I am sitting on a conference call with the special-collections people from Hofstra University and Barnard, speaking of how we might highlight two decades of writing from some of Long Island’s most silenced and isolated communities, as a resource for activists, scholars, and students grappling with the living history of this long island of ours. As we speak of noncustodial and digital archive models, I remember those days in the Morgan Library, studying the original manuscripts of the already acknowledged “great” writers whose works had become the canon for the striving and the young.

Could a literature of unheard voices become its own kind of canon? What would happen if those voices were to be truly heard?

My mind wanders back to the dream that led me to open the doors of the Southampton Cultural Center to a small group of women wishing to write their memoirs but not yet knowing how they might begin. I had offered a week of free workshops following a conference I had co-organized celebrating women breaking silences. 

Up until that time, whether I had taught writing in the university or at home, I had assumed that there was a certain consistency that people needed to count on as they were opening themselves up on the page. By the time I had second thoughts as to what it would mean to craft intimate stories in a situation where strangers might come in at any moment, it was too late to take back my offer. The publicity was out, and people had already signed up.

I decided to make the most of what I thought was a bad situation by inventing the notion of writing for a reading stranger who might walk in at any “page one moment” of each person’s life. I told the circle of women that the stranger wouldn’t intrinsically care about the dreams and sorrows, injustices and gifts that make up a life. 

“How then could you come up with a scene that would fast-forward your imaginary ‘stranger/reader’ into walking in your shoes?” I asked. Then we all got to work, playacting the scenes out of each woman’s life that began to tell her story, trying each one on for size, seeing what produced the greatest empathy and engagement. 

I wasn’t prepared for the power of the stories that people who hadn’t written before were able to create. Within two or three days, I could tell that these opening moments were far more consistently compelling and strategically shaped than anything my students in closed workshops had been able to produce. 

But something else was happening as well. Already the women had formed a community that broke through those barriers that keep us from hearing one another. They were rearranging child care, taking sick days at work, and making other adjustments so as not to miss even one of the five days. They were staying up all night writing. 

On the third day, I sat bolt upright at 5 a.m. and said to myself that I had happened upon an interesting pedagogical notion, that someday I would pursue it and see if it could be funded. As I made my morning coffee, I could not stop thinking about the private-public nature of this odd amalgam I had chanced upon — part speakout in search of the stories most needing to be told, part throwback to the consciousness-raising of the 1970s, but with something else added, through the making of a product that was meant to be publicly heard. Why it worked, against all intuition, was something to be pondered and explored. 

On the fifth day, which was to be the culmination of the workshop, I realized that I didn’t care whether it would be funded. I asked the Town of Southampton for the use of the cultural center one evening and one morning a week. And Herstory Writers Workshop was born.

Never could I have dreamt that I would spend the next 20 years building a network of writing circles engaging thousands of women and girls (and more recently men and boys) in domestic violence shelters, universities, labor halls, public schools, and healing centers, nor that the words “stranger/reader” and “imaginary page one” would be echoing in Spanish and behind prison walls.

As the weeks turned into months, and eventually years, we continued to alternate our meetings between daytimes and evenings to accommodate working women as well as mothers and grandmothers with young children at home. Some came to every meeting, working on book-length projects that would take years to complete. Others came just long and frequently enough to write a particular story that needed to be told. There were always new strangers. There were houseguests and visiting cousins who would come simply to listen or to offer support, but soon they, too, were beginning to tell their own stories.

After a while, the project, which had begun as a bit of an experiment as to why such a public-private thing should work so well, took on a life that came to feel more permanent. Women were coming from so far away that we were invited to open another branch in a more central part of Long Island — in a community and counseling center whose teddy bears and boxes of tissues, bright sunflowers and freely wandering animals would sharply contrast with the guns in cases and displayed war helmets of the Southampton Veterans Hall. 

And then there was another invitation, and another, from the Greater Port Jefferson Arts Council, from Friends World College, from a union of day laborers, as together we developed our tool kit to help our stranger/readers care. 

Teachers, human-rights activists, and healers took notice of the power of a pedagogy based on the dare to care. There was talk of replication and the creation of a manual to train new facilitators. The first two trainees asked to work in the jails, where the silencing was the greatest. A third founded our first Spanish workshop here on the East End, where women who worked as housecleaners, nannies, and cooks, many of them scholars or judges in their own countries, could write in the language of their memories and dreams. 

We published two bilingual magazines, along with a prison collection, then six other books, including two full-length anthologies used as textbooks by our college partners to help their students give the issues they studied a face. We received many invitations for our writers to give public readings. 

I will never forget the day when our favorite lieutenant called to purchase 250 books to train incoming officers in Suffolk County’s correctional academy. For 18 months, no officer was allowed to graduate without reading the stories of the women he or she would someday guard. 

We began to work in the schools, taking students with stories of growing up in poverty, racism, violence against immigrants, teen pregnancy, and early incarceration to write with college students on their campuses. Today it is our largest program, with eight school districts and five colleges involved.

And then, five years ago we created a new position for a justice and advocacy director, who just became our executive director, while I let go of the administrative journey to return my 70 hours a week to the literary work that set me on a course larger than I could have imagined. 

As I drive the long miles from my house in Sag Harbor to the campus of Hofstra University, the home of our new training institute in partnership with Hofstra’s Center for Civic Engagement, I look down at the copies of our manual “Paper Stranger” that I will be distributing to our cohort preparing to work in the field. And I think about how in this moment of history, when those coming into power are sanctioning hatred of the stranger, how doubly important are the stories that come from populations kept silenced, estranged, and apart.

I think about the notion of passing along the dare to care — how simple it is. And yet how profound are the ramifications as we move out of silence into speech. For when we care deeply enough, we find words we didn’t know we had. Each of us has a poetry of experience hidden deep inside us that can be called into being out of the stream of memories that bubble up to the surface from our hope and our anger and our grief. When we dare to imagine that someone might hear us and actually care, bit by bit we break out of the silence and isolation that is the fate of so many.

