 fire changed everything at the Cedar Street laundry. Fred Dayton, a “wide-awake business man,” according to The Star, but now without a clothing business, immediately purchased the laundry from Jere. Who do you think Fred hired to run it? If you guessed Jud, you’d be right. Soon his ads were pronouncing the “Laundry operating under new management. Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

    But Jud, involved in other business adventures, left the laundry sometime in 1908, and Fred sold it to T.B. Whitney, now married and with ties to East Hampton. Mr. Whitney owned the laundry for less than five months.

    “Steam Laundry Burned,” The Star reported on Jan. 29, 1909. “Started by an accidental explosion of gasoline, Mr. Whitney was lucky to escape with his life. Though the fire department was called and responded as quickly as they could, by the time they laid 1,000 feet of hose, the building was totally engulfed with no hope of saving it. Turning their attention to Mrs. Huntting’s nearby house, they were successful protecting it.” (The S. Hedges Miller house — Mrs. Huntting’s — still stands across from the fire station on Cedar Street.)

    The estimated loss was $3,000, and insurance covered about half. Mr. Whitney said he hoped to rebuild, but perhaps in a more central location. He never did.

    The first Race Lane laundry was built in 1911, but it, too, burned, in 1913, to be replaced by the brick building in the restaurant’s masthead picture. But that’s another story.

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

    A good friend called during work hours early this week and said he had something important to discuss. Immediately, I thought that he was calling to say he was engaged now that New York is about to allow same-sex marriages.

    As it turned out, he was calling about an idea he had for something entirely unrelated and of a less thrilling nature. I love a good wedding, and my friend, if and when he decides to marry his long-term partner, would probably throw one hell of a party.

    Because of him, the same-sex marriage debate in New York State was personal for me. It was inconceivable that he, the best man at my own wedding, could not enjoy the same basic rights I do as an adult citizen of the United States of America.

    And I thought, too, of the gay children of other friends. How could it be that they could not grow up, fall in love, and marry whomever they damn well pleased. What if one of my own children was told by the state who was an appropriate spouse and who was not? If ever there was something for government to mind its own business about, it was this.

    I remember going into Town Hall back in 1998 with my now-wife, Lisa, for our marriage license, though I can’t recall who on the staff handled the paperwork. We had the required documents, and enough cash to cover the modest fee. At no time did anyone question our choice of each other, and it was a lighthearted transaction. We might even have received a gift bag with laundry detergent samples and other things newlyweds might need.

    Monday is the first day that the town clerk’s offices in East Hampton and Southampton Town Hall will technically be able to process marriage licenses without regard to the gender of applicants.

    Not that I wish any more work on the long-suffering town clerk staff, but it would be gratifying if there were a long line of spouses-to-be there hoping to be among the first same-sex couples here to take officially sanctioned vows.

    My friend and his boyfriend will not be among them, but at least they now have the option. And, you know what? It’s about time.

     Because one of my friends wants to lose a lot of weight and recently asked whether I had any recommendations about how he should go about it, I’ve been thinking about diets.  We had discussed counting calories and the Weight Watchers system of food points, but I had seen a new documentary called “Page One: Inside The New York Times” and knew that Brian Stelter, a reporter, had lost 90 pounds in a relatively short time. The question was, how had he done it? The answer was easy to find.

    Mr. Stelter, a former TV blogger, was hired as The Times’s new media reporter in 2007, shortly after graduating from college. “For me,” he subsequently wrote, “Twitter is an early warning system for breaking news, a tool for interacting with readers, and a great way to promote and improve our work.” It comes as no surprise, then, that he lost weight the digital way.

    If Twitter posts helped spur the Arab Spring, using it to lose weight should be a breeze.

    In March 2010, Mr. Stelter let it be known on Twitter that he was going on a diet. His first goal was to lose 25 pounds by his 25th birthday. Five months later, in an article in The Times, he explained his thinking, and the results.

    Rather than blog about dieting, join Weight Watchers, or keep a diary, Mr. Stelter chose to Tweet what he ate, and sometimes what he drank, along with his weight. It took him a while to make it known publicly that his weight as he started was 270 pounds, but he lost 25 pounds in two months and, by August 2010, he had lost 75 pounds and was proud of it.

