After the election of Donald Trump, I began to think about what made me the person I am today, politically speaking. Was it the ’60s? I don’t think so. While some were marching, my friends who grew up without a lot of money were busy chasing the American dream, not protesting against it. Visions of little white-shingled houses with picket fences danced in my head, and Vietnam seemed far away. I was so young. Little did I realize the impact it would have on America.

My political leanings were acquired by osmosis, through the amniotic fluid in the womb, later infused by the atmosphere that surrounded me in a family and neighborhood of first-generation Americans who championed Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. 

My parents were DEMOCRATS, all in caps, I might add. After Adlai Stevenson lost the election to Dwight Eisenhower in ’56, my dad never voted again. Self-employed, he feared losing his salary if called for jury duty. The candidates who followed never stirred him to take the chance again. Four years later, I would find my own political wunderkind.

Needless to say, like many children I followed in my parents’ footsteps and was a Democrat at a tender age, not all in caps, but a Democrat just the same. Walking home from school one day in 1956 with my friend Linda Eichorn, I had a surprising Bronx moment. As we strode up the big hill on Ogden Avenue, book bags weighing down our small frames, I saw she wore a campaign button on her coat. It read “IKE,” and I was astonished by it. 

“Your parents are voting for Eisenhower?” I said with a surprised tone — nothing negative, just sheer surprise. I had assumed the whole world was voting for Stevenson. Thus I learned that not everyone had my dad’s passionate belief in the man from Illinois with the hole in his shoe. Adlai was one step above God in my home, for my parents were sure at least that Stevenson was real. God’s existence they questioned.

And so began my long love affair with and hero worship of politicians. John Kennedy came along in 1960, just in time to replace my first hero, Roy Rogers, and his formidable horse, Trigger. Kennedy didn’t ride a horse, but the PT-109 was a good story, and he spoke to my generation. It was no small thing that his wife and I shared the same first name, Jacqueline. We even spelled it the same. They had a cute family as well. The White House was filled with promise and beautiful people. Joe Kennedy Sr. said he would sell Jack to the country like soap flakes, and the country was buying. 

On Jan. 20, 1961, my generation, the first raised on television, watched, eyes glued to screens across the country, as the nation inaugurated our new president. Snow blanketed Washington that day, as the youngest man to be elected to the presidency spoke of the torch that passed to a new generation of Americans. That generation was our parents. Only one generation before, our grandparents had seen the torch held by Miss Liberty as they came into New York Harbor on boats escaping Europe. 

Decades later, I collected political campaign buttons for the nostalgia, pinning them on stuffed teddy bears. In a dusty antiques shop in Cold Spring Harbor, I spied a small pin studded with rhinestones spelling out “IKE.” I wanted to buy that pin. It spoke of the era. But guilt overcame me. “A Kennedy Democrat can’t do that,” I told myself. The moment was reminiscent of a 1964 television commercial for Lyndon Johnson featuring a Democratic hand struggling at the voting machine. Although ambivalent, the hand just couldn’t pull the lever for Goldwater, not the hand that had voted for the assassinated Kennedy.

Several years later while at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., I found the rhinestone Ike pin sitting in a glass case encircled by other presidential campaign buttons. I could have kicked myself. “I was so stupid not to buy it when I saw it,” I said quietly to myself. “It was such a piece of history.” 

At that point in my adult years, Ike was beginning to look better to me. Maybe it was nostalgia; maybe it was the article I read in American Heritage magazine, “Why We Were Right to Like Ike.” By then I knew that he had let blustery Senator Joseph McCarthy blow himself out on national television, because Eisenhower realized if he tried to quash the blowhard, people would think Ike a Communist. Also, Eisenhower was the man who reminded us to beware of the military-industrial complex. He was the general who insisted that the liberation of concentration camps be documented in photographs to bear witness to the atrocities for history. Ike wasn’t just a golfer. As I got older and J.F.K. stood frozen in time after the assassination, Ike and I were becoming closer in age.

And then while in Connecticut, serendipity took over — I found the pin again. Oh, it wasn’t the pin, the original was in Cold Spring Harbor, but probably one made by the same manufacturer. It spoke to me. This time I was not going to let a bit of Democratic genealogy get the best of the situation. I bought the rhinestone Ike pin and pinned it to the chest of a stuffed bear, next to J.F.K. and Adlai, just above an F.D.R. button. 

Now I am not in love with politics or politicians. I am jaded and disappointed in the menu of candidates we have been served. Where have all the heroes gone? Kennedy believed public service to be an honorable profession. So much was not reported then, no soap operas about our leaders, no raunchy stories. There was raunch, but it wasn’t news on the front page. Now we know much more, and it is a cesspool of payoffs, fake news, and affairs. We are subjected to stories of liaisons, which first became a spectator sport with Bill Clinton’s exploits. Not my business. 

Can we keep the private encounters under the covers, so to speak, and concentrate on what our civil servants do for the good of the country, not for their personal satisfaction? We now know of the peccadilloes of past presidents, but as enticing as the drama is, what should be front and center is how the country is doing. As Ed Koch said, “How am I doing?” Not “How am I screwing?”

I once read that every candidate who has run since J.F.K. has run against his ghost. Still a Democrat at heart, by inheritance and by tradition, I am hoping that a new hero emerges to win next time around. But I am a grown-up now, and slightly jaded, so I will consider a hero, or heroine, who is a work in progress.

Step up, whoever you are. America is waiting. 

Jackie Friedman lives part time in East Hampton.

Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, 100 years ago. The poem most often read out today in remembrance of the war’s dead is “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, an Oxford alumnus. The only person in World War I to receive two Victoria Crosses, Noel Chavasse, a fearless medic, was also an Oxford alumnus.

Binyon and Chavasse were educated at the same place, Trinity College, Oxford. It is also the credential claimed by Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, whose story is dramatized at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor this month. 

Is there something special about a place that can be captured through its symbols and stories? That is the question I set about trying to answer with my new book, “Oxford College Arms.”

