I thought I was up on things when I learned to text. And though my aging thumbs refused to fly across the keypad of my cellphone — trek was more like it — once I got the hang of using the tiny microphone to record, it took only minutes to send a message. Easy as pie. And quick! 

Not so quick, come to think of it. Truth to tell, I found it a bit drawn out and annoying, accustomed, as I was, to one short and sweet phone chat. 

“Friday, 1 o’clock, the diner?” was how my texting went. And went and went, a simple sentence taking three separate texts from my end alone, and I was still bashing thumbs. 

#1: How about lunch on Friday?

“Friday is good. What time?”

#2: One is good for me. 

“Where?” 

#3: The diner?

“Nah. I’m meeting Ellie there today.”

If one picture is worth a thousand words, one text is worth bupkis.

Then there’s the shorthand — or short-finger, as it is — of chat-speak, the requisite LOL to let a receiver know that what you just said — typed really, no one actually says anymore — was funny. After all, how would anyone know something was yuk-yuk if you didn’t tell them? 

But I couldn’t claim my salt in the cellphone stew till I mastered the fine points of emojis, sprung free by tapping the smiley face at the bottom of my cell’s texting page. It was then I called forth happy, sad, and angry faces, a veritable mood menu including party hats and clapping hands standing for good times, airplanes and cars denoting travel, puckered lips — “Love ya, babe” — a treasure trove of symbols with which to punctuate my missives when mere words just would not do, laying claim to my expertise in the chapel of the mighty text and banishing thoughts that I was behind the times, uncool, or, heaven forbid, not fly.

But alas, my triumph was short-lived, when in came a text from a friend who signed off with not a simple anyone-can-have-it emoji, but her cartoon likeness, happy-faced and popping out of a side-of-the-road, flap-down mailbox, exclaiming in a colorful, fun font, “Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” It was her all right, but younger, thinner, and cuter than she was in real life — sorry, girlfriend. 

That was for me: An iteration of my real self, yet a new and improved version, giving my lame texts punch and personality. And for a free Bitmoji download a new me was mine to have. Well, that and the help of my daughter, Leslie, a technical genius as far as I’m concerned. 

Shape of face, eye color, hairstyle — doesn’t need a cut every six weeks. Dressed in my look: tights, long cardigan, and scarf. No cellulite or wrinkles, thank you very much. It was all there in my avatar, and I was good to go, ending my texts with hands to hips, my head cocked just so — a bit oversized, but on me it looked good. I’m so cute I can hardly stand it. 

Open-armed and smiling, I give morning hugs and nighttime kisses: “Muah!” Someone gets my angst up, I get a little frown on, and the colorful font exclaims “Bummer!” I’m still adorable me. 

Who then is the grouch in the mirror giving me the stare? The one with the under-eye pouches and bleeding lipstick, and why so pale? My Bitmoji always has a healthy blush to her cheeks. And what’s that pooch of belly fat? Don’t tell me muffin top! Argh! What’s a girlfriend to do? Call up that old cutup, Dr. Shiv? Not a chance. This old face and bod are going down with me; it’s my darling double I worry about. 

To my eye, a change of late has come over my little one-inch imp. A smiling-on-the-outside, crying-on-the-inside kind of vibe from my outstanding other. Maybe it’s something only a BFF would spot, but methinks something is getting her down. A “wine time” pick-me-up, anyone? Nah. Been there, done that. Girls’ night out? Uh-uh. Enough with the girls already, it’s time to bring on the boys. But who? How? 

I know, what she needs is a beau, a Bitmoji beau. There’s an app whose time has come. And I know just how I’d set him up. 

I’ll give this one dimples, brown eyes, a beautiful smile, and gray hair — distinguished on an older man, don’t you think? I’ll turn him out in a tracksuit and big white sneakers. Passé, you say? Wanna step outside? 

They’ll “meet-cute” in a Stop and Shop, where there’s only one copy of The Sunday Times. 

He: “You take it.”

She: “No, you.” Bitmojis don’t waste time with idle chitchat. 

He: “Share it, then.” The dimples deepen. “Coffee?” Gestures toward an empty table.

What’s she got to lose? They’re in a public place; he seems nice enough. 

He likes the business section, she Arts & Leisure. They both take their coffee black, no sugar. They chat. He still works part time. (Good, a man who has interests.) He likes to drive. Why don’t they take a trip together? Fast worker he, but for all her sass, our Bitmoji babe is still old school. They just met!

He: “How about a movie, then? I hear ‘The Wife’ is good.”

Game on. 

Rita Plush is the author of the novels “Lily Steps Out” and “Feminine Products.” She had a house in East Hampton for many years.

As someone concerned about mitigating the potential ravages of climate change, I admire Assemblyman Fred Thiele’s past leadership in replacing fossil fuels with energy from the sun and wind. In 2017, he supported the Deepwater Wind South Fork Wind Farm, to be located 35 miles east of Montauk, as an economic source of renewable energy necessary to meet growing electric demand on the South Fork. This project is the first step to taking advantage of New York’s plentiful offshore wind energy and furthers Governor Cuomo’s ambitious plan to move the state’s electrical system off fossil fuels by 2040.

Yet I am now puzzled by Assemblyman Thiele’s withdrawal of his support for the South Fork Wind Farm project. He cites two recent changes behind his decision. The first is the purchase of Deepwater Wind from its initial hedge fund owner by Orsted, a Danish company and the world’s largest developer and owner of offshore wind farms. Orsted will retain Deepwater’s Long Island team while bringing technical knowledge and expertise that does not yet exist in North America. 

Why is this a problem for Assemblyman Thiele? Exchanging a hedge fund owner for the world’s most experienced offshore wind company is actually a gain.

Mr. Thiele should check on Orsted’s reputation and commitment to sustainability with his counterparts in Europe before he reflexively condemns them as not being “a good steward of the natural resources we have worked for decades to protect.”

The second change he cites is upgrading the 15 turbines in the South Fork project to newer and larger turbine technology — with a limit to the project size of 130 megawatts. The newer turbines will produce 44 percent more energy in the same project footprint and at a lower cost than the originally planned ones. 

