Like so many homeowners in Montauk, under the seductive spell of commerce (a.k.a. making a buck), I had designs to rent my one-bedroom condo last summer. Perched on a high hill overlooking the hamlet and the Atlantic Ocean, with great views out all windows, this baby would move, and I wanted in on the seemingly booming online rental game that others were exploiting.

My asking price was $15,000, Memorial Day to Labor Day — granted, an outrageously inflated price for 650 square feet, compared to 15 years ago when Montauk was a working-class family destination and $100-a-night rooms were the norm for the summer. If you’re not going the route of a legitimate agent, there are three main venues: Airbnb, HomeAway, and a little thing called Facebook. God forbid Amazon delves into real estate.

I was intrigued by the raving success other owners were apparently having on Airbnb and HomeAway. Many were fetching close to 70 grand for a modest ranch house on cinder blocks (Montauk is not known for its architecture). I’ve liked the online platforms ever since they humbled the high-end hotels in the cities. Remember how a single glance at one of the those hotel telephones ended in $95 on your bill, and a soda from the mini fridge cost more than a gram of coke?

I was aware that the online platforms had obstacles, and I had heard the horror stories, renters partying and charging admission, for example, subdividing rooms with Sheetrock or plywood then subletting to other tenants. Places basically being destroyed. I knew that Montauk was now a party destination, and my condo board would throw me out if I tried to cater to rabble-rousers. It was also a family spot where nice people worked, and therefore I did not want to disrupt the tranquillity with coked-up stockbrokers. For this reason the Town of East Hampton was cracking down on temporary rentals. I could be fined. 

I started with Facebook. In the beginning, I had strict criteria for potential candidates: Must be over 30 (no college kids), nonsmokers, married, loads of references, and good credit. Golfer types, people who occasionally indulged in a couple of glasses of wine at the Harvest as opposed to partying at the Surf Lodge. Oh, and no chefs. (I had read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential.”) They are absolute animals. 

But as the summer drew closer, maybe because of the flood of inventory, I hadn’t secured a single deposit or landed so much as a prospect, so I relaxed my criteria: “First person with $12K gets it! No background check necessary! No one denied!” I was like a 40-year-old ex-model on Match.com. I was willing to settle and couldn’t have cared less if they roasted a pig in the hallway. I wanted the money.

I posted pictures of my condo with some attractive copy — “Happy sun-drenched apartment,” “Bike to the beach” — hoping to find someone old, stable, and rich. 

Ah, the enigma that is Facebook: One part wholesome sharing of news and pictures, one part entertaining videos, a big part sticking it in everyone’s face. I always feel somewhat deflated after viewing it. No one wants to see a picture of a happy family skiing in Vail over the holidays — no one except maybe the people in the picture — or how their daughter landed a gold medal in fencing at Yale, while you’re struggling to get your daughter into her third rehab. Personally, I like the sad posts, the worse the story the better, like seeing a guy in a cast or after a terrible operation, hashtag “rough road ahead.” 

Despite my 2,000 friends, only a woman named Anna bit on my Facebook offer. We had been friends in Manhattan 25 years ago, and she was, by my recollection, a very kind person who once let me stay at her house for no charge for a few weeks. Through no fault of her own, Anna had fallen on hard times. She had some health issue, lupus or something, so she did not work and had apparently left the real world and become a Facebook person. She walked among us, but she was not one of us, since her world consisted of briefly stimulating but ultimately unfulfilling and boring cybercommunication and attempts to get her friends involved in playing Candy Crush Saga.

Then I saw her comment under my rental ad: “Hey, Jeff, if you don’t rent, my husband, Michael, and I would love to come out for a weekend. Love you! We will pay you, of course!” 

I responded affirmatively — bear in mind this was February, so I could afford to make all the empty gestures I wanted. “Of course you can come!”

A month went by, and I would post again: “Looking to rent luxury apartment in MTK.” No response. Although Anna would comment cheekily, “We’re coming in June, Jeff, don’t worry.”

It was March, so of course I wrote, “Can’t wait!”

Time passed. May arrived. I posted again. Anna could clearly see that I had not rented the place, so they traveled overnight from southern Jersey to avoid the Hamptons traffic. I made plans to take the husband fishing the next day.

Condos in Montauk can get tight in June, and there are rules: parking passes, signing in at the facilities and pool, and so on. There is an understanding that in tight quarters or in a shared space guests try to stay as inconspicuous and courteous as possible. Have a blast but no drama, please.

Enter Anna at 5 a.m. with her stick-in-the-mud husband. 

Anna did not drink. I was to find out later, however, that she was on high doses of antidepressants and Kpin (a valium cocktail). Nonetheless, Anna appeared to be drunk. Her husband and I left for the boat, and Anna somehow instantly got into an altercation with the pleasant security guard over being asked for proof that she was a guest, ripping him a new one, going by the complaint report, and bellowing my name to anyone who would listen, I’m sure.

To top it off, while I was out fishing with her painfully quiet husband, Anna apparently got into several other confrontations: at the pool, on the shuttle to the beach, with the housekeepers. For each of these I got a call from the manager, a lovely woman with a sense of humor, thank God.

Now for the sake of the story and candor, I’ll tell you an embarrassing tidbit: I’m 51 years old and my mom had helped buy me the condo. The office still had her phone number, so at 6 p.m., during a dinner out with my guests, I checked my messages and found one from her: The office had called about the commotion and would I try to be careful with the people I brought to the place and was I drinking again?

I was indignant. “My mother just called. What the hell went on today at the condo?” 

Using Airbnb and HomeAway, finally, in late June, I started to get bites online. 

