I am 76 years old and I have been listening to sermons for all those 76 years. My religiously devout parents took me to church from the get-go. I had the longest string of perfect attendance pins in the history of the Oak Park Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia — one of the longest strings of perfect attendance pins in the whole of the U.S.A. I have heard thousands of sermons, sung millions of hymns, and heard the Bible explained in trillions of ways.

Often while listening or singing I have wished I had a basket of rotten fruit to heave at the pulpit and express my opinion of the preacher — such nonsense from the pulpit, such pap in the hymns, such utter confusion in Bible spinning. 

I have often thought that any of us in our little church in Springs could cook up any new religion at all from the Bible. It is so endlessly confusing and contradictory and too often appallingly violent. 

Once I took my 12-year-old daughter to a Bible discussion group at my Congregational church in Maine. A liberal bunch are these Congregationalists (at least in Maine), but Lily was so appalled by the violence of the Bible stories, she swore she would never go back to another Bible class. “How can you explain all that killing when you speak of Christians as people who love God and love their neighbor,” she said. In essence she pointed out that we’re all either hypocrites or psychotic. 

And yet that is what Jesus said, these few simple words: “Love God, love your neighbor.” We say God is love, and therefore, at least in my calculation, love is God. Love is the spirit that surrounds us, or should. That’s where we should be, in the spirit. But too often — daily — we stray from love to pettiness and hate and casual violence.

How is it that this Christian nation is also among the most violent? More mass shootings than any country on the planet. A love of guns that often equals our love of the church. Where does this violence come from? Why do we sit quietly and listen to our politicians speak of wiping out North Korea — which means millions of deaths, people like you and me? And we tolerate politicians who treat these people as nothing. We hear lie after lie from our politicians and we see violent death after violent death on our screens and think nothing of it. 

Is it that we Christians have been infected by our own Bible? “Guns and God” is what some of us worship, said a former president. Is that who we are as a nation? As Americans?

Consider if you would the New and the Old Testaments. We start with genocide. This God ethnically cleanses the earth and sends Noah out on a ship to save a few lucky critters, including us. When I was a kid in Sunday school we loved this tale — think of the neat animals, the fortunate humans, the great sea adventure. Never once did our kindly teacher mention the slaughter of innocents that this God had brought about — the millions of little kids dead in the sea. Imagine the stench of their decaying bodies. We kids were not encouraged to think about any of that gloomy stuff. God made a mistake in his creation so he wiped it out. What a rollicking tale. 

Then we come to Abraham and Isaac. Abe wanted to prove to God what a loyal fellow he was. His devotion and his willingness to sacrifice his only son are the basis for three religions — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. He stakes out Isaac on a hill and prepares to kill him when, presto, God lets him off the hook. In some interpretations he does kill Isaac. 

What a fine example to us Christians. Instead of suggesting that he be locked up after all these years, we admire Abraham. But of course this history of child murder is not over. Many more human sacrifices follow. We come to the tale of God and his only son, Jesus. The lamb slain by his dad to erase the sins of the world. I’m not buying that spin and neither should any Christian. 

We do not worship baby killers. We are not a religion of human sacrifice. This has nothing to do with who Jesus was or who Jesus thought he was.

But just to make it even worse for those of us who worship the God of love, we run smack into Revelation at the end of the Bible — a bloody bookend with Genesis. Revelation is nothing less than a bloodbath of vengeance. Odd 10-horn beasts and various hate-inspired monsters slather the world in gore. Revelation alone has inspired more human violence than almost any book, including “Mein Kampf.”

I bring all this up to suggest to you why the Christian Church worldwide is in decline. The cathedrals of Europe are empty; American churches are in free fall. Our own little church — which is precious to me — has dropped to less than half its size in the 25 years I’ve been a member there. 

My friends are amazed I still call myself a practicing Christian. They consider the hypocrisy, the fundamentalist, evangelical jihads that support a racist, a liar, a philanderer, and woman abuser in power, a cruel narcissistic would-be tyrant who calls himself a Presbyterian. This is why our churches are failing. We have forgotten Christ. Christ was about love, forgiveness — a gentle man who abhorred violence. A rebel surrounded by a vicious Roman occupation and a rule-bound, power-mad organized religion. They killed him for daring to point to a different idea — a God of love, compassion, healing, empathy. 

This is the divine person Christians have worshiped over 2,000 years, about whom organized religion — and yes, I include the Presbyterian structure — has made up rules and myths such as walking on water, rising from the dead, casting some of us into hellfire, including unbaptized babies, to say nothing of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the endless stream of wars fought in his name. All these ridiculous and blasphemous ideas and adventures in the name of the Prince of Peace.

I think, in order to save our precious Jesus and precious little church, we must get back to the divinity who inspired us originally. The Jesus of love, of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, of total nonviolence. I think, as Jesus said, God is love and love is indeed God. We must remember this or our Christianity and our beautiful Springs church will perish.

Bill Henderson is an elder at the Springs Presbyterian Church. He edits the annual Pushcart Prize, and his latest memoir is “Cathedral.”

I love musicals. Maybe you’ve seen my writing about them here. My encounters with Stephen Sondheim, my adoration of Kander and Ebb. And now, how much I also love Jerry Herman, with “Hello, Dolly!” hitting the big-bucks time with the revival (tickets top a grand, I just read). I’ve seen it twice. Once with the Divine Miss M, and then with the lesser but equally fabulous other Miss M, Donna Murphy.

Brilliant.