How is this a problem? We all know that when you buy the “economy-size” package, the cost per unit goes down. It’s the same thing here. This is another positive development.

Finally, Assemblyman Thiele is upset that the Long Island Power Authority has redacted certain terms of the South Fork contract from the version released to the public and available on LIPA’s website. His concern is that Long Island customers don’t know what the project costs because of these redactions. But LIPA has disclosed both the total cost of the contract and the impact to monthly electric bills, which is estimated at $1.39 to $1.57 per month for a typical Long Island residential customer. 

And the salient point is that energy from this project, when combined with local battery energy storage, greater efficiency of use by customers, and reduction of peak demand, will be the least expensive way to meet the growing energy needs of the South Fork.

The contract was approved by LIPA’s independent board, and the entire process — including competing proposals — was audited and preapproved by both the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the State Comptroller to ensure that the process was fair, competitive, and in the best interests of Long Island’s customers. Does Mr. Thiele think he could do a better job of finding flaws in the contract than people whose professional careers are spent doing this work?

Why redact certain terms from the publicly available contract? LIPA’s position is that making this sensitive information public and thus available to other offshore wind developers would reduce the competitive nature of the next offshore wind auction, to the detriment of Long Island’s residents.

In summary, none of the stated reasons for his U-turn make any sense. Assemblyman Thiele has rejected meetings with LIPA and Orsted representatives to discuss the South Fork project. He should take these meetings to inform himself about the changes to the project since he first expressed his approval in 2017.

Playing politics with an impending climate crisis is not the visionary leadership Assemblyman Thiele has previously shown. I urge all readers concerned about clean energy and climate change to contact him and ask him to reclaim his mantle as a sustainable-energy leader by renewing his support for New York’s first offshore wind farm. 

He’s taken a wrong turn. The faster he comes about, the faster the turbines of the South Fork Wind Farm will produce clean, reliable power for all Long Island.

Peter Gollon was appointed a LIPA trustee in 2016. A former energy chairman of the Long Island Sierra Club, he lives in Huntington.

Mike the Master Plumber from Westhampton Beach was referred by Billy the Licensed Electrician from East Islip when I was building my three-bedroom heaven down the block from Jackson the Drip Painter from Cody, Wyo., 11 years ago in Springs, a hamlet of East Hampton where most of the homes use wells, high in iron, to supply drinking water, fed from the springs 73 feet below, perhaps coining the area’s name, “Springs.”

Mike had the most gregarious salesman’s salesman personality; he could sell me anything. As a matter of fact, he sold kayaks part time, traveling often to South Africa to find rare hardwoods and designs, which he tried to sell me, but his faraway exorbitant models’ prices were not even in the same universe as the orange plastic two-person Sun Dolphin I bought from Kmart in Bridgehampton that was marked down 40 percent one summer.

“Hey, Frankie,” he said so happily while waving two three-foot pipes, one blue and the other red, of rigid plastic. “These are the newest and greatest plumbing inventions since the flushing toilet bowl,” he boasted with a smile from ear to ear. “They will never, ever burst, can withstand minus 100 degrees, won’t freeze and pop like copper pipes. Unless, of course, you want old-fashioned copper pipes,” he continued.

And so, I bought Mike’s pitch, hook, line, and sinker, gladly handing him my check for $9,400 to install PEX pipes, “the greatest invention since the flushing toilet bowl,” all throughout my two-story cedar shake saltbox, beaming with joy, relieved the harsh Northeast winters, with howling wind-chill temps common at 14 degrees, would never, ever surprise me in the depths of night and freeze, springing a leak in my basement, destroying my lavish 99-cent-per-square-foot indoor-outdoor gray carpet from Home Depot I’d strapped to the top of my Honda CR-V.

He never said a word about the fittings — brass pipe connectors that after years exposed to hard minerals in well water can turn white and cruddy, like the decaying battery terminals on my ’85 Benz, ultimately corroding them, spewing flowing water everywhere when they fail.

Last winter, on a brutally cold morning, while relishing my third cup of hazelnut at my dining room table, all the while trying for three hours to access the internet on my laptop, I kept getting the same error message, “No internet connection,” a message not uncommon in my area because of the swirling winds that often take down a silver oak and interrupt service.

Nearing 11 a.m., Anderson Cooper’s face on my living room plasma TV disappeared; NO CONNECTION danced across its screen instead, forcing me to my basement to pull the plug on my modem, a recommendation the cable company makes when an electricity spike occurs, but when I neared the lower fourth step, my bare foot hit water. My basement was a two-foot-deep pond, causing my diastolic to match my systolic.

In a panic, I called a friend, who donned high rubber boots and turned off the electric main, discovering a ruptured brass fitting shooting water like an open New York City fire hydrant on an August afternoon, leading to the loss of two $8,000 broadcast cameras, while my cable modem bobbed up and down like a snapper caught on its coaxial, quickly turning me into my own master plumber with all the accessories.

An inch from the rippling water, on a two-foot-high wooden D.I.Y. shelf I made from watching Bob Vila on the original “This Old House,” sat a covered 2-foot-by-2-foot clear plastic box with 54 12-cent comic books, souvenirs and memories of my eight-week summer vacation in Rockaway Beach in 1965, a summer filled with fresh waffle and ice-cream sandwiches, 10-cent Skee-Ball games in arcades on the boardwalk, and my first paying job — for 50 cents, sweeping the wraparound porch of the bed-and-breakfast my family rented on Beach 69th Street.

The two quarters Miss DeWitt, owner of the B&B, handed me were spent at the candy store under the elevated A-train on banana Turkish Taffy and 12-cent comic books, such as Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man, and those based on popular TV shows like “Bewitched,” “Get Smart,” and “F Troop.”

Sliding off the cellophane wrapping of each comic book, I was hurled back 50 years to the front gray-plank porch, where I fell deep in a lime-green Adirondack chair, transported to a faraway land as the fifth member of the Fantastic Four, busting through the front line of my football team and rushing for a touchdown in Astoria Park, Queens, as Thing, or dangling from the Hell Gate Bridge, looking out over the majestic and peaceful East River as Spider-Man, or using my white Converse low-top sneaker telephone like Maxwell Smart did with his shoe, immersed in the colorful storyboards. Ironically, I stare at similar storyboards on my computer every day, editing projects for my video business.

