When the biblical Cain tries to cover up the murder of his brother Abel, we find the first example of an individual shirking culpability for his actions. Cain decides not only to plead ignorance as to the whereabouts of his brother, but mocks the notion of accountability by rhetorically asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:1). Cain insinuates that he takes no responsibility for the welfare of his brother. 

The Bible finds the opposite to be true. Yes, of course we are our brother’s keeper. “Every individual is responsible for his fellow,” declares the Talmud (Shevuot 39b), because our lives are so intertwined that “brothers stumble over one another” (Leviticus 26:37). I might add that not only are we our brothers’ keeper, we are our sisters’ keeper as well.

In the traditional Jewish reading of Scripture, we have just rolled our Torah scrolls back to the start of the book of Genesis. The story of Cain and Abel is sometimes glossed over, but for me this year I find it particularly relevant given the cries of women who are calling out in pain and anguish. When God confronts Cain over his crime, God tells him “the bloods of your brother cry out to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:9). 

Commentators point out that the word “bloods” is strangely in the plural. This teaches that it’s not just Abel’s blood that cries out, but the blood of all those under the yoke of affliction. The blood, pain, and anguish of women cry out.

When women cry out, are we listening? Do we just write off the harassment of women as locker-room talk or typical male behavior? Do we throw out a perverse aphorism like “Boys will be boys”? 

Senators recently sat before Christine Blasey Ford as she courageously recounted the trauma of being sexually assaulted at the hands, she said, of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Were they listening? When two tearful women confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and one exclaimed, “Don’t look away from me, look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me,” I hope Senator Flake was listening. 

We are all our sisters’ keeper, and the blood of our sisters cries out. Senators sat with the question of not only whether to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, but also with the pivotal question “Am I my sisters’ keeper?” They unequivocally answered the question about confirmation, but left a lot uncertain regarding the accountability of those who perpetrate sexual assault.

I am concerned that in the course of a judge’s appointment to the Supreme Court, many in our community feel that their cries have gone unheard. I’m not in a place to assess whether Kavanaugh was innocent or guilty. I do feel, however, that there was more at stake for many victims of sexual assault than whether or not a bench seat would be filled. There are those who feel that if senators don’t treat alleged sexual misconduct of the past (even if it happened over 30 years ago) with the weight that it’s due, they by implication give a pass to every perpetrator who permanently scarred a victim. 

We are our brothers’ keeper, and we are our sisters’ keeper. And if we can’t protect victims, I hope at the very least we hold each other accountable for misconduct. After all, “every individual is responsible for his fellow.”

Playing the role of Cain seems banally easy. Just act as if the plight of others is of little concern, plug your ears when you don’t want to hear a painful cry, and write off the testimony of a sexual assault victim as a partisan political strategy. Cain is our anti-model, the opposite of the virtues to which we aspire. We are our brothers’ keeper, and we are our sisters’ keeper. 

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

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.

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. 

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.­

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hate rubbernecking. I think it’s mean to stare down a waitress after she’s dropped a tray of dishes, cruel to slow down to inspect a highway wreck, stupid to obsess over the extramarital flings of the C.E.O. of the U.S.A.

Yet I gladly rubberneck “The Affair,” the Showtime series that spins around two couples who split but can’t quit each other after a summer infidelity in Montauk. For four seasons I’ve avidly followed four basically decent people who keep making disastrous mistakes: abandoning a child to get mentally well; burning down a house to deny and confirm a family curse; stalking a stalker who may not be a stalker. Alison, Cole, Helen, and Noah are the black sheep of my TV ark, the rogue surfers of emotional tidal waves that crash into my life on and off the South Fork.

My affair with “The Affair” began on Halloween 2014, a day of expected and unexpected treats. I was visiting friends in Wainscott, where I lived from 1967 to 1972, when I discovered all my major passions, from baseball to sex to writing. That morning I satisfied my love for nature by walking the Walking Dunes in Napeague, the Sahara stand-in in Rudolph Valentino’s silent film “The Sheik.” I hiked over the mountainous mounds into the sandy bowl where I once ate hot dogs grilled on a hibachi and listened to twilight ghost stories. All that trudging made me hungry, so I headed to the Clam Bar on Napeague for Manhattan chowder, sweet potato fries, and my first-ever midday beer. Driving back to Wainscott I saluted another Napeague landmark, the Lobster Roll, where I ate my first lobster roll and met my first lover. 

