Hold on to your hats! Extra, extra, hear all about it! The U.S. Open is coming back to Shinnecock in 2018.

    I greeted the news (remember, you read it here last) with utter dread, and wondered if I would be retired and/or dead by then.

    Then, on that same day, I read in a “Health and Science” item in Newsday that “a baby born in 2009 can expect to live 78 years and 2 months,” which gave me hope, since I was born well before then — 69 years before then — that easeful death might overtake me before all the crowds descend and I am once more kept outside the ropes, even as our well-connected weekly competitors from Southampton stroll and loll about within.

    “But your uncle lived to 103,” Mary says whenever I speak hopefully about somehow ducking the assignment.

    “I have to admit you’re right,” I say. “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with me except for terminal alliteration.”

    “You’re a geriatric jester, Jack. [Aside: Is this catching. . . ? Do they do alliterectomies?] I’m positive you’ll live a long time.”

    “Nurturing negator of negativism,” I say, recalling appalling, galling stonewalling and post-perambulant profanations past, “by 2018, if I follow in my father’s footsteps, I’ll be suffering, not only from advanced alliteration, but from acute agoraphobic anxiety, and will be filing stories from bed. . . . Can you imagine the crowds this Open will attract?! It was bad enough in 2004. It took me an hour — as long as it took to get to Southampton College from East Hampton on the shuttle that day — to walk the last 50 yards to the bridge over the highway after it was over. I remember somebody saying, ‘Next time, they ought to have two bridges . . . make that three.’ ”

    It was in 2004 that the U.S.G.A. — in contrast to 1986 and 1995 — decided to no longer let The Star inside the ropes. When I protested, the spokesman said we, being a weekly, had never been allowed inside the ropes to begin with. I said — politely, of course, in keeping with the nature of the sport — that I had published photos to prove we had. No dice. I had to ante up $65 for a periscope on the final day and trade a well-credentialed photographer The Star’s lone parking space for photos from within the ropes.

    So, no, I’m not looking forward to the 2018 U.S. Open.

    Alex White, who was Shinnecock’s longtime superintendent, told me 25 years ago, when we wrote our advance, that the best place to watch it would be on TV.

    Little did I know then that I would be watching that 1986 Open on TV — in London, Mary having won a free trip there the week before. Maybe she’ll bail me out again. We’ve got seven years to think about it.

“They’re more scared of you than you are of them” was simply not true when it came to me versus stinging, swarming, flying creatures. As a Woody Allen-esque city kid dragged to the Hamptons on weekends or for vacations, those insects — bees, wasps, hornets — were lumped into one scary interchangeable species.

    If I heard the dreaded, low-pitched buzzing noise, I would proceed into a series of swatting, hopping motions that came to be known by friends and family as Bridget’s “Izzitonmee” dance.

    But as I aged, I began to see the value of bees. At least of honeybees. They do, after all, make honey. They pollinate flowers and, more important, crops. And I felt the stirrings of compassion, mixed with growing alarm, when I heard the piece on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2006.

    “Wild bees across the country are in a state of decline,” said the show’s host, Steve Inskeep, introducing a story by John Nielsen. “And that could cause problems for anybody in the following categories . . . gardeners, farmers, people who like to eat.”

    “Hey, I like to eat,” I thought. Making one of many snap decisions I’ve been known to make — which have included, in the five years leading up to hearing that broadcast, quitting my job, leaving the Hamptons for New Hampshire, becoming a minister, leading women’s retreats, buying an inn and restaurant, and raising goats — I instantly went from stark raving bee terror to buying books on how to raise them.

    “We’re going to keep bees,” I told my family after doing about three hours of research and going to one beekeeping seminar.

    The word “bees” was still echoing in the air when the screaming started. It was apparent that I was faced with a choice: keep bees or keep my family together.

    My husband and kids have put up with a lot of Mom’s Krazy Adventures but there was no way, no way in hell! that they were okay with the notion of swarmy, buzzy things.

    “I will leave,” said my daughter, Georgia Warner, with a solemn face, saying each word distinctly while staring into my eyes. “And I will never, ever return.” The two smaller ones were actually on their knees, making those bothersome puppy eyes at me.

    And the truth is, I had no experience whatsoever with bees. I had never even been stung. In fact, I still did the “Izzitonmee” dance on occasion. So it was clear, in this case, that my concept was full of holes and my family was right on the money.