“We’ll make a fortune selling these on eBay,” shouted my Stony Brook University son Paul as he Googled each one. “Hello, master’s degree!”

And now, with my 12-cent comic book memories two floors above my eroding PEX pipe fittings, as I sleep with both eyes open, one anticipating another piercing wail at midnight from my basement’s First Alert water detectors, and the other watching my finance-savvy son’s appetite to flip my comics to inflate his Fidelity.com account, I recall the benefits of my first paying job and a family-fun vacation that still exists within the “near mint” pages of my 12-cent memories.

Frank Vespe is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.

Remember the monkeys typing out Shakespeare in the infinity of time and space? However facetious or improbable, it’s really the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence or Return as enunciated by Nietzsche and the French mathematician Henri Poincaré. The idea is that looking at possibility under the aspect of eternity and with infinity as a parameter, the self, among other things, is essentially a malleable conception and unutterably protean in nature. From a teleological point of view, there’s literally no end to the possibilities. 

Say you would like to be a little bit more this or a little bit less that. There’s a form of you that’s accessible in another dimension. Instead of wasting time and money on psychotherapy, you simply find a new set of coordinates to occupy in the multiverse. Imagine further being able to access a secret terrain, a set of portals leading to wormholes, which are chinks in time and space, shortcuts that take you to your desired self. 

Alternate or parallel universes used to be the province of science fiction, but they, like time travel, may provide a kind of exogenous mode of personality change for members of varying wormhole societies that start to crop up in the wake of discoveries in the Large Hadron Collider. 

The world of subatomic particles adheres to laws that defy the logic of a Newtonian universe. For instance, in the quantum world, a particle can be in two places at the same time, a totally counterintuitive notion that requires the kind of “paradigm shift” Thomas Kuhn referred to in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” While it may be hard for the average person to grasp “string theory” or any of the other advances in nuclear physics, it’s apparent that the very concepts we maintain about the physical world are as limited as the vision of the human species described by Plato in his famous cave allegory. Science pushes on, but even a scientist accustomed to the most advanced thinking, the kind of character portrayed in a documentary like “Particle Fever,” still might not be able to envision the consequences. 

Would Moore’s Law have predicted quantum processors who work on single atoms? And look how far robotics has come. H.G. Wells wrote “The Time Machine,” and then there was “Back to the Future,” but there will come a time when science is likely to surpass science fiction, with the objects of man’s creation taking the reins out of mankind’s hands. Imagine not WikiLeaks or the Russians, but a hive mind created in some rogue computer taking over the election.

Is it too hard to believe that human consciousness experiences only a slight iteration of its essence? Could it be that hovering around the seeming manifestation of our so-called selves lies an infinity of incarnations? Further, is it possible that humans might have access to these if only they developed the agency and ability to negotiate the accordion-like vision of the cosmos that has always housed this “Garden of Earthly Delights”? 

When Copernicus and Galileo challenged the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, they were regarded as propagating a heresy. The idea that sound could be carried through an electrical wire still totally seems like magic.

We are on the verge of exploring dimensions that exist outside our usual conceptions and demarcations of temporal and spatial reality. Now the earth is beginning to look more and more like a puny cosmic backwater, considering the multiplicity of destinations available to the itinerant traveler with a restless mind. “Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light-Years From Earth,” ran a New York Times headline back in 2013. “Fun reading, but not in my wheelhouse” might have been the way most readers treated the piece back then. 

“The Stars My Destination” was the title of Alfred Bester’s sci-fi classic. While we grapple with our everyday fears, momentous shifts are taking place, representing a sea change in mankind’s ability to understand both the self and the cosmos.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance,” “Seven Days in Rio,” and “Tombstone: Not a Western.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and recently completed a novel titled “The Wormhole Society.”

So, after its humiliating defeat three years ago, working family affordable housing in the Wainscott School District is again on the front burner, this time in the form of a 37-unit across-the-highway complex on Route 114 near Sag Harbor.

In 2015, affordable housing advocates were confident the East Hampton Town Board would approve a plan to develop a 49-apartment project in back of Stephen Hand’s Path. The need for the housing was obvious and longstanding. Larry Cantwell, then the town supervisor, seemed to be enthusiastically on board. The town Democratic Committee voted to support the proposal, with only one nay vote. Democrats controlled the town board four to one and even its only Republican, Fred Overton, favored it.

Twelve million federal and New York State dollars would enter the town. Forty-nine local working families would have apartments with rents within 30 percent of their income, and even the most pampered of our town’s exclusionists could not complain. The project would be located north of the highway, remote from our wealthier enclaves.

It was a win-win all around — for working families, town coffers, and our business community, which was contending with a diminishing labor force because of the area’s soaring housing costs.

Then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

The Wainscott School Board complained vehemently that the working families project would raise the district’s taxes and that children from the apartments would overwhelm their small school’s unique and superior education culture.

Actually, Wainscott, East Hampton’s richest hamlet, has by far the lowest tax rate in the town, about one-fifth that of Springs, the town’s poorest hamlet. And a report by the town Planning Department, based on an approaching residential build-out in the Wainscott School District and the number of school-age children residing in existing local working family affordable apartments, concluded that the school board’s estimates of added students from Stephen Hand’s “appear to be too high by 13 to 45 percent.”

But after a visit to the school, Supervisor Cantwell declared it was indeed unique and excellent and urged the Stephen Hand’s developer, a Windmill Village corporation, to work out a deal with the school board to lower the number of children who would reside in the project by designating a portion of the apartments for senior citizens.

Discrimination by private landlords against families with children has been against U.S. law at least since 1988 and New York State law for nearly a century, since 1921. Affected individuals may sue landlords for damages.

If it is not okay for a private landlord to discriminate against children, how does it become okay for the East Hampton Town supervisor and town board to do so by telling the developer to alter the tenant mix and shutting down the project when they don’t get their way?