But what is caring, really? It is so much more than a feeling passed along to another, going nowhere. It is — and must always be — a very deep call to action. Otherwise our belief in society’s capacity to protect us will die even before it is properly born.

Yet this is the time when our stories are needed the most.

Erika Duncan is the author of the novels “A Wreath of Pale White Roses” and “Those Giants: Let Them Rise.” Her monthly “Encounters” series ran in the Long Island Weekly section of The New York Times for four years in the 1990s.

I first saw Streisand in Vegas in 1969. “Funny Girl” was behind her; “Yentl” some years later. But she was a star even then, with her nails and her empire-waisted gowns. I remember the audience at that time — husbands dragged from the gaming tables, bored. But wives seemed swept up. (Like her hairdo.)

She sang “People.” And “Happy Days Are Here Again,” made immortal by her duet with Judy Garland, another diva, long gone.

At 21 (me) and 27 (her), I was already a fan. I had listened to the album “My Name Is Barbra” in my bedroom at my parents’ home in Brooklyn constantly, staring at the album cover, one side a black-and-white picture of her as a 5-year-old, the cross-eyed look, the nose, a bow in her hair. And, on the other side, voluptuous, lying on her side, in a slinky green gown.

I was mesmerized by every song on that album: “Where Is the Wonder,” “Jenny Rebecca,” “I Wish I Were a Kid Again.”

Her CBS-TV specials were also part of those 1960s. “The Second Barbra Streisand Album” was out. “Cry Me a River,” “He Touched Me.” The liner notes read, “This young woman, a mere 20, has a stunning future ahead of her. And, remember, I told you so.”

How prescient.

I saw her again in D.C. in the early ’90s. She had a thousand more songs to choose from at that time, including Broadway stuff. 

She’s 74 now. Blond. Botoxed. And bigger, in more ways than one, than ever.

I saw her recently in Fort Lauderdale. When she came to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2012, I missed out on that, but watched “Funny Girl” on DVD. Then, in 2016, she came back to Brooklyn. I missed out on that one because I was summering in Provincetown. No way I was going to miss her this time around, even if it was in Florida and I live in Manhattan.

My husband, David, loves Miami. I love Babs. We booked a trip for a three-day weekend in early December and bought two tickets. The seats were $1,250 a pop! On the floor of a sports and entertainment arena minutes from Miami. As I’m a holder of an Amex Platinum card, they were discounted to a mere $900 each.

And there we were, Babs, opening to wild applause in a black pantsuit — nothing like Hillary would ever wear, this was sheer and dotted with sequins. She started out with “The Way We Were.” She likes to talk, too, and she is pretty political. But she decided, in Florida, anyway, post the election, not to talk about what’s-his-name, newly elected.

But behind her she had plenty of political agendas to impart by way of videos spanning decades of racial divides, gay-pride marches, politicians, women’s rights and heart-health issues, and wars, Vietnam and elsewhere, while she sang “Being at War With Each Other.” She talked about climate change, the absence of bees and butterflies, but she basically gave the crowd, all 18,000 of us, everything we wanted to hear. 

She did a medley of her “hip” period: “Stoney End” and the Donna Summer duet “Enough Is Enough.” A backup singer joined her front and center for that number.

Her voice cracks, but her notes last an inconceivable amount of time. The big thing about Babs is the way she performs a song. She really wanted to be an actress and not necessarily a singer. I for one am glad she found her voice and uses it to not only reach incredible heights of no other singer before (okay, Sinatra) but also to perform. Her mother has been quoted as saying, “She never sings a song the same way twice.” And she doesn’t. Not even after what has to be many thousands of times singing “People.”

Her nods to Sondheim always slay me. She sang one of his songs that I never heard her do before: “Losing My Mind” from “Follies.” I pretty much lost mine as she sang it.

“Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” really ratcheted up the applause, the cheers, the shouts of “We Love You, Barbra!”

After a brief intermission, she came out in a shimmering gray chiffon gown, long and twirly. She twirled and darted back and forth around the stage as she sang songs from “Funny Lady”: “How Lucky Can You Get,” “Isn’t This Better?” — which she introduced by saying, “My good friend Liza [another great daughter diva] sang this during some tribute or other to me.” 

Her album covers, her directing efforts, her heroes in filmmaking — she goes back to William Wyler, whom she called Willie. She talks about her crush on Marlon Brando. All of this, all of these people, appeared behind her in videos. A duet with Anthony Newley: “Who Can I Turn To?” The videos were huge behind her. But no bigger than she is, way larger than life.

Magnificent.

Hy Abady, formerly of Amagansett, has twice collected his “Guestwords” essays in books, the latest being “Back in The Star Again Again!”

You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave:

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead. 

— “King Lear,” Act IV, scene vii

What made Othello listen to Iago rather than his beloved Desdemona? What made Lear believe in his venal daughters, Goneril and Regan? Why didn’t he see through their unctuous protestations of fealty? What made Gloucester believe in the self-seeking Edmund over his loyal and honest Edgar? 

Dark energy is the force that is expanding the universe, and of course we know the “dark side” of the Force from the “Stars Wars” saga. Does negativity produce a certain charisma that’s lacking in exchanges between those who have each other’s best interests at heart? Characters like Iago are proto-demagogues because they possess the charisma that comes from unequivocal affects. 

It’s nice to think that reason will always triumph, but when you look back over your own history it’s often apparent that visceral emotion generally prevails in instances where character judgments have to be made, with ratiocination simply providing the supporting evidence after a choice has already been decided.

Hindsight is always 20-20, and there are few people who don’t wish they had chosen Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” But when you’re in the heat of the moment and faced with imminent desire or danger, you tend to rely on intuition. Coleridge, for instance, described Iago’s behavior as “motiveless malignity,” yet there was something magnetic about it that became the agent of Othello’s tragic fall.