    But I kept beekeeping in my heart and respected, even revered, those who tended to the little critters and kept the farms of America running smoothly.

    When I was afforded a chance to interview Robin Blackley for a story in this week’s arts section, I donned the full hazmat uniform she provided so there wasn’t even the slightest chance of getting any bee on me. However, I chose, since I was a grown-up now, not to wear the gloves.

    Robin was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And sandals.

    During the interview, she picked up a particularly heavy frame, covered with “her girls” and filled with honey. There was a tiny, half-inch space where one hexagonal section was not covered in little black-and-yellow bodies.

    “Stick your finger in there,” Robin said.

    “In where?” I asked, squinting to see the space between the crawling bodies. “In there?”

    “Yes. Stick your finger in there.”

    “In there?”

    “Yes, in there.”

    “In where? Where the bees are?”

    “Where the honey is.”

    Finally I surrendered. What the hell, I thought. Never been stung anyway. There’s a first time for everything.

    As is the case with most people in my life, the bees did not find me nearly as interesting as I thought they would. They just kept muddling about on the frame, doing bee things, and I got a luscious fingerful of warm, straight-from-the-comb liquid gold.

    How many other times in my life have I let fear and useless worry get in the way of having a good time? I shudder to think.

    Spending an afternoon with Robin Blackley and her girls, hanging out at the farm, and getting a taste of fresh nectar straight from the source was sweet indeed.

    But conquering a lifelong fear that day was the sweetest thing of all.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    Before I left Long Island with an educational delegation to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona in May, I thought I knew everything about the problems that immigrants face in the United States. But I could not have been more wrong.

    We’ve heard so much about the border — the fence, the violence, drugs — but we’ve managed to forget the real story.

    By some estimates, thousands of migrants are dying in the desert each year trying to enter the U.S. just so they can feed their families and have access to basic human needs such as clean drinking water and an education. Families are also being torn apart, with parents being separated from children and husbands separated from wives.

    Despite the humanitarian crisis, migrants crossing the border are being treated as criminals, all because Congress refuses to reform our immigration laws.

    The desert might seem far away from the Long Island suburbs, but it’s not. Some of those migrants risking their lives crossing the desert are heading here, hoping to find work or reunite with family members. Some won’t survive the journey.

    Immigration isn’t a new topic for me. I’ve been an activist and very passionate on the issue since I was 16, and I’m about to enter law school to study immigration law.

    I also have a personal connection to the issue. My parents came to Long Island with the hope of finding better jobs and a strong education for their children since they were unable to provide that for us in our home country, Colombia. Because of the United States’ broken immigration system, the only pathway we had available was to overstay a tourist visa we had obtained back in our home country. As a result, we were undocumented immigrants here in Suffolk County for eight years, consigned to the shadows and vulnerable to everything from hatred to deportation.

    Even though we began the process of legalization in 2001 and my dad paid taxes, we were still considered undocumented and I wouldn’t have had access to things like state and federal financial aid for college.

    To an outsider, it may be hard to imagine the life of an undocumented immigrant, but through­out that period I felt depression and shame. I once even contemplated getting married just so that I would be able to stay in this country, the only home I had ever known.

    My experiences, however, didn’t prepare me for the realities that I found on the border. For starters, I learned that the U.S.-Mexico border wasn’t always a battleground against immigration. Before 1994, people had moved with relative ease across the Arizona border for thousands of years. Yes, thousands.

    But after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement that year, the border changed. Millions of farmers in Mexico and Central America lost their livelihood as U.S. imports undercut their own crops. Nafta promised to create jobs for Mexicans in maquiladoras — new factories moving over the border from the U.S. But there weren’t enough factory jobs for out-of-work farmers, and some jobs paid no more than $6.50 a day.

    As a result, immigration increased. But instead of reworking our immigration laws to support the changing migration flow, politicians opted to dump billions of dollars into militarizing the border.

    We saw the effect of these policies firsthand at places like El Comedor, a soup kitchen in Nogales, Mexico, where recently deported migrants — who sometimes had no more than the clothes on their back — were able to find a meal and perhaps some hope for the future.

