I have in front of me the rule that resulted in the suspension for the rest of the season of our highly successful softball coach, Lou Reale, and wonder, given the apparent fact that Section XI’s executive director can hardly remember the last time it was violated (whether knowingly or inadvertently) before this year, why it is in the section’s handbook to begin with.

    The rule, approved in October 2007, reads: “If an individual or team exceeds the maximum number of contests permitted by Section XI [the governing body for public high school sports in Suffolk] the penalty is team ineligibility from the date of the violation for the rest of the season, including playoffs.”

    Pretty Draconian, don’t you think? Practically a capital offense.

    The number of scrimmages a team can play is apparently unlimited, but God help you if you play one more official contest than the agreed upon number, which in softball’s case is 20.

    It is pretty much agreed that Reale, in scheduling more nonleague games than he should have, did not intend to gain any advantage by so doing. It was, as he said, an honest, though admittedly “stupid,” mistake inasmuch as he’d become used to replacing the two league games East Hampton would have played with Amityville (a perennial League VI dropout) with nonleaguers with Connetquot and Bayport-Blue Point, where he began his career.

    This year, though, he failed to take into account that Elwood-John Glenn, which moved into the league, had taken over Amityville’s schedule, and thus he went over the 20-game limit.

    After having played a nonleague game with Hampton Bays (which had replaced Bayport on the schedule), Reale realized a violation had occurred and immediately reported it to East Hampton’s athletic director, Joe Vas, who, according to Reale, suspended him, apparently to underline their position that an honest mistake had been made.

    Reale said he was told at first that he would be suspended by the Section from the next scheduled league game, with Kings Park, that he would have to forfeit the last game of the regular season, with Rocky Point, and that the team would be banned from playoff contention.

    A subsequent appeal, by Vas and Reale, resulted in restoring the team’s playoff chances but in banning Reale forthwith for the remainder of the season.

    The idea, we are told, was not to hurt the kids, but to hold the coach — who readily admitted his mistake and who has undoubtedly suffered exceedingly as the result of it — accountable.

    He has agreed that he should be held accountable, that that, after all, is what he always tells his players to do, to admit their errors when they make them, to face the music.

    But I can’t help but think that the punishment in this case — which did not exactly mirror a cited precedent involving girls lacrosse coaches at Sayville and Babylon that had come to light through an e-mailed complaint to Section XI’s executive director — did not fit the “crime.”

    This man has coached wonderful softball teams for nigh 30 years. He is among the state’s top five or six in career wins with more than 400. Under his leadership East Hampton debuted in the state’s Final Four in 2001, and played again in the Final Four in 2007 and ’08. Many of his protégées have gone on to get scholarships and star on collegiate softball teams. He self-reported to his athletic director, which was the right thing to do, and nobody had to send an e-mail to Section XI’s executive director.

    He deserved better — especially given Section XI’s tacit admission in the way it handled the girls lacrosse coaches’ and Reale’s cases that the rule’s penalties were deserving of amendment.

    It is understandable that Reale, having seen the rule amended once, might wonder whether, through appealing further, to Section XI’s athletic council, as is permitted, it could be amended twice.

    The question of appealing further was raised at the East Hampton School Board meeting on May 3, but the board, most of whose members apparently were sympathetic, ultimately decided, after meeting in executive session, to forgo that and to have the school’s attorney write a strongly worded letter to Section XI protesting Reale’s treatment.

    As aforesaid, the coach deserved better.

    And the team did too.   

    Local elections are around the corner, with political parties making their candidate slates for this November’s contests public. Around here, we practice democracy mostly at the town level, where politics remain quite tangible and rarely veer into the abstract.

    We choose neighbors to run public utilities, various departments, and supervise operations as a whole. Budgets are drawn up just as they are in Albany and Washington, but their total outlays are relatively small, leaving room for us to nitpick about individual expenditures without bringing government to a standstill.