This is a hurting season in which fear leads to blame. Angry words are exchanged in response to the surprising decisions that loved ones have made. Is this really the person I once knew? While tolerance might have prevailed in earlier exchanges, the stakes have risen, and a recent holiday passed in which the members of some families didn’t gather simply because they couldn’t bear the sight of one another. 

One of the most feared of the world’s rogue states is North Korea, where a dynasty begun by Kim Il-sung, carried on by his son Kim Jong-il and his grandson, the current leader, Kim Jong-un, flies in the face of its putative Communist ideology. How can a country where no freedom exists term itself the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea? Maybe the answer lies in Disney. America is the enemy, but the fantasy world of Disney characters is a favorite of the current leader, whose title is chairman of the Workers’ Party. 

Nothing makes sense anymore. In America a populist putsch results in the election of a billionaire who has now installed his own dynasty. The White House is filled with family members. The prospect of nepotism and off-the-charts ethical conflict looms in a way it never has before. 

Political figures are by nature larger than life, but when one arrives in office having, for good or bad, defied polls and pundits after waging what seems to have been an uphill fight, he or she achieves an almost mythic status. The highest office in the land is now occupied by what Hegel would have described as a figure of world-historical importance. Value judgments are irrelevant when a tsunami of support vaults a personage onto the stage of history, leaving those who had no idea of what was coming like aging heavyweights staggering to stay on their feet after taking a trouncing from the underdog.

Perhaps the only way to really understand what’s happening in this country and elsewhere, like England, where Brexit won, and France, where Marine Le Pen’s National Front is gaining an ever greater foothold, is to look at events with the perspective offered by tragedy. You might be frustrated by Lear, Othello, or for that matter Hamlet, but you don’t get angry at them for how they voted. They indeed have caused pain and even death to others, but they eventually suffer too. They’re the victims of themselves.

It’s Friday night. It’s been a long week filled with comeuppances and humiliations at the office. How many times have you had to bite your tongue? Life seems to be one big embarrassment. You stop off at the local bar after work to have a few drinks and, instead of leaving when you know you’ve had enough, decide you need just one more for the road. Perhaps it’s that final drink that results in the fender bender that earns you the D.W.I. 

After it’s all over, you could kick yourself. If you had gone straight home and didn’t feel you deserved any reward for your miserable life, none of this would have happened. On the other hand, there are those who would argue that it was all a learning experience in which you had a chance to modify your behavior before something even worse occurred.

Will the current inebriation turn out to be a learning experience?

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio” and of the blog The Screaming Pope.

After my first bout of puppy love, I began to question the meaning of true love. I yearned to find the love of my life.

Like most girls growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I mooned over movie stars, cut out their pictures from fan magazines, and longed to feel a grand passion like those portrayed on the silver screen: Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in “Splendor in the Grass,” Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons in “Spartacus.” 

“You’ll fall in love,” my gramma assured me.

“But how will I know?” I wondered.

“Oh, honey, you’ll just know. You’ll feel something special.”

Still, Gram’s words were too vague for me. I wanted examples, stories, details.

“You’ll think you’ve been hit over the head with a sledgehammer,” Sandra Dee’s mother told her in the movie “Gidget.” Well, I thought, that doesn’t sound too promising.

At college, we debated the question of true love in a freshman religion course. I was as perplexed as ever. The professor defined love: “Love exists in the presence of caring for someone more than you care for yourself.” His words left me cold. Where was the talk of fireworks, sparks, ardor, attachment, eroticism?

I continued in my angst. If love was like my mother and stepfather’s relationship, I wasn’t interested. If love meant fights and reconciliations, like I’d experienced with a boy in high school, I wanted no part of it.

Of course, I did fall in love — my junior year. We were to be married, but Vietnam intervened. 

It would be several years (and therapy sessions) later that I would fully understand that my complex issues with love and trust centered around one traumatic event in my childhood: my father’s abandonment of his wife and family when my sister and I were infants. He rejected us completely. We never saw or heard from him again. “Sperm donor” is how my sister refers to him now.

Today, I recall three great loves of my life. Yet, I’m more interested in finding joy and love and happiness in the moment.

Recently, I came across a card and a book my brother had given me on Valentine’s Day years ago. “I love you, sorta,” he had written. The book is “Love Is Walking Hand in Hand” by Charles Schulz. 

In the past few days, rereading this tiny tome has brought me pleasure. Schulz’s take on love is simple, yet profound. Love is in the little things — acts of kindness, sharing, being, caring. “Love is getting someone a glass of water in the middle of the night.” “Love is a phone call.”

I remember using the book in my kindergarten and first-grade classrooms long ago. Valentine’s Day was my favorite holiday at school, and I’d read the book aloud. The students would make valentine cards for their families and friends and write their own love essays. Here’s a glimpse:

Love is . . .

a nice, warm house on a cold day.

someone you can trust no matter what.

holding your puppy in your arms.

helping an old lady across the street.

being together in a family.

having a friend when you need it.

having someone to lay your head on.

whispering in a friend’s ear.

your baby brother hugging you.

sleeping in your own bed.

when people say “Hi” and smile at the person.

being nice and not calling names.

a party on your birthday. 

playing together. 

singing songs together.

when you care.

when something is hurt and you save it.

when your friend talks up for you.

knowing that a person likes you.

dancing.

a private life.

making up with someone.

a deep and tender feeling.

And, my favorite, love makes me feel good inside.

Here’s wishing you love in each moment of every day, whether you’re alone, with your family, or with the love of your life. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Dianne Moritz writes children’s books from her home in North Sea. She has had poems and stories recently in High Five and Hello, from the Highlights magazine group.

I have Zillowed the house I grew up in at 70 Seventh Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond district. The building consists of two six-room flats that my parents paid $12,500 for in 1937, which would be $200,000 now. Zillow’s current estimate is 22 times that, $4,407,925 to be precise; its estimated monthly rent $13,171. We rented out the lower flat for $60 a month, less than $1,000 now.