Negotiations for such a dilution never really started, and the town board rejected the plan. The arduous grind to provide reasonable housing at reasonable rents for East Hampton’s labor-force families was thwarted by a complaint from a hamlet school board.

Though serious and lovely, Wainscott’s little school is not Choate. It is an American public school, paid for by American public funds.

The surrender to the town board in early 2016 came from what had been a proud, effective, peaceable group of advocates, some of them antiwar demonstrators from the Vietnam era, who in the 1990s were to put their jobs and futures on the line by championing affordable housing for working families and seniors and for strong local implementation of disabilities rights laws.

They had fought hard battles over long years. Their heroes were ordinary people who do extraordinary things, such as Crystal Lee Sutton, whose story was made into the movie “Norma Rae,” and Erin Brockovich. Their bumper stickers proclaimed “Speak Truth to Power” and “Tax the Rich.” Their bulletin-board-posted wisdoms tended to be from the speeches and writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

For almost 20 years, I was a part of this group and think of it as a highlight, perhaps even a justification of my long, full life, a culmination of my New Deal Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Depression era’s faith-in-democracy upbringing and my lucky, snafu-ridden survival of World War II.

So, why did these advocates so passively accede to our town government’s insistence on weaponizing seniors to exclude their grandchildren from housing they needed?

The answers I get from them are that knowledgeable people at the county level warned them of dire repercussions if they confronted the supervisor and that the present Windmill board is more town-establishment oriented than previous Windmill boards. Others simply cited burnout.

I don’t see these as reasons for advocates to default — to just present an appeal to a town board brown bag meeting, write a few indignant letters to The Star, and then shut their toolbox and slink off without a serious exploration of the legal possibilities available to them. The Stephen Hand’s demise is not parochial to the East End of Long Island. It is an example of the frivolous power of money, a symptom and symbol of decay in our country’s democracy and soul. Skilled, principled civil rights lawyers exist in abundance in our universities and civil rights groups. Plaintiffs with standing can be found on our housing waiting lists.

I also know of no attempt by Stephen Hand’s backers to interest our major national press. I expect The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal would be fascinated.

It lingers and stings. Now we have another chance. Let’s not blow it again.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton.

In the desert, taking showers is a luxury. Especially when you’ve left a famous tourist destination that’s experiencing a three-year drought. That would be Cape Town, where if you shower twice a week for two minutes at a time, you’re being a model citizen.

So we flew to Namibia to be blessed by “liquid gold” for a full five minutes. Outside our tent, a 104-degree sun burned. Inside, a fan gave weak relief. But hey, we go to the desert to chill, not to be chilled.

It takes almost two hours to fly from the dry Cape to Windhoek (“wind corner”), a town that in 1884 became the heart of a protectorate called German South West Africa. I felt the German influence not long before in a seaport called Swakopmund: The town’s Bavarian architecture looks like a film set stranded in the sand; the buildings don’t belong. Try telling that to the legions of tourists who land from Frankfurt via Lufthansa to sample bratwurst and sauerkraut in the local Brauhaus. These boisterous souls are at least 8,000 kilometers south of the German winter — it’s Lebensraum rediscovered — what’s not to like?

So, how far would you go for a good shower and virtually limitless water? Surprisingly, the Damaraland region of Namibia offers that. The entire country has a population of two million, as opposed to Cape Town’s four million. But fewer people doesn’t mean there’s more water to go around.

Namibia has always been a semidesert, and its liquid gold is under the ground, just as a lot of it is in Cape Town. The Namibians, however, have made a better job of accessing it.

Throughout the 1990s, Windhoek built three reservoirs and a plant that allowed wastewater to be reused. The mayor drank the first glass on TV. The city fathers educated communities about how to save water — and enforced codes strictly. New factories for water-intensive industries, like making Coca-Cola, were disallowed. Other widespread controls were enacted through a drought management plan. The result? I didn’t use water carelessly (four weeks in Cape Town will cure you of that), but I certainly didn’t feel that I was in the middle of a crisis.

Namibia’s landscape has often been described as lunar. But compared to pictures of the moon that I’ve seen, it’s not that bleak. Sure, it’s monochromatic — a brown jumble of rocks and sand dunes — yet its scenery has great contrasts, with mountains, deserts, giant sand dunes. All of these landscapes possess a rough, if not beauty, then demolished grandeur. If Namibia were a person, as the admen like to say, I submit it would be an older, craggy male. You can see Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, or Clint Eastwood riding through it.

There are no big predators here. The oryx doesn’t have much to fear, as lions are rare, though not unknown. Springbok leap with their characteristic joy. Rhinos, giraffes, and zebras cluster in certain areas. All of this adds to the peaceable air.

Now I ask you to take in a Big Fact: You were sourced here, in the land of the Khoisan. Many anthropologists believe that the Namib Desert was the birthplace of modern Homo sapiens. A hundred and fifty thousand years ago, a group of indigenous people broke away from the original tribes already living here and headed north. As they spread out, these nomadic hunting and gathering communities became the ancestors of everyone who didn’t continue to live in Africa. They seeded the Northern Hemisphere and, over many millenniums, the rest of the world.

The ones who remained in Africa, in the vast region now known as Namibia, are the ancestors of the modern Khoisan. And for the last 150 millenniums, the Khoisan have been the largest population of biologically modern humans. Yes, that fact is almost indigestible.

As your Land Rover judders across the landscape, you’re aware that you’re driving through prehistory, crossing a dead planet. In a way, you are, because the Namib Desert is the oldest desert in the world; it has looked like it does today for at least 55 million years. Lost civilizations seem baked into the ground. Red sand dunes rise like backdrops to a “Mad Max” movie. Roads are what’s left behind after the bigger rocks have been removed. You swivel through them, rolling and jerking in a manner that the locals term “the African massage.”

We found the elephants after a 90-minute drive through a windstorm. Abner, our big, capable guide, knew that these special creatures were found only in Namibia, Kaokoland, and Mali. And that they roamed a particular riverbed, some hundred kilometers from our camp. After 20 minutes of shaking around in flurries of dust — eyes smarting and patience ebbing — Abner whispered, “There!” He’d spotted, blending into the foliage, a father, mother, and son — a nuclear family of pachyderms.