Many who read this will be familiar with the Oxford University coat of arms, as it appears on or inside the 6,000 books a year that Oxford University Press produces and on many souvenir items. The shield shows an open book displaying the words Dominus Illuminatio Mea, “The Lord Is My Light,” from Psalm 27. The book shows learning, and the biblical message implies piety. The book is surrounded by three crowns that connote loyalty to the monarch and patronage in return.

I’ve been absorbed by heraldry since I was sent off to a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire at the age of 10. We ate our meals in the Great Hall of Gilling Castle, which had giant stained-glass windows featuring the coats of arms of the Fairfax family. I will never forget the antique script and vivid shields. The castle’s owner’s cousin, Gen. Thomas Fairfax, created the New Model Army for Oliver Cromwell and hunted down Charles I in Oxford. After a trial by Parliament, King Charles was beheaded for refusing to acknowledge that Parliament had any rights. Living amid this history, I was hooked by the lore.

Later, from 1962 to 1964, I attended Trinity College, Oxford, and enjoyed trying to interpret the coats of arms that appeared on every building, including the ones I lived in. Trinity’s arms are those of Sir Thomas Pope, who became wealthy while dissolving monastic colleges for Henry VIII, and then under Mary Tudor re-establishing one to ensure that he would leave behind someone to pray for him. Trinity’s three birds with the big ears are griffins, which have the head and wings of an eagle (king of the air) on the body of a lion (king of the land).

While the Oxford arms are the most recognized by tourists, Oxford alumni usually have stronger loyalty to one of the 44 colleges and halls where they lived and ate. Each college has its own shield.

One of my favorite birds featured on college arms is the martlet. A flock of four or five of them appears around a cross on the shield of University College, one of Oxford’s three oldest colleges. This coat of arms was attributed posthumously to St. Edward the Confessor, the last king of England before the hapless Harold, whose brief reign precipitated the Norman Conquest. The cross at the center of the shield shows that St. Edward was saintly, while the martlets show that he was learned.

Why is the martlet, a small martin, a symbol of the intellectual life? It is always shown legless and footless, and the point is that a bird with no feet can’t perch; it is like an aircraft without landing gear and has to stay aloft. Tennessee Williams, in his 1957 play “Orpheus Descending,” references such a bird. The bird symbolizes thinkers who can never rest because the answers of those who came before are constantly being challenged. The midterm election we just went through is an example of our having to confront anew the same questions faced by our forebears.

Coats of arms are the brands of yore. Oxford’s communities need an identity, and a shield provides it. A deep dive into colleges’ coats of arms is a better guide to visiting Oxford than a GPS. For an American, each college shield is a window into the people who founded and now constitute each community. The stories equip us better to face today’s challenges and provide pure joy in better understanding the strong Norman English chivalric thread in America’s history.

Colleges today are more modern than when I was “up” at Oxford in 1962-64. The plumbing has improved, for starters. However, colleges can return to some of their historical themes when least expected. After World War II, new Oxford colleges were needed to provide the residential and common dining experience to burgeoning numbers of students in graduate and professional specialties. At first, it was assumed that new university-created colleges, like Kellogg and St. Cross, would not need a coat of arms. But students and dons missed the heraldry when they competed in intercollegiate programs. The university itself discovered that it needed arms to identify each college in its calendar. 

So the new colleges created their own arms, and I wrote about their diverse choices for Oxford Today (then the Oxford alumni magazine, now called Quad) in its first issue in 2015.

For the book, I have tried to wring truth out of the many college shields. Are these arms relics of feudalism, sexism, superstition, racism? Assuredly. Do they also tell the story of how the colleges gradually escaped these suffocating prisons? Yes. 

For example, imagine what a great leap into the future was made by Bishop Oldham of Exeter and his colleague Bishop Foxe of Winchester when they founded Corpus Christi College. From the beginning, as a great departure from existing practice, they decided to open the place up in 1517 to non-monastic scholars. Part of its shield shows yet another bird, the pelican, with drops of blood dripping from its beak. The medieval world thought that pelicans poked their beaks down to pierce their breasts and feed their young with blood. It was called a “vulning” (wounding) pelican “in its piety” — i.e., sacrificing its blood for its chicks.

This, of course, is a metaphor for Jesus. Today, we know that a pelican puts its beak down on its chest not to wound itself but to push up food from the pouch below its beak. We can also interpret the message of the pelican in a more secular sense as one of a caring parent.

These old shields have life in them, like the ancient buildings many of them are affixed to. They have a lot to tell us, if we stop, look, and listen.

John Tepper Marlin, a 40-year resident of Springs, will talk about his new book and sign copies at BookHampton in East Hampton on Friday, Nov. 16, at 4 p.m. He blogs about Oxford and heraldry at TheOxbridgePursuivant.blogspot.com.­

The Jewish community is no stranger to being the victim of violence. Many Jewish family histories — mine included — carry a tale of a pogrom, an act of violence orchestrated against the Jewish community. In many cases throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, the government would take part in planning these acts of violence. My great-grandfather fled to the United States after a group of Cossacks raided his Lithuanian village toward the turn of the 20th century. 

This time period was a particularly bloody era for Jews in Russia. In the wake of a blood libel against the Jews in 1903, violence erupted in Kishinev, Russia, as the crowds chanted “Kill the Jews” and wreaked havoc on the Jewish community. This pervasive hatred of Jews throughout Europe foreshadowed the Holocaust, as the violence escalated to genocide during World War II. 

The recent attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh may seem like a resurgence of a historical hatred and violence against the Jewish people. Eleven Jews killed and six injured by a man who walked into the Squirrel Hill neighborhood sanctuary armed with an assault rifle along with several handguns and fueled by a hatred of Jews. Indeed, it was the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in American history.

Yet I do not believe that this lone wolf signifies a return to the horrific massacres of the past. The uptick in anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. reported by the Anti-Defamation League is certainly nothing to scoff at. But, by and large, anti-Semitism within American culture is marginal, not normative. When a tragedy like that in Pittsburgh occurs, we don’t see an increase in hatred, rather we witness the opposite. In the wake of the shooting, the Jewish community has welcomed an outpouring of support. 