I put on “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” often on Pandora or Sonos. Or with my headphones on my iPhone. A rousing song from the show. (Jerry Herman does rousing well.) Although I did think of him as underrated in the era of the aforementioned Sondheim and Kander and Ebb. But he is really redeemed now. And like Sondheim and Cole Porter before him, Jerry Herman does it all, does it both: music and lyrics. He may have been underappreciated earlier on, but one thing he did do early on was send Bernadette Peters into the stratosphere of Broadway broads.

I have seen Bernadette Peters a lot, although not in her Herman breakthrough, “Mack and Mabel.” I did, however, see her perform in a concert where she sang the heartbreaking love song from that show: “Time Heals Everything.” (Jerry does love very well.) I compare the idea of that song to one of my favorites from Sondheim: “Losing My Mind.” Both are about obsessive love. Unforgettable and forever love. (Often a theme in show business, regardless of how unrealistic.)

But back to Bernadette. In 1984, she was divine as Dot, a corny name for a character in Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” About the painter Georges Seurat, with his pointillism. Dot. Get it?

I got it and saw it half a dozen times, a wondrous musical about, of all things, a painting. I also caught the more recent London import at Studio 54 another half-dozen times. This, with animated trees and a lake in the park. And boats. And soldiers. And parasols. (I’ll have to Google and see if Peters or Mandy Patinkin — never better — won Tony Awards for the original. I know the show won a Pulitzer Prize.)

Sondheim: There may never be another like him, with his sophisticated cleverness, his hilarious wordplay, and his haunting visual references to love, among many other unequaled attributes. And the themes: Not only a musical about a painting, but also about a murderous barber. And a group of assassins. Also Follies girls, aging and revisiting their past. The range! I digress to Sondheim, but there is an ultimate point if you keep reading.

So back to Peters once more, and the extraordinary coincidence of seeing her at two different opening nights of two very different Broadway shows. Here goes:

In 1997 a revival of “Chicago” opened (and is incidentally still running). I happened to catch the original in 1976. Liza Minnelli was filling in for Gwen Verdon alongside Chita Rivera. Kander and Ebb again. They also paired up those two legendary performers in two other (lesser) shows later: “The Act” and “The Rink.” But I digress. Again.

In 1997, it was Ann Reinking and Bebe Neuwirth playing the merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail. I was invited by my good friend Tony to the opening night, and there, on that opening night, in the audience, was Bernadette Peters — along with Mary Tyler Moore, I might add.

You can’t miss Ms. Peters — that curly mop of vibrant red hair, her pale, pale skin, the Kewpie doll lips. And Mary was Mary. Regal. An icon among the rest of us ordinary people that night. I saw the two of them on my way out of the theater after the show ended. A great New York City celebrity spotting — good thing I was too shy at the time to tell either one of them, or, actually, the two of them, what a fan I was. Of the two of them.

Flash-forward to 2017. Opening night of “The Band’s Visit,” an invite by my dear friend Edward, an investor in the show.

Now, I do go to the theater a lot. But I’ve been to only two opening nights. And there, at “The Band’s Visit,” was Bernadette Peters. (Sadly, not with Mary, gone now but living on in reruns of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and her own namesake sitcom.)

Now, I ask you: Wouldn’t you call that quite a coincidence? Two opening nights? Twenty years apart? And, once again, Bernadette Peters with the glowing white skin, that hair, and those lips. Amazingly, she looked exactly the same 20 years later.

Does she go to every opening night?

Which brings me back, I always go back, to Stephen Sondheim.

One night, in the middle of the run of “Gypsy” in which B.P. was playing Momma Rose, I saw S.S. in the theater. Not shy now, I asked him to sign my Playbill. I gushed and went on and on to let him know that I was his greatest fan.

“Cool it,” he said as he signed.

For the other theater die-hards out there, allow me to digress one more time — I promise, it’s the last digression. In London a couple of years ago, I saw “Gypsy” with Imelda Staunton in the Rose role, and who was there, behind me, entering the theater? No, not Bernadette, but Sondheim, I repeat, in London, on just an ordinary night of the run, long after the opening night. I didn’t ask for his signature on a Playbill this time because in London there are no Playbills. Only larger size and more colorful programs that you have to pay for.

Coincidental, right? Like Bernadette? Fate, it seems that I must get myself tickets as she appears in her own opening night in “Hello, Dolly!” come Jan. 20. I must. And just did.

Hmm . . . maybe Stephen Sondheim will be in the audience, too.

Hy Abady is a former advertising executive who had a house in Amagansett for 30 years. A contributor for 25 years, he has collected his “Guestwords” essays in two books, including “Back in The Star Again: Further Stories From the East End.”

Like many of you, when I was growing up, all the outdoors was my playground. From the rocks left behind by long-ago glaciers to the mysterious seashells washed ashore on the beach, this dynamic environment of ours has always fascinated me. That fascination with nature turned into my pursuit of science. Physics led me to a world of problem solving; biology reaffirmed my reasons for trying harder to understand our world and to make it a better place. 

From 1996 until very recently when I applied to be a congressional candidate, I worked as a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Now, although ever a scientist at heart, I am running to represent the diverse community of the First Congressional District to protect our jobs, create new ones, and especially to protect our Long Island environment — home to the most stunning seascapes in the country as well as to more than 7.5 million of us who look forward to keeping our beaches beautiful and our water clean and safe to drink.