The website describes the house as “elegant, spacious, sunny with a master bedroom — a nice little back yard — [and] built in book cases [flanking] a decorative fireplace.”

But except for a modernized kitchen and laundry setup, the house seems just as it was 80 years ago. It wasn’t notably sunny when I lived there and still stands nudged between a similar house and an apartment building, so I don’t see how it can be now. The “nice little back yard” is surely the same one that was so small my father bought the shortest hose he could find at Woolworth’s to tend its one proud resident, a hydrangea bush. The bedroom was small, too, and became decidedly cramped when my mother without my father’s input switched from a double to twin beds with ornately initialed bedspreads declaring which bed was whose. And a call to the building’s agent confirms my expectation that the “decorative fireplace” still means as it did in 1937 that you’d really better not light a fire in it.

We were poor for a while, but I never felt it. We had enough food and heat and a sweetly functioning old Nash sedan. For 10 cents I attended movie matinees at the Coliseum on Clement Street, where one Saturday I won a drawing for an angel food cake and a bulging quart of Blum’s scoop-and-pack ice cream. Ten cents was also the kids’ price for the ballpark where my friends and I would watch the San Francisco Seals’ Dominic DiMaggio race with the lightness of a dandelion gone to seed to catch line drives in deep center field.

Don’t get me wrong, we’d have relished being rich, but to most of us on the block middle class was fine and pursuit of riches a waste of family quality time. Put another way, we didn’t think that bothering to get rich was cost-effective.

I vividly remember the built-in bookcases that are pictured in Zillow’s promotional literature. They were the inspiration of Irving Silberberg, my father’s first cousin who lived out of the closet with his gay partner, Bill Mitchell, for decades before it was really safe to do this in an area that still clung to gruff frontier ways.

The bookcases, bare in the Zillow photo, were stuffed with novels and histories of the Old West, some of their hard covers depicting heroic scenes of monks in the desert and explorers in the mountains. My mother favored John Muir and Willa Cather, my father Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, whom he read to me every Saturday when I was ill and bedridden for a couple of years.

Dick Warren, my best friend from around the corner at 620 Lake Street, I think it was, also enjoyed the books. One rainy afternoon when we were 13 he gleefully came upon a passage in a Fannie Hurst novel referring to the beautiful breasts of a bathing 15-year-old girl. He found this much more meaningful, as well as less expensive, than the $5 hard porn illustrated palm-sized booklets, available in the Roosevelt Junior High schoolyard, which claimed, on their bedraggled pink covers, to have been “Published in Persia.”

Dick was short, happy-go-lucky, and a perpetual adventurer. He was much braver than I at riding the Big Dipper at Playland at the Beach and bolder at snagging baseballs at the annual Seals Stadium ball scramble for kids. Sometimes on a Friday night after the movies, we’d go to Laurel Hill Cemetery, where he’d lead me past the grand tombs of senators and bandits to gravestones behind which we could crouch and peer through my mother’s opera glasses into back bedroom windows on Presidio Avenue in hopes of seeing a female schoolmate undressing. We failed. Whenever one of us thought he saw something significant the other snatched the glasses and had to refocus them, by which time the opportunity, if there really had been one, had passed.

But Dick was much more than a normal adolescent boy. He had a daunting moral courage. He was the only one in our group, including me, and as far as I saw the only non-Asian in all of Lowell High School, to eat lunch openly in the schoolyard with Nisei students after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t in anyone’s face about it. He just did it. And while no one emulated him, no one criticized him either.

He also, humiliatingly, robbed me of home runs in the street baseball games we organized on spring and fall afternoons after school.

We played at the dead end of a street that stopped abruptly at a low stone wall separating Seventh Avenue from the Presidio, then a sparsely developed old military base established by the Spanish in the late 1700s. There were six of us, three to a team — Bob Katz, Dick McFarland, Dick Schaefer, Dick Boyle, who was to pitch for St. Ignatius High, Dick Warren, and me.

Sometimes, we’d let Larry Kahn, who was a couple of years younger, in the game to pitch for both sides and get a couple of at-bats that didn’t count. Mr. Sheehy, who I believe was looking for work — we were still in the Great Depression — would come home and volunteer to catch so that foul tips didn’t roar down the hill to Lake Street and its speeding traffic.

Our parents were never there or otherwise monitoring us. They were either at work, looking for work, or home preparing dinner, which we were required to be present for, hands and faces washed, by 5:30.

In my memory’s eye the wall was about 200 feet up from our chalk-designated home plate. Balls that cleared it were home runs. I never did clear it. Never hit a home run. I was a line-drive hitter and number-one window breaker. The few times I connected well and straight enough for a homer, Dick, who was on the other team, would run back to the wall, propel himself way up, catch it back and bare-handed, and bring it down, grinning and chiding me that I’d never slug one past him.

I didn’t take this at all well and actually started doing stuff I detested, like push-ups and lifting weights. I was going to hit that home run.

But we’d played our last game. December 1941 came and with it the war. We’d briefly be going away to college and then into the Army or Navy.

One evening in 1942 when we were almost 17, Dick, who was eager to become a Navy fighter pilot, came over and sat down carefully in one of my mother’s wobbly antique chairs facing the bookshelves and decorative fireplace to check out a test for colorblindness that was in our current issue of Reader’s Digest. On each of about 10 pages were gobs of differently colored dots one cluster of which formed a letter or number. If you weren’t colorblind you were likely to identify all of them. If you were, you’d likely miss them all. As Dick did.

When I came home from the war four years later, filled out and stronger, one of the first things I did was retrieve my old bat and a ball from my closet and set up a little game.