The Jewish Center of the Hamptons received numerous phone calls, emails, and messages of consolation and love over the last few days. Clergy from every house of worship called to express sympathy. One East Hampton resident wrote to simply say that “while we are not Jewish, we wanted to let you know that we stand by you and will be a neighbor anytime you need.” Village Mayor Paul Rickenbach was quick to be in touch and publicly declare that “our community will not tolerate such deplorable acts, and we stand together to support acceptance and freedom of religion.” 

On an everyday basis, and especially in the wake of this tragedy, the Hamptons community has exuded a solidarity of love and togetherness. You can witness the same response throughout the country. 

In this spirit, we hope that you will join in a community vigil at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons Thursday night at 7. Together we will not just mourn the loss of those killed and pray for healing for all those injured, but we will comfort one another and demonstrate that the love within a community will never fail to overpower hatred.

Daniel Stein, 71

Joyce Feinberg, 75

Richard Gottfried, 65

Rose Mallinger, 97

Jerry Rabinowitz, 66

Cecil Rosenthal, 59

David Rosenthal, 54

Bernice Simon, 84 

Sylvan Simon, 86

Melvin Wax, 88

Irving Younger, 69

Josh Franklin serves as the rabbi of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton.

Back in the spring of 2017, my physician detected a blockage in my carotid artery that subsequent tests confirmed.

We had a heart to heart.

At least once a week, I was to eat fresh, wild fish. I must avoid supermarket fish, which he said is not reliably fresh and usually raised in pools full of antibiotics. He said he would be nagging me about this.

Then, aware that I try to keep sandwiches on hand because a hip disability sometimes prevents me from making my meals, he urged me to avoid supermarket cold cuts, which he said were stuffed with harmful preservatives. He promised to nag me about this too.

I was confident I could handle the situation. Because I am a low-income, disabled senior, my grocery shopping is done for me, entirely with my money, by a town-employed homemaker aide under the auspices of EISEP, the Expanded In-Home Services for the Elderly Program.

The obvious place for my aide to get the right fish was Round Swamp Farm. It’s a pricey place, no doubt about that, but their fish is reliable and by Hamptons’ standards competitively priced. And over the years I’d found that Round Swamp could surprise you. Every year, their season-end, bargain-priced local tomato sale had supplied me with months of great tomato sauce.

Also, EISEP guidelines require that aides use “the closest grocery store only.” Round Swamp, a half mile around the corner from my house, is the closest. In the off-season, when Round Swamp closes, we could get wild fish from Citarella in the village and the sandwiches from Mary’s Marvelous, as we had been all along.

Problem solved.

But then, shortly after my doctor’s artery blockage diagnosis, my town social worker phoned to tell me that aides could no longer buy fish or anything else for their clients at Round Swamp.

Why not?

Well, Round Swamp was not a “grocery store” but a “specialty market,” and the town’s Human Services Department had declared specialty markets off limits for EISEP shopping. Furthermore, Citarella was also a specialty market and so now also off limits. And further-furthermore, all groceries, including fish and sandwiches, were to be bought only at one of East Hampton’s two supermarkets, the I.G.A. or Stop and Shop. Mary’s Marvelous also had been blackballed.

I told the social worker of my doctor’s warnings, but she blew it off. These were the regulations for any senior on the program regardless of his or her need to follow a coronary-care diet.

What’s all this in aid of, anyway? This bureaucratic overreach. This bossiness masquerading as efficiency.

The changes do not lower costs and thereby help taxpayers. Quite the contrary. A healthy diet means less use of expensive emergency services and other costly taxpayer-supported health care activity.

They don’t save time, either. The time allotted each client remains the same, in my case two hours once a week for my shopping and mail pickup. During my four years as an EISEP client, I can’t recall one occasion when an aide (they are remarkably efficient and conscientious) exceeded the limit. Shopping and mail pickup were completed well within the two hours. Their remaining time is spent doing light cleaning for me.

The categories assigned to the town’s food retailers are also confused. Citarella in East Hampton is far more a supermarket than a specialty market. It has the major hallmarks of a supermarket — a variety of defined departments: dairy, produce, baked goods, meat, fish, and more. Citarella also contains such standard supermarket features as aisles, self-service, and customer lineup checkout.

Pork stores, cheese stores, condiment stores, pasta shops, and butchers are examples of specialty markets. They specialize overwhelmingly in one food category and offer product expertise and personal service, which Citarella largely does not. 

Round Swamp Farm, with its variety of inventory and lineup checkout procedure, also is not a specialty market.

What these regulations really do is display an infantilizing contempt for the ability of us older people to steer our own lives. They also mess with our opportunities to patronize local merchants with whom we have had trusting relationships for decades, and deprive them of business that is mostly conducted during off-peak hours.

And anyway, why on earth exclude specialty markets? Gosman’s fish store in Montauk is a specialty market. Can you imagine a town aide being forbidden from buying fish for a Montauk senior at Gosman’s, just because East Hampton Town labels it a specialty market? Or from Duryea’s? Or burgers for a Montauk 80-year-old’s birthday cookout from Herb’s?

All the work and mental gymnastics that must have gone into producing these deadly little proclamations; all the conditioning of social workers to become petty enforcers when the end result is that we defy our doctors and risk our lives. I am hardly the only senior in town who has received coronary-care diet orders from a physician.

I first raised these issues in June 2017, when I emailed the director of the Human Services Department about their danger. In October, I wrote a “Guestwords” piece for The Star and copied each member of the town board.

Now, nearly a year and a half later, I have yet to receive a response or acknowledgment. Which is quite astonishing really in a democracy and from a local government that likes to think of itself as efficient and caring.

Is all this deadly nonsense simply the nature of the bureaucratic beast? It needn’t be. The town board can fix it immediately if it wants to.

I am 93 years old and living independently. I am not a burden to the town, my friends, or emergency services. I hope to last a few more years and write a few more articles, such as this, that I believe are necessary for our community.

Where are the better angels of our town government? Where is the simple, essential curiosity of civic leaders to explore the consequences of such actions and report their findings? Where is the town board’s concern about what is taking place with an esteemed and vulnerable part of the population? 