    We heard stories from dozens of migrants who had lived around the country. Many had been torn away from their spouses and children who were still in the U.S. And even though many migrants had been deported more than once, they typically intended to try to cross the desert again. They did not want the American Dream. Like many immigrants on Long Island and here in East Hampton, they simply wanted to survive.

    Not everything we learned was negative. In Nogales, we drove up dirt roads to visit Hogar de Esperanza y Paz (Home of Hope and Peace), an organization that provides approximately 120 meals a day to children whose parents work long shifts at the maquiladoras and can’t provide them with food. The organization’s mission felt truly inspirational.

    We also met the co-founder of No More Deaths, a faith-based volunteer group that provides water and first aid to immigrants struggling to cross the Arizona desert. This may sound hard to believe, but in recent years anti-immigrant activists have actually fought against the water campaign, even going as far as pouring the water into the desert.

    In the news, we see the politics of immigration: politicians like Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy calling the children of undocumented immigrants “anchor babies” and downplaying attacks against Latino immigrants.

    But that kind of talk doesn’t get us anywhere. As I saw in Arizona, this issue isn’t simply about Republicans or Democrats; it is about caring for fellow human beings. People are dying in the desert: mothers, daughters, husbands, and sons, from adults to small children.

    We need to change our country’s immigration laws so that people have a pathway to come to this country legally, and so that they can fully contribute to our economy and our communities.

    We need to tell that to Congress. But we also need to tell that to our friends, families, and neighbors. Tell them about No More Deaths. Tell them about a humanitarian crisis that’s happening here on American soil. Tell them about the stories of hopelessness and the stories of hope.

    It’s time to ask ourselves who we want to be as Long Islanders and as residents of East Hampton. Our daily choices, even acts as basic as conversing with someone different from you and learning about his life, can have a positive impact on our communities.

    We need to ask ourselves, are we the type of people who give a drink of water to a thirsty traveler, or who knowingly pour that same water out into the desert?

    Isabel Saavedra, who lives in East Hampton Village, graduated from East Hampton High School in 2006. Next month she will begin her first year of law school at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

When the Emirates plane landed at J.F.K. on Saturday after a 23-hour trip (with 18 of them in flight), my daughter and I were filled with both joy and relief. Her second child and my seventh grandchild was now a citizen with the promise of a good life. Besides, we had fallen in love with him.

    At the age of 20 months, our little boy had spent the previous year in an orphanage in Addis Ababa, one of millions of children in Ethiopia who have lost parental care due to extreme poverty, AIDS, or some other combination of misfortune (but one of only thousands who end up in care centers run by foreign adoption agencies).

    According to a Central Intelligence Agency Web site, 43 percent of the Ethiopian population is illiterate. Agriculture accounts for 85 percent of the economy despite droughts and much of the soil having been severely denuded and overworked, leaving many of the 82 million people who live in the country without enough to eat.

    Teodros was nicknamed Taydee in Ethiopia, and that’s what we’re calling him. Officially, he is now David Teodros Rattray, after his uncle (and his uncle, and his uncle). His sister, Nettie Tesfanesh Rattray, who was adopted from the same agency three years ago, will be 4 in 10 days.

    It was my first time in Africa. Although the effects of famine and disease were obvious out on the streets of the capital, in some instances dreadfully so, my stay in Addis Ababa filled me with respect and admiration for Ethiopians. The staff at the care center, which is run by the Children’s Home Society and Family Services organization, based in St. Paul, Minn., were kind and gracious to us, and very loving to the children. Their smiles were endemic.

    The children we met were getting acquainted with their adoptive parents in a carefully programmed transition over five days. They smiled, too, showing affection for each other with hugs and kisses. A few older kids broke unbidden into song in the guesthouse dining room at breakfast one morning and when the electricity went out in a thunderstorm one afternoon. It should not have surprised me that children who had grown up with no radios, let alone televisions or video games, would like to sing, but I found it touching nevertheless. One talented boy, about 10, who had been adopted with his younger sister, led call and response songs, with the cooks’ voices joining in from the kitchen. I hope he doesn’t forget these songs as he grows up in America.

    There was talk among the adoptive parents of how their charges would adapt to new surroundings and siblings, of how to make sure they learned of their heritage, and of how to know when it would be appropriate to bring them back to Ethiopia for a visit.