As the late Lawrence Anthony pointed out in his marvelous book “The Elephant Whisperer,” elephants are neither bullies nor cowards; they are simply “majestic.” These royal highnesses certainly were.

We watched the bull pull out a branch of the ubiquitous Acacia robusta. He adjusted it adroitly with his trunk, so that the leaves went first into his mouth. Then followed a meter length of branch to be mashed by the huge teeth deep within. Dad paid us no mind, even when his young son wandered toward our vehicle. The little one, about two meters high, slid his trunk into the Land Rover. We’d been warned not to touch elephants, so my partner sat rigidly as the elephant’s trunk inspected her knee and, finding nothing comestible, stepped away. He then moved to the back of the truck, placed his rear against it, and pushed in a vain effort to move us, presumably from his terrain.

We continued to watch these placid beasts for another half-hour. As we did so — and we talked about it afterward — a meditative calm infused us all. Some of their majesty was spilling over us.

An hour later, we were 100 millenniums back in time in the driest spot in Namibia. It’s an area now called Twyfelfontein. The Afrikaans word roughly means “probably a fountain.” More than 6,000 years ago, a tribe settled there because there was probably a spring. And there was, occasionally. The spring occurred often enough for the tribe to settle and establish a hunter-gatherer community.

Today, Twyfelfontein is a World Heritage Site, and about 50 descendants of that tribe stay at the site during the day. (At night, they hurry home to more modern quarters.) These indigenous people reside in a living museum. So we were not surprised when a bare-breasted woman greeted us at the village entrance and said, “Hello, I am /Eng.” (To which our German companion replied, “I am Christian,” which made me wonder if her ancestor, two centuries ago, had had a similar exchange with a missionary.)

The punctuation / denotes one of the four basic clicks of the Khoisan language. The anthropologist James Suzman writes of the / sound that “the click is made by bringing the tongue softly down from behind the front teeth while sucking in, as a mother might in scolding a child with ‘tsk, tsk.’ ”

Clicking away in her language, and then switching to flawless English, /Eng led us through the village. One of the young men conjured fire from a stick spun in a small pile of hay, as his forefathers had done. Another led us through what passed for an early form of checkers, played with small balls of mud moved rapidly from holes in the earth. We watched the entire group dance and sing, playing music that had originated at a time when, except for wild animals, Europe was a region of dark, uninhabited forests.

After a week in unique Namibia, what was my sense of the place? It’s easy to say that this is “a land that time forgot,” or even “a people that time forgot.” But millenniums ago, the Khoisan learned and adopted a way of life that served them well.

It’s recorded that in 1498, Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator, attempted to trade with a group of “tawny-colored people” farther south. But they showed little interest in his goods, nor did he understand their asset-free existence. As the Khoi lived only to have enough, apparently they saw no point in being burdened, like the Europeans, by any excess. The locals embraced affluence without abundance.

Before the time of Christ, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.”

We still seek the happiness of the Khoisan of Namibia.

Brian Clewly Johnson is the author of “A Cape Town Boy: A Memoir of Growing Up, 1940 to 1959.” He lives in Amagansett.

I’m kicking myself that I can’t find that poster. Our daughter Samantha made it herself, when she was, oh, 10 or so. See, we had this most amazing cat at the time. His name was Mango. And he went missing.

He was an orangeish tigerish marmalade cat, rather plump and rounded. So, in shape as well as color, he did rather resemble a mango. Or at least Samantha thought so. She was very good at naming cats, our Samantha. She was responsible for the late lamented Tuna (whose runner-up names were Grandpa and Lipstick) and our current cat-in-residence, Wombat. 

When I was a kid, I was terrible at naming cats. I would give them names like Buttercup. And then everyone, including me, would just call the poor badly named creatures Kitty. Once we had two littermates called Black Kitty and White Kitty. They were both brown; one was just darker than the other.

When I was pregnant with Samantha and my husband and I were arguing about (er, considering) names, my brother Scott would tease me and ask, “Why worry about naming her; you’ll just end up calling her “baby.”

Anyway, back to Mango. And why Samantha made the poster that I can’t find even though we cleaned a whole Toyota-load of old magazines and papers out of the attic.

We didn’t adopt Mango, though we had adopted cats before (the late lamented Tuna was a prime adoptee example). No, Mango was a cat who just showed up at our house in Amagansett one day, purring and looking orange and adorable. We fed him, and, sure enough, he started hanging out with us. We loved having Mango around, but we didn’t really “own” him. Oh, we tried to. I took him to the vet for shots and such, and slapped Frontline on him in tick season. 

But when I introduced him to the litter box, he looked at me like I had holes in my head. So, “outdoor cat” he had to remain. Which meant he was free to come and go as he chose. But, sure enough, he would come running when we called his name — bounding across the neighbors’ yards to our house, where he’d spend many happy hours soaking up warmth on our deck, or accepting pets and/or treats from the owner of the nearest lap.

Speaking of laps, once Mango presented me with a not-quite-dead chipmunk. When he laid it at my feet and I didn’t immediately pounce on it, he tossed it onto my lap where I couldn’t possibly ignore it.

Well, one day we called and called. And called some more. No Mango. I tried my best to reassure Samantha, who was around 7 at the time, that Mango was “just fine” and would “turn up when he’s hungry,” but I was just as worried as she was. Probably more so.

So she made this poster that said “Lost Cat: answers to the name Mango” — complete with a photo of said Mango and those little strips with a phone number that you can tear off — and plastered them around the neighborhood.

A couple of weeks passed by in Mango-less agony. Alas, nobody responded to the posters. Maybe people thought they were too cute to deface by tearing off one of the little strips.

But one weekend, just about when I’d started to practice my “Mango is probably better off wherever he is now” speech, I heard this meow outside the bedroom, and there Mango was. He’d clambered up to the second-floor deck via the drain spout, and darn it, he wanted in.

This would be the first of many Mango disappearances-and-returns. Eventually, we got used to them. We figured, wild bachelor that he was, that Mango just needed his “space.” Eventually, though, we discovered the horrible truth: that Mango, that rascal, had two other families.