    On Twitter, he accumulated a big audience. Strangers across the country Tweeted him. He had wanted the “help of a cheering section,” he said later, and he found one. “You’re ruining pastries for me with this Twitter feed, Bri,” a friend said.

    Mr. Stelter acknowledged that he wasn’t the first person to divulge his weight on the Internet. (Drew Magary, a writer for Deadspin, a Web site that puts an irreverent spin on sports news, for example, had blogged about his “Public Humiliation Diet.”)  Mr. Stelter, however, also decided to give the world images of himself as he lost weight, using a short-form-blog platform — which I didn’t know anything about until now — called Tumblr. Anyone who wants to see a collage of his photos can do so there

    The biggest hurdle, he said, was admitting the truth after a long evening of drinking or a late-night pizza binge. With the aid of the “Page One” film, he is now a media celebrity. It has been widely reported that he is dating a CNBC anchor, Nicole Lapin. Gawker, the online gossip site and newsmagazine — which usually has particularly sarcastic things to say about the media and publishing world, and can be just short of nasty — took aim at him about a month ago.

    “So there you have it,” Gawker said. “Brian Stelter lost a bunch of weight and is starring in a movie, and now he has a famous girlfriend. He also seems to be wearing decent clothes. How long before he quits journalism entirely? You don’t belong here, Brian.”

    The screening of “Page One” at Guild Hall tomorrow night — with the film’s director, Andrew Rossi, The Times’s outgoing executive editor, Bill Keller, and the columnist David Carr taking part in a question-and-answer session afterward — is sold out. Brian Stelter is not expected to attend, but I’m sure he’d be looking fabulous if he did.

    On entering the office one recent deadline morning, I was told that the electricity had gone out and would be out for the next six hours.

    Since I had one more story to write, not of much moment, but nevertheless a story that needed to be done to fill out the page, I thought, for the first time in a very long time, of manual typewriters and how they would — for me at any rate, because I don’t have a laptop — save the day.

    We have a few of them downstairs, all of which I’ve probably used at one time or another, but I quickly learned that they were hopelessly gummed up, and before I could properly mourn their loss, concluded that I would have to go home and work on Mary’s laptop.

    I hate computers, if the truth be known. I never feel at ease with them. At least with typewriters you knew where you stood and where what you’d written was, right there on the page. What I’ve written on this screen thus far looks palpable enough, but it’s a deception. A thundercrack or power surge and I’d be cursing the dark again, agonizing over the fact that I had not yet hit “save.”

    I have just done so, but I’m still not reassured.

    At any rate, I went home to our new computer. The old one had drowned a few weeks before, having fallen victim to an open window and a vigorously oscillating sprinkler. Nothing could be done, though our editor, who is very much at home in this technological age, did his best, for which I genuinely thanked him.

    Before leaving to work at home, I asked for the address to send the story to and was given [email protected].

    Not wanting to bother Mary, who was at her mother’s and who is very computer literate, with any importunings, I wrote the story as an e-mail, and when I was done the better part of an hour later I hit “send” and quickly picked up the phone.

    “Did you get it, Kathy — I just sent it.”

    No, Kathy said after checking, they hadn’t gotten it. Sometimes it took a while. She suggested I try another address, [email protected], and then went back to work. (The electricity had been restored to the back shop early on, a line having been run over from the library.)

    As soon as I began to type in the new address I knew I’d done something horribly wrong. I went posthaste to the “sent” box, the one with the paper plane at the left of the screen, hoping against hope. . . . The story wasn’t there!

    Mary said she’d be right over. Frankly, I moaned, I doubted that even she would ever find it. And I’d been working the better part of an hour!

    But she did! In some unexpected place, after clicking on everything there was to click on. “Don’t ask me how I did it,” she said as she began to print out a copy, which I tugged from the machine as if I were performing a forceps delivery.

    She also, bless her, sent what I’d written to the second address given, and off I went to the office, relieved but seriously shaken.

    Later, I was told that the e-mail I’d originally sent did, in fact, arrive, but well after the one Mary had sent.

    Where, then, had it been?!

    It would have been a good question to raise at the computer class I’d signed up for that afternoon, but which, because of all of the above, I’d missed.

    Another day and I am not yet saved.