    My daughter and I had no fear that Taydee would not take hold of his new life easily. Imagine: Here was a child who had spent most of his hours over the previous year in a single room, full of cribs, but who quickly overcame confusion and fear to smile and laugh out loud constantly, as, for the first time, his new mother toted him into cars and vans, and fed him strange new foods, and marched him into a crowd at the United States Embassy — and then carried him away on a long, long airplane trip.

    The future of the adoption of Ethiopian children was thrown into doubt this spring when the Ethiopian government took measures that could radically delay the process for any given child, in effect cutting the number able to be adopted out of the country by as much as 90 percent. It is certainly understandable that Ethiopians would be concerned and upset to see their small compatriots leaving the country. More than 2,500 left for new homes in the States in 2010. It is also certainly very right and good that both Ethiopians and Americans should be extremely vigilant in protecting against corruption and exploitation; there is a very real potential for child-trafficking in a situation like this, where there is such huge wealth and power dividing the “sending” and “receiving” nations, to use the jargon.

    But, even so, at least in some cases, adoption is sometimes the best remaining solution — and the solution most desired by surviving birth families. The future of a boy like Taydee would have been very grim indeed if this avenue hadn’t been open.

    We are thankful we were able to bring him home and very grateful to those who nurtured him till now.

Tuesday started off well enough, I suppose, until I was reaching into the refrigerator at my mother’s house behind the Star office and the lights went out.

    I walked down to the office, concerned about a blackout. It was just after 9 a.m. on the most hectic Tuesday of the year so far, and we were out of business.

    Russell Bennett in the front office phoned the Long Island Power Authority, which said it would look into it and that the electricity would be back on in 45 minutes. This was not so bad, but I remained concerned. Would it really be less than an hour?

    Some time ago, The Star bought two mobile generators for times such as this, but in the absence of hurricanes or other calamities, they had been rarely used. I recalled that one did not work at all, but thought the other would start. The supposedly good one needed a battery jump, so I went off to look for cables.

    After fiddling around with this for a while, I gave up and walked back down the lane. A power company worker was already high in a cherry picker attaching orange cables to the overhead lines. Remarkably fast, too fast, I thought. Minutes later, a tree-trimming crew showed up, and I realized what was going on.

    One of the workers explained what I suspected by then: The power had been cut deliberately to allow them to work around the power lines in safety. The job was to last until roughly 1 p.m. We were supposed to have been notified in advance by mail. Right.

    Without a working generator and with no prospect that the power would be restored soon, I headed next door to the library, where the electricity had not been affected, and asked if I could attach a few extension cords temporarily so we could get the arts section done and to the printer. It was noon by the time it was all assembled. Of course, you probably guessed that within what seemed like minutes of cobbling this arrangement together, a LIPA crew returned and restored the power.

    The rest of the day went relatively smoothly, and we had nearly caught up with our regular schedule by the end of it. Our nerves, frangled and jangled by the morning’s drama, however, remained on edge till quitting time. Whether or not the LIPA guys will be back tomorrow to finish the job no one would say. We’ll just have to wait to see.

    Hold on to your hats! Extra, extra, hear all about it! The U.S. Open is coming back to Shinnecock in 2018.

    I greeted the news (remember, you read it here last) with utter dread, and wondered if I would be retired and/or dead by then.

    Then, on that same day, I read in a “Health and Science” item in Newsday that “a baby born in 2009 can expect to live 78 years and 2 months,” which gave me hope, since I was born well before then — 69 years before then — that easeful death might overtake me before all the crowds descend and I am once more kept outside the ropes, even as our well-connected weekly competitors from Southampton stroll and loll about within.

    “But your uncle lived to 103,” Mary says whenever I speak hopefully about somehow ducking the assignment.

    “I have to admit you’re right,” I say. “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with me except for terminal alliteration.”

    “You’re a geriatric jester, Jack. [Aside: Is this catching. . . ? Do they do alliterectomies?] I’m positive you’ll live a long time.”