Larry Kahn was there to pitch, a new kid on the block offered to catch. I cleared the wall on my second swing, but I wasn’t at all sure I’d hit it high and far enough to get it past Dick. I’ll never know. He couldn’t be there. Unable to fly for the Navy because he was colorblind, he’d joined the infantry and been killed in Germany, in the grim, frigid Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, shortly before the war in Europe ended. He was 19.

Richard Rosenthal’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York magazine. He lives in East Hampton.

If life can be compared to being on a teeter-totter, the longer you live, the more unbalanced it becomes, with the memories you have accumulated, the experiences, good, bad, and indifferent, outweighing your present, causing you to rise, metaphorically, higher in the air . . . and off the ground. With feet dangling, your viewpoint of the world is more expansive: You see more, and you see farther. 

It is the vista that produces nostalgia — the melding of a foreseeable future, where you might go, and your realized past, where you have been. And your ability to stay in that moment — to balance the mix of emotions that sweep in like opposing currents — eventually determines the ultimate angle of the teeter-totter; that is, how you will feel about, and thus lead, your life. 

Right now, I am rising — in age, that is. And with it the gap to the past is getting larger. Sometimes the memories are hard to pull up, sometimes they are not. But mostly they are fluid, bouncing through the “thought stream,” a term often used by mindful meditation practitioners to cite one’s continually running engine of a mind. 

I’ll share one such memory, or flurry of thoughts, I experienced last summer when I stopped at the Sagaponack General Store, the once post office of my youth that over the years had turned into a place for coffee, bagels, the newspaper, and more. What I always liked about the store was its whimsical, beach-swept look, and the way, no matter its evolution toward a trendy nosh spot, it retained much of the old feel, including rows of old postage slots visible in the large front-right window. To me it bridged the old Hamptons and the new, and it was a comfort to know that the part I remembered from my childhood remained. 

But more than anything, the store sold my favorite drink — Hampton Dairy Lemon Flavored Iced Tea, originally made by Schwenk’s Dairy in East Hampton, a brew colloquially known in the area as Bonac Tonic.

On that day, I realized, with a start, that sometime over the winter the store had vanished — not physically, of course, but it had been taken over by Pierre’s restaurant in Bridgehampton. I had strode in with my head down, but once I looked up I thought I was lost: The inside had been reconfigured, brightly painted, spiffed up, looking like a swank New York City bistro. I was shocked and more than a bit dismayed, but still I trudged on to the back refrigerator, looking for the item I came for: Bonac Tonic. 

In one word, I can tell you why I liked this tea so much: sugar. I had the pleasure of touring North Carolina extensively at one time in my life, and during my visit I drank so much sweet tea my molars hurt for weeks after. But I loved the flavor, the artificial pick-me-up, and even the eventual crash after, because I knew, right around the corner, at any barbecue joint that was open, I could get my fix. 

The Sagg Store, purveyor of Bonac Tonic, was my outlet for that same high, and I savored it during the summer months when I was out in the Hamptons, after playing basketball or taking a long bike ride, or after a nice day at the beach — a refreshing, saccharine treat before dinner.

But Pierre’s, to my horror, did not carry Bonac Tonic. What they had instead was an assortment of fine-looking iced tea varieties housed in pretty, ornamental bottles. This was in great contrast to my beloved brand, which came in a plump green paper container, somehow constructed so that whenever I opened the spout a good portion of the sweet stuff spilled out on my hands. 

Tempering my dejection, I selected a bottle that looked the most decadent and went to the counter. There, a pretty young woman with an angelic face and looking prim and proper in her Pierre’s uniform frowned when I set the bottle in front of her. She then added a quick headshake to the grimace.

“Don’t drink that,” she said, in what I interpreted as an Eastern European accent.

I blinked back at her. “Why?”

“It’s not good. I tried it and didn’t like it.”

“Really?”

“Better to try something else.” 

It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so I went back to the refrigerator and chose another brand, this one in a less shapely bottle. I set it in front of the woman and she smiled.

“That’s very good. I’ve drank that. That you should get.”

I paid, thanked her, and left. It was only outside, right before I opened the bottle, that I had an epiphany — while many things have changed in the Hamptons, and in my life since my youth, including the passing of the old Sagg Store and its bounty of Bonac Tonic, what remained was human camaraderie, a looking out for one another, and, on a personal level, new beginnings. 

Let me explain. In the early 1920s my grandmother and grandfather, separately, left Ireland and came to America, finding themselves, after a few years, working on the East End, in Wainscott specifically, on a wealthy estate in Georgica. They set roots, had two boys who grew up and set roots in the area, as did their children. Walking from the store, I had the feeling that this young woman might be starting a similar journey, perhaps forging her own future in Sagaponack and, on the way, in the present, helping someone who was looking back enjoy a new brand of tea.

Which, just as she promised, was very good. 

John McCaffrey is the author of “Two Syllable Men,” from Vine Leaves Press, and “The Book of Ash,” a science fiction novel.

Recently I went to Washington, D.C., to participate in a two-day event sponsored by the Citizens Climate Lobby, or C.C.L., as it is called by its members. More than 300 volunteers visited 350 offices of Republican and Democratic members of Congress to advocate action to reduce global warming.

C.C.L.’s proposal is to charge a fee on fossil fuels proportional to the carbon dioxide they emit and to return the proceeds to the American people in equal shares. This would provide the incentive to move toward climate-friendly sources of energy. Low and middle-income people would benefit because the rebates they would receive would exceed their added energy costs. And far from killing jobs, it would actually increase the number of good American jobs by more than two million.

On the first day we practiced how to approach members of Congress effectively. Then we were updated on the prospects for climate-change policy after the election. 

Some of the news, of course, was bad. For example, President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have greatly reduced carbon emissions by electric utilities, is likely to be undone. The status of the Paris agreement on climate change is in question.