I found out about one of his families, who called him Salmon, which is also a pretty good orange-inspired cat name, during a visit to the vet. Turns out this other family took him to the same one. The vet put two and two together and realized Mango and Salmon were one and the same, thus saving the cat double immunizations but depriving herself of a patient.

My husband is the one who found out about the other family, who called Mango Steve. One day he and the other family’s dad were walking on the beach and the subject, somehow, turned to cats. “You have an orange cat? That’s funny; we have an orange cat. He’s big and striped and has this sort of raspy meow? Hmm.”

We actually found out about the Steve family before the Salmon family, so for a while there we tried to honor their claim by referring to our joint-custody cat as Stevie Mango. Which had a nice sort of Rat Pack rhythm to it.

As for Mango/Steve/Salmon himself, he didn’t care what you called him, as long as you called him. But now, alas, he really is lost, passed on to the Great Cat Box in the Sky. But we won’t forget him. Not by a long shot. Even if I can’t find that poster.

Alice Henry Whitmore was an advertising copywriter in New York City for many years. She writes a weekly humorous blog at lutheranliar.com.

In religious texts, messengers appear as angels. Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, the unnamed angels who visited Abraham and Sarah. These spirits in human form appear in the stories to share information or to stand in for God. To be a divine messenger. The messages are good news, except when they’re not. Or it depends on the audience. In apocalyptic literature in sacred texts, the angels augur dire events that, depending where you see yourself in divine history, can be understood as good news or bad. 

But then who needs divine history? We have Messenger in Facebook. I find myself in something of a quandary here. Facebook can feel like some latter-day secular religious system, Zuckerberg the — no, I won’t say it. He’s not a god, though he seems to act like one. I’m not picking on him. Other superior beings fly through the ether of our computers and devices demanding obeisance. There are consequences if we don’t go along, don’t join the throng of devotees. If not ostracized, we’re at least separated out by our own choice into a wilderness of vague religious remembrance.

I was recently traveling on Amtrak. A train, earthbound. I was reading a book. I do have a phone for texting, which is helpful as a messenger, to connect with others while in transit. I noticed, however, on that trip that I was the only one around me who was not connected through Wi-Fi to some page on a screen. Is Wi-Fi another angel? I don’t understand these things. That I read a book suggests I am antediluvian in modern time.

Back to Facebook. The purpose of my recent train trip was to visit an ailing sister who lives in Blacksburg, Va. That’s an actual geographic place with a discernible topography. I stayed with a nephew and his wife. They are religious conservatives, though not wackos. In the bonds of real family, I respect them as they do me, with my more liberal persuasions. 

I went with them to a Wednesday evening “house fellowship” from their church. It was a good experience, meaning there was pleasant social exchange along with honest engagement with a biblical text. They were into the Book of Daniel where, behold, we meet the angel Michael. Michael has an apocalyptic message for Daniel, which in theme with variations is also written in the Book of Revelation. Messengers all over the place, to and fro in time.

In my immediate time as a religious fellowship guest in Blacksburg, the leader for the evening, who referred to Daniel and by sidestep to Revelation, asked, “And who might the Antichrist be today?” It’s a favorite question for those engaged in apocalyptic speculations. There was a pause after the question, then I rushed in where angels fear to tread and said, “How about Facebook?” My nephew laughed, I think with a degree of appreciation for my thought.

I’ve said I’m in a quandary about Facebook. That’s because I’d just as soon delete myself from it, considering its darker spiritual empyreans. But then Facebook Messenger is how I communicate with friends in Cuba. Especially younger friends who, like their counterparts here, eschew emailing in favor of Facebook or other social media. Messenger is like the appearance of an angel with an instant message, though not so scary as in religious texts. There is no mantra, “Do not be afraid.” No one seems to be afraid of Facebook, except maybe curmudgeons like me who peer onto the screen darkly but see not an emergent image of salvation but hidden behind the screen, oh no, Mark Zuckerberg.

Pay no attention to the man behind the screen! I wish I could. 

I’ve been going to Cuba for a number of years. Up until recently I’ve had to wait through an intervening year to pick up communication with friends, except for snail mail, which mysteriously through a third agency (an angel?) transmitted mailed letters. That took time, sometimes more than a month. The Cuban government (another arbiter of communication) has relaxed its restrictions to the extent that many Cubans now have smartphones or access to a computer, and by those windows get to Messenger. Or Instagram. Retire the old gods and the angels of our forebears, look what we have now! 

One day I was sitting in the home of a young friend of mine in Guines, Cuba. He’s 22, smart, gorgeous girlfriend, loving family, employed, and computer literate. He doesn’t speak English, and we haltingly converse in Spanish. I’m not fluent, and he and his mother and grandparents tolerate my constructions. I believe I was not given the angel of linguistics. I have to be my own angel, and I work at it. So, the young man was explaining to me that he and I could communicate when I’m back home if he sent a message by Facebook to my son, and my son could forward it to me. I then said, “I’m on Facebook.” He was dumbfounded. At my age, on Facebook? 

Ah, Messenger. Now this young man and I communicate as do others in Cuba who are friends of friends of . . . including me, and isn’t that just what Facebook loves? The system grows upon itself. Could its god be happier? 

You see my conundrum. I have dark suspicions about Facebook. At the same time its angel Messenger allows me to communicate with friends with whom I otherwise could not communicate, or not so easily. Plus, thank you, Cuban government, for allowing its citizens to do that now. Of course, that’s another subject, the Cuban government. They and our government are not exactly Facebook friends. Obama tried, but he’s been trumped. Tweet. 

Where does this leave me? I feel I could be self-exiled to a wilderness without Facebook, though I keep my finger on it. I don’t think the angels of our religious texts like that kind of both/and. Look, you’re either in or out. Which god will it be? What angels do you want to play with, anyway? 

I do like those old guys, Raphael or Michael, Gabriel. And what about the angels appearing to ragtag shepherds on a hillside, shouting, “Glory to God in the highest.” Oh, they’re singing. Right. I’m writing this essay in that holy season. I preach at the Springs Presbyterian Church. Angels abounding.