For Long Islanders, water is our common ground. Regardless of the size of our paychecks, our politics, our ethnicity, or our religion, all of us benefit from our beaches, which attract tourists from all over the world. Our economy, particularly on the East End, centers on tourism, and Long Island has long been a coveted vacation destination. As locals, we get to enjoy the sand, the surf, and historical towns year round. So when our beaches become polluted, when the safety of our drinking water is at risk, we all face the same health and economic threats. Therefore, we should all be a part of the solution.

There have long been questions about the safety of our water. With the high rate of breast cancer on Long Island and throughout the country, for years there was much speculation that toxins in our water could be the culprit. To date, no conclusive link has been established. However, there have been studies to suggest that contaminants have made their way into our drinking water through irresponsible waste disposal. In those bygone days of Long Island manufacturing, some big employers, it is believed, were responsible for a toxic plume, posing a risk to the water supplies of Bethpage, South Farmingdale, and Massapequa. 

Closer to home, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has focused on East Hampton Airport as a possible inactive hazardous waste disposal site. And last month, the Suffolk County Water Authority sued 11 manufacturers for polluting our public water wells with harmful chemicals used in the production of firefighting foam, industrial greasers, detergents, and other household products.

Cleaning up these contaminants will cost many millions of dollars — something that could have been prevented. But if, as the plaintiffs have alleged, these companies out of either ignorance or arrogance allowed these chemicals to infiltrate our groundwater and present a threat to the health of Long Islanders, there perhaps need to be much clearer regulations and stiffer penalties for pollution. In law, ignorance is not a defense.

Fortunately, we live in New York, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has invested heavily in the preservation of our public water. In fact, he recently announced nearly $27 million in grants to support 13 essential Long Island drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects. But this kind of environmental protection is crucial throughout our government. Municipalities, local governments, and state governments cannot be expected to shoulder alone the expense or the complex scientific research required to investigate and clean up contaminants. Water pollution, air pollution, and, of course, the devastating effects of climate change require a national effort — it is a matter of our civil rights. We have the right to live on Long Island and in this country without getting sick.

Unfortunately, today we are seeing a near decimation of the one agency in the federal government charged with protecting our whole environment — the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead of making deep cuts in this agency (established in 1970 by President Richard Nixon), we should be making further investments in it. A well-funded and properly functioning E.P.A. would be able to zoom out and broadly assess how clean water flows in all of our U.S. waterways, and also determine the trouble spots. Despite the political fervor of the last year, as congresswoman for the First District, I would lead the fight to restore and build upon the assets of the E.P.A.

What has too often happened in this district is a narrow focus on a few Long Island estuaries rather than a comprehensive assessment of all our waterways. After all, it is wholly inconsistent to vote for a bill to protect Long Island Sound and Peconic Bay in 2015, and then abandon environmental principles two years later to vote in sync with a new administration that seeks to gut the E.P.A. Protecting our environment is a lifetime commitment — it should be and used to be a bipartisan commitment — and that is the least of what we should expect from our elected officials.

What can you do? For starters, you can get involved in local environmental groups that address issues pertaining to Long Island bays, estuaries, and pine barrens, Plum Island, and First Nation lands. National organizations with Long Island chapters include the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and Citizens Climate Lobby. You also can write to pressure the current Congress and the Trump administration to increase their support of the E.P.A.

Elaine DiMasi, a Democrat who lives in Ronkonkoma, will take part in a forum for progressive candidates on Saturday from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Stony Brook Southampton’s Chancellors Hall.

Whatever transpires in 2018, cancer will not defeat John McCain. 

Cancer is neither an opponent nor a binary condition, and the sooner we stop pitting humans against a disease, stop using war metaphors in the field of medicine, the better off we all shall be, especially cancer patients and their loved ones. Many a mislabeled loser has been quietly valiant and privately heroic.

A war veteran, prisoner of war survivor, and presidential candidate, Senator McCain’s courage has never been in question. But glioblastoma cares nothing about mettle or fortitude. Only 5 out of 100 people outlive the illness, and, according to the best studies available, their survival was not due to willpower or fighting spirit. Teddy Kennedy and Beau Biden lacked for neither, and both were felled by the disease. 

If “battling cancer” has long been a misguided metaphor, it seems spectacularly inapposite in connection with the redoubtable John McCain. Cancer is not an adversary to be conquered or outflanked; cancer is the emperor of all maladies. An oncology team finds it, cuts it out, poisons it, irradiates it, and prays for the best. If they are successful, your cancer will go into hiding and lurk just outside the gates of good fortune for a long time. The idea of winning or losing is just cruel, as it has been since Susan Sontag made the point 40 years ago in her classic “Illness as Metaphor.”

When first diagnosed, unspoken shame strikes all patients: You must have smoked or drunk too much, eaten unwisely, exercised insufficiently, loved incompletely, or mangled your emotions into some sorry state. And then, should you succumb to cancer, the unuttered implication is you did not fight doggedly enough, or you chose the wrong hospital or wrong protocol or, God forbid, the wrong God. 

It is all unnecessary and untrue. You do not declare war on nature; cancer has been with us since ancient Greece, when Hippocrates, the father of medicine, removed tumors around 440 B.C. Just like my doctors did for me in 2015. 

Tonsillar squamous cell carcinoma is not as lethal as glioblastoma, but it’s a serious disease. Cancer of the head and neck is the sixth most common malignancy in the world. Possessing neither the energy nor inclination to charge into battle, I surrendered to the new realities of the constant companionship of mortality and the hard work ahead.