    It is no wonder, then, that local politics seem to produce less outrage, less rancor, than their national counterpart. We can fume at a member of Congress we have never met, from a state hundreds of miles away, but more difficult is lobbing verbal grenades at the guy whose kid we tutor in math after school every day. Tea Party members rallying on tax day last month had tough talk for President Obama, but kinder words for local officials, despite the fact that both had cut their taxes in the last year.

    As Peter Orszag, President Obama’s budget director for 2009 and most of 2010, recently pointed out in a panel discussion at Guild Hall in East Hampton, Americans increasingly segregate themselves — consciously or not — based on political affiliation. We are less and less likely to live in counties that are hotly contested in presidential elections, and more prone to live among those who share our ideology and attitudes.

    Practically, in local elections, this means national partisan divides will not carry as much weight as they might have previously. Instead, political fights will be waged over issues that do not fit neatly into ideological boxes. More than ideology, personality and character will matter to us. And unlike the carefully manicured images candidates like Mr. Obama have brought to the fore in recent years, our relationships with the local folks who seek office are real, or at least not unidirectional.

    Indeed, it is hard to imagine a candidate for local office on the East End with a horde of media consultants and press spokespeople trailing close behind, giving speeches but not interacting meaningfully with the public. It would be out of character with the place and the people.

    This is not to say candidates around here do not force a smile and shake a few more hands than they might like, as all politicians must. Rather, this means the person we come to know who intends to be highway superintendent or supervisor or any other elected official, is probably showing us his or her true self, or at least a truer version of it than we could possibly hope for from a Republican or Democrat in Washington. If a local office-seeker were to invent a new personality, those who knew the old him could be expected to take notice, and the charade inevitably would collapse.

    Consider mine an optimistic take, then, that even as federal politics becomes more and more a matter of selling the public on a fresh cultural type, whether a beer-drinking, knee-slapping Southerner or a Blackberry-toting, Jay-Z-listening Chicagoan, local elections remain a space where authentic individuals serve their neighbors.

—

    Matthew Taylor, a reporter at The Star, counts local politics among his beats.

    The six of us were the only Americans flying to Havana from Miami on a chartered flight in March. The others were Cuban, many with packages of goods purchased to take home. The mood among the Cubans was festive. I was excited in a more interior way, looking forward to seeing friends in Guines, the town southeast of Havana where we were going.

    We were Dennis and Barbara D’Andrea and Patricia Wadzinski, members of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church; John White, Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church; Steve Calo, the Shinnecock Presbyterian Church, and me, pastor emeritus of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church.

    U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba for religious purposes do so legally with a license from our Treasury Department. The process of getting the license has been simple, but the rules change. As of this April religious travel will no longer require a license.

    I’ve been to Cuba eight times, and I’m usually asked upon my return if I’ve noticed changes. Yes. Two things of note: economic hard times in Cuba and the government’s initiative to permit some private enterprise.

    One Cuban pastor told us there are now half a million unemployed in Cuba, and the number is expected to rise to 16 percent of the population of 11 million. Food is also a problem. There is not enough.

    The government had provided free lunches to children at school, but it can’t do that now. There has always been some food rationing. It’s not like refrigerators are stocked or you can run up to a supermarket to get more. There are no supermarkets. I spoke with the Rev. Ismael Madruga one morning on his way to a neighborhood food store. He is the retired pastor of the church we visit. He was on his way to buy eggs, and he showed me his ration book. There is some good news here. He can now buy five eggs a week, up from four!

    One recent change in economic policy was to allow people to lease uncultivated arable land from the government and split farm proceeds 50-50 with the government. The government also encourages small business ventures, though it’s difficult within the structure of a socialist economy.

    We were given one example. An individual or a family can now go into the bakery business, selling bread. Cubans get their daily bread in the morning, long or short loaves (like French bread). The difficulty is this: There is no wholesale level of business to handle the private bread shops. What happens then is that the owner of a private enterprise goes to a government bread shop and buys up bread to sell privately. This has two effects. It creates a shortage of bread at the government shops, so there are now long lines to get bread where there hadn’t been previously. And the private shop will charge more because of the expense of running the business, however modest.