I got a call from a Boston banker. His family has had a beach house here for years. He sounded like an old WASP, which seemed good. He told me that he would use my place only for family “spillover.” Over the course of the conversations, subtle at first, I became aware that this man had one agenda: to find a place for his 18 and 19-year-old daughters to stay for the summer. He explained that they were hard-working girls, with 4.0 averages, who would be waitressing at the Surf Lodge and were there to work, not party. 

Now, the guy may have been right, but I don’t have such an expansive imagination. I know what I was like at 18 and simply could not take the chance of a bunch of teenagers having a keg party in my small condo.

It was a tough spot. There was no easy out. I told him that the condo board would not let me rent to people under 25, and he countered that that was discrimination. I absorbed some nasty texts and moved on.

Both Airbnb and HomeAway are specific and demanding and make you really kiss their butts. If you’re not getting good reviews, they threaten to drop your ranking so you get less exposure to prospective renters, or if you’re booking they threaten to totally drop you and do. Hypersensitive, they will accuse you of cutting them out. 

Therefore, everyone who has a property on these platforms has his head in his cellphone the entire summer, desperately trying to meet the criteria and get his property placed ahead of the formidable competition. Answering the smallest inquiries from prospective renters consumes all your time. I once took a friend fishing and half the time she was on the phone, screaming at “agents” as to why her listing was down at the height of the season.

Here is what I know: 

If you’re not computer literate, you’re not going to have an effective listing. Pictures have to be cropped and edited before uploading, etc.

Expect to be lowballed. But that’s not the worst part. If you don’t know how to modify your price, you get browbeaten by management and your ranking drops considerably.

If you receive one bad report, your offering will be buried. They will always take the renter’s side, in my experience, and you will get a 1099.

God forbid you double book, you will be banished. 

To make a long story short, from my personal experience with these online rental sites and Facebook, I would suggest going with traditional real estate agents, who have all but given up on the rental market. 

Jeff Nichols’s book “Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot” was made into the movie “American Loser,” released by Lionsgate.

When it comes to gun violence, we need more than thoughts and prayers.

Again and again, senseless gun violence takes innocent lives, leaving agony, heartbreak, and indescribable grief in its wake. But as the brave survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have made clear, there can be no excuse for inaction. These tragedies — whether it’s the headline-grabbing mass shootings or the day-to-day gun violence that afflicts some of our neighborhoods — don’t have to be routine. Kids don’t have to die. 

One piece of legislation that I supported and the Assembly passed prohibits the possession, manufacture, transport, shipment, and sale of devices that accelerate the firing rate of firearms so they operate in the same manner as machine guns, including trigger cranks and bump-fire devices. Under current New York State law, attaching such a device to a firearm is illegal, because once attached, the weapon is considered a machine gun. However, there is no restriction on the sale or possession of bump stocks or other similar devices that are not attached to a firearm. 

This type of firearm modification enabled a single gunman to kill 58 people and injure over 500 in the October 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. Using bump stocks on two separate weapons, he was able to fire more than 1,100 rounds in approximately 10 minutes. This horrific level of violence shows why gun modifications of this kind should never be in the hands of civilians. 

The legislative package also establishes the ability of a court to issue a restraining order, known as an “extreme risk protection order,” prohibiting a person who exhibits serious signs of being a threat to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing a firearm for up to one year. The petitioner, who could be a family member or law enforcement officer, would be required to file a sworn application describing the circumstances and justification for the request. Following a hearing, the court could grant the order if there were a finding that there is reasonable cause to believe the person in question is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to him or herself or others. In emergency circumstances, the court would also be authorized to issue a temporary order restricting access to firearms pending a final hearing.

Under the existing appeals procedure provided in the civil practice laws and rules, individuals would be permitted to appeal a court’s decision to issue an extreme risk protection order. They would also be entitled to submit a request at any time, while the order is in place, for a hearing to discontinue the order based on a change of circumstances and a showing that he or she no longer poses a danger.

This legislation in no way hinders the rights of law-abiding citizens. What it does is help prevent suicides, fatal domestic violence incidents, and possibly even mass shootings. Simply put, an extreme risk protection order could prove the difference between life and death. 

Currently, five states — California, Connecticut, Indiana, Oregon, and Washington — have these so-called red flag laws in place.

To further help keep guns out of the wrong hands, the legislative package includes the Domestic Violence Escalation Prevention Act, which would prevent domestic violence abusers from having access to weapons by prohibiting someone who has been convicted of a domestic violence crime from purchasing or possessing a firearm. 

More than half of all female homicide victims in this country are killed by an intimate partner, with nearly three women murdered every day. Those aren’t just startling statistics, they are mothers, sisters, and friends whose lives are brutally taken, and one of the first steps in preventing these tragedies is making sure their abusers don’t have a gun. 

Further, legislation was passed to establish a waiting period of 10 days — instead of the current three days — before a gun can be delivered to a purchaser whose background check is not completed. Under current federal law, gun dealers must conduct a background check through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System before selling a firearm. The NICS system responds with one of three messages — “proceed,” “denied,” or “delayed.” The dealer must deny the sale if the NICS background check determines the buyer is a prohibited purchaser and responds with a “denied” message. However, if the response is “delayed,” the dealer may nonetheless complete the sale after three business days. In these cases, the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to investigate whether the person is an eligible purchaser beyond the three-day period even though the person has likely already been sold the firearm.

According to the F.B.I., more than 15,000 gun sales went forward between 2010 and 2014 to people who were prohibited from purchasing or possessing a firearm because the determination whether to deny or proceed could not be made within three business days. The additional waiting period provided for in the legislation would help ensure that only those who have cleared a background check are able to purchase firearms. 