After CAT and PET scans, I took drugs, took notes, had teeth removed, then a tonsil (by a robot) and dozens of lymph nodes. No food or water for eight days. Thirty-five radiation sessions scrambled my taste buds like eggs, burned my throat like toast, and fried my saliva glands. Eating was a chore. Forty pounds disappeared. Talking was difficult, breathing was compromised, and any social life was fantasy. Hardest of all, perhaps, was trusting total strangers who introduced themselves as my doctors and nurses and technicians and dietitians and therapists — far from a battalion of warriors, they made up a gentle, lifesaving team. They addressed my cancer. I dealt with my psyche. And my family. I can only hope I did as well as they.

Battle cancer? At 67 years of age? At 80? At 8? Other than “following orders,” military language never came into play. If a metaphor were needed, weather provided a more useful lexicon. Weather can surprise, strike hard, and then dissipate. Cancer was akin to a great northeaster; once spotted on the radar screen, you batten down the hatches, consult the experts, follow the playbook, gather supplies and community, and hope for the best. You don’t fight weather. You don’t blame its victims, and you don’t put the onus on the stricken.

Then, as now, support and encouragement can be salutary during hard times and health challenges, but they are not magical. With cancer, the only real war is the war of words. People mean well, but their best wishes can be laced with unintended meaning. 

And even a wordsmith like Barack Obama, ever empathic, could use some re-education.

“Give it hell, John,” is what Mr. Obama tweeted to Senator McCain last year.

You cannot give cancer hell. Cancer is hell.

Some metaphors work.

This morning, brushing my teeth, I closed my eyes. I saw only black. I opened them again, all without thinking, and the light rushed back in, not just light but the outpouring of information it brought, the edges, the planes, the colors, the textures of the world; its orientation, heaviness, opacity and translucence, weight and delicacy and shimmer, its meeting points and the interplay between everything and everything. So much. It spoke to me from all around.

I immediately closed my eyes again, overcome by that inpouring. Even the slightest glimpse, a momentary opening of a closed eye, can give me so much connection to the world; all in a microsecond I saw far more than I could take in or detail in words. If that’s true of a momentary glance, what an abundance of wealth I take in with my eyes when they are full open, and maybe even more when I let them rest and gaze.

I just lost a good bit of the sight in one eye. I woke one morning and saw a black round sun against the background of the window by my bed. I turned and looked at my alarm clock. There was that dark circle again. It had moved with my gaze. I got out of bed, put on the kettle for my tea, and called the eye doctor.

Yes, it was a long day of drops and tests and bad news. And yes, I realized, if it happens again in the other eye that would be quite a change for me — I would be legally blind. And so I’m precariously between two worlds right now, and working hard to keep my balance, and my root, in the one where both eyes work — at least to the extent that is left to them now.

When I don’t focus on it it doesn’t seem like too big a deal because the other eye is so willing and able to fill in. The unfathomable brain is weaving the pieces of the patchwork of information that it’s gathering from my left eye and putting it together with what is coming in through the right. And one thing I’m seeing, ha-ha, one thing I’m seeing is that what is happening with the left eye now is that I am actually seeing the eye itself; it’s getting in the way of its own flow that all my life has been an open river of information it’s been pouring into me, allowing, interpreting for me. It’s as if the eye were saying, hey, pay attention to me, not to the information I’m giving you. 

And I see that that’s happening in so many other ways in my psyche and in my life as I get older. My body is saying it. My mind is saying it; my ego is too. All the parts that I think are separate from the world around me.

This is a transient, ephemeral time of adaptation, getting to be a witness to this process. The blood vessel broke only a few weeks ago, and my brain hasn’t finished relearning how to see, is in the process of relearning how to weave things together in this new way, so I’m getting to watch this as it happens. I’m thinking that, if the progression stays on this course, I will experience a seamless flow of connection with the world through my eyes as I did before. It won’t be the same as it once was, for sure. Those patches of comprehension have undeniably become more fragile, almost threadbare. But it will still seem like a whole quilt, a blanket that I can wrap myself in.

But of course there’s that fear, that finally there won’t be enough material for my brain to work with, that this time of change will simply be continuous, fast or slow, with the dear brain working to accept, weave, interpret, and categorize a whole new, and fading, alphabet.

When this first happened, I had to cancel a class, tell my daughter, ask a question of a friend. And every time I dictated into my iPhone the phrase “my eye,” it typed in “mayeye.” Uncomfortably close to the word “mayday,” from the French m’aidez, or help me, but also reminiscent of that old childhood game, mother may I? May I, Great Mother, each day for one more day, continue to see?

Tina Curran has taught tai chi and qigong for many years and enjoys photography. She lives in Hampton Bays.

Hello. My name is BB Gun and I am an addict. For the last 23 years, first thing every morning and last thing every night, I check up on my fantasy baseball team — good news, bad news, mixed bag. Never a dull moment. Several times throughout each day, I go to various websites to find out about trades, tirades, injuries, and pertinent updates. The hourly findings trigger substitutions or self-pity or fist pumps. Up and down like a corked yo-yo. 

My league has its own e-bulletin board on which we share every minute maneuver (except our secret strategies). The races are tight, the competition stiff; any nugget of information could swing a whole season, so you best not miss any games, including postseason, spring training, minor leagues, winter ball.

El Diario is obligatorio. The DirecTV MLB package is de rigueur. The financial investment is modest — less expensive than one ski trip or one golf outing at a fancy country club. Some years, finishing in the first division, you even take home some cash. 

Winning the whole shebang gets you a new plush sofa and a puffed chest. 

