I have a suggestion for the students, faculty, and alumni at Yale, where the naming of a residential college in 1931 to honor John C. Calhoun, an 1804 graduate from South Carolina, is being reconsidered. Calhoun had a notable political career — congressman, senator, secretary of state, and vice president twice — but by 1850, when he died, he had become notorious for his advocacy of slavery as “a positive good,” not only in the South but in new states and territories, and for arguing that Southern states had a constitutional right to “nullify” federal legislation.

If the residential college is to be renamed, an alternative might be Clay College, to honor Cassius Marcellus Clay.

No, not that Clay. I mean the white, Kentucky-born, antislavery Clay, a prominent figure in American social and political life in the 19th century — he lived from 1810 to 1903 — and, yes, the man for whom Muhammad Ali’s grandfather Herman named a son, who in turn named his son Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Ali’s full birth name. 

Like Calhoun, the original Clay graduated from Yale, in 1832. He was born into a wealthy Kentucky family whose circle included his cousin Henry Clay (Cassius adopted Henry’s “American System,” promoting Northern industry alongside Southern free-labor agriculture), the Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which legalized separation of the races: “Our Constitution is color-blind,” he objected), and the Robert Todd family of Lexington. Cassius and Mary Todd, Lincoln’s future wife, began a lifelong friendship when she was 13 and he was a 19-year-old student at Transylvania University (founded in Lexington in 1780 by Jefferson and the Virginia Legislature, before western Virginia became Kentucky).

Justice Harlan was, like Clay, an earthy Kentuckian who attended Transylvania; his fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harvard Law School) called him “the last tobacco-chomping justice.” Harlan’s encomium to Clay, shortly after his death, was typical of others: “There was a more striking combination of manly beauty and strength in his face than in the face of any man whom I ever saw. I always had the highest regard for his integrity of character, his manliness, and his fidelity to his own convictions.”

I first came across Cassius Clay while writing my previous “Guestwords” piece, “Am I a Racist?” Even the briefest glance into his life is engrossing. By the time he transferred to Yale early in 1831, he had already inherited from his father thousands of acres of rich bluegrass country and 17 slaves. He graduated not merely with honors — he was chosen to deliver the centennial George Washington birthday address on Feb. 22, 1832 — but as a fervent abolitionist. 

His life after Yale could not have differed more from Calhoun’s. While Clay was emancipating the slaves left to him by his father and carrying the abolitionist campaign to his Kentucky neighbors (he began publishing The True American in Lexington in 1845, exhorting 600,000 white Kentuckians to resist a “despotic and irresponsible minority” of 31,000 slaveholders), Calhoun was pushing the case for extending slavery into new states and territories.

Clay became a founding leader in the Republican Party and promoted Lincoln’s nomination for president in the election of 1860. Calhoun’s pro-slavery views still influenced that election, 10 years after his death. When Jefferson Davis, as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, told his constituents that if a Republican was elected in 1860, “let the Union be dissolved,” the future president of the Confederacy invoked Calhoun’s ghost: “As did the great and good Calhoun, from whom is drawn [this] expression of value, I love and venerate the union of those states — but I love liberty and Mississippi more.”

(Davis was in fact born in Kentucky, two years before Cassius Clay, and also went to Transylvania University. He then graduated from West Point and served seven years in the U.S. Army before he moved to Mississippi and entered politics.)

American historians have largely ignored Cassius Clay. The most recent biography appeared in 1976, a self-described “biographical essay” by H. Edward Richardson that is important more for locating than for using the numerous archives of letters, legal documents, newspaper articles, and earlier books and articles pertaining to Clay’s life. It could serve as a guidebook for a young Ph.D. who would make his mark with a reassessment of an important figure in American history.

Clay was, for example, Lincoln’s ambassador to Russia during the Civil War. His page on the U.S. State Department website calls him “the most famous Southern emancipationist” and credits him with maintaining “Russian support for the Union cause” at a time when both France and England were actively supporting the Confederacy. It concludes, “In 1867, Clay played a key role in the purchase of Alaska.”