    “Nurturing negator of negativism,” I say, recalling appalling, galling stonewalling and post-perambulant profanations past, “by 2018, if I follow in my father’s footsteps, I’ll be suffering, not only from advanced alliteration, but from acute agoraphobic anxiety, and will be filing stories from bed. . . . Can you imagine the crowds this Open will attract?! It was bad enough in 2004. It took me an hour — as long as it took to get to Southampton College from East Hampton on the shuttle that day — to walk the last 50 yards to the bridge over the highway after it was over. I remember somebody saying, ‘Next time, they ought to have two bridges . . . make that three.’ ”

    It was in 2004 that the U.S.G.A. — in contrast to 1986 and 1995 — decided to no longer let The Star inside the ropes. When I protested, the spokesman said we, being a     weekly, had never been allowed inside the ropes to begin with. I said — politely, of course, in keeping with the nature of the sport — that I had published photos to prove we had. No dice. I had to ante up $65 for a periscope on the final day and trade a well-credentialed photographer The Star’s lone parking space for photos from within the ropes.

    So, no, I’m not looking forward to the 2018 U.S. Open.

    Alex White, who was Shinnecock’s longtime superintendent, told me 25 years ago, when we wrote our advance, that the best place to watch it would be on TV.

    Little did I know then that I would be watching that 1986 Open on TV — in London, Mary having won a free trip there the week before. Maybe she’ll bail me out again. We’ve got seven years to think about it.

Out in these parts almost everyone has a fish tale. I have just one, but it’s a whopper. And to this day I hold the record for catching the biggest flounder ever on the Lazy Bones fishing boat in Montauk. It’s a feat I’m not quite sure I’m proud of.

    The boat’s owners, Kathy and Captain Mike, are very good friends of mine. They invited me out on the boat for a lazy day of fishing some years back. It was a lovely autumn afternoon and I couldn’t resist the thought of being on the water on such a beautiful day. But as the large boat sliced through the calm waters of Fort Pond Bay to the fishing grounds near the hangar dock, I sat back and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

    Although I truly believe our creator expected us to eat fish, it’s very hard for me to actually kill any other breathing creature. I accepted the invitation, never imagining that by the time I returned to shore I would resemble Attila the Hun, complete with salt-stained raggedy hair, a sweaty brow, and grimy fingers dripping with stinky clam juice. In one afternoon, I had conquered the sea and proudly gazed at my flounder that lay upon the deck, gills gasping for air. I cringe when I think of it.

    At four pounds, the fish was so big that I became the poster girl in the Lazy Bones advertisements. Before I knew it my picture was posted all over Montauk. And Montauk being what it is I soon had blackened teeth, a mustache, and strange black tentacles sprouting from my head. There I was, this passive lover of creatures great and small, holding up a dead fish that only minutes before the picture was taken had been grazing the bottom of the sea when he came upon my hook. Who was this woman who had gained possession of my body? And why did she all of a sudden sport tentacles?

    My family came down to meet the boat at the end of the day. My husband was so proud, he of the 774-pound giant tuna that drew a late-night crowd of gawkers years ago to the dock at Salivar’s. My children didn’t know what to make of this new woman who was supposedly their mother, the same Mommy who catches and releases bugs in the house, feeds feral cats, and stops to talk to every dog she meets.

    Thank goodness my son was too young to remember this little incident. But the posters are still in circulation. Yes, that’s me during flounder season, hanging in the deli, the beer distributor, the hardware store, and other places around the hamlet. One day after fishing with his friends at Stanley’s pond for carp, my son told me I ruined him for fishing. He, too, can’t stand killing them, and as much as he likes to fish, he always hates when he actually catches one, he said. And of course like everything else, that’s my fault.

    I don’t regret the fishing trip and this is not meant to make anyone feel bad about catching fish. They are a source of food. My family ate my catch that night for dinner (I don’t eat fish, but put a lobster or some shrimp before me and a hungry Attila returns). It was a good experience because I felt for the first time the thrill of the catch that many out here live for. It turns out I also found something I was really good at — fishing.

    It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever do again.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.

    Summer again. Salt on my tongue, sand in my suit, sun on my shoulders. It takes me back to Napeaque, to a new A-frame on a vast expanse of bare shore, dunes covered with storm fencing. A pristine playground for a lucky few in the early ’60s.

    They were halcyon days before the glitterati discovered the East End, before Mercedeses and Jaguars clotted Montauk Highway, before that 40-cent weekly People magazine hit the stands, before Ralph Lauren’s empire and before Paul Simon’s hits, before Dick Cavett’s talk show and when Dan’s Papers, still in its infancy, was actually owned by Dan.