But during the year now that I have periodically informed them and the Human Services Department of my physician’s dire warnings, I’ve heard nothing from them — no actions, no queries about the wasted money, laughable nitpicking, or indifference to endangered lives that is taking root on their watch.

I believe that now, with our nation’s political culture facing a crisis of decency and maturity, such oversight by local governments is more important than ever.

Richard Rosenthal has been a business reporter for Fairchild Publications.

This summer after a reading from my new book about aging and the life cycle at Canio’s an audience member asked if I didn’t see the central task for older people as the search for a meaningful life. I was caught off guard by the question, surprised by my difficulty in responding. Surprised, for although a fundamental assumption of my research and writing over the last three and a half decades has been that we are all always struggling to make meaning of our experience, that no longer felt like a fruitful line of thought. 

I wanted to honor the question and I wanted to suggest how my thinking about legacy had led me in another direction, less concerned with finding meaning and more tolerant of the fragmentary, incoherent nature of experience.

Over the last 16 years I have been steward to the legacy of my first life partner, the American photographer Robert Giard, with whom I lived in Amagansett and who is best known for having photographed over 500 G.L.B.T.Q. writers before his death in 2002 (robertgiardfoundation.org). Much of that stewardship has involved the care and management of the work that he left. Until recently I have thought of legacy in largely material ways. 

Then, on a bleak, sunless day last February as I was selecting photographs in my East Hampton storage unit for a show of Bob’s work later in the spring, it occurred to me that I too might have a legacy to leave, albeit of a very different kind. After all I have published four books, numerous scholarly articles, and popular essays. Here on the East End I was a founding board member of the East End Gay Organization in the 1970s and in the 1980s and 1990s took an active role in AIDS education and fund-raising.

Looking back on that moment in the storage unit I wonder why I hadn’t thought about my own legacy before. Was it simply the preoccupation of caring for another’s work that kept me from thinking about it? Or is there something fundamentally fraught about the question of legacy, inflected as it is by our concerns about mortality, the meaningfulness of our life projects, and yes, ego. 

The discomfort elicited by the topic was confirmed for me when I took an informal survey of colleagues at an educational conference last spring. My queries were met with surprised silences as well as a range of responses from “I don’t think about it” to “My students are the legacy.” And while it’s commonplace among teachers and parents to see their influence as traveling across time embodied in the next generation, my curiosity about legacy was only further piqued.

It’s an especially problematic interest for early childhood educators like me who are supposed to be singularly focused on welcoming the new and unrehearsed into the world, rather than preserving the old and familiar. Traditionally women’s work, teachers were to be models of probity and selfless negation.

At the same time, life in the classroom turns us into temporal specialists. We know that children’s play can wreak havoc with linear chronologies and that the excited cry “Let’s pretend” signals that they are about to enter alternative realms of time and space. 

Observing children move between past and future, real and imagined, abruptly rewriting narratives midcourse — now I have superpowers because I am big and powerful, and now because I am small and agile; now I am a baby, and now I am the mom going to work. The children are 3 and 30, 6 and 60 all at once.

As adults we know the reverse; living in aging bodies, aware of our growing limitations, we continue to experience ourselves outside of clock time as child, adolescent, and young adult. We too are 4 and 40, 7 and 70. The unconscious knows nothing of time.

On that summer afternoon at Canio’s, I stumbled through my response to the question about seeking meaning in life, but with time would offer a more considered reply that includes an older commitment to existentialist ideas and recent interest in Buddhist perspectives.

In the face of the fundamental absurdity of the human condition, existentialists say we can make choices that define who we are and enable us to leave a mark on the world. In short, we try to ward off death by investing in children, institutions, art, scholarship, and religion. It’s a thoroughly Western perspective, and contemporary psychologists who study this process have given it a thoroughly Western label, “terror management theory.”

For Buddhists, on the other hand, life is transient, not only because it ends in death but also because it exists only as momentariness, a series of tiny, ordinary, imperceptible moments. From this perspective it is our attachments to things and people that cause suffering, and the core project of a life well lived is letting go. Considerations of legacy, of leaving a mark on the world, are less relevant because existence is constant change and nothing can be said to endure.

That nothing endures, at least as we intend it, is a familiar instruction to those of us who teach and write. Marking graduate student papers at the end of the semester, I wonder where the ideas have come from. Had this student actually read the texts on the carefully crafted syllabus, attended the well-structured classes, and listened to my thoughtful words? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes there is considered resistance, other times it is as if we had totally missed the mark.

I do not pose the existential and Buddhist perspectives as opposites because most of the time I find myself swimming between the two, finding temporary comfort on one shore or the other. 

This dynamic is captured in the Jewish tradition, where it is said that everyone should have two pockets, each containing a slip of paper. On one should be written: I am but dust and ashes, and on the other: The world was created for me. From time to time we must reach into one pocket or the other. The secret of living comes from knowing when to reach into each.

No matter our ability to reach into the right pocket at the right time, legacy is both an elusive idea and an evocative reminder of human transience. I try to capture its meaning by searching dictionaries online and am struck by a site that offers “loss” as an antonym for legacy. I think of legacy not as the opposite of loss but as a trace within it. The gift of legacy, all that it offers us in material, spiritual, or intellectual benefit, is inevitably marked by who or what no longer remains. We welcome the gift and we grieve the loss it signals. 

If legacy is understood as both presence and absence, then, as my graduate students tell me, we have no control over what others take from our work. Where once I thought of legacy as a bounded set of artifacts, now I understand that it is a relational process that takes form in a future field of things and people, objects and desires. 

On the surface, my days working in the Giard archive of photographs are consumed with a material legacy. But when I stop for even a moment, I experience a more complicated dynamic, time oscillating between the now of the photographs before me folding into the past when they were made and future when I hope they will find new audiences.

Perhaps a scholar-activist legacy might also be understood as an assemblage, fragmentary and resisting definition, brought to life by those who follow.

Jose Munoz, a professor of performance studies, teaches us to read with queer eyes, to look for ephemera, “the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.” Eschewing the tyranny of facts and evidence-based arguments, he urges us to attend to the queer gesture — the handshake, look, posture — that contains the past as well as a way forward. Might legacy be read in a similar manner? That is, not as a fixed set of objects or ideas to be protected, but as a series of gestures and traces offering possibilities for critiquing the present and reimagining the future. 