The BB Guns have been a consistently solid squad that has delivered a little money, a little glory, and surprisingly deep pleasures. A home run hit by a longhaired stranger in Anaheim or Arlington lands deep in your soul. A shutout hurled by a tall lefty in Toronto or Cleveland fills you with relief and rapture. The less you paid for the player at the draft, the more you celebrate such joyful moments. You are, after all, head scout, general manager, and chief dealmaker. You learn about the beauty and the business of the game, as well as the complicated nature of cohorts-cum-competitors. (Why do grudges have no final inning?)

This desultory season, this terrible Summer of Seventeen, the BB Guns suck. I mean, suck on steroids. (How I wish I could force-feed some anabolic-androgenic compounds into my feckless power hitters every time they whiff.) Poor projections on my part, coupled with constant injuries and dunderheaded trades, have my psyche catching Aroldis Chapman fastballs without a mask or mitt. I ache in cranial nooks and crannies I didn’t know could ache. I pore over box scores and Bleacher Report and Baseball Prospectus like a Franciscan monk studying scriptures. 

My better angels — no, I do not own Mike Trout — want me to stay far away from the whole mess: my league, my stats, my failings. But I am failing at that too. I am hooked. And unhappy. I chase my misery doggedly, compulsively, first thing each day, last thing each night, and twice on Sunday — Rays vs. Jays at 7 p.m. followed by O’s vs. A’s at 11. And then I pace and sulk, sulk and pace, until dawn’s early light.

But why? Oh why?

Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that reading positive items about yourself or, by extension, your fantasy team, on a regular basis, can be as addictive as cigarettes or alcohol. Facebook is just a gateway drug. Instagram is mere porn. Twitter dulls all pain and makes anyone feel omniscient and loved, in a poetic fashion.

Who needs fentanyl when you have fantasy baseball? 

At Harvard University, M.R.I. scans of the brain revealed high activity when subjects received personal attention and/or approbation from websites like OnRoto and FanGraphs. They concluded that “self-disclosure communication” stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers much like sex or food. “High-scoring participants experience greater excitation of their amygdala and striatum, the two brain regions involved in impulsive behavior. These patterns are on par with those who are addicted to cocaine.”

Soy un adicto. Yes, I am an addict. In two languages.

Science equates 20 years of fantasy baseball to decades of cheap booze, rough sex, a pack a day, and crack. This sad season, I am experiencing all the lows and none of the highs of a debauched lifestyle. I want to get off this unmerry-go-round. Seeing oneself in last place, sinking like a stone, day in, day out, will do serious damage to your amygdala and striatum, not to mention ego and erections. The BB Guns are misfiring. 

Oh, say can you see the grand opening of The First Real Rehab Center for Fantasy Ballers. It will be in Florida, and likely located within the Devil’s Triangle of Clearwater, Dunedin, and St. Pete’s (spring homes of the Phillies, Jays, and Yankees). I pray for the day, and have to trust it will be covered by Obamacare. 

If you, dear reader, are looking for a happy ending or a silver lining — a miraculous ninth-inning comeback — you have come to the wrong place. Just like the Trump presidency. 

Or the Yankees’ pennant drive.

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

About two years ago, I canceled our subscription to Sotheby’s fine art auction catalogs. I canceled our subscriptions with Christie’s and Phillips too. During auction season, which is roughly twice a year in New York, the catalogs would come fast and furious, hand-delivered by a bicycle messenger, sometimes twice or three times a day, a battered delivery log for me to sign, a creamy white “With our compliments” card tucked into the package. 

For a while I liked having the catalogs around. They were printed on thick, glossy paper, one artwork per page, the color reproductions expensive and gorgeous. When the boys were young, we cut up pages from the catalogs and made collages and Christmas cards out of them. We made paper snowflakes and taped them to our dining room window. We once pressed fallen leaves between a catalog’s pages then laminated them with a machine we had bought at Staples. Sometimes, before dinner, I would use a stack of five or six catalogs to press the water out of a block of tofu. 

Some of the particularly interesting catalogs — one on kinetic art that seemed obscure and unfamiliar — or ones that featured photos of my husband’s father, the art dealer Leo Castelli, I would save and place on the shelves downstairs with our other art books. But mainly I would let the catalogs accumulate on the kitchen counter, unread, in increasingly teetering towers, until I had the time and inclination to flip through them. 

Eventually I would place them in a neat stack in the pantry near the recycling bin or down in the basement, just in case one of us wanted to look at them again. My husband would sometimes transfer a catalog from the basement back onto the kitchen counter: “Hey, you’re not throwing this away, are you?” he’d ask. It would then stay on the counter for quite a while, the base for another stack of catalogs. 

Some of the catalogs wound up in Montauk, but I don’t remember how. Some I gave to artist friends. Twice I hauled a box of the catalogs across town to the boys’ school and gave them to Liz, the art teacher. I don’t know if she ever used them. 

As the boys grew older, I would try to interest them in some of the catalogs’ images. They liked the work of Lucio Fontana, the idea of a knife-slashed canvas being particularly compelling to grade-school boys. They liked Salvatore Scarpitta and his racecars. They liked a print by Bruce Nauman that read “EAT SHIT AND DIE.” But, for the most part, they’d rather look at something else. 

And, frankly, after a while, so did I. The problem, of course, was the prices. All those zeros! No matter how lovely the Mark Grotjahn painting or smart the Cindy Sherman photo or riotous the Rauschenberg combine, one could not ignore the 8-point type marching across the bottom of the page: $16 million . . . $6.7 million . . . $12 million. . . . And in case one didn’t have a calculator handy, prices were given in pound sterling and euros as well. Chinese renminbi, too. 