However, there are hopeful developments, as well, and I believe it is important to keep our eyes on the positive. Here are some specifics:

There has been a significant shift among Republican members of Congress toward considering action against climate change. This is key, because unless support comes from both sides of the aisle, nothing will happen. This year, the number of Republicans in Congress who were supportive and positive toward C.C.L. lobbyists was 10 times the number who were negative or antagonistic. The favorable-to-unfavorable ratio is three times better than it was just two years ago. While this doesn’t mean that all these Republicans are ready right now to endorse a specific proposal, it does indicate movement.

Recent polls show increasing support for climate action among Republican voters. This should encourage many of the climate-aware Republicans on Capitol Hill to go public with their support, which up to now has been politically dangerous in the G.O.P.

Several Republican senators have spoken out in favor of climate action. Specifically mentioned were Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Industry support for action on climate is increasing. What industry wants most of all is a policy that is predictable, that can be relied upon even when administrations change, and that uses market forces rather than regulation. C.C.L.’s proposal fits those needs perfectly.

There is increasing support in conservative media that have heretofore opposed climate action. For example, The Wall Street Journal recently published an article praising a Washington State initiative to put a price on carbon emissions there. Here again, it is the use of market forces rather than regulation that is appealing to many conservatives who recognize the need for action but don’t want the government to pick the winners and losers among competing low-carbon energy technologies.

During a panel discussion, a speaker mentioned that one of President-elect Trump’s priorities is to invest a large amount of money (perhaps a trillion dollars over 10 years) in improving our transportation and energy infrastructure. The panelist suggested that a portion of the proceeds of a carbon fee could be dedicated to this purpose, thereby winning the support of deficit hawks in Congress who otherwise would oppose it, leading to a bill that the new president might want to sign.

On the second day of the program, I participated in four lobbying visits. Three happened to be with Democrats. The fourth was with our own Republican Representative Lee Zeldin. Although Mr. Zeldin had once voted for a House resolution opposing climate action, more recently he has moved in a more favorable direction, and that came through in our meeting. Not long ago he joined the Climate Solutions Caucus, a bipartisan group of House members working to develop a plan that could win acceptance in Congress. Regardless of party, this is something we should applaud. 

C.C.L.’s strategy is to avoid framing climate change as a partisan issue, but instead to approach constructively all members of Congress who will listen. C.C.L.’s leaders are convinced that there is a real possibility, even likelihood, that a critical number of Republicans will join with enough Democrats to get a climate bill through Congress this session, and that with the right incentives President Trump might be induced to sign it. There are no guarantees, of course, but there is reason for hope. This is no time to give up.

If you haven’t yet joined the Citizens Climate Lobby, please go to the website citizensclimatelobby.org to learn more about its proposal, and then click on the button to sign up. The more people C.C.L. can count as members, the more effective it will be. This is a unique opportunity to stand on the right side of history. 

John Andrews lives in Sag Harbor. Citizens Climate Lobby will meet on Jan. 22 at noon at the Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse in Bridgehampton.

The first day of the new year is usually about hangovers and party cleanups, but in some coastal areas of the Northern Hemisphere it’s also when groups of people run into the ocean for no reason other than doing something on the high end of the stupid scale. 

While walking the dog on the beach on New Year’s Eve I saw a billboard announcing “Annual Polar Bear Plunge — January 1 — Main Beach, East Hampton — Benefit: East Hampton Food Pantries.” And this is how I decided to do it: Hmm. Never done this. Sounds like fun. What the hell.

Unlike a foot race or a mountain climb, the plunge demands no special training. In fact the only real endurance involves putting up with friends’ and relatives’ reactions: “You’re an idiot,” “Why would you do that?” along with variations of each. 

Another difference between the plunge and other tests of the human spirit is the minimal amount of anticipation involved. I awoke the morning of the event with no actual recollection that in less than five hours I would be running nearly naked into very cold water. It was only after my second cup of coffee that a lonely thought drifted into my consciousness, something like, “It’s January and I need to find a bathing suit.”

With plunge time fast approaching, I sat in front of a plate of scrambled eggs mixed with salmon and sweet onions at Nick and Toni’s, the training table favored by local plungers. Actually I made that up. I really have no idea where plungers eat their last meal prior to plunging, or even if any last meals are involved at all. For all I knew plunging was an activity best done on an empty stomach, with a celebratory meal consumed after its successful completion.

As we drove to the beach my main concern wasn’t how my body would react to plunging into water colder than I have ever experienced, but three thoughts did consume me. 

First concern: The polar bear plunges I had seen on television took place in truly nasty winter weather — snow and sleet and wind and such — making the contrast between people in bathing suits and their environment much more dramatic. But today’s weather was cloudlessly sunny, temperature around 45 degrees, with a gentle breeze. Would this be a real plunge or some faux climate-change-diminished castrated version? 

Second concern: I had received no coaching and in fact no instructions at all regarding plunging. What was I supposed to do? The TV clips showed a bunch of people running into angry surf, but then what? How long was I supposed to stay in the water? Was I supposed to dive in? What was the minimum plunging standard I was expected to meet to qualify as a plunger? 

Last, and probably most important, concern: Why was my girlfriend’s 16-year-old son driving me to the plunge and signaling left when in fact he wanted to turn right? 

We arrived along with hundreds of other people, plungers and their support and media teams, parking in a lot much fuller than during the hottest summer beach days. I stripped down to my bathing suit, wrapped myself in a towel, and walked beachward. The amount of actual organization was minimal, basically a rope stretched about a foot off the sand, separating — I’m not sure exactly what from whom. It seemed whoever runs this plunge believes events involving crowds require ropes providing the feeling of planning and organization. As I stepped over the rope I wasn’t exactly sure whether I was entering or leaving a designated area; nevertheless, I was now standing with a whole bunch of other plungers, observers, and pets.

At my age I’m always mindful of doing something for the first time in my life; as one gets older, first experiences are rarer and demand respect and appreciation. Standing barefoot wearing only my bathing suit surrounded by others similarly unclothed, I was aware this was a first for me. Another thought was that in a few minutes I would be very, very cold and uncomfortable, an obvious realization that had somehow eluded me until that moment.