I’m not really a curmudgeon, and I’m not puzzled by the technology of communications. Oh, maybe a little, but I’m not opposed to it. I’m just raising questions at year’s end with a few ill-sorted associations. Odd-lot thoughts, you might say. I share them in good old print media, The Star, reliable messenger that it is. Slight obscene gesture to Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein.

A toast to what endures, technology or no, at year’s end, from a well-known source:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” 

— A. Lincoln

The Rev. Robert B. Stuart lives in Springs.

The greatest 19th-century novella ever written, “A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas,” was composed in six weeks starting in October 1843 by Charles Dickens and published in time for the holiday. By the author’s own admission, the seeds of the tale germinated from Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” in my humble opinion the greatest 19th-century short story ever written, with its ghosts and goblins of olde Dutch New York. 

Further inspiration for Dickens came from his own bleak childhood, when at the age of 12 he was forced to work in a boot black factory, pasting labels on bottles to support the recently vacated head-of-the-household position after his father was incarcerated in debtor’s prison for defaulting his creditors. The story has not been out of print since.

Let’s speculate on which of the surplus population of filmed versions of his immortal classic he might have liked best. So, take my hand and you will be upheld in more than this!

Since 1935 there have been many film adaptations of the beloved tale, from both the United Kingdom and the United States. Which is the best, though? Oy! I can see everyone jumping up and declaring the 1951 British film with Alastair Sim the hands-down best, and you’ll get no argument from me. However, nearly every incarnation has merit, and each has something to offer. Furthermore, it is my intention to convince the reader that there is one that equals or possibly surpasses the 1951 version by which all others are judged. So, before you get your Christmas stockings in a bunch, hear me out. Humbug, you say?

In 1935 Twickenham Studios produced the first fully talking version of the spectral narrative, titled “Scrooge” and starring Seymour Hicks, who was well qualified for the part, having reprised the role countless times on the British stage. In this strange version, concessions had to be made to the 77-minute running time, so the characters of Scrooge’s sister, Fan, and the employer he was first apprenticed to, Fezziwig, were omitted. Marley’s Ghost is seen only on the door knocker for a minute and then is a voice thereafter, but it is interesting to note that it is the voice of Claude (“Casablanca”) Rains in an uncredited role. Thus the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Three years later, MGM released “A Christmas Carol” with a British-born character actor, Reginald Owen, cast in the lead. Bob Cratchit, as played by the lovable Gene Lockhart, was criticized as being too corpulent, rather like an overstuffed Christmas goose, to portray an underpaid, underfed employee of a skinflint like Ebenezer Scrooge. As its running time was only 69 minutes, the powers that be decided to cut the character of Belle Fezziwig, Scrooge’s fiancée, thus removing the epicenter of the plot, that of Scrooge’s choosing mammon over woman and the inherent regrets that accompany it. At the crossroads of avarice or amour, Scrooge selects the former, and he is thus catapulted down the road of solitary coldhearted businessman. The absence of a loving lifelong companion creates in him an eternal bitterness toward all mankind. 

Which brings us to the 1951 masterpiece. Released in England, where it was produced, as “Scrooge” and in the U.S. as “A Christmas Carol,” it was the longest and most faithful adaptation yet. The film introduced elements that were not in the book, however, such as the suggestion that Scrooge’s sister, Fan, died giving birth to his nephew, Fred, thus offering a reason why the boy’s uncle never accepted any yearly invitations to holiday get-togethers.

In addition, the film has it that Scrooge’s mother died giving birth to him, this being the sole reason for his father’s utter contempt for his only son. This angle would be adopted in all subsequent reincarnations, and one must admit that both deviations enhance the narrative. 

Why is this version the standard to which all others are compared? Alastair Sim, that’s why. Sim plays Scrooge as a sympathetic, tired old personage who is self-admittedly beyond redemption or reclamation. His transition from cold, mean penny-pincher on Christmas Eve to gleeful, giddy benefactor on Christmas Day is nothing short of triumphant. Dickens would have loved this film.

In 1977, the BBC aired a 58-minute version with the inimitable character actor Michael Hordern in the role of Scrooge. This all but forgotten quickie can be found in an eight-DVD boxed set titled “The Charles Dickens Collection.” All the actors involved are brilliant, and you get Bernard Lee as the Ghost of Christmas Present and the mercurial actress Zelah Clarke (the best Jane Eyre?) as the eldest Cratchit offspring, Martha. Seek this one out. It’s worth it if only for the John Le Mesurier rendition of a tired, forlorn Marley’s Ghost.

The 1984 redux coulda been a contender but for the ghastly casting of the wooden, stilted George C. Scott as Scrooge. It was released as a TV movie in the U.S., and we do get Edward Woodward as the Ghost of Christmas Present, and a jollier bloke you’ll never see. But best of all is Frank Finlay as Marley’s Ghost, without a doubt the most jaw-dropping (literally) acting tour de force in any of the films.

Hallmark released a version in 1999 with Patrick Stewart as the grump. Though fairly straightforward, it is the only one to include a long-forgotten passage in the novella regarding sailors, coal miners, and a lighthouse, and for that alone it is worth a look.

In 2004 Hallmark produced a nearly 100-percent musical, with Scrooge played by Kelsey Grammer, who hobbles about as though he has plum pudding rolling around in his britches. This musical is annoying and the songs unmemorable. The one interesting scene not found in any other version or the book is one in a court in which Scrooge’s father gets convicted of not being able to pay his creditors and is sentenced to debtor’s prison. Young Ebenezer is present, and as his father is being hauled away he can hear his pleas to make a fortune and keep it, thus setting up a lifelong deep-rooted belief in avarice.

In 2012 October Eleven Pictures released the only adaptation that cannot be considered a family film, and this atmospheric, dreamy, spooky, mesmerizing ghost story is no doubt what Dickens had in mind when he penned his classic. Complete with an eerie score by Michael Richard Plowman and Moya Brennan, lead singer of the Irish band Clannad and sister of the new age artist and more famous Enya, this film is way better than the ratings it receives on IMDB.