That night I accidentally tuned into a rerun of the first episode of “The Affair,” which opens, lo and behold, at the Lobster Roll. Not only that, the eating place is the meeting place for the titular cheaters: Noah, a bored Brooklyn writer and teacher summering with his family in Montauk, and Alison, a Montauk-raised waitress and nurse mourning her drowned son. In an instant a sexy coincidence became seductive.

“The Affair” sucked me into its riptide of misery, ecstasy, and murder mystery. What really sucked me into the show was the undertow of my memories of Montauk, where I first made love, flew a kite, bodysurfed, clammed, clam baked, picked black-eyed Susans, and roller-coastered on the slaloming Old Montauk Highway. My senses go haywire on the East End’s East End; the Montauk Point panorama makes me feel enshrined in one of those huge Kodak photographs that illuminated Grand Central Station.

“The Affair” is a handsome exploration of ugly behavior. Writers and actors expertly examine the detritus of divorce: the guilt, the relief, the guilty relief, the torn treaties, the lashing limbo. I know because I’m one of divorce’s children. My parents’ 15-year marriage dissolved after my father sold our Wainscott house without telling my mother. At the time he desperately needed money after losing his job and $10,000 of his kids’ college tuition on a bad business deal in Montauk. The bickering between Mom and Dad escalated after he married the owner of a bigger Wainscott home, which I passed every time I visited Beach Lane Beach. Their arguments were aggravated by their loneliness. Dad missed his children; Mom missed her mate.

My parents made peace after Dad’s second divorce. Three months before he died, they agreed to share a gravestone. Three months later, she came with me to see his corpse. She wanted to comfort her son and say goodbye to the only man she truly loved.

“Affair” characters bury axes with their exes, too. Alison and Cole buy and restore the Lobster Roll, which replaces the Montauk horse ranch he lost with his brothers and mother. Helen nurses Noah out of a psychotic haze caused by a nearly fatal stabbing; he swears his attacker is his alleged stalker, a jealous prison guard. Helen is essentially repaying Noah for essentially saving their family by confessing to a crime she essentially committed. 

Noah’s hell is very much like my father’s. My dad mastered pretty much everything: selling ads, playing tennis, singing barbershop, telling stories, writing whimsical animal poems worthy of Ogden Nash. The only things he couldn’t master were his alcoholism and his manic depression. Living alone in Hampton Bays after his second divorce, he substituted wine for lithium, which led to a stroke, which led me to move him into my apartment. Embarrassed by feeling like a burden, he disappeared for a month, living in shelters and parks in Manhattan, where he’d worked for four decades. He was rescued by psychiatric nurses, social workers, and loved ones who knew he was a good guy in a bad way.

Noah pays dearly for his affair. He turns it into a best-selling novel that angers Alison, who has a child with Cole that Noah thinks is his for two years. My affair was a lot less costly. Helen — yes, she shares the name of Noah’s ex — and I had four nights of passion 12 years after one night of passion that climaxed a year of beautiful mental foreplay. She was tickled when I told her I decided to scratch our itch while I watched Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep do the same in “The Bridges of Madison County.”

After our erotic reunion, Helen returned to married life in Texas. I returned to single life in Pennsylvania, where I’d met Helen and the very decent fellow I always knew she would marry. Over the next 20 years our friendship deepened while our yearning lingered. We never regretted our affair; we only regretted that we didn’t pursue a romance when she was single. We continued to have refreshingly frank, funny phone conversations until three weeks before her sudden death less than a year after her daughter’s sudden death. 

I hear myself talking to Helen and my other exes whenever “Affair” characters ruthlessly inventory their relationships. When Noah and Helen fill a favorite restaurant with confessions, accusations, and resolutions, it reminds me of the last great chat I had with my former wife. It took place, lo and behold, in our favorite restaurant right after I told her, in our therapist’s office, that I didn’t want to be married anymore. We were so relieved that we still liked each other, we hurried home to make unfettered, unmarried love. 

It took me 30 years to realize we were auditioning for “The Affair.”

Geoff Gehman is the author of “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons” (SUNY Press). He lives in Bethlehem, Pa., and can be reached at [email protected].