Another measure passed by the Assembly requires out-of-state citizens who have homes in New York to waive the confidentiality of their home state mental illness records when applying for a firearm here. Closing this dangerous loophole will help law enforcement better protect our communities.

We need to do more to combat gun violence, and we need to do it now. No parent should have to bury his or her child because someone who shouldn’t have had a gun got one. Let’s stand together and say enough is enough.

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. lives in Sag Harbor.

By the late 1940s, Rocky Graziano and Frank Sinatra were the two most popular Italian-Americans in the United States. Looking at the early life of Graziano, originally named Thomas Rocco Barbella, very few people would have thought that he could have avoided a life of crime and intermittent incarcerations.

His father was an alcoholic and failed boxer; his mother was a schizophrenic who spent time in mental hospitals. The family was so poor that young Rocco, age 5, was sent to steal coal to heat his family’s small apartment. For nourishment, he was sent to dig for clams on the beach at Coney Island. His father, known as Fighting Nick Barbella, would get drunk and put boxing gloves on the tiny hands of Rocco and on the larger hands of Rocco’s older brother. Nick would command that the two boys box until one of them cried and gave up. Rocco never did.

Is it any wonder that young Rocco had a chip on his shoulder as big as a cinderblock? As a teenager, he formed a gang of like-minded delinquents. They started out by mugging their peers, stealing lunch money and sandwiches. Rocco became so much of a street kid that he quit school in the sixth grade. He rarely went home. He and his gang graduated to more and more valuable heists, stealing anything that could be sold for a few dollars. 

Eventually, the law caught up with Rocco and sent him to reform school, where he met a future middleweight champ, Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull. The misnamed reform school taught its students the tricks and scams of racketeers. Upon release, the students were primed to enter the underworld of professional criminals.

When Rocco was drafted into the Army, his mother thought he would learn to honor those in authority. Instead, Rocco knocked out his commanding office and went AWOL. On the advice of his friend Terry Young, a promising journeyman boxer, Rocco signed on to become a professional boxer. To evade the attention of the military police, he changed his name to Rocky Graziano. The evasion worked only until Rocky was apprehended and sentenced to a year in Leavenworth, where he joined the prison boxing team, took instruction from a former boxer, and won all the bouts he was entered in.

Upon his release, he returned to New York and Stillman’s Gym. There he agreed to be managed by Irving Cohen, a man of great patience and understanding who was able to guide Rocky’s career up the jagged pyramid of boxing. Rocky had found the ideal father figure in Cohen, and the two men formed a relationship that would endure well beyond the end of Rocky’s boxing career. Unlike many managers, who are in the game for a quick buck, Cohen made sure that Rocky received all the money he earned and would advise him how to invest it so that he would have a capital cushion for his retirement.

Along the way, Rocky met Norma Unger, a well-educated Jewish woman with beautiful dark eyes. That she and Rocky fell in love and married is a testament to the notion that opposites attract: Not only were their backgrounds different (she was the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants, he the son of second-generation Italian-Americans), but so were their religions, educations, and ambitions. She hated boxing and never attended one of his bouts, but she supported his career and was always there to embrace him and nurse him after a bout.

In one of the bloodiest trilogies in boxing history, Rocky beat Tony Zale (a.k.a. the Man of Steel) for the middleweight championship. He received a parade from Grand Central Terminal to his old neighborhood on 10th Street and First Avenue. He even received a congratulatory telegram from President Truman.

Following his retirement from boxing, Rocky had a successful career on television, first on “The Henny and Rocky Show” with sidekick Henny Youngman, and then with Martha Raye on her weekly show. Rocky played the part of Raye’s boyfriend, known as the Goombah. In addition, Rocky made more than 3,000 TV commercials and was the spokesman for Post Raisin Bran cereal.

The transformation from Rocco to Rocky was like a change from night to daylight. Rocky had not only become a beloved personage, he became a one-man philanthropic institution. One day, while watching up-and-coming young boxers in Stillman’s Gym, Rocky noticed a former boxer who had fallen on hard times: He was blind and living on welfare. Stillman’s Gym had become his second home and social club. Rocky took up a collection from all in attendance, added some of his own money, and stuffed it all into the breast pocket of the blind boxer. He told him he would get the same thing every month. Rocky became so generous to those in need that his wife had to put him on an allowance for fear that he would give away all his money.

Most afternoons, one could find Rocky at his reserved table at P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. There he was always charming and friendly, happy to sign autographs and occasionally pick up the tab for other diners. Rather than a clenched fist, he greeted the world with an open and friendly hand and a broad toothy grin.

He had a wonderful sense of humor: When asked what he stole as a delinquent, he said everything that began with the letter A: a car, a television, a refrigerator, a bicycle. When asked why he quit school in the sixth grade, he said it was because of pneumonia. You had pneumonia? he was asked. No, he replied, it was because I couldn’t spell it.

I attended Rocky’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1990 and was not surprised that more than 1,000 people turned out to honor the former champion, for his story is one of an unlikely redemption that few others could have achieved.

Jeffrey Sussman is the author of “Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune,” published by Rowman & Littlefield. He lives part time in East Hampton.

I’ve been a teacher for a long time — an adjunct professor at private, state, and community colleges. I have the work experience, the education, and the dedication, but I have no gun. So why do I want a gun?

I want a gun to make my job easier. It takes far too much time and effort to create a safe, nurturing classroom in which my students can write and speak freely. Obstreperous student? Take aim and send her out the door. Baseball-capped snoozer in the back row? A chest prod with my AK-47 should do the trick. Class discussion getting too passionate? Just shoot off a round.

I want a gun to add to my arsenal of teaching strategies, so I don’t have to work so hard to reach the most reluctant students. With a gun strapped to my chest, I’ll have their full attention. 