    The business is also taxed. One long loaf of bread at a private store costs 10 Cuban pesos, which is the equivalent of half a day’s wages. A short loaf of bread is 5 pesos. I don’t know the price at a government store, but obviously it’s less. There are two currencies, one for Cubans, the other for visitors to Cuba. The latter is called the convertible peso, or CUC. On this trip the exchange was 86 cents American to 1 CUC. In the domestic Cuban currency, 1 peso is equal to 8 cents.

    We were guests of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Guines. We were legally able to take cash to the church for capital improvements and to augment the church’s outreach into the community. One new program is a weekly lunch for senior citizens. We also legally took with us over-the-counter and prescription medicines. The latter are distributed by the church with medical supervision.

    The pastor of the Guines church is Yampier Sanchez, a young man who visited East Hampton last year. He just got a new car — a 1955 Ford! Purple, diesel engine. One night Yampier took me for a ride. We rumbled through the streets, windows down in the warm tropical air, people outside after work and young people in the streets. Having come of age in the early 1950s I felt like a teenager again myself, cruising around town.

    Yampier’s car does not have a title because the purchase of it was private, “on the left,” as the expression goes. Purchases through proper channels, as with daily bread, are “on the right.” To ask a Cuban (or anyone else) how the Cuban economy works is to get a shrug of the shoulders. Who knows? Yampier quoted Leonardo Padura, a Cuban writer: “In Cuba it’s better to live it than to explain it.”

    The people do enjoy free medical care and free education. On the downside, political debate is not open, outside Internet access is blocked except for professionals like doctors, and travel is severely limited. E-mail is open for those who have computers, but few among those we know in Guines have them.

    There is of course underground political comment on the slant, or sotto voce. I was speaking with some men and women after a Sunday church service (where I had preached). Informally I commented on our government’s rules to get a license to travel, and I said in Spanish that it seemed one office didn’t know what another office was saying on the same subject. One Guines woman said quietly in English, “Not just your government.”

    With all the complexities and hardships, the people live their lives. Men and women go to work, children go to school, churches thrive as social centers, there are fiestas or parties, youth flirt and date, the old gossip in their doorways. What else is new, the world over?

    I have become especially close to one family, and I visited them in their home. Olga is the grandmother. Her son, Lazaro, works for the rum company Havana Club. His wife, Hilda, is a teacher. They have two sons, Yadiel, age 15, and Yassiel, 11. Lazaro gave me a bottle of Havana Club. Strictly speaking we’re not to bring rum back to this country, but since it was a gift I thought I’d take a chance, and it got through.

    All of us in our group went on pastoral visits to church members. The homes are modest, to put it mildly, and vary greatly in appearance and repair. Some families receive money from relatives in the U.S., and a visitor can see that assistance in the upkeep of those houses. Other houses are old wood structures that look as though they might fall down.

    In that mixed context, church is a vital social experience. Churches are thriving in Cuba, where in the 1960s through the ’80s churches were repressed. Things opened up in the early ’90s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Sunday school of the Guines church has 80 children, the adult congregation close to 150, with a good choir. The morning service lasts two hours, broken into segments: study, worship, and a break with juice and cookies outside. Singing is lusty; open prayer is heartfelt.

    I enjoy the slower pace of life in Guines. Many walk or ride bicycles to work. Children walk to school and play in the street afterward. There are very few personal computers, and our American cellphones have no reception — oh, the bliss of that quiet! As with the old Ford, I felt I’d been transported back into the 1950s. It’s pleasant, and bittersweet, because at the end of it we return to our hyped and hooked-up society, a jarring contrast.

    The Rev. Thomas Schacher of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church will be taking a group of young people to Guines in July. And I look forward to next year when I will again see my Cuban friends.