One archive of Clay papers is in Berea College, established in Kentucky in 1855 on land that Clay donated, and with money he provided to its founder, John G. Fee. It was the first American college to admit blacks and whites, men and women; its motto remains “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth.”

Clay’s importance in antebellum politics was attested by the great newspaperman Horace Greeley, who founded The New York Tribune in 1841 to further “the end of all government — the welfare of the people.” By 1845 Greeley joined the antislavery movement and read Clay’s new paper The True American — “the first paper which ever bearded the monster in his den,” he wrote. In 1848 he published “The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay.” Promising readers “passages and pages which have rarely been excelled in vigor, in forecast, or in true eloquence,” Greeley predicted that the book would be “the trumpet-call to the wide battle-field in which the liberties of mankind are now to be struggled for.”

Cassius Clay was, in the tenor of his times, as devoted to his native state as his pro-slavery opponents were to theirs. In his 1885 memoirs, he boasted of his contributions not only to “the overthrow of American slavery [and] the salvation of the Union,” but to “the restoration of the autonomy of the states.” The difference, however, is that for Calhoun and Davis and others, defending “states’ rights” was merely a mask for protecting slavery not only in their home states but wherever the country expanded. 

Despite Lincoln’s often repeated promise while pursuing the presidency to “let slavery alone where it is,” Southern states began to secede within weeks of his election in November 1860. Jefferson Davis was named president of the new Confederacy a month before Lincoln was sworn in as president of the Union on March 4, 1861.

The Confederacy had no interest in Lincoln’s explicit inaugural promise: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Exactly a week later, on March 11, the Constitution of the Confederate States was formally adopted.

That document was in fact copied virtually intact from the U.S. Constitution — except for a single permanent injunction: “No law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” Unrestrained expansion of slavery was the sole objective of secession, the single reason why Confederate flags began to replace the stars and stripes over Southern states (but not Kentucky).

Most telling, Southerners’ professed love for states’ rights was unrequited. As in the Union they fought, their central government was supreme: “This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 allowed racists in both the North and the South to restrict voting rights for blacks and to impose strict color lines, especially in education, which lasted nearly 60 years. After 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated education unconstitutional, racists were mostly restrained by the federal government. They did not, however, give up either their goals or their states’ rights mask. Working within each state, they have succeeded in creating today’s appalling inequalities between primarily white and primarily black public schools — in resources, quality of education, and physical environment.

Incredibly, Congress last December revamped its No Child Left Behind laws, passing with uncommon bipartisanship the cynically named Every Student Succeeds Act, which returns full power over education to the states.

At the same time, however, Connecticut residents have brought a civil case against the state executive in Hartford, alleging inequitable funding of public schools. Its citations include two neighboring school districts, the wealthier (and whiter) of which buses students to school, while students in the poorer district have to find their own transportation or walk to school. 

Readers familiar with the various cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education will remember the black minister in 1940s South Carolina who petitioned his school district to provide a bus for his daughter’s school, as it did for white schools — and was quickly hounded out of his job and the county.

The website of the Connecticut Coalition that brought the case is ccjef.org. A judge recently ruled strongly for the Coalition, and the attorney general is appealing. The case could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. I would like to live long enough to see that.

Malcolm Mitchell, until recently a part-time resident of East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. 

We live in a world awash in facts and figures. Daily the media report on the sophisticated ways that corporations use big data to identify and track our smallest purchases and our larger political decisions. And who has not been at a dinner in recent years when someone has reached for an iPhone or tablet to settle a dispute — the exact number of Michael Phelps’s Olympic medals or the difference between median and mode. 

When the search for answers turns us away from each other and toward our individual screens, the pleasure of conversation is too often lost. The presence of so many screens in our lives challenges our tolerance for not knowing, for living with questions rather than so many answers.

Recently I have begun to think I would be happier if I knew less and were more empty-headed. Given the finite space in my aging brain or, more accurately, my limited ability to recall what I have already crammed into it, I want to forget more. More of the names and numbers, the passwords and coded identities we are urged to take on. 