I want a gun so that my students will no longer besiege me with their many personal problems. The suicidal and depressed, the cutters and addicts will find their own way to campus services. And I won’t be an ad hoc counselor for family and work-related problems with a gun to wave around. I will teach literature and composition with military precision and focus. No one will invade my emotional fortifications.

I want a gun to protect myself in the classroom. Who knows how many covert weapons lurk in those innocent-looking backpacks, alongside the usual drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and condoms. Obviously, the teacher should wield the most powerful weapon in the room.

I want a gun so that I can clear my classroom of DACA students (as well as the “lazy” ones who didn’t sign up for DACA) and escort them to ICE vans to be thrown back across the border along with their rapist and gang member compatriots. 

I want a gun to protect myself on campus as well. That one security guard at the gate checking parking permits just doesn’t cut it. And most campuses don’t even have that. If we can’t have barbed wire, electrical fences, security cameras, armed guards, and canine patrols to protect our liberal ideals and institutions of higher learning, then give me a gun. Enough of these demilitarized zones of education.

I want a gun so I can confront sexual assault and sexual harassment on the college campus with actions instead of words.

I want a gun so that I will be paid a living wage. American colleges and universities have enlisted an army of poorly paid part-time teachers to avoid paying real salaries and benefits. Adjunct professors with M.A.s and Ph.D.s are expected to reinforce the value of higher education to their students, while patching together a meager livelihood themselves. My Ph.D. has little value, but my gun permit and training certificate would. The funding not available for traditional educators will miraculously appear once I strap on my gun and become a soldier of education.

I want a gun so that instead of being dismissed as a bleeding-heart liberal, or someone whose work has little real-life value, I’ll finally be able to join a truly American institution of enlightened individuals: the N.R.A.

I want a gun so that I can help with the current overstock of weapons in the gun industry, keep manufacturers from bankruptcy, and hold on to those good American jobs. With the coming of Trump, stockpilers are no longer afraid of losing their personal armories and are buying less, so more unarmed Americans need to step up to defend our students and support our workers. 

I want a gun so the next time that deer hunter strays onto campus, instead of retreating into a campus lockdown, I can just shoot him from the window and return to the class discussion.

I want a gun so I can be a true role model for my students. For years I’ve strived to motivate them, while working within a severely skewed educational system that favors the wealthy and too often makes empty promises to the rest. Think analytically, write persuasively, get that diploma — I besiege them with advice. Arm yourselves with education is a message heard clearly when the teacher is actually armed.

I want a gun because a well-educated cadre of trained teachers fully armed in the battle to expand students’ minds and protect their bodies begins with adjunct professors. We are the boots on the ground. Once the recalcitrant public becomes accustomed to adjunct soldiers on college campuses around the country, it will only be a matter of time for that success to trickle down to high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. When my future granddaughter joins her preschool reading circle, her teacher will be well prepared: a picture book in her hands, and a gun on her hip. 

So please, just get me a gun. It’s a matter of national security.

Laurie Gurney Newburger lives in Amagansett.

Any trade policy should put American workers and small businesses first. But President Trump’s attempt to launch a trade war with China, backed by Representative Lee Zeldin, hurts American workers, farmers, and businesses. 

Unfair Chinese labor practices subsidize production and hurt United States workers in the process. The equivalent of slave wages is paid to produce Chinese electronic components, and American importation of these products condones this practice. We should be trying to correct Chinese theft of intellectual property, currency devaluation, overproduction and dumping, subsidies for state-run enterprises, and violations of basic labor standards. Tariffs may be used as leverage in the fight, but labor rights are not even mentioned in Trump’s goals and agenda.

Trump’s trade war will cause higher prices on goods, which will hurt U.S. consumers, but it will also affect American farmers and manufacturers since there will be less international consumption of our products. Among others, our Long Island wine producers will be directly affected. Trump threatens to tax Chinese goods, and China retaliates by threatening to tax our goods. 

Trump’s defenders and enablers declare that no tariffs have been levied, so this is really just a step to reaching a “fair” deal. But U.S. agricultural exports, on which our farmers rely, are in jeopardy. Buying decisions are made in advance, and plans will assume that the threatened tariffs are a reality. Costs of steel and aluminum are already rising on just the potential for tariffs. This affects U.S. manufacturers such as Boeing and GM, as their material costs go up, and it will lead to rising consumer costs, lower sales, and less employment. 

And it will affect light manufacturing here in Suffolk County. 

Trump is imposing lots of pain and risking permanent damage on individual Americans for a long-term “greater good” of “freer” markets. But nowhere in the dialogue is there a demand or concern about unfair Chinese labor practices. Our leadership is ignoring the biggest problem in China altogether.

Representative Zeldin was interviewed this week singing Trump’s praises on trade. Zeldin called Trump “the ultimate dealmaker,” suggesting that new tariffs on China were part of a larger game plan “to be bringing down walls” between the two countries and create a better balance. Even if successful, this “deal” will result in higher prices to consumers, and Zeldin seems indifferent. 

Is this worth risking the livelihood of American producers, who would be subject to Chinese tariffs? Trump is playing a high-stakes game of chicken with other people’s money, and Zeldin is cheering him on. Ignored are the declining values of people’s retirement accounts caused by a stock market made volatile by trade concerns. If Trump’s gamble fails, a lot of people will have been hurt unnecessarily.

Previous U.S. leaders have deemed this type of gamble unwise, but neither Trump nor Zeldin seems to care. Even if Trump wins and the Chinese back down, we must ask ourselves at what cost was victory achieved? And unfair Chinese labor practices remain unaddressed.