In fact, I love this near-horror film. It has perfect casting and tremendous acting by an admittedly unknown troupe of Irish and English players and a clever script that blends traditional Dickens dialogue with a touch of Shakespearean language, which results in a wholly fresh take on a tired genre of retreads. I urge the viewer to watch with the captions on. Give it a chance on a windswept and stormy, if not silent, night.

And finally, I will make a case for the best “Christmas Carol.” The 1970 British semi-musical “Scrooge” is a forgotten masterpiece, so unwrap it this Christmas. The great Albert Finney won a Golden Globe for best actor for his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge, the best Scrooge ever. Directed by Ronald Neame with a score by Leslie Bricusse, this 113-minute film allows the story to finally be fully fleshed out. The songs are infectious and memorable and the supporting cast staggering. In one hilarious segment we visit Marley’s Ghost, played by none other than Alec Guinness, in hell, where a special room has been allocated for Scrooge because of the enormity of his karmic chain. 

One of the tunes, “Thank You Very Much,” won an Academy Award for best song. It refers to Scrooge’s dying and relinquishing all debts owed to him. He witnesses the townsfolk joyfully singing this tune and parading through the streets of London, unaware that he is the object of their merry derision. In fact, Scrooge joins in the dance and festivities celebrating his own demise.

The film’s most soulful element is a segue into the loss of his fiancée, Belle (Suzanne Neve), through flashbacks to their courtship. The viewer realizes what Scrooge has given up in the name of financial gain: love and a woman who loved him, something he will never again attain. 

Best of all is Tiny Tim (Richard Beaumont), who is without debate the most tear-inspiring of them all. When asked by his beleaguered but always mirthful father as they look in a toy store window which toy he would pick if he could pick one, Tim replies with the wisdom of a sage, “All of ’em.” His father asks why all of them and not just one, and Tim philosophizes, if he can’t have none of ’em, he may as well have ’em all. (Moist eyes.) 

Give this film a long look and don’t shy away because it’s a musical. After all, a carol is a song!

“God bless us, every one.” — Tiny Tim

Frank Fedi, a former poker columnist for The Star, lives in Sag Harbor.

Holiday season in a war zone: 1968. Fifty years ago this month.

I was one of a half-million American men and women stationed in Vietnam, the majority of us involved in combat support operations. I had arrived in March that year, six weeks after the major Tet offensive, a junior officer assigned to Army headquarters at Long Binh, some 20 miles east of Saigon. It was the largest military installation outside the United States — a post larger than Manhattan Island and home to more than 50,000 men and women.

Christmas in a war zone is bittersweet. Spirits lift; feelings of optimism and friendship are welcomed and embraced. At the same time, there’s the constant realization that you’re in a combat zone and with it an ineffable, terrible loneliness. We were separated from those we loved and detached from the daily events in American life that would make 1968 the most tumultuous year in recent American history. We were at war. And, while the war was often the focus of news, much else played — and preyed — upon our emotions.

On March 31, two weeks after arriving, I listened to a live radio broadcast as President Johnson unexpectedly declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party as your president.” Did this mean, somehow, that peace was nearer at hand?

Five days later I would learn, with shock and sadness, anger and pain, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. In May I would feel frustration at the slow beginnings of the Paris peace talks — talks that ultimately would last almost seven years. And somehow things got worse: In June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. 

That summer, I read about the political conventions in Miami and Chicago, of Yippies and hippies, and of more numbing violence. If 1967 embraced the “Summer of Love,” what should we have called the summer of ’68?

Hope was renewed that fall when President Johnson declared a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, but that hope was replaced by disappointment when Richard Nixon, not Hubert Humphrey, was elected president. 

And then it was Christmastime. 

Bob Hope, Ann-Margret, and Rosey Grier came to our base to entertain us. So did the Rev. Billy Graham to lead us in prayer. Thousands attended both events in an open-air amphitheater, but what I remember most were the surrounding hills ringed with guards, weapons at the ready for an attack that never came.

On Christmas Eve the people with whom I worked got together and set up an artificial tree with tinsel, ornaments, and paper cutouts. We sang carols and exchanged inexpensive gifts. And our first sergeant managed to come up with trays that overflowed with cold cuts, salads, fresh fruit, bread and rolls, and cake.

Christmas Day itself was quiet. Wherever possible throughout Vietnam, it was a day of rest. Worship services were held, and the mess halls served a dinner from half a world away: turkey, cornbread stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and apple pie. The Red Cross passed out gift packages put together by volunteers back in the States.

For those few days it was a time of peace.

Many years have passed. I often think back. But the holiday image I carry is not of a sun-baked Army base, visiting V.I.P.s, or mess-hall tables in a combat zone incongruously laden with food. Nor is it the image of lonely servicemen, or a sad people whose land was being systematically destroyed. It is, instead, an image from late Christmas Eve. On that night, when one more religious than I might have sought a star to lead the way, on that night I stood outside my bunker and looked up toward the moon.

It was the era of our earliest Apollo spaceflights; the moon landing would not come until the following summer. But I knew from news reports that three men were silently, peacefully circling the moon — the first men ever to travel so far into space — and that three days later those same men would splash down in the Pacific.

And I was overwhelmed by the realization that it was easier to send those three men to the moon and get them back safely than it was for me to get home, for my fellow servicemen and women to get home, for the war to end and for people to somehow live at peace.

It is now 50 years later. Half a century.

In 1968 we were engaged in what we called the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese called the American War, a war we could never win, a war in which 58,000 Americans and more than three million Vietnamese would lose their lives.

Today, sadly, it too often feels we are fighting a different war, a war within our own country, a war on civility and decency, on compassion and inclusion, on understanding and tolerance. 

Have we learned any lessons from the past? Is there an end to the bigotry and hate and violence we do upon ourselves?

At this season of peace, at this time of peace, these remain sobering thoughts.

Jim Lubetkin is a retired nonprofit public affairs and public relations executive. He lives in Amagansett. An earlier form of this article appeared as an op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor in 1987 and was chosen by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism at its 100th anniversary as one of 100 great stories written by its alumni.