In the city, we live down the street from the painter Lois Dodd, who is 90 years old and still painting. One day an artist friend took me along to visit her. We brought sandwiches and berries and walked five flights up to the apartment/studio where Dodd has lived and worked for over 50 years. She welcomed us warmly, dressed in jeans and a cotton button-down, a no-nonsense digital watch on her wrist. Inside, there was a small kitchen, a wooden table and chairs, a mirror. But mainly there was art: In racks, in boxes, on shelves, on tables, on easels, on the floor. She had been painting for over 70 years. Seventy years! She had founded a gallery, taught, applied for fellowships, raised a son, found larger studio space in Maine, sold paintings when she could, but mainly she painted and painted and painted. 

After the sandwiches and berries, Dodd showed us some of her work. She yanked the canvases out of the racks, dusted them off with a flick of her hand, propped them up without ceremony on a chair. A barn. A tangle of flowers. White windows against a blue-black sky. “I don’t know about this orange,” she laughed at one painting, as if it were alive, as if it were some zany relative. She pulled out another and shrugged: “This one is good.” And another: “No one seems to like my tunnel paintings, but I do.” 

The room turned golden as the afternoon drifted into evening; the air, cool and still. We drank tea. We looked at art.

Shortly after that visit, I gathered all of our auction catalogs, bundled them up with twine, and set them out on the curb for recycling to pick up. “They are a horrible way to look at art,” I told my husband. The next morning, on my way to Whole Foods, I noticed a man selling books on the sidewalk. Lined up neatly on a red blanket were the auction catalogs I had just tried to get rid of. 

“Ten dollars each,” the man told me when I stopped to look. “But for you, I’ll take 5.”

Lisa Silver is a freelance writer who has been spending summers in Montauk for the past 16 years.

It’s gone. I know. Another summer, another year barreling by.

That title up there actually has a second meaning. Summer is the name of a poof of a poodle, under six pounds, jet-black hair, now aging with some white around the mouth. She’s got this very (purposely) unkempt look — her hair covering her eyes and dangling haphazardly in soft twirls off her bony body. She also appears as if she’s walking on tiptoe. Everyone on the street wonders what kind of dog she is. 

She’s Summer, dark and small and shapeless, hard to tell her front from her back. At rest, she resembles a black mop head. Or a fake-fur throw pillow.

Her owner passed away this past winter. A lovely and courageous woman named Carol Lee, of Southern heritage. The dog wound up outliving her at 14 years old. Carol Lee was 74 when she died but told everyone, for years until the end, that she was 59. (Except, of course, when she was 59; then she recalibrated to the mid-30s.)

Sam, her brother, had a summer house this summer in Sag Harbor. A rental, a spectacular one on the edge of the cove, a more remote part of Sag — you travel along Long Island Avenue to Redwood Road to Cove Road, and there it is. About a mile from the American Hotel.

It’s a gorgeous house, modern and chic, with stunning views of the cove — a tranquil body of water, smooth as glass; it ripples slightly when a family of ducks glides by, or a lone paddleboarder drifts along, or a kayak, a canoe, or a rowboat. There’s a low bridge at one end, so larger boats are blocked from entering. You rarely hear a motor. It is quiet and serene and reflects the ever-changing skies above. Even the recently complained-about noisy helicopters don’t seem to pierce through, but, frankly, the workers who trim the hedges on a Saturday slightly annoy. 

The house has a small fenced-in pool, but the rest of the grounds, with an elaborate grill and an outdoor dining table where we would often dine, is open to woods and nearby houses. After dinner, we would sit outdoors, look out at the water, and listen to music, the air glittering with fireflies as night began to fall.

“Where’s Summer?” is what Sam asks a thousand times a day. Even when the dog is on a leash, sitting under us at an outdoor table at Page restaurant, for one, inches from our feet. 

“Where’s Summer?”

Maybe I passed over too quickly how the dog came to be Sam’s. She belonged to Carol Lee since May of 2003, and my husband and I were there on her first night in Carol Lee’s East 60th Street apartment in Manhattan. For years, when we had a house in the Amagansett dunes, Sam and Carol Lee would come and visit, Summer tiptoeing behind them.

The two of them (make that the three of them) would rent houses each summer in various locations but seemed to settle on Sag over the last few summers. Houses, some grand, some simple, with pools and without, and always walking distance to town.

There were dinners and backgammon and rosé wine. Carol Lee’s passing was sad for many people who were touched by her. But no one was more bereft than her brother. They were closer thanthis.

This was his first summer in decades that she hadn’t been there with him, often in the city, and constantly in the summer houses. Shopping together. Museums and movies together. Gabbing and laughing together. Screaming at each other.

David (he’s my husband) and I became sort of grateful stand-ins for Carol Lee this summer. Sam was lost without her, and we would show up. David would cook — David and Carol Lee often cooked together on summer weekends, and also holidays and birthdays, for as long as I can remember.

And now she’s gone. And summer is ending. But Summer, the dog, is always right there no matter how many times Sam asks where she is. We wonder if she misses Carol Lee. We always do wonder: What do dogs think? (They must think something.)

Maybe Sam believes that Carol Lee lives on in Summer. He takes her everywhere, in his arms on the subway to his office (she’s that tiny). She’s there at any outdoor restaurant here and in N.Y.C. Carol Lee may be gone, but the dog seems to be thriving.