Going it alone is not the answer. We need an international coalition of our allies who are all directly affected by Chinese practices if we are going to properly combat the problem. The World Trade Organization may be dysfunctional, but international coalitions of affected nations can be assembled. The agenda must include trade, intellectual property, and fair labor practices. 

Bluster is not going to solve the problem, and Zeldin should show more concern for his constituents than simply being among the president’s biggest defenders.

Perry Gershon is a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in New York’s First Congressional District. He lives in East Hampton.

Though she is only 2 1/2 years old, my daughter, Lilah, has begun to master the art of questioning. I never expected the depth of her curiosity. She has proven to be able to see even the most mundane parts of the world as worthy of inquiry. Picking up a dead crab at the beach, she’ll stare inquisitively at me and ask, “What is this?” My paternal instinct kicks in with the response, “Don’t touch that, it’s disgusting!” It takes me a few moments to catch myself before realizing the importance of the mere act of her asking a question. 

Judaism encourages the asking of questions, and each year on Passover, Jews are, in fact, required to ask questions. The overarching query that frames all of our questions on Passover is: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” There are, of course, trivial answers to the famous quiz-like four questions that act as a guide for children to ask their parents. But questions aren’t always meant to be answered. The emphasis in the Jewish tradition lies in the simple act of asking. 

There is a famous discussion in the Talmud (an ancient compendium of Jewish stories and laws) that emphasizes the value of questions over their answers. While traditionally the youngest child has the responsibility of asking questions at the Passover Seder, the rabbis remind us that children may not always be present. 

“What should you do,” the rabbis ask, “if you are by yourself?” They respond by saying, “You should ask yourself questions.” 

They then imagine a scenario in which there are only two wise sages at the table, and they already know everything there is to know about Passover and its laws. What should they do? “They must still ask each other questions” (Pesachim 116b).

On Passover, when we are instructed to demonstrate our freedom from slavery, asking questions serves as a reminder of our freedom. Slaves, after all, are never permitted to ask questions. But asking questions that we need not answer also reminds us that thoughtful questions are more important than smart answers. 

The reason Jews love questions, I believe, is that life is better with a question mark. The advice column “Dear Abby” once jokingly asked, “Why do Jews always answer a question with a question? . . . How else should they answer?” I’m also reminded of a famous saying that exclaims, “Don’t trust people who claim to have all the answers; rather trust people who are always searching for them.” 

Life is better when we live to chase the question mark. Even in a scientifically advanced world, we need to be comfortable with the reality that there are many more questions than answers. 

This might seem disconcerting, until we begin to realize that questions drive us to create amazing things. Before any scientific hypothesis, there is a question. Driving every thesis, there is a question. Great minds are driven by asking questions. The Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi attributed his becoming a scientist (rather than a doctor or a lawyer, like most other immigrant Jews) to his mother’s unusual way of greeting him after school. While most mothers asked their children, “Did you learn anything today?” Rabi’s mother instead greeted him with “Did you ask any good questions today?” 

Children who are encouraged to ask good questions develop into the adults who solve the world’s problems. In this light, as my daughter dangles the corpse of a crab from her tiny toddler fingers and inquires about this strange creature, she is developing one of the most sacred Jewish habits — questioning.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tells the story of a famous Holocaust historian who was interviewing a Hasidic rebbe (the name given by Hasidic Jews to their leader) who survived Auschwitz. The rebbe emerged from the death camp still a faithful and practicing Jew. The historian asked, “Seeing what you saw, did you have any questions about God?” 

“Yes,” responded the rebbe, “of course I had questions. So powerful were those questions, I had no doubt were I to ask them, God would personally invite me to heaven to tell me the answers. I prefer to be down here with the questions than up in heaven with the answers.” 

Such a story reflects the paradigm of the Jewish value of questioning. That is, while we ask a lot of questions, we’re not always that interested in concrete answers. 

We all instinctually want resolution and clarity. When people ask unanswerable questions, or perhaps questions to which we simply don’t know the answer, something holds people back from admitting “I don’t know!” Instead, we find ourselves trying to fake an answer. We are prone to think that having the best answer is the ultimate mark of wisdom. It’s not! Passover is the Jewish reminder to refrain from answering and to sit with a question mark.

Rabbi Joshua Franklin leads the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. He lives in East Hampton.

If you happen to be curious about the state of disabilities-access code enforcement in East Hampton Town, I suggest you drop by Solé East, formerly the Shepherd’s Neck Inn, on Second House Road in Montauk. Drive a block along the side of the building closest to Montauk Highway and turn left onto South Easton Place, a neglected little street that runs behind Solé East’s high back fence. There, in a nook among small trees, you will find a handicapped-reserved parking sign and perhaps a small car parked by it.

The space is a fake. When I last saw it on March 27 of this year, the ground was too soft to ensure safe car exit and movement by a person dependent on a wheelchair or walker. There were also no accessible paths of travel to Solé East’s entrance.

This wildly nonconforming slice in the woods was the only designated handicapped-reserved spot I could find at or near the hotel among four parking areas with room for about 60 vehicles. No spaces at all were reserved for people with disabilities. New York State law requires that at least four be surfaced, striped, and signed in accordance with the law. The town’s own disabilities law, enacted in 2002, probably requires this as well.

One might ask why do I, a disabled man of 92, care about access to a hotel nightclub. Well, I was unable to attend the memorial service that was held in Solé East for my friend David Hartstein, who died several years ago. I couldn’t park there and get myself to the building.

The Americans With Disabilities Act and New York State’s disabilities codes are designed to provide such access, because they improve a disabled person’s opportunity to be self-reliant, which in turn reduces the devaluing of disabled individuals and the large taxpayer expenditure required by a dependent culture. These laws also help local businesses by encouraging disabled people to get out and shop. It’s a win-win all around.