    About a year ago, thinking about the young, impressionable minds living under our roof, I realized we had to do something about certain words that were in too-common usage. I don’t quite curse like a pirate, but there were occasions that I did utter the F-bomb, and once Lisa and I began to catch the kids saying it, I realized something had to be done. I didn’t know at the time how much it was going to cost me.

    One morning while driving the kids to school, we talked about how there were things, one thing in particular, that you shouldn’t say. One of the girls pointed out, “But, Daddy, you say it all the time.”

    She was right, of course, and it was agreed among us that I would pay them each $10 every time I dropped the forbidden word.

    As time went on, the plan worked well. My use of that particular imprecation dropped off sharply, to the point that the girls tried to sneak other bad words into the bargain. It was funny to negotiate with Evvy, who’s is 6 going on 7, about whether a “dang” uttered during some kitchen mishap or other was a payable offense.

    I noticed that my language in the office and when out with friends was a lot less salty, too. I started saying things like, “What the heck!” a lot, going suddenly all 1950s-corny.

    What I had not counted on was my eldest daughter’s prodigious memory for numbers. Though I should have: Money was at stake. She kept close track each time I let one fly, ticking off the $10 increments and remembering the running total, which she lumped in with her belated allowance remittances. By the time the tally got over $500 — payable to each child separately — I was beginning to sweat.

    In the end, I got off lightly. Adelia, the older one, had wished for a new Xbox Kinect videogame system and hit on the idea that she would agree to erase the growing debt if I bought her and her sister the coveted device so they would not have to wait for their birthdays in June or, worse, the December holidays. I agreed quickly, lest the girls do the math and change the terms.

    I haven’t checked whether they think the original deal is still in effect, but I haven’t used the F-bomb lately, just in case.

   Looking out of our bedroom window one recent morning onto the lawn that becomes greener every day, I remarked on the stone rabbit that sits on a stump and on the lamb from which paint has been flaking the last few years.

    “I should probably spray it. . . .” I said. “It’s looking worn.”

    But of more urgency to Mary were the mice in our oven, though what I, in my hearing aids’ absence, heard was, “How about mace?”

    “You want me to spray the lamb with mace. . . ! ?”

    “No, I asked, ‘What about the mice.’ ”

    “Ah. I’ll go see.”

    We’ve been putting the Havaheart traps in the warming drawer, though, of course, when she cooks Mary takes the traps out and, opening the oven door, inserts a brass Buddhist bowl and, rather than coax from it the harmonious Om sound of the universe by running the wooden pestle around the lip, clangs and clangs it as I, in my most authoritative tones, call out, “Attention, all mice. Attention, all mice. Premises must be vacated immediately. Premises must be vacated immediately. . . .”

    We’ve caught three so far and I have taken them down to a nature preserve by the harbor where, despite the removal of their safety net, I trust they will be able to fend for themselves. I tell them as I set them free that this is America, that they must learn to stand on their own two feet, and that this is no commie nanny state where you can just lie back and get fat sucking at the teat of others slaving over hot stoves.

    “Don’t expect any free lunch,” I tell them, as they look up at me with their big black eyes. “Cuteness won’t cut it. You should be happy you haven’t been disappeared the old-fashioned way.”

    Were the mice to linger, and were they to act like men, they might say, “Well, what about Henry? He is cared for from cradle to grave, is he not?”

    “Yes, but Henry doesn’t make nests out of the insulation in stovesor chew through wires in automobile engines, or spread hanta virus,” I’d say. “Contrariwise, he creates value. People — most people — light up when they see him walking along. I dare say he helps to make their day and contributes to their happiness and productivity, thus fueling the engine of our economy.”

    “An enlightened capitalist he, fair-minded when it comes to the transactions that derive from the production and consumption of smiles and wagging tales. Not greedy, not exploitative (albeit a bit demanding when my mother-in-law, an easy touch, comes to dine, though he would counter that he’s exercising his inalienable rights).”

    “America could learn a lot from him. And so could you mice who’ve been taxing our patience.”