But back to the house where we have spent weekends, four in all, since Memorial Day. There were lots of laughs and lots of reminiscing about Carol Lee, the dog a constant reminder among other reminders and stories shared. How we would curse at each other over backgammon moves. How we thought how she would have loved to see Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard” or Bette Midler in “Hello, Dolly.” Carol Lee was a sometime actress, along with her other gifts. Gifts of interior design, of fashion styling — the greatest gift-giver I have known. (Lorne Michaels, in fact, used her for a time as his personal shopper.)

I would write pieces in this column and on my blog and she would insist she portray one of the characters in my stories. She wanted me to write a one-woman show for her. In the end, she would have been much better qualified to write her own story and portray herself in a one-woman show. She had an Imogene Coca comedic quality. And she looked somewhat like Carson McCullers. It was often discussed how she could play those two women in that never-to-be-done one-woman show.

Meantime, summer does speed along. It is August as I write this; my husband and I are in Provincetown for the month, a new summer spot since selling in Amagansett.

But I’m lucky enough to still spend time in Sag Harbor and the Hamptons, driving around, getting takeout from Round Swamp Farm and Cavaniola’s, eating dinner at the bar at the Palm, shopping at Turpan. Reading and reminiscing.

Weekends in June and July were not great, weather-wise. Some sun. More clouds. Rain.

What happened to the summer of 2017? Where did it go? And, more specifically, where is Summer, that wayward, but always underfoot, shadow of a dog?

Where is she?

Oh, there she is. Right there.

Hy Abady has collected his “Guestwords” essays in two books, the latest of which is “Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”

Over the past 25 years covering the Hamptons International Film Festival for newspapers, TV, and radio, it has been a wild ride of different theater venues, celebrity interviews, after-parties, and films that often went on to win Academy Awards.

Sir Patrick Stewart, of Shakespeare and “Star Trek” fame, said it best at one of the festival’s “A Conversation With . . .” programs on Saturday when he emphasized the importance of the arts. Whether it’s painting, writing, music, or dancing, he said, the arts give a community its soul and inspiration.

This is certainly true of East Hampton and Southampton Towns, which turn into “Hollywood East” each fall. Who would think, I asked myself, watching Stewart speak at the East Hampton Middle School, that this used to be my little high school, and it now hosts movie stars?

Of the scores of events I cover each year throughout the Hamptons, this festival has always been my favorite, for the major actors I get to meet and for the educational value of the top-quality independent films. Before this festival, I never realized how different an independent film was from a mass-produced one, with filmmakers for the most part creating films they really care about, rather than just to make millions. 

It’s been an amazing journey to see this festival grow from small parties and brunches at Nick and Toni’s restaurant in the early 1990s to bigger gatherings at the Wolffer Estate Vineyard, at the home of Stuart Match Suna, a founding HIFF board member and chairman emeritus, and at other venues. It was fun to wait among throngs of press to interview and photograph guests at the opening night parties at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, East Hampton Point, and the former Lily Pond nightclub.

I remember the excitement of watching “The King’s Speech” at its 2010 premiere at the Southampton movie theater, and of going to the after-party at a nearby restaurant with its producer, Harvey Weinstein, its director, Tom Hooper, and writer, David Seidler. Seidler told me how he got the idea for the movie, about the king of England’s stuttering problem, because of his own struggle with stuttering as a child growing up in that country. I was even more excited as I saw the film go on to win an Oscar for best picture, as did the festival movies “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Moonlight.”

Besides getting an inside view of the best upcoming films, the festival has given me entree to interviewing the stars. I talked to Richard Dreyfus, Roy Scheider, and Steven Spielberg about the making of “Jaws” and the controversy with Capt. Frank Mundus, who claimed that Peter Benchley, the author of the book and one of the screenwriters, did not credit him for teaching him how to fish for sharks on his Montauk charter boat, Cricket II. The late Roy Scheider said later that of all the various roles he’d played, “I guess I’ll always be remembered for ‘Jaws.’ ”

But it’s not always easy to get these movie stars to talk, let alone open up. Following a “Conversation With . . .” in 1996 with Angelica Huston at Guild Hall, where she also talked about working with her famous father, the director John Huston, she refused all interviews with the press and hurried out the back door. At the time I was working for WVVH-Hamptons Television, and my cameraman, David Nadal, and I ran to the back parking lot and caught her climbing into her limousine. 

“Can we just have one interview for the local TV station?” we pleaded. To our surprise, she came over, just for a second, she said, but we ended up getting a 10-minute interview for our show before she darted off. Once we got her talking about her first film as a director, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” she couldn’t stop.

Following Richard Gere’s “A Conversation With . . .” in 2012, I saw him at an after-party and asked him for an interview. Of all the stars, he turned me down in the best possible way, putting his arm around me warmly and saying he was sorry, he just didn’t want an interview. I was so happy to be hugged by Richard Gere, nothing else seemed to matter, and I never forgot it. 

Then there was an enjoyable evening sitting on the porch of the Maidstone Arms, laughing with another of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti, who was in town for the opening of “Barney’s Version.” He was funny, easygoing, and gave me plenty of time as he discussed the film. I had to tell him how much I enjoyed one of his most popular movies, “Sideways,” and how much I admired his various roles.

And last year I finally met someone I’d always wanted to meet, the globe-trotting Anthony Bourdain, outside the East Hampton movie theater after the screening of “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” about the famous chef, which he produced. When asked if he lived in the Hamptons, Bourdain said he often visits here and loves to shop at the farm stands, and that he usually lets his daughter decide what’s for dinner.