Forgetting has gotten a bad rap, associated as it is with growing old and the absent-minded scholar. But perhaps there’s another story to tell. Perhaps forgetting and remembering are not opposites, one all good and the other all bad. Perhaps they are part of the same selective processes through which we become ourselves. We are constantly engaged in a curatorial project in which we edit our conscious thoughts in response to our life experiences. Forgetting is not an absence or lack but, as the German philosopher Hans Gadamer suggests, a condition of the mind that nourishes and promotes renewal.

Although my curiosity about forgetting is prompted by my age, 72, it might benefit everyone to do some serious housecleaning. I know that many of my age-mates are more given to serious anxiety about losing information than to playful quips about senior moments. We are members of the growing demographic of young-old, the graceless term that sociologists have given to those of us between 60 and 80, no longer middle-aged and not yet frail elderly. For us, senior is here and now.

In our youth-oriented culture, everyone wants to live longer but no one wants to age. I am different only in one regard — the pleasure I take in forgetting. Names of friends, entertainment celebrities, favorite songs and restaurants fly in and out of my brain as easily as the wrens that flutter in and out of the birdhouses that flank our bedroom windows. And I am happy to let it all go, as well might my younger friends and colleagues. 

I heard my first jokes about bad memory when barely 40. It was early, but my close friend Pat, who was always fast with a playful quip, taught me that it was okay to have senior moments in middle age as long as we redeemed ourselves with a touch of self-mockery. My initial panic about lost bits of information abated quickly when I realized that it was only a matter of an hour or a day, the pressure of the moment gone, that the missing information would make itself known. Always there, not always available.

Memory became a more serious matter in the following decade when, mired down in the practical and psychological tasks of caring for my two elderly and fragile parents, I turned to prescription medications to combat debilitating insomnia. Despite my best efforts to find alternative phrases, I began to miss essential nouns and adjectives, as well as simple information. For a teacher and writer whose life work has been closely tied to finding the right words, this new kind of forgetting was deeply troubling. Language is a central way we make sense of experience, and forgetting words seemed to signal a loss of control, if not of a meaningful world.

It was two decades later with the urging of David, my younger partner, that I was able to free myself from chemical dependency — no mean feat, requiring the support of both psychotherapist and cognitive behavioral therapist. Initially thrilled by the achievement of night after night of unmedicated sleep, it was only several months later that I recognized a slow improvement in memory affirming that I was not suffering from serious dementia.

Today, we are all on information overload. Living on the internet we have come to assume that we should be able to access facts and figures, ideas and history, in ever faster and more efficient ways. What about the virtues of slow thinking? Like slow cooking, slow thinking allows ideas to simmer, conflicting opinions to be thoughtfully weighed, and our tendency to rush to judgments short-circuited. Then we are better able to recognize that the important differences are not resolvable in evidenced-based arguments but are grounded in divergent worldviews. 

How often would we be better off for allowing new ideas to settle in, or experiences to ripen, before expounding on their meaning? With the 24/7 news cycle, how often in recent months have we seen politicians jump to comment on fast-breaking and profoundly disturbing stories without considering multiple perspectives and what might be revealed in time?

The Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi reminds us that our most important knowledge cannot be articulated, written into manuals, shared on the internet. Tacit knowledge, built on our skills and ideas, is remembered in the body and precedes language. It is best conveyed to others through shared experiences. The way that David learned to garden by helping his mother when he was young, or the way, as a novice teacher, I watched my mentors go about the complicated process of orchestrating the day for 25 4 and 5-year-olds.

Over time, one of the essential lessons I learned as a teacher was about forgetting. Each summer, as the successes and failures of the preceding year settled into my tacit understanding of good teaching, I also forgot them. I did not want to be haunted by these memories in the fall. Nor did I read the voluminous reports handed to me, at least not at the start of the year. I wanted to meet each class with fresh eyes, to allow every student a new beginning. Forgetting affords that kind of forgiveness of the past.