Plunge time approached but I had no idea what actual plunging signal to expect — a gunshot? A flag? A horn? It turned out to be no signal at all; the consensus quickly spread that there wasn’t much point idling around with a bunch of skimpily clad strangers on a chilly beach so if the idea was to get into the ocean then let’s get on with it already. And so we did, running across the few yards of wet sand and splashing into the water, a kind of D-Day in reverse, with bullets of cold water hitting our skin.

I ran as fast as I could until the water reached my waist, at which point I wondered whether I had actually plunged or whether more plunging remained to be done. In that moment it occurred to me that there may be various degrees of plunging ranging from below the waist to chest high to full submersion, and I didn’t want there to be any question but that I did the whole plunge, so I executed a shallow dive to dunk my head and every other body part below waterline, if just for an instant.

There are two points on which I should have received practical information. The first is that the human body is a machine evolved to react in specific ways to various stimuli. One of those stimuli is the rapid application of very cold liquid to a significant portion of the body’s surface area, causing in response an equally rapid and completely involuntary inhalation. Darwin might explain it as a mechanism where the body fights for short-term survival by rapidly filling the lungs with air upon falling into cold water. Maybe it helped our ice age ancestors increase their chances of surviving falls into glaciers, I don’t know exactly. 

In my case that mechanism worked perfectly as I plunged into the icy water and involuntarily took a quick and deep breath of . . . seawater. First my mouth tasted it, then my throat was chilled by it, and finally my lungs took in an unwelcome half-cup or so of the very cold briny. Immediately I stood up, turned stumbling toward shore, coughing hard while doing my best to appear as competent as possible. Upon making it to dry land I spotted my girlfriend, Nancy, who was carrying my towel and fleece shirt. I ran to her and made fast use of both.

The second relevant point I would have benefited from knowing is that my feet would take the brunt of the experience far more than any other body part. Because they would be immersed in very cold water longest, the blood vessels in the feet would naturally contract as the body preserves heat by keeping it in its core and away from extremities. 

Putting on my fleece shirt, wrapping myself in a dry towel, and driving home didn’t take long. The entire experience had been piercingly awakening and electrically enlivening. A big smile was an easy reaction — not just for me but also for everyone else who had plunged. 

Upon arriving home I took a long hot shower that unexpectedly caused my feet to sting with chilblains — reaction to the rapid switch between temperature extremes mentioned above. But that soon passed. Back in dry clothes I felt a burning in my throat and lungs as my body did its best to expel what saltwater remained in there. 

Finally, just to make sure I’m an actual plunger, I looked up the definition of plunge: “Jump or dive quickly and energetically.” Check the box: I am a Polar Bear Plunger.

Michael Kubin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He lives part time in East Hampton.

In subways, restaurants, and other public places, I see more and more caregivers totally absorbed in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets while they are with young children. When the children fuss and try to get their caregivers’ attention, the caregivers often ignore them.

As a professor of child psychology, I am deeply concerned. Several of my field’s greatest scholars — people such as Erik Erikson, John Bowlby, and D.W. Winnicott — felt that caregivers must be responsive to young children for the sake of the children’s emotional health. Caregivers, these scholars said, do not need to attend to absolutely everything a child does, but they should be sufficiently responsive to give the child confidence that care will be forthcoming when needed. 

These scholars wrote before the era of mobile devices, but I’m sure they would have been astonished by the degree to which caregivers with mobile devices ignore children. A few current researchers — the psychologist Sherry Turkle, in particular — have described how the devices distract caregivers, and I would like say more about the risks. 

According to Winnicott, Bowlby, and Erikson, caregiver responsiveness affects children’s sense of worth. When caregivers frequently ignore children, children get the feeling that they don’t matter. A 2015 online survey commissioned by AVG technologies suggests that parents’ extensive use of mobile devices can produce this result. 

The survey sampled 8 to 13-year-olds and their parents in several nations, including the U.S. More than half the children reported that their parents checked their mobile phones too often, and more than half the parents agreed. Moreover, a third of the children who complained indicated that their parents’ preoccupation with the phones made the children feel unimportant. Although only a minority of the children gave this response, it is worrisome. 

Bowlby and Erikson also emphasized that caregiver responsiveness influences children’s feelings about new relationships. If caregivers are accessible and responsive, children approach others optimistically, looking for positive responses. If, however, children feel that caregivers may be emotionally absent or unhelpful when needed, the children find it difficult to reach out to others in a confident manner. 

An in-depth study by Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician, and her co-investigators provides a vivid picture of how mobile devices interfere with caregiver responsiveness. In 2013, Radesky’s team conducted 55 observations of caregivers and their children in fast-food restaurants in the Boston area, primarily in middle-class neighborhoods. The observers, who sat at nearby tables, estimated the children’s ages to range from infancy to about 10 years. Seventy-three percent of the caregivers used mobile devices during the meals; 29 percent used their devices almost the entire time. Some never looked away from them.

While the caregivers were absorbed in their devices, the children frequently wriggled or engaged in provocative behavior to try to get their attention, but the caregivers generally ignored or scolded them. One young boy repeatedly tried to lift a female caregiver’s face up from a tablet screen, but she just kept pushing his hand away. When another child tried to get his caregiver’s attention, she kicked his leg under the table. A few tried to quiet the children by giving them their own tablets to play with. 

My guess is that the rejection was painful to the children. Bowlby’s colleague Mary Ainsworth has shown that one way children avoid this pain is to stop caring about others. Not wishing to experience further rejections, they keep others at a distance. 

Does this mean many of today’s children are doomed to lives of total isolation? Probably not. They can use the new technology to avoid this outcome. As Turkle observes in her recent book, “Reclaiming Conversation,” people can connect with others on digital devices without risking the rejection they fear in deeper, face-to-face relationships. But, Turkle says, their relationships are not as rich as they might be.