   I had never really thought about traveling to South Africa. Cape Town wasn’t on my bucket list. But . . .    

    Kate, my daughter, a junior at Fairfield University, decided to do her semester abroad in Cape Town this spring through a Marquette University program. She is living in a house with 19 other students from various colleges in the United States. She volunteers two days a week teaching sixth graders, just started helping in an after-school program at a day care center, and goes to school at the University of the Western Cape three days a week. The program doesn’t encourage family visits, as everyone is very busy between their service sites and their work at the university, but Marquette did suggest that if you really wanted to visit, the ideal time to do so would be at the end of March, when the students returned from their holiday tour of South Africa.

    We began our adventure on March 27. A 15-hour flight to Johannesburg followed by another 2-hour flight took us to Cape Town. Flying in, the mountains are outstanding, running right down to the beautiful white, sandy beaches. What a huge, sprawling city! At the waterfront, hundreds of cranes were loading and unloading cargo from all over the world. There were some high-rise buildings, but not too many. It was a wonderful, clean, bustling city with so much to see and do.

    Our first trip was to the waterfront, where there are lovely hotels and restaurants, shops, and boats of every size and shape, many for hire, even a huge Ferris wheel, the Wheel of Excellence. We went to the Robben Island Museum and took a fast ferry over to the island to see where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 20 years starting in 1964 for sabotage and treason.

    The ferry was packed with 600 people from all over the world — people from Nigeria, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Zimbabwe, Japan, and China — but we were the only Americans on our bus when we got to the island. We heard about the conditions at the prison and why people were jailed there — mostly because they were black and their political beliefs were being questioned. What a somber, moving experience touring the island, seeing the limestone pit where the men were put to work seven days a week, and hearing about the horrible, squalid conditions they lived in, all told to us by an ex-inmate. Unimaginable. Truly sobering.

    Another day we took a drive to Cape Peninsula National Park. We headed first to Muizenberg, a quaint little surf town with a wide sandy beach and wildly colored cabanas. Kalk Bay was next, with the railroad running right along the beach, colorful fishing boats, and charming touristy shops. Then came Simons Town, home to the South African Navy, a bustling little city right on the water; Boulder Beach, with its huge population of African penguins, and finally Cape Point, with miles of scrubland, ostriches and baboons roaming wild, and a beautiful lighthouse built in 1919.

    The scenery is breathtaking — steep cliffs and rugged terrain, with beautiful rocky beaches. Heading back toward Cape Town, we went through Noordhoek and onto Chapman’s Peak, an extremely high toll road overlooking the Atlantic with a straight, vertical drop. Not for those afraid of heights (like me). The road is closed when it is extremely windy and when rocks are falling!

    In Hout Bay, where we stopped for a late afternoon dinner on the waterfront, seals swam around the harbor and there was a jumping seal that a boy fed with fish held in his mouth. We were in Camps Bay for sunset, with the Twelve Apostles mountain range looming overhead. Incredible.

    We also spent a day in the wine region of Stellenbosch touring wineries and tasting wine and cheese. There are over 150 vineyards in the area and you can see vines for miles. The architecture of the town is Cape Dutch, beautiful houses with gabling and thatched roofs. The amazing botanical gardens of Kirstenbosch have thousands of acres of manicured gardens and sculpture gardens, hundreds of flower beds filled with native South African plants, including the protea, the national flower of South Africa.

    When it was time to say goodbye to Kate, her friends, our lovely hotel, and wonderful staff and head off on our safari adventure, we flew back to Johannesburg, then took a 35-minute jet ride to Hoedspruit. As short as it was, we were even offered drinks and a sandwich on the flight! Looking down on the rivers and shrubland and Klein Drakensberg mountain range, we saw no signs of humans. A hotel shuttle bus met us at the tiny airport to take us to Chapungu, a private game reserve and our home for the next three days.

    The road from the airport is paved for about three miles, then turns to red dirt. In the bushveld along the way, we saw wart hogs and guinea hens.