Some I am sure will accuse me of sour grapes for putting memory in its place. But I prefer to think of it as a release from the burden of time, a newfound freedom that allows me to be more fully in the present. Sometimes a loss is a gain in disguise.

To be clear, I am not advocating the kind of social amnesia in which we forget the history of man’s inhumanity to man or the moments in which we have failed to stand up to social injustice. But we do not need to scold ourselves for daily lapses in memory. I suspect that when my brain is cluttered with scraps of information, even with other people’s valued knowledge, I am less creative and more likely to follow the tried-and-true paths. In allowing myself to forget, I hope to make more time and space for the new and unrehearsed, for a better then and there. 

And in the end, isn’t that what keeps us young and hopeful?

Jonathan Silin is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto and a part-time resident of Amagansett.

Christmas Day this year will be the 100th anniversary of a huge memorial service on Capitol Hill for Inez Milholland Boissevain, a New Yorker who died on Nov. 25, 1916. Her death played a crucial role in the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. 

Inez was the probably the most famous American feminist alive in 1916. She led the 1913 Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. Later that year she secretly married Eugen Boissevain, who was my mother’s uncle. It was front-page news all over the United States because feminism and marriage were then considered incompatible. The New York Times described Inez as “the fairest of the Amazons.”

She died weeks after collapsing in Los Angeles during a speech urging a vote against the re-election of President Woodrow Wilson because he opposed women’s suffrage and what was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. Her shocking death sparked hundreds of tributes and memorials around the country. The huge Christmas Day funeral service in the Hall of Heroes led to a White House meeting of members of the National Woman’s Party with President Wilson to urge him — in memory of Inez — to support the constitutional amendment recognizing the right of women to vote. 

Wilson’s response to the delegation was condescending. He explained that it was impossible for him to hold together the southern wing of the Democratic Party if he championed a federal amendment, as they would have known if they had done their political homework. The fuming delegation went back across Lafayette Square to the Woman’s Party headquarters and decided to picket the White House every day until Wilson changed his mind.

The picketers were in due course arrested and transported to the Occoquan Women’s Workhouse in Lorton, Va. They promptly went on a hunger strike and were force-fed like geese. When descriptions of this torture were smuggled out of the workhouse, public opinion shifted decisively, and Wilson decided to support the 19th Amendment. It was passed by both houses of Congress and became law in 1920.

New Yorkers were prominent in the achievement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were from the Rochester area. Inez was Brooklyn-born and Vassar-educated. Her portrait on a horse has been hung over the mantelpiece in the National Woman’s Party headquarters in Washington for nearly a century. Money to support the party came from Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, whose castle at Sands Point on Long Island is widely viewed as the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” mansion.

One reason for Inez’s effectiveness was that she understood the media, as the daughter of a Lincoln Republican newspaper editor who in midcareer became wealthy by promoting underground tubes for the distribution of mail. Her father, an Irish Presbyterian, was the first treasurer of the N.A.A.C.P. 

She championed the cause of the small upstart activist Delta sorority at Howard University to be represented in the women’s suffrage march when others in 1913 feared a backlash among whites in segregated Washington and the Southern states. I attended the 100th anniversary of that march three years ago. It attracted 5,000 Delta marchers from around the country, outnumbering by more than 10 to 1 representation by the traditional women’s organizations that existed in 1913. 

In the wake of the defeat of the first female major-party presidential candidate in U.S. history in 2016, American women’s groups are organizing a Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21. The urgency and passion with which Inez and her colleagues in the National Woman’s Party pursued their cause turned around the media, the public, and then the president, in that order. Remembering how women succeeded in the years 1913 to 1920 and translating that to a radically transformed media environment might be useful for those planning the 2017 march.

John Tepper Marlin wrote a play about the women’s suffrage movement that was staged at Rochester’s Geva Theatre in 1998 and twice at the Springs Presbyterian Church in 2005. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

Two months ago my life changed from black-and-white photograph to color movie for four hours. The special screening took place during the 40th reunion of the East Hampton High School class of 1