    Childhood friends thought us blessed when we departed for our vacation house on Napeague in June. Mornings we hopped out of bed into our suits and flew down to the shore under a canopy of blue sky, hair billowing in the wind like birthday streamers. On weekends Daddy taught us to ride the waves on glasslike seas. How great is it to lie back in your bed after a day in the ocean, feeling the gentle swell and fall of waves you no longer tread?

    Mom preferred the living room couch, a cup of coffee, and Glamour magazine, the gorgeous Jean Shrimpton gracing the May 1964 cover. Mom loved fashion: pink pedal pushers, checked gingham, “Bye Bye Birdie” blouses, clutch handbags, hooded sweaters. She was an early fashionista.

    By Independence Day we were well acquainted with our tic-tac-toe tract Napeague neighbors. Mr. Hamilton, president of Scripto pens and owner of our tiny beach enclave, lived just south of the highway. Farther west on Osprey Road, Bob Diercks, with eyes like buttons and a leathery tan, called a cottage on stilts home. Bob, who numbered Richard Avedon and Judy Garland among his friends, was a photographer for Life magazine.

    Like my dad, Warren Fitzsimmons was in the ad biz. He lived across from the White Sands Motel. He and my dad used to sit on the deck by night, the golden glint of cigarettes barely visible through the rolling fog, the clink of martini glasses barely audible, plotting future ads and discussing my dad’s Cleo-winning campaign for Chase Manhattan Bank. Dad and Warren commuted into Manhattan during the week. When other ad men were sharing watery lunches at the Russian Tea Room and Ma Bell’s, Dad traveled to Chinatown gathering Roman candles, cherry bombs, and sparklers for our Fourth of July celebration.

    There was speculation on the beach and behind closed doors that summer: Would our oceanfront neighbors, the ones whose house, it was whispered, had cost $100,000, join us? Would they be watching from their upper deck? Or would Gwen Verdon, appearing on Broadway in “Damn Yankees,” and her husband, Bob Fosse, soon to be famous for “All That Jazz,” be entertaining at home? And if so, whom?

    We kids had our own celebrities. Lee Nelson, a guitar player, labored as a handyman at the White Sands Motel. Lee’s dad was the famous ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson, notable for the Nestle commercial parroted by his dog dummy Farful, “Oh, N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestle’s makes the very best . . . chocolate.”

    All of us — my siblings and I, Sherry from next door, and Rob Murphy, whose family owned the White Sands — gathered nightly on the beach, building bonfires, roasting marshmallows, and singing. Lee taught us “Moriah” and played lots of Peter, Paul, and Mary. The eclectic collection of music in the air that summer included the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl,” the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Motown sound with the Four Tops’ “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch” and “Can’t Help Myself,” the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love,” “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five, “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” by Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand’s “People,” and Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

    The teen nightclub Cola Copa was nestled in the hills of Montauk. I could never find it today, though there are rumors that the playwright Edward Albee can. Kids congregated there Friday and Saturday nights, watches glinting in the poor light, flipped hair pivoting around shoulders, mohair sweaters itching excruciatingly, dancing the Monkey and the Mashed Potato.

    Independence Day finally arrived. Unfurled flags flapped on poles from east to west. Dad assembled his arsenal on a high dune still hot from the summer sun as dusk descended. Warren Fitzsimmons, Bob Diercks, Sherry, Lee, Rob Murphy, Mom, my brothers, and my sister assembled on our deck in Adirondack chairs. There was no sign of the Fosses.

    Sand sifted between my toes as I handed Dad a Roman candle. Bright splinters of light were subsumed into the black theater of the night sky. A burst of green, a dripping fountain of red shattered the ocean stillness. We took a collective breath. The whoosh of a whirling Roman candle. Colors blended in ways never beheld before. Snap, crackle, pop.

    Out of the corner of my eye I saw them — the Fosses — climb into a long white limo. Gwen was in red, white, and blue spangles, Bob Fosse dressed down in denim. They missed our fireworks, and we missed theirs.

    Jacqueline Beh has been contributing to The East Hampton Star for more than 20 years. She writes a column for Great South Bay magazine, works in human services, and lives in Sayville.