David, a fine chiropractor, had contributed to my self-sufficiency. His death at 35 was a tragedy for his family and a wound to the town. I should have been there. But, unable to park and access the building, all I could do was turn around and leave.

And yes, my ego is also involved. Having spent 10 years as the town disabilities rights advocate, I don’t enjoy watching the considerable progress we made disappearing as if it had been dropped into the top of Vesuvius.

The town board’s indulgence of such violations has been enduring and bipartisan. Over the past decade, as the raucous summer scene has risen to overwhelm Montauk, three successive administrations, under Supervisors McGintee, Wilkinson, and Cantwell, have promised a strict enforcement of applicable codes to control the noise, public drunkenness, pedestrian road clogging, and inaccessibility for disabled people, including of course disabled war veterans.

At Solé East, we have an example of what really has, or, more aptly, has not happened with these pledges. Solé East, open since 2006, as of late March 2018 has yet to come up with the blue paint, signs, and an hour or two of modest labor to produce four usable, legally required handicapped-accessible parking spaces.

Perhaps Solé East and other code-defying hangouts feel enabled to shrug off access requirements because that is what the very court charged with enforcing these laws is itself doing and has been since it opened in 2010.

I am not nitpicking here. The East Hampton Justice Court’s eight-years-long display of its own noncompliance with laws it requires others to obey has a grandeur to it — an awe-inspiring chutzpah that punches you right in the face.

The court’s two designated handicapped-reserved spaces are located in a notch in a rear corner of the building. There is no accessible route from this area to the court’s entrance. There is no curb cut to allow one to wheel onto the sidewalk and proceed in safety to the court’s entrance. In fact, it is virtually impossible for disabled persons with or without a wheelchair or walker to ascend to the sidewalk at all, even to be pushed up to it, because the sidewalk is a stunning seven inches above the street. 

This is more than 10 times the Americans With Disabilities Act’s maximum acceptable street-to-sidewalk rise of five-eighths of an inch. As a result, wheelchair and walker users must push their way to the court entrance through the street, sometimes in the face of oncoming vehicles that might be making a 90-degree turn and moving right at them.

And, if you happen to enjoy irony, it gets even better. Throughout these many years, a quick, inexpensive solution has been in plain view. Ample space for more general and handicapped-reserved parking is waiting to be used on the court’s spacious, level, easily reachable Pantigo Road side of the building.

The town board and court cannot be unaware of these conditions. They are too stark. And I for one informed the Disabilities Advisory Board and the town board of them and the ready solution back in 2011, and the town board again, several times since, most recently in 2016. I’ve also periodically written of it in articles and letters to The Star.

How come these many years of procrastination and illegality by a Montauk hotel and by our town and court? We are losing something here. Something civilized and honorable. Something that has allowed us to use the word “community” when we speak about our town and our country.

Richard Rosenthal has two Battle Stars from World War II and promises not to go gentle into that good night. 

May 8 will be the 73rd anniversary of V-E Day, when World War II ended in Europe. I am on my way from London to Holland, where the 1945 liberation is celebrated on May 4. That day, I plan to be at the Cemetery of Heroes in Amsterdam to remember my relatives who gave their lives to fighting the monster Adolf Hitler through the Resistance.

East Hampton contributed many fighters to this effort. Some survived World War II with powerful stories. Charles Miner Jr., who died at 96 in March, was a bomber pilot in World War II. When he died, he was one of 480,000 surviving veterans of that war, out of more than 16 million Americans who served. 

Charlie was not related to me, but he was extremely helpful to my understanding his grandfather William H. Woodin, who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Treasury secretary, and my own family during the war. 

As we talked one day, I became interested in his life story. Charlie had to leave Princeton before he graduated to join the Army Air Forces. “I was studying engineering and they wanted engineers, so I was called up,” he told me. “I went to a single-engine flying school, graduated in March 1943, and from there was sent to a sub depot in Charlotte, N.C., where they rebuilt planes that had crashed. I was given the job of test-flying the rebuilt planes before they were returned to their home bases. I got flying time in many types of aircraft.”

While assigned to the base, Charlie married in October 1944 a Southern belle, Mae Hoffman, who was called Maisie. “But just two weeks after we married, I had to report for combat training in two-engine bombers at the Greenville, N.C., Army Air Forces base. We were trained on the B-25 Mitchell bomber. We had three months’ training, doing mock bombing runs over Myrtle Beach at night.”

The B-25 has been described as the most versatile bomber in World War II, named after the air power advocate Gen. Billy Mitchell. Nearly 10,000 of the bombers were built between 1941 and 1945. It was the most heavily armed airplane in the world, used in the historic Doolittle raid over Tokyo in 1942.

“We had a crew of five,” Charlie said. “Besides me, the pilot, we had a co-pilot, bombardier, radio operator, and gunner. Boeing strengthened the plane by adding a gun in its nose, which allowed us to shoot back at targets, but lowered the plane’s maximum speed.”

When was his first combat run? “After my training in Greenville, I was first sent to Corsica to be instructed by the more experienced [Royal Canadian Air Force] and especially [Royal Air Force] pilots who had been flying the B-25. Some of the R.A.F. and Italian pilots were daredevils. They didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died. We had the Mosquito, a laminated-wood plane that could break the sound barrier. The pilots loved it, and they would dive from 5,000 feet. But one day a pilot tried this and one of the wings just came off. The pilot, of course, went straight down with the plane and was killed.”

Miner paused and continued in his jaunty rat-a-tat style (he was a superb joke-teller): “We started flying missions out of Corsica. The Germans were pushed north in the Italian boot, so we relocated closer to the targets, in Fano, on the Adriatic in eastern Italy, about 150 miles south of Venice. My squadron flew 18 missions at 15,000 to 18,000 feet over the Brenner Pass in the Alps between Italy and Austria.”