Legacy functions optimally not as a repetition of the past but as a phenomenon that directs us to the horizon.

Although the question of legacy has arisen later in life for me, I know this is not true for everyone. Here I recount my favorite rumor hanging in the air of queer history. 

The first part, going back to the 19th century, involves Oscar Wilde, age 28, on his first speaking tour in America, seeking out a meeting with Walt Whitman, then 63. Oscar revered Walt. Queer lore has it that the two got on famously and that Whitman, after much talk and some wine, suggested that they might repair to his upstairs bedroom where they could be on “thee and thou terms.” 

Apparently both were pleased with the outcome, Oscar boasting to a friend that “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips” and Walt reporting in a newspaper interview that they had had a “jolly good time.” 

Fast-forward 75 years, and Oscar, long gone, had himself become an object of admiration of another young writer, the tattoo artist and pornographer Samuel Steward. Steward sought to affirm his connection to Oscar by seducing the then-aging Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s former lover. 

In his diaries Steward records his success in creating this visceral link through the once notoriously beautiful Douglas, then a wizened and much older man, and his great hero, Oscar Wilde.

While I suspect that most of us might not choose the kinds of visceral connections sought by Wilde and Steward, we may still imagine ourselves bearing the memories of admired friends and mentors into the future. We strive to honor those who came before and stay true to particular traditions. We ponder the traces and gestures that others will extract from our own lives. For myself, I am trying to heed the Player King in “Hamlet,” who reminds us of the futility of such preoccupations: “Our thoughts are ours,” he opines, “their ends none of our own.”

Jonathan Silin lives in Amagansett and Toronto. His most recent book, “Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground,” was published by Palgrave Macmillian earlier this year. 

Having a screenplay optioned and sold is the pinnacle, the summit, the Mount Everest for writers who’ve published hundreds of short stories in publications for little or no payment, just to have their unique stories told, see their names in print, whether to reaffirm the gift to weave a tale unlike any other or simply to impress four children, including me. But the journey along that yellow brick road is sometimes fraught with potholes.

My childhood in Queens was always orchestrated around a challenge, fueled by the unknown, whether sharing my Cracker Jack with the rats on the shores of the East River under the Hell Gate Bridge in Astoria Park (I was 5 years old when my parents feared I was kidnapped after I wandered off to feed them, and the N.Y.P.D. pulled me wading from the polluted, crashing tide), or riding New York City subways to the toughest neighborhoods to play with the best basketball players in Queens — Jamaica, Ravenswood, Queensbridge projects — getting pummeled and a broken nose in the boxing ring in Lost Battalion Hall’s basement in Rego Park, necessitating two rhinoplasties 10 years later, or to the Bronx, dribbling in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, or on the courts of Manhattan in Harlem at Rucker Park, Alphabet City, or the Lower West Side to sharpen my basketball skills, where many times my long blond hair, blue eyes, and torn, soiled, low-top white Converse sneakers made me an outcast, but always forging the most memorable experiences, making friends where friends didn’t exist, and, miraculously, enabling me to confidently strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, anytime, intimidated forever by no one.

Fast-forward to a few years ago, when my teenage son Paul played for the East Hampton High School basketball team and wanted to improve his basketball skills, just like his dad many years ago, and he asked me for advice.

“If you really wanna fine-tune your game,” I told him, “you gotta go back to where I played, the projects of Queens, taste hunger, take an elbow to that pretty face, six stitches above the right eye, play with kids who chase the ball like hundred-dollar bills are taped to it.”

And so my riches-to-rags, East Hampton-to-Queens, fish-out-of-water screenplay was born, “Pretty Doesn’t Get You Into the NBA,” a script that, when submitted to contests like Nicholl, Blue Cat, and the International New York Film Festival, received rave reviews and best screenplay awards, soon catching the attention of a producer who optioned and bought it from me with plans to invest $5 million to turn it into a feature film.

This past May, 30-degree mornings resurrected my concerns of climate change, leading me to conceive a “Twilight Zone” type of story titled “Summer of 32,” in which every day, year round, remains a constant 32 degrees. Recalling a movie titled “Summer of ’42,” I thought connecting my story and the film would make for a great hook.

After researching the movie, I wrote a short story about an intimate relationship with its main character, Dorothy Walker, played by Jennifer O’Neill, in a beach bungalow on Fire Island that was being washed away by oncoming tides exacerbated by climate change, destroying a perfect love affair. Two East End newspapers printed my story, and I mailed a copy to Jennifer O’Neill’s assistant, not having much hope she’d read it.

A week later, an email arrived from Jennifer telling me how she really enjoyed my story and looked forward to reading more of them.

During the summer of ’18, I emailed her a few of my tales, and she confided in me her roller-coaster life, a life that appears spectacular but underneath is so sad it makes me traumatized to think of it. I wonder how she survived; it haunts me every day. 

Near the end of October, I asked if she’d read my script, just optioned and sold — perhaps there was a part for her — unconcerned if producers would mind my asking Jennifer O’Neill to be in my movie.

“Send it along, but I’m very busy,” her email read, “will get back to you in a few weeks.”

That Thursday, I overnighted my 109-page script, hoping to hear from her in a month, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

Two days later, Saturday evening was crisp, not a cloud in the sky, when I parked in the 7-Eleven lot for my three-mile walk around Montauk. The full moon had a peculiar hue around it — I found it peaceful, dreamlike, mystical, hovering there alone in a clear, dark sky. I stared at it as I walked east toward the Point, lost in its beauty, but then, when I turned the corner in front of St. Therese Church toward the Sloppy Tuna, my cell rang and interrupted my trance.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Frank, it’s Jen, Jen O’Neill.”

“Jennifer?” I asked.

“Is it a bad time? I’ll call you when it’s better,” she politely said.

“No no. I’m taking a walk in Montauk,” I said, sitting on the church’s polished granite bench, the full moon illuminating me like a spotlight.

“Really? I lived at the last house on the right,” she continued.

“Wow,” was the only word that came to mind.