I recognize the need for more research on caregivers’ use of mobile devices, but I believe that health professionals should do more to alert parents to the risks. I had imagined that professionals talk about mobile devices with new parents. To check if I was correct, my colleague Kelly Conover and I spoke with six mothers who had given birth within the past three years (two within the past month) and three nurses who are familiar with hospital postpartum-area practices. The parents and nurses live or work in the Northeast or California. 

To my surprise, everyone told us that health professionals say nothing to new mothers about placing limits on mobile devices. Indeed, mothers routinely text friends, even during the quiet moments of labor, and when the baby is born, they hold smartphone parties, sharing photos and messages about the baby. The only limit anyone mentioned was a notice telling mothers not to unplug medical equipment to recharge their phones.

Official health organizations also have been rather silent on how mobile devices might promote inattentive parenting. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ new media-use guidelines include the sentence “Attentive parenting requires time away from screens,” but the academy needs to speak more fully and forcefully on the matter. 

The AVG survey suggested that many caregivers realize at some point that they should reduce their use of mobile devices and pay more attention to their children. But this isn’t easy to do. Caregivers, like most people, have become very attached to the technology. 

I recommend behavioral techniques. When sitting across from a child at a meal, for example, caregivers might reward themselves with a sip of coffee or a bite of tasty food only after spending a few seconds paying attention to the child. To be comfortable with the process, caregivers should initially keep the periods between rewards very brief and lengthen the periods very gradually. I bet that before long they will enjoy the children even more than the technological devices. 

William Crain is a professor of psychology at the City College of New York and a part-time Montauk resident.

He was big: 6 feet 4 inches, 260 pounds, and all muscle. He had hands that seemed as large as catcher’s mitts. His large, rectangular face and broad features reminded me of one of the heads on Easter Island. He played football in the 1930s for John Adams High School in Queens. One day, he beat up three pro-Nazi members of the German-American Bund, which supported Hitler in the 1930s. For that heroic act he was briefly known as the Knight of Woodhaven Boulevard. 

His name was Abe Simon. He was a friend of my father and my uncle Harold. He became a heavyweight boxing contender. 

I met him three times. While I found his appearance intimidating, he was really a gentle giant, soft-spoken and quick to smile. I was surprised that one who looked so hard and tough was a lover of classical music and always had a radio tuned to WQXR, New York’s classical music station. He was such an odd mixture of tough and tender that The New Yorker published a profile of him in April 1941. He lived on 215th Street in Bayside, Queens, with his wife, daughter, and son, and worked as a liquor salesman. 

By the 1950s, when I met Abe, he was suffering from severe arthritis that made walking painful. Back in the 1930s, however, he seemed indestructible.

My father told me that Abe, while playing football in high school, broke the leg of a running back on an opposing team. Some boxing promoters sitting in the stands had watched and admired the big, hulking football player and thought he could be molded into a heavyweight boxer. They offered him a lot of money and said they would arrange for him to be trained by one of boxing’s legendary trainers, Freddie Brown. 

In addition to being a great trainer, Freddie was also considered one of the best cut men in the sport. Among some of the more famous boxers he worked with were Rocky Graziano, Rocky Marciano, Larry Holmes, and Roberto Duran. Freddie had started out as a boxer, and his face showed the result: a cauliflower ear, a nose that looked as if it had been split with an ax. His knuckles and fingers were as gnarled as the weathered bark on an ancient tree trunk. Yet, like Abe, he had an engaging and affable smile. He taught Abe all the tricks of the trade as well as the basics: jabbing, feinting, slipping punches, right crosses, left uppercuts, dodging, weaving. It all paid off.

Abe had his first fight in March 1935, winning by a knockout against Jim Dowling. Abe won his next 13 fights, most by knockouts, before he had two losses. One was to Lou Nova, the other to Buddy Baer, brother of the heavyweight champion Max Baer. 

Then, in 1940, Abe knocked out one of the finest heavyweights of the 20th century, Jersey Joe Walcott, a future champion. Now Abe was a contender for the heavyweight title, which was held by Joe Louis. 

On March 21, 1941, in Olympia Stadium in Detroit, Abe challenged Louis. He was larger and stronger than Louis, but not as quick and not as skillful. He lasted 13 rounds and lost by a technical knockout. Abe had another shot at the title on March 27, 1942, when he fought Louis again, this time in Madison Square Garden. He lost again by a T.K.O., but claimed that he had risen from the canvas before the referee had counted to 10. 

It was Abe’s last fight. He had a good run for seven years, losing 10 bouts and winning 37 — 53 percent by knockouts. He was smart enough to retire before suffering any injuries to his brain, and then wrote an article about his retirement from boxing for Esquire magazine.

Because of his imposing appearance, he had a striking though intermittent career as an actor. In the movie “On the Waterfront” he played a thug in the employ of Johnny Friendly, the dockworkers’ crooked union boss portrayed by Lee J. Cobb. In one scene, Karl Malden, standing in the hold of a ship, is seen urging the dockworkers to rebel against the criminal union that has been keeping them in bondage to poverty and victims of violence and shakedowns. Signaled by a nod from Cobb, Abe throws a beer can that hits Malden’s head. It was a startling scene, and Abe — a Jew — felt uncomfortable throwing a beer can at a character who was a priest. 

After “Waterfront,” Abe appeared in the movies “Never Love a Stranger” and the 1962 “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” as well as in several television dramas.

Abe died on Oct. 24, 1969, 11 years to the day after my father died. I am grateful to both men, for while it was my father who introduced me to boxing, it was Abe Simon who exemplified the life of a boxer. I had admired Abe from a distance, but I would never have wanted to follow in his footsteps, never mind that I didn’t wear size-13 shoes.

Jeffrey Sussman is the author of a new book, “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing.” He lives part time in East Hampton.