How did he feel on these missions? Charlie slowed down. “Of course, the Alps were a majestic sight to look down on, but each flight was nerve-racking. We had to stay perfectly in box formation during the bomb run so that the bombardiers could be accurate. We had to keep to it so long as we had more bombs to drop. We could see yellow puffs below as anti-aircraft guns tried to shoot us down, but we were not allowed to take evasive action until our payload was dropped. As soon as we released the last bomb, it was a relief, we were all out of there in every direction, helter-skelter.”

It is easy to visualize Charlie keeping his formation while the flak was flying. His cousin Woody Rowe, in an interview with me, compared Charlie (whom he calls Chas) to his mother, Libby Woodin Rowe. She was a patient mother, although neither of her sons inherited her patience. But Woody told me that Charlie never seemed to be mad at anyone. Asked about it, Charlie thought and said, “I guess you’re right. Disappointed, perhaps, but not angry.”

I asked Charlie whether the anti-aircraft fire found its mark. “Yes,” he said. “We would find out when we returned to the base when a plane and crew were gone. We all paid our respects. But after that, we didn’t talk a whole lot about the ones who were gone. It was just the risk you took.”

Again, Charlie’s usual fast-paced speak­ing style became slower. He looked at me with the closest I ever saw him get to a tragic expression. “There was one pilot who seemed immortal. He was a major in the Army Air Forces. He finished 50 missions, which meant he could retire and go home. But he wanted to keep flying a couple more times, even though he didn’t have to. On his 51st mission, his plane was hit by flak and he bailed out. I remember seeing his parachute going down over the Alps. If he was lucky, he was rescued by one of the partisans below.”

“Did you ever find out what happened to him?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I never did.” He was silent for what seemed like a long time.

That was a personal moment for me as well, because my Dutch-born uncle Willem J. van Stockum worked hard to put himself in harm’s way. He was a bomber pilot for the R.A.F. and was hit by flak over France on June 10, 1944. I was 2 years old then, so I never got to find out from him what it was like being on the front lines of the air war against Hitler. He was flying with 10 Squadron, one of 126 squadrons serving with the R.A.F.’s Bomber Command. They were bombing a Luftwaffe airfield in Laval, France. His plane was hit by flak.

Bomber Command in World War II recruited 125,000 aircrew, of whom 57,205 were killed. That’s a 46-percent death rate. The queen unveiled a monument in 2012 to the extraordinary bravery of these R.A.F. aircrews.

My uncle Willem, a mathematician who worked in Einstein’s institute in Princeton, understood these numbers. He just had to do something about his country being occupied. His story is told in “Time Bomber” by Robert Wack. His crew of seven and another that came down on the same mission are buried in Laval. I have visited three times, including in 2014, when the French locals erected monuments to the two crews. A survivor of the bombing, of course a child at the time, said that my uncle’s flaming plane steered away from the house where she and her family lived, into an orchard.

This year I went with my wife, Alice, to see for the first time my uncle’s base, R.A.F. Melbourne near York, England. I am grateful to the 10 Squadron Association volunteers who helped us make the visit.

And I am grateful to the late Charlie Miner for helping me understand better what was facing this uncle I never knew. Whatever questions we have about the morality or effectiveness of indiscriminate bombing of civilians in World War II, our appreciation of the bravery of those who looked in the evil face of Hitler’s guns will never be sufficient.

John Tepper Marlin, a regular contributor to the “Guestwords” column, has had a house in Springs since 1981. He is writing a biography of William Woodin and a book about his Dutch relatives’ work in the Resistance.

In the aftermath of three powerful winter storms, the status of Montauk’s downtown beach has once again been thrust into the public spotlight. 

While this commentary is about forward-looking coastal zone management, it’s important to reflect on previous decisions to provide a clear vision for adaptive change. Namely, rejecting a structural approach to coastal erosion and recognizing the pitfalls of beach replenishment in order to move forward with coastal retreat. 

The downtown Montauk stabilization project, the half-mile-long sandbag revetment, or seawall, was completed in the spring of 2016. Its architect, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, justified its construction as an emergency response to beach and dune erosion caused by Hurricane Sandy. Skirting town restrictions on the placement of hard structures in the coastal zone, the structure was craftily called a reinforced dune. 

Touted as a temporary fix until a large-scale sand replenishment project materializes as part of the Army Corps’ Fire Island to Montauk Point plan, the structure has steadily become a physically dominant and influencing feature on the beach. Each passing storm brings greater exposure and the gradual narrowing of the beach. 

While the physical impacts have been largely incremental, the financial obligations to East Hampton Town and Suffolk County are acute. As co-sponsors, the town and county obligation is to cover the costs of ongoing maintenance — keeping a three-foot sand coverage atop the structure with grass plantings. With the initial estimate of $150,000 per year tossed, costs could exceed $1 million in 2018. The previous repair costs paid by the Army Corps approached $1.5 million.

Beaches and dunes are dynamic natural protective features that function as an interactive system. The system’s stability is controlled by four primary factors: supply of sand, shape of the beach, ocean energy (currents, waves, and surge), and sea level rise. These four integrated influences form a dynamic equilibrium that determines shoreline resiliency. 

Sand supply comes from several contributing sources: updrift beaches, dunes, bluffs, and submerged offshore ridges. Sediments are moved by waves and currents via onshore and offshore and longshore transport. Shoreline hardening structures disrupt sand supply and transport, ultimately destroying the beach.