“I had a few minutes, picked up your script, read the first pages, and couldn’t put it down,” she said.

“Are you sure you read my script?” I asked.

“I spent the last three hours reading it, taking notes, a lot of notes.”

“Hope you liked it,” I said.

“I loved everything about it — the story, the characters, the dialogue, everything — and not only do I want to star in it, I want to direct it.”

“Direct it? Like for a TV show?”

“TV show?” She giggled. “No no, my dear, I’m taking your story to another level . . . a film, the big screen. We’ll work side by side tweaking it.”

I sat bewildered, in awe as super-actress and Cover Girl Jennifer O’Neill, star of 50 movies, praised my screenplay as if the name below the title were Salinger, Serling, or Hemingway.

And for the next hour we chatted like best friends reconnecting after a long absence, with her sincerest promise to direct a love story like no other.

“You’re a compelling guy, take my cell number,” she said. “Call me anytime.”

And I have, often.

The next day I called the producer with the news of Jennifer O’Neill’s desire to direct my screenplay.

“I’m leaning toward having a woman direct my movie,” I said.

“Great idea. Who do you have in mind?”

“Jennifer O’Neill.” 

“Jennifer O’Neill, the model?” the producer asked.

“I sent her my script last week —”

“We had a chat about you not promising parts to anyone,” the producer said.

“You said not to offer parts, nothing about directing, right?”

“Well —”

“Jennifer’s a huge actress, Cover Girl, really, really, really a big star,” I continued.

“She’s been out of the public eye for 20 years,” the producer countered.

“That’s even more of a reason, kinda like a female version of Rocky, the underdog making a comeback. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?” 

“What has she directed?” the producer asked. 

“She’s starred in over 50 movies.”

“That’s nice, but what has she directed?” the producer said, pressing me for an answer.

“She’s had a lot of heartache in her life, and if anyone knows about falling in and out of love, I say she’s well qualified, the perfect person to direct a love story.”

“But is she bankable?”

“Very beautiful,” I answered.

“I didn’t ask if she’s beautiful, I asked if she’s bankable,” the producer said.

“What’s bankable?” I asked.

“Investors will give money to make a film when an actor or actress is well known. That’s bankable. But is Jennifer O’Neill bankable?”

“I’ll be an investor. Keep the money for my script, and I’ll waive all my future earnings from the film, and give it to her, okay?”

“That’s not how it works, my friend,” the producer continued. “When you signed our contract, you sold all your rights to us. It’s not like one of your Queens street games — no do-overs.”

“But —”

“Finding a director, probably a well-known female director, will be easy,” the producer said.

“I hear passion in her voice, I feel passion in her voice. I can’t explain it, it’s surreal, and . . .”

“And what, Frank? What’s so special about Jennifer O’Neill?”

“My soul tells me she’s the one. I’ll bet my life on it.”

A quiet pause.

“Here’s my offer,” the producer whispered, “bring 2 million to the table, or a bankable star, and your BFF directs your movie.” 

“BFF? What’s that?” I asked.

“Best friends forever.”

Thanksgiving weekend, my overly social kids threw a massive party in my backyard, deck, and basement. “Stay in your room, Dad!” they screamed, leaving behind hundreds of red Solo cups, six Ping-Pong balls (I don’t own a Ping-Pong table), and 93 empty cans strewn everywhere, each labeled 5-cent return, which I gathered in a 30-gallon Hefty bag and took the next day to King Kullen’s recycling bin in Bridgehampton, collecting $4.65 in change, leaving me only $1,999,995.35 short on my quest to have Jennifer O’Neill direct my movie.

Anyone throwing a party this weekend?

Frank Vespe is a regular “Guestwords” contributor. He lives in Springs.

With one hundred women just elected to the House of Representatives, we’ll soon see the first Muslim, the first Native Americans, and many African-American women take their seats as lawmakers come January. These new faces in Congress look a lot like the diverse faces we saw at the Women’s March on Washington and worldwide in January 2017. 

I’d been to other rallies before as a member of East End NOW, but never anything like that one. In the crush of that day, in the nation’s capital, many of us were energized anew to take action. We made commitments, whether we spoke them aloud or whispered them silently within. It’s quite possible these national election results are, in part, the fruits of those commitments. My commitment is taking shape closer to home.

One month after the march, Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island called an emergency meeting. Racist and bigoted fearmongering spewed from our highest office, demonizing immigrants. ICE agents were showing up at job sites, at restaurant kitchens, at people’s homes, hauling people into detention. Pews were packed at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Bridgehampton as families fearful of being pulled apart came to learn their rights. Advocates, allies, and others filled the balcony, every aisle. 

A panel of speakers gave advice: Find someone to take care of your kids if you get picked up. Tell your kids not to open the door to strangers. A woman near the altar silently wept. Children feared going to school one morning and coming home to an empty house, their mother or father gone. How could we stand idly by? 

Late one night this spring, I read an email from the Herstory Writers Workshop. Something about its call for facilitators spoke to me. I’d known of Herstory for years, ever since Erika Duncan, a Sag Harbor writer, first offered women a chance to write a story they hadn’t previously told, to break silences they’d kept for years. We’d hosted several Herstory readings at Canio’s, always moved by what we heard. 

Herstory evolved from classes at the Southampton Cultural Center to offer workshops Islandwide in prisons, domestic violence shelters, with young student Dreamers, and more. I wanted to work with writers who had urgent stories to tell, to help them shape a narrative that would move the “stranger-reader,” as Erika terms it. If we understood someone’s lived experience, if we walked in their shoes even for a few pages, hearts and minds might open. That is the hope. As one Herstory facilitator said: “You can argue politics, but you can’t argue with a story.”

I’d been teaching writing workshops at Canio’s for years, but this new effort would call me into other corners of the community. Years ago, my college classrooms were filled with black, brown, and white young people, some struggling to keep up, and some who enjoyed every privilege of their race and status. We read stories like Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible,” Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” But could we understand our common experiences across differences, all the while learning a thing or two about comma splices and verb tense? 