    At the game lodge, where everything is outdoors, Jennifer, the manager, sat us down to tell us the rules: The sound of a drum means that meals are being served. No walking around at night without a night watchman. There was no telephone service, so if we needed to contact someone, we should use the whistle and horn in our tent.

    We stayed in a luxury tent, one of eight tents, each very private. Along with four other people that had arrived the day before, we prepared for our first game drive after lunch, loading into a four-tiered Range Rover with Sipps, our driver, and Aubrey, our tracker. Every time we came upon some animals, Sipps stopped the truck so we could observe them and take photos. There were Cape buffalo, impalas, zebras, baboons, spring­­bok, and giraffes.

    Jennifer met us back at the game lodge that evening with warm towels to wipe the dirt from our hands and faces, then a glass of port to warm up. After a buffet dinner, we were all walked back to our tents for the night.

    The wake-up call the next morning came at 5. By 5:45 we were at the lodge for tea, coffee, and juice, and then it was off again in search of elephants, hippos, rhinos, leopards, and lions. This time, when we returned from the drive, there was a giraffe, standing all alone 50 feet away from us. After two more game drives that evening and the next morning, we headed back Johannesburg to begin our journey home.

    We met a couple from Johannesburg on our way to the airport who told us that we had to come back, fly into Jo’burg, then down to Port Elizabeth to take the garden route along the coast to Cape Town. What an amazing place! Everyone that I had spoken to about South Africa before we left all said that they couldn’t wait to go back again.

    Now I know why!

—

    Jane Bimson is an advertising sales representative at The Star.

--    My mother adored me. I was her midlife baby, and even though I had two teenage sisters, I grew up pretty much as an only child. They were both out of the house by the time my memories begin. My mom, Ruthie, was a stay-at-home mom, so we had plenty of time together, but I’m guessing I must have had time alone too, to think about things, because I had my own opinions and expressed them from a very early age.

    Ruthie was a great seamstress and made me wonderful pinafore dresses, jumpers, sock dolls, and the best princess costume ever. She sewed us mother and daughter dresses that we wore on our summer walks along the New Jersey Boardwalk. She praised my rhyming poetry and my homemade greeting cards. And certainly she defended me when my grown sisters claimed she was spoiling me.

    Truth is I was never spoiled with material possessions (yes, I had a Patti Playpal, a Hula Hoop, and a transistor radio, but not one of those bedrooms furnished in poofy pink carpets and spreads) but rather with love. I never for a minute doubted my mother’s devotion to me.

    After my father passed away, when I was 13, Ruthie and I became even more of a unit. The two of us, now independent, could come and go as we pleased. Of course she took a job to support us and I did my best in school, but if we wanted to stay up late and watch Woody Allen movies on TV, we did. If we wanted to have bread and cheese with a little honey wine for dinner, no one could tell us not to. My mother always said that having me kept her young.

    During those years, I was a good girl. It was the late ’60s when I was finishing high school. Mother had a simple request, “Please don’t smoke any of that stuff,” at least until I left home. That was no problem. But times were changing and I couldn’t wait to leave my hometown and head off to college. I wanted to meet new people and talk about the kinds of things I was hearing on late-night radio, WBAI, WFMU. There was obviously more going on in the world than what was available in my New Jersey town.

    And once I left home, I never really came back. In the early ’70s people were not in touch on a moment-to-moment or everyday basis. You could go weeks without calling home, and if a parent called the pay phone on your dormitory floor, the chances of reaching you were very low. I never stopped to think about how my leaving might have affected my mom. Sure, she had asked my sister and brother-in-law to take me to college that first time because she didn’t think she could bear it, but my outlook was really all about me. What I wanted to do, where life would lead me. I remember coming home on one of my first school breaks and berating my mom for some of the incorrect values she had instilled in me. I made her cry but I was just trying to show her I was growing up and thinking for myself.