Over 25 years, the times were not always funny or magical. On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2005, tragedy just missed the festival. While watching a film by Polly Draper in a packed Guild Hall, there was a loud explosion, and I ran out of the theater to see that a small twin-engine plane had crashed across the street on Mill Hill Lane. Smoke and fire were coming from it as emergency crews rushed to save the pilot, who died. He was the only one inside the Cessna, which just missed the Maidstone Arms and some houses on the street. Inside the theater with Draper were the actors Kevin Bacon, his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, and Miranda Richardson. 

But there was no shortage of happy times, through all the film festivals, hanging with the press at the Maidstone Arms, the Huntting Inn, and John Papas Cafe between screenings. Now celebrating his own 25th year in business, John Papas told me he opened in June of 1992, three months before the festival. “Being so close to the movie theater, I always enjoyed having the movie crowd come here and chat about the films,” he said. “We also served many of the stars, so it’s been a lot of fun over the years.”

Kudos to Alec Baldwin, a HIFF co-chairman, Stuart Match Suna, Anne Chaisson, the executive director, and David Nugent, the artistic director, and their whole crew for all their hard work in helping to reach this big silver anniversary. 

David Nugent made a good point while introducing Rob Reiner at Sunday’s “A Conversation With . . .” in East Hampton: “Movies change your life,” he said. “I was 13 when I saw Reiner’s film ‘Stand by Me’ for the first time, and it had a big effect on me.” He said it made him want to see and study more films, which eventually led to his passion for the industry. 

I look forward to seeing more great films and stars over the next 25 years at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Debbie Tuma is a freelance writer and a host at WLNG Radio. She lives in Riverhead and can be reached at [email protected].

An open letter to Diane Patrizio, director, Department of Human Services, Town of East Hampton.

Re: Disturbing changes in the Suffolk County Expanded In-Home Services for the Elderly Program, or EISEP.

Dear Diane,

As I noted to you in my email of July 5th, your recent one-store-only food shopping order for the town’s EISEP clients requires me to defy my doctor’s orders.

This results from diagnoses over recent years of such old-age-related conditions as a carotid artery blockage, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and low red cell counts, which translates into my need to consume fresh fish and meats. I have not found the fish at our local supermarkets, the I.G.A. and Stop and Shop, to be reliably fresh.

If your home care workers are to shop for me at a nearby location, my fish should be bought at Citarella, and I should continue to rely on the I.G.A. and/or Stop and Shop for basics, many of which are not available at Citarella and are usually much more expensive when they are.

Additionally, I often need sandwiches on hand for occasions when, because of an injured hip and temperamental back, I am unable to prepare my meals. So, over the four years I have had the good fortune to be an EISEP client, the shopper assigned to me has picked up fresh poultry sandwiches from Mary’s Marvelous. The supermarket sandwiches are generally made from processed food, which my physician discourages.

Surely, these health challenges and consequent dietary regimen are not unusual among a client pool made up entirely of senior citizens. But when I tried to inform your social worker who called to inform me of your one-store edict of my diet necessities, she told me that nevertheless town helpers could now food shop at only one location.

If this restriction would actually save money or time, I could see some reason for it. But it does neither. Shopping at the I.G.A. (or Stop and Shop), Mary’s Marvelous, and Citarella is a compact undertaking. Everything is central. For me, it involves driving in one direction in a four-mile circular route from and back to my house. A similar ease of access to the necessary healthy foods exists throughout the town and probably most of Suffolk County. No one is asking you to send your shoppers all over the countryside.

The one-store rule also does nothing to save wage costs. EISEP’s structure precludes this. A worker is assigned to each client for two hours once a week. My shopping list and mail collection have seldom if ever required the two full hours to complete. The remaining time is used to clean my kitchen and bathroom, help that I welcome. But my priority is healthy food. I am grateful to have been getting that.

What difference can it possibly make to your office and EISEP funders how much of the two hours is used for food shopping and mail pickup and how much for other tasks? Am I not, with my 90-plus years on this earth, qualified to make such decisions for myself, especially when it has no meaningful bearing on your employees’ workload or EISEP’s expenses?

I have other questions. Prior to issuing this order, was thought given to findings that healthy diets actually save taxpayer money by reducing demands on emergency medical services? Was thought given to the psychic cost that enforcing such nonsense will have on our young social workers, many of whom entered the field to help make the world a little better? Or to the effect such needless micromanaging will have on your efficient and committed helpers, who take such pleasure in helping us thrive?

Why mess with it, Diane? EISEP is, at root, a lovely, productive program. So, let’s dump this dehumanizing edict.

We survived the Depression, fought great armies in World War II and the younger among us in Vietnam. We also fought for race and gender equality, disabilities access, and peace. We supported families and educated our kids, often by working long hours at grinding hardscrabble jobs. And now, for no good reason that I’ve been told, we are faced with senseless, nitpicking little orders that treat us like irresponsible children.

On a recent Friday at the East Hampton senior center, I had the pleasure of being honored along with other East Hampton 90-plus-year-olds. Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc gave a nice speech in which he extolled our wisdom, leadership, and integrity. During the same week, I got the call from your social worker about the one-stop rule and was blown off when I tried to inform her of my doctor’s inevitable reaction.

So, Diane, what are we old folks? Stalwart members of the community? Or demented old farts to be infantilized?

I look forward to receiving your response.

With best regards, 

Richard Rosenthal

Richard Rosenthal recently celebrated his 92nd birthday.