Often the disparities between students were too great to bridge. We’d need more than one class, one semester to develop the empathy I was after. We’d need better basic education for all; we’d need support for single mothers, quality child care, and a whole lot more. The effects of institutional racism, classism, sexism couldn’t be undone in a few short months.

I grew up in relatively safe, segregated, middle-class suburbs where it was easy to consider everyone equal since nearly everyone I met looked like me. Everyone I met lived in a house more or less like mine, often an exact model. When I first came to the East End, decades ago, social stratification announced itself in the grand mansions in Georgica and along Southampton’s Dune Road. And in the modest cottages of friends in Springs and Pine Neck. The old migrant farm workers camps were still standing along the Bridgehampton Turnpike. At harvest time, I’d see men riding in open flatbeds with the cabbage they’d cut from fields all day, as if they, too, were excess produce that might easily fall from the truck, unnoticed, along its bumpy route. 

Walking through an old oceanfront estate a friend was remodeling, we passed the master’s suite, then down a hallway to the servants’ quarters, where, once through a dividing door, the woven carpet changed to old linoleum; silk wall coverings vanished, revealing bare wood. The material distinctions so obvious, it seemed like a parody, but wasn’t. I’d watched teams of landscapers fuss over sod lawns sloping over dunes. Garden expenses for one summer exceeded my yearly salary. The disparities were disturbing then, and feel much worse today.

The sense of urgency has quickened as military troops have swarmed the border, caravans of desperate refugees labeled “terrorists.” As a Herstory facilitator-in-training now, I meet weekly with a diverse and lively group: young students, mature professionals, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, mostly women and one wonderful young man. We practice our skills, read our work, and listen in awe to the fierce tenderness each of us brings to the table. We’ve each made a commitment to take this writing for justice to some corner of the community come spring.

It’s that fierce tenderness that runs through “Brave Journeys: 15 Border Crossing Stories,” recently published by Herstory. In one story, a pregnant young woman escapes domestic violence at home and endures days of difficult travel, days of hunger and cold. Then she’s confronted with a river crossing. She cannot swim. In another, a 15-year-old girl leaves home on the day of her quinceanera. Her aunt and uncle were murdered. She dreams of a better life, but must leave her mother behind. Once you hear her story, you can’t deny her strength of spirit, the tenacity within. 

“Brave Journeys” deserves a wider audience. If our local legislators read these stories, might that lead them to greater understanding? Would they make better policy decisions to protect rather than punish community members? That is the hope. If students read “Brave Journeys” in our East End schools and libraries, wouldn’t it inspire them, challenge stereotypes, and spark conversation and compassion? That is the hope. 

With these dreams propelling us, Herstory writers and advocates will gather at Canio’s this Thanksgiving weekend to hear stories from our East End immigrant neighbors. With OLA and Racial Justice East End, a group of clergy and activists, we’ll renew commitments to create a collaborative and just community. We know full well the East End economy would collapse without critical contributions made by our hard-working immigrant neighbors. But more important, we value each other as people sharing a dream. 

If Thanksgiving means anything to us as Americans, surely it means we depend on one another for survival. It means there’s always room for another guest at the Thanksgiving table. Especially here on the East End, where we have so much to offer, and there is so much need. 

Maryann Calendrille is a co-owner of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, where a Herstory Writers Workshop reading and call to action will take place on Nov. 25 at 3 p.m.

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.

Last year The Star ran an article of mine in “Guestwords” titled “Conservatives and Climate.” In it I stressed ways in which climate change is degrading values — family, country, and being right with God — that conservatives care about.

I advocated a solution based on the free market, namely revenue-neutral carbon pricing, otherwise known as carbon fee and dividend. That proposal, advocated by Citizens Climate Lobby, would have the government impose a fee on fossil fuels in proportion to their carbon emissions and then rebate the proceeds to the American people in equal shares. That this proposal won’t add to the national debt or increase the size of government were points I thought conservatives would like.

With the recent election delivering control of the U.S. House of Representatives to the Democrats, it’s time to speak to progressives on the same topic. My task here is to convince you that a solution to climate change that has appeal to conservatives also deserves support from progressives.

Because carbon fee and dividend is market based and revenue neutral, some progressives have characterized it as “too right-wing.” They feel that strict regulations are needed and that any proceeds from a carbon fee must be used to fund government-sponsored research and to ameliorate impacts on low-income people.

I have no desire to denigrate those goals. Regulations can be useful where market forces alone are not enough to bring about rational choices. Consider the case of rental housing in which landlords who don’t pay the gas and electric bills have little incentive to upgrade the energy efficiency of their buildings. Homebuilders can be tempted to cut corners on insulation or install cheap furnaces and air-conditioners in order to keep their selling prices down, leaving the new homeowners with excessive energy bills for years to come.

As for research, we very much need new approaches to energy efficiency, carbon-free energy, and ways to extract carbon from the atmosphere and the oceans. And certainly marginalized communities have borne the brunt of the pollution from our power plants and suffer the worst consequences of climate change.

Nevertheless, there are several good reasons for progressives to rally around carbon fee and dividend as the core strategy for mitigating climate change. First, most economists, regardless of their political orientation, agree that putting a price on carbon is the most effective way to achieve a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. Second, increasing the price of fossil fuels would give entrepreneurs the incentive to invest in research and to deploy new low-carbon technologies. 

Third, members of marginalized communities would benefit from the carbon dividend because they would get the same rebate that Bill Gates gets. The dividend would more than compensate for the increased cost of energy for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, while the rich would pay more unless they wholeheartedly embrace energy-efficient technologies. Fourth, carbon fee and dividend, if enacted, would create millions of good private-sector jobs, most of which would not require advanced education. 

Finally, no proposal will have any effect unless it is enacted into law. Although any action on climate is unlikely as long as our current president is in office, it will be necessary to get bipartisan support for action even should the Democrats control both the executive branch and the national legislature after 2020. That’s not only because of the need for 60 votes in the Senate, but equally because the private sector needs to have reason for confidence that the incentive structure won’t be repealed after the next election.

We need to make climate change a bridge issue, not a wedge issue. Compromise will almost certainly be needed. It would be the greatest of tragedies if conservatives came to support an effective solution to the climate crisis only to have progressives walk away from anything short of perfection.