    The difference between good and evil seemed straightforward when I was a child. Call it what you will: the Judeo-Christian ethical code, the Golden Rule . . .

    As a Jewish kid growing up during World War II, I thought the world had only one set of evil people: the Nazis. I learned to revere those Americans who died in that war, who fought not only for us but for the Jews of Europe. I didn’t ponder the role of Stalin’s army, or where an ally like Stalin might fall in my simplistic good-versus-evil mental filing system; and that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor didn’t figure much in my parents’ or grandparents’ thoughts, much less mine.

    On Monday, Memorial Day, I will again remember those Americans who sacrificed their lives, but my absolutist understanding of good and evil has considerably changed. Although nations do sometimes sway, in mysterious ways, toward one or the other, as an adult, I certainly don’t think any country has a monopoly on either.

    The United States is one of the most religious countries in the developed world. According to Wikipedia, a 2002 study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found the U.S. to be “the only developed nation . . . where a majority of citizens reported that religion played a ‘very important’ role in their lives, an attitude similar to that found in its neighbors in Latin America.”

    With Memorial Day approaching, I have been wondering what American children, these days, are being taught by their religious elders about how to do good in the world. I think about the men and women we have sent to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And about Abu Ghraib (where a few of those men and women committed acts of humiliation and inhumanity). We know that the violent exigencies of fighting in a war have extreme effects on those who take part, but can they destroy a soldier’s gut understanding of right and wrong?

    The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1 probably will be heralded in speeches on Memorial Day as a victory against evil. However we personally received the news of his death (relief, jubilation, fear), we should not because of it be tricked into condoning the “harsh” interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda prisoners — waterboarding, for example —  on the theory that torture led to a tip about Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

    We are also apt to praise the Central Intelligence Agency for tracking down Bin Laden. But we should not forget that since 2001 the C.I.A. has hidden and interrogated alleged terrorists in secret prisons from Afghanistan to Thailand and has engaged in what is called “rendition,” sending prisoners to Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, where human rights activists report torture has been routine.

     A terrible World War II image of Jews crowded into railroad cars on their way to concentration camps came to my mind’s eye when I read recently that in the winter of 2001 “Afghan generals” with whom the U.S. was allied crowded so many captives into metal containers that some died of asphyxiation.

    It is time for the United States to dedicate itself to a document it signed in 1994: the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. To do so would be a true memorial to those Americans who have died for liberty, on American soil, in Europe, and beyond.

    Not all that long ago really, East Hampton Village saw its first driveway gate. Now every other property seems to have one — and it’s not just deer homeowners are trying to keep out.

    When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the appearance of the first gated property off Further Lane in East Hampton was enough to spawn years of speculation. Unable to understand why anyone would bother to close off a driveway like that, we kids figured that someone whose past was filled with danger and intrigue lived there. The Mafia house, we called it.

    You can still see what I believe was the original gate, but today it is hardly remarkable. Impressive white gates are visible from one end of town to the other.

    In case you wondered, in East Hampton Town one needs the correct approvals for any driveway gate worth putting up. Permission from the architectural review board must be secured before the Building Department will issue a construction permit. In East Hampton Village, gates can be as high as six feet from the ground, as long as they are not in the public right of way. In Saga­ponack, driveway gates cannot be higher than five feet, not quite tall enough to keep out your more athletic deer.

    With the explosion of deer here, gates now have gotten taller and much fancier. Some are installed in combination with cattle guards and other measures designed to keep the four-footed pests moving along to less-well-protected neighbors’ perennial beds.

    Doug Casto, who runs East End Fence and Gate, said his customers had a range of reasons for calling on him. In almost 15 years of installing and servicing gates, he said, while people were interested in keeping deer and salespeople at bay, security concerns topped the list.

    “There are two different mindsets here,” he said when I called this week. “There are the people who want it rural and those who want privacy.”

    Curious, I asked Mr. Casto how much a gate would run me if I wanted one. He said that an automated pair would be about $30,000; to spend less, well, you would get what you pay for. I told him I was glad I was sitting down.

    Then there’s maintenance to figure in, Mr. Casto said. With the slowdown in new construction during the last couple of years, taking care of the gates he installs has been an important part of his business.

    Celebrities, government figures, and ordinary folks are all among his customer base. “People want some distance between themselves and the road,” he said. Can’t argue with that, I guess.