    I was pretty independent except when I occasionally got into trouble and needed her help. I spent a few college summers with her but I was only a visitor. Once I graduated, I was out on my own or with whomever I was with at the time. I stayed in touch with Ruthie but never felt an obligation to her. I loved her, she loved me, and as far as I was concerned, all was good.

    But now that I am a mother with a daughter out of the house, the shoe is on the other foot, as they say. With a new perspective, I realize how much of herself my mother gave me and how I took it all as what was naturally coming to me: love, support, adoration. I’m sure I gave love back, but never an amount equal to what was given — how could I? I was way too young to appreciate the full picture, and sadly I lost my mother before I was 30, before I married and before I gave birth to my own child, the child I love unconditionally and who on occasion tells me I’m a gooney bird or insane when I give advice or express my opinion.

    As modern mothers do, I put a lot of time, love, and effort into raising her. It started with many hours spent carrying her around the city in that little chest pouch, pushing her in the carriage, and finally holding her hand walking to and from school. As she grew older there were so many talks about friends, plans, life! From the moment she could talk, I enjoyed my daughter’s company because even as a little one she was cool, bright, and perceptive, and I became dependent on the joy she brought to my daily life. It was torture when she first went away to school, but I have work, a loving husband, and a life of my own.

    Still, as she is spreading her wings I selfishly miss her company. She has a job, an apartment, and a community of friends. We talk often and she shares details of her life and sometimes asks for advice, but it hurts a little bit to know I am only in the background and not really a full part of her new life, which is, of course, as it needs to be now, all about her.

    The other day as I was out running, thoughts passing freely through my mind, I realized something true and basic about being a mother. A mother gives unconditional love to her child and the child basks in this love. This love moves in one direction, from mother to child. It’s love that’s passed on from one generation to the next. My mother adored me, and in the very same way, I adore my child. My daughter loves me too, no doubt about it, but not in the all-encompassing way that I, as a mother, love her. God willing, when it’s her turn she’ll pass it on.

    My New York City grandchildren spent their spring vacation from school in East Hampton with us, a long week in which I got to know them better. We saw each other from morning till night, and there were continual surprises. I discovered how much they had grown up, and it felt like seeing them anew.

     It’s easy for grandmothers to dote. We are famously prone to finding common behavior thoroughly remarkable when it comes to our own grandchildren. I myself find it fascinating how much Ray knows about computers and how much his sister, Sky, loves to draw, but you probably don’t.

    But will you indulge me while I tell you how Ray has begun to get into cooking? Surely it isn’t the average 10-year-old who creates complete recipes from scratch. The culinary high point was a thoroughly original dish, prepared with a tutorial from his father on slicing and dicing. Who’d-a thought of combining eggplants with a yam, sautéing them with bacon, onion, and garlic, adding a pinch of ginger, and letting them simmer slowly in chicken stock for an hour and a half? If this doesn’t sound very good to you, just try it. It was delicious. Ray topped it with a little grated cheese and, although we ate it straight, it would have been good on pasta or rice.

    Sky, who is 8, took to arranging forsythia blossoms into small centerpieces, and she did a lot of art. She left a painting of a dashing girl on the refrigerator, but her most singular work was a two-sided letter to the bunny found on the dining room table after the kids had gone to bed on the night before Easter.

    On one side it read: “Dear easter bunny, I love easter! I hope that you are nice! Love and happy easter, Sky Rattray! P.S. This is what I hope you look like! open this way. . . .”  A drawing of a bunny with long eyelashes and perky ears was inside. The bunny was standing up, wearing a two-piece summer outfit decorated with an Easter egg, and holding a basket with a heart on it. A caption reads, “My famaly’s easter bunny.”

    Today, the New York kids are back in school in Manhattan. They left me with treasures: a printout of the recipe and a letter to the Easter bunny for that scrapbook I keep meaning to start.

    Earlier this year if you had asked about the upcoming local political season in East Hampton, the response would have been little more than a shrug. Not anymore.