Some believe the solution is beach replenishment — pumping sand from an offshore source. Is this the panacea for Montauk’s beach erosion problems? If only it were that simple. On its face, pumping an artificial beach seems like a positive undertaking. The manufactured beach will slow down erosion, protect property by absorbing storm surges, and offer recreational space. And it’s not a seawall.

But examine its flaws. In the big picture, a replenished downtown beach is a mere patch of sand when compared to the entire system, which extends extensively offshore and longshore. Beach replenishment is a Band-Aid solution.

What will the new beach look like? The compatibility of the dredged material with resident sediments is a critical factor. Gravel versus coarse sand versus fine grain — the life span of the beach and traditional recreational use hang in the balance. 

The Army Corps claims a suitable borrow area exists near Napeague. But past experience with replenishment projects substantiates an uncertainty with dredged material. Its consistency will be known only when it comes out of the pipe. 

Often glossed over, the ecological damage to the offshore ecosystem can be significant. Dredging obviously kills the organisms in the path of the dredge head. But the greater threat is the expansive dredge holes where mud and silt accumulate, altering the composition of fauna and flora on the bottom.

The massive depressions can cause water quality issues, like turbidity, when fine sediments are resuspended during storms. For a sense of scale, the 1.1-million-cubic-yard Quogue project would create a hole in the seafloor approximately 7 feet deep and 100 acres in size. Reoccurring dredging off Montauk would cause irreparable harm to productive fishing grounds.

Last, the cost: Replenished beaches disappear much faster than natural ones. The average life span of replenished along the Mid-Atlantic coast is three to four years. At its exorbitant cost, sand replenishment as a long-term prospect is both economically and environmentally unsustainable. 

We now understand that hard structures, while appearing to stabilize the shoreline, ultimately destroy the beach. We also know that beach replenishment is costly and only temporary, and will become increasingly less feasible as the life span of beaches grows exponentially shorter with rising seas. Sea level rise is accelerating, and the frequency and intensity of winter storms are on the increase. The reality is that in the not-too-distant future we will be forced to retreat from the shoreline. 

Moving out of harm’s way — a daunting challenge, to put it mildly. But it’s time that we demonstrate collective foresight and resolve in this endeavor. Our environment, economy, and coastal lifestyle depend on it.

Kevin McAllister is founder and president of Defend H2O, a nonprofit based in Noyac.

I was completely rattled when it happened — a young man in his 20s offered me a seat on the bus. I turned, sure that he was speaking to the person beside me. But no, he clearly meant me as he stood up. I demurred. Certainly I was not yet ready for the kindness of strangers.

At home a glance in the mirror does not lie. Some mornings I barely recognize the drawn, craggy face I see there. How did this happen, I ask myself even as I note that the face looking back at me is fast becoming the face of my father and his five siblings, three of whom lived into their 90s. This patrilineal resemblance, less frequently glimpsed when I was younger, was once a source of curiosity, belonging, even reassurance.

The thought of roots soothes, says the French philosopher Roland Barthes, and the thought of the future disturbs and agonizes. Now the sight of my transgenerational genetic essence elicits equal measures of disbelief and resignation, alienation and recognition. Profoundly unsettling. I don’t linger.

The mounting evidence of public encounters and private confrontations with the mirror tells me that I have clearly crossed over into the country of the “young-old.” This is the term that sociologists have adopted to describe the period, roughly 60 to 80, when we are no longer shouldering the responsibilities of middle age — establishing careers, nurturing families, changing the world — and still able to enjoy active lives and contribute to the broader society. After a decade of caring for my fragile, elderly parents, I relish this staging of the increasingly long lives that many of us are now fortunate enough to live.

Between middle age and old-old age, I find myself, along with 76 million baby boomers, confronting inevitable questions of retirement, health, and legacy. But five decades of working with and thinking about young children’s lives helps me to realize that the challenges young-old age presents are not so different from those we have faced earlier in life.

Although buried in the busyness of middle age, we all grapple with the tension between independence and dependence. Gray panther Maggie Kuhn reminds us that interdependence is the truth of our lives at all stages. Each individual, every generation, needs those who came before and those who will follow. While in the big picture the young are moving toward independence and we young-old are moving toward increasing dependence, in our daily lives both young and old experience a heightened push-pull between the desire to stand on our own and our need to rely on others.

The psychologist Adam Phillips tells us that from the moment we are born until we die our central challenge is to make sense of the losses that mark our lives. Regardless of age, we move forward through compromises, substitutions, and denials. While the young-old more obviously grieve the loss of friends and family, even physical and cognitive skills, children too are deeply affected by the loss of closeness with first caregivers, at times temporary at others permanent, at times imagined and at others real.

Both the young and the old strive to be visible in a world that shuns those not seen as economically productive. No one who has spent time with young children can doubt that they want to be seen and heard, to make their mark on the world. Now my life as a young-old person tells me that it is also critical that we sustain a sense of social relevance as we age. Current education policies promote testing and standards-based classrooms that leave little space for students to voice and explore their own interests. Older people in a youth-oriented, throwaway society often wrestle with how to make their lives count and leave their imprint.

Focusing on similarities rather than differences across time, a common world emerges in which we can better appreciate people of different ages as more like ourselves and less the other whom we may ignore, disregard, and underfund. It mediates against age-segregated institutions that limit the opportunities that the young and old have to learn from each other. For the young remind us of the importance of play, the imagination, and self-expression, while the old not only share routes taken and not taken but also the wisdom they have accumulated from fording difficult times.

Entering the landscape of the young-old is never easy. But we can more quickly orient ourselves once there when we recognize that its geography poses similar challenges to those we have met before. Perhaps the next time someone offers me a seat I’ll just have the confidence to accept it as a privilege granted rather than a marker of declining capacity.

Jonathan Silin is the author of “Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground.” He lives in Amagansett and Toronto.