John Andrews is co-group leader of the Long Island East chapter of Citizens Climate Lobby. He lives in Sag Harbor.

Late summer is gazpacho season at our house. All the essential ingredients for this summer soup are abundant by August. My garden provides them: crisp cucumbers, onions, peppers, and plump tomatoes. And if I am low on something, the closest farm stand is stocked full. This chilled summer soup is always deeply refreshing. 

I first had gazpacho one hot summer night in 1970 at Hal and Flo Williams’s house in Bridgehampton. Hal and Flo were pioneers of organic gardening on the East End in the 1960s. And although they have both passed away, their legacy as organic gardeners, devoted neighbors, and food lovers is still celebrated by those of us who knew them. I honor Flo and Hal every time I make gazpacho.

Flo and I might never have crossed paths if not for boarding school in Massachusetts, where her daughter, Loie, and I became friends in 1970. I was from Southampton, and in those days, before the East End became one big Hampton, everyone pretty much stuck to his or her own village.

Loie and I bonded through our East End connection. We spent hours in the back seat on the five-hour carpools to and from school for vacations. And at school we bonded while sneaking out of dorms, smoking in secret places, discussing boys, and feeling homesick.

During summer breaks, Loie served hamburgers and scooped homemade ice cream at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton, and I waited on customers, made keys, and mixed paint in Southampton at my family’s store, Herrick Hardware. Bridgehampton and Southampton were seven miles apart, but we had driver’s licenses and a new straight stretch of highway, Route 27, as long as one of us could borrow the family car.

I preferred Loie’s house. She lived in a simple red clapboard ranch that Hal had built on Halsey Lane in the late 1940s. Low ceilings and pecky cypress paneling gave a cozy feeling in the main living/dining room. Most days, four to five elderly friends and relatives, cared for by Flo, rested in the comfy chairs all around. The creaking screen door in the kitchen announced visitors. Flo welcomed everyone with “Come in, come in to see . . .” as she ushered us to the old folks. Loie’s Grandpa Williams chatted enthusiastically. Miss Nelly, the oldest person in Bridgehampton at nearly 100, sat smiling at all the activity. 

Early, worn editions of Organic Gardening magazine crowded the coffee table. One afternoon, I leafed through an issue with a photo of onions on the cover. An article about toxic bug sprays caught my attention. I had sold some bug spray that morning in the hardware store. I didn’t know it was harmful. 

Hal’s organic garden bloomed on a triangle of Bridgehampton loam dividing Mecox Road and Job’s Lane. It was the corner of a field that belonged to his good farmer friend Gurden Ludlow. Hal’s colorful crops caught the attention of passers-by. This was certainly not a potato or corn field. Yellow, red, orange, purple, white, and green shapes punctuated by thick variegated foliage spread across the ground or stretched skyward on fences. There were tomatoes, string beans, onions, carrots, zucchini, and more, a vivid display of robust health.

Flo was captain of the kitchen. Her uniform: shorts, shirt, blue Keds sneakers, and cotton apron. Huge canning and soup pots simmered on the stove. She orbited the galley kitchen from refrigerator to stove to sink, processing the day’s harvest. When visitors stopped in, she would pause and offer something fresh, like homemade bread or a piece of pie warm from the oven. 

A photo of Grandpa Williams sums up summer at his son’s house. He dons a striped chef’s apron and stands before the back door, leathery wrinkles creasing his beaming face and a bundle of zucchini in his arms. Behind him, on the back stoop, are buckets of organic tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and onions, the main ingredients for Flo’s gazpacho.

One August evening as I entered the kitchen, Flo handed me a large soup tureen. “Please set that at Hal’s place, would you, Hilly?” she asked. The vessel was cold. The soups I knew were always piping hot. I was confused but did as asked, without question. 

Eight of us gathered around the table: Grandpa Williams, Hal, Flo, Loie, her brothers, a girlfriend, and me. Hal said grace and ladled the cold soup. I examined my serving. It was full of raw tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and cucumbers in tomato juice. Chopped chives and parsley garnished the surface. There were tiny oil dots floating in and among the herbs. It looked mysterious and inviting. A sweet vinegar aroma galvanized my taste buds. 

Flo dipped her spoon into the bowl, and then I did the same. A sweet, spicy, fresh flavor embraced my taste buds. The crunch of cucumbers and peppers followed, with the herbs and hint of hot pepper punctuating each swallow. It was a garden in a bowl! And it was one of the most delicious things I had ever tried.

Now, over 40 years later, I make the “garden in a bowl” for the thousandth time. Tomatoes must be slightly overripe and the cucumbers crisp, right off the vine. Flo’s recipe calls for green peppers, but I use a mix of green, yellow, and red. Yellow onions are best, but any will do. My newest addition is milky kernels of barely cooked corn for a sweet crunch.

Like Flo, I never use a food processor to chop the ingredients. Hand chopping slows me down for a time, and that in itself is gratifying. The cucumbers, peppers, garlic, and onions are cut into bite-size pieces and added to the bowl. After the tomatoes cool, the skins slip right off. I remove their seeds if I’m feeling especially patient. A flexible cutting pad is good for the tomatoes. Holding it cone-shaped makes it easy to pour all bits of them and their juice right into the bowl. 

Next, I take a short break to head into the garden for chives and parsley. Along the way, I usually get distracted by other vegetables and herbs calling for picking, weeding, or trimming: zucchini growing large, borage taking over, nasturtiums cascading into beans and Swiss chard, a vole hole near the carrots, and on and on. But I stay focused on my gazpacho goals.

Back in the kitchen, I chop the herbs, inhaling the clean scent. Flo added red wine vinegar. My choice is balsamic. Top-grade olive oil balances the vinegar. Last, vegetable juice, salt, and a dash of hot sauce or cayenne. 

Every time, my husband responds to the first spoonful with “This is the best batch you ever made.”

Recently, Loie called from her home in Boston.

“I am making the gazpacho,” I chirped, setting the phone on speaker so I could finish chopping cucumbers.

“Ah, Hilly, I love the gazpacho.”

Hilary Herrick Woodward lives and gardens organically in Southampton.