    Election 2011 got very interesting when word came down that the Republicans were going to run Steven Gaines, the tell-all author, and Richard Haeg, a former cop, for town board. Supervisor Bill Wilkinson, no surprise, is in it again, seeking valedictory affirmation after a year and a half in office.

    The East Hampton Democrats’ pick of Zach Cohen for supervisor, announced this week, came as more of a surprise. But as a by-the-book, straight-ahead numbers guy, he is sort of the anti-Wilkinson, so the choice has a certain logic. The Dems’ selection of Sylvia Overby and Peter Van Scoyoc for the two open town board seats signals that the party is also looking to score points on land-use issues; both have been fully involved members of the East Hampton Town Planning Board.

    The real wrinkle this year comes from the Independence Party, whose leadership has made no secret of its dislike of the current board majority. Its members have tapped Marilyn Behan to run for town board. She is, intriguingly, a Democrat, married to John Behan, who is the town Republican’s vice chairman. The Independents’ other pick was Bill Mott, a town trustee who has run for the seat before.

    The Independence Party, amping up the drama, has not released the name of its candidate for supervisor. But it is expected to run someone for highway superintendent, possibly Stephen Lynch, who was in as a Republican four years ago and would face off against Joe Bloecker for the Republicans and, presumably, Scott King for the Democrats. If this pans out it should be a very lively race.

    East Hampton seems to be at a crossroads in some ways, almost an xistential turning point between the forces of overdevelopment and private privilege on one side and tradition, care of the environment, and concern for the rights of neighbors on the other. Do long-time residents believe that there has been too much of the former in the last few years and not enough of the latter? That remains to be seen.

    It will be an entertaining run to the November polls, to say the least.

    I read in The Times today about a longevity study that finds the more organized you are, the longer you may live.

    Genes apparently don’t have all that much to do with it, nor does optimism, for optimists tend to set themselves up for falls, such as when your computer crashes and you realize you’ve not backed everything up, as happened to us this week.

    Prudence and persistence seem to be traits associated with long life. I will lay claim to persistence, when so inclined, though Mary is the more prudent of the two of us. I suppose there does come a day when it is no longer prudent to persist, the day when you should pack a bag and buy a one-way plane ticket to Switzerland. But, besides euthanasia, Switzerland has always stuck in my mind because of Roy Emerson’s summer tennis camp at that old Victorian hotel in the mountains — Gstaad, St. Moritz, somewhere — which has forever seemed beyond my financial grasp.

    He sends me a brochure each year, and each year I sigh and put it aside. Even in extremis I think I’d go there first, though, just to see if I could summon up, for one more time, the joy of kicking others’ butts.

    “You are mean,” a woman I played doubles with recently said, and I, a self-confessed passive-aggressive type, had to admit she had a point.

    By the same token, I get very upset when someone takes me to school. Somehow, it seems to me very unfair to have my butt kicked, as happens every now and then. My cordial (though mean) rivals delight in knocking me off my high horse, for they know I’ll throw a fit and self-destruct. (Aside: Did I tell you that I once threw a tantrum that lasted four hours, from Bennington, Vt., to Bay Head, N.J.? I was 2 at the time, and I don’t remember, but I was told it was memorable.)

    After one recent Har-tru humiliation, I said to Mary I might give up the game and put more of my energy into drinking henceforth, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She doesn’t like sniveling. Like the Spartan women, I imagine her saying as I go forth to do battle at the East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club on Thursday nights: “Come home with your racket or on it.”

    Well, that’s a misrepesentation; she just wants me to have fun. And indeed I do, as long as things go my way!

    Seriously, I would like to grow spiritually on the tennis court, to the point where I would meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same, just as it says over the players’ entrance to center court at Wimbledon. It’s from Kipling’s poem, “If” (or “Eeef,” as my French stepmother used to call it), counseling a stiff upper (not a quivering lower) lip.

    So then, God grant me the serenity to accept the flubbed shots I cannot change, the grace to praise the shots that others may (however infrequently) make, and the wisdom not to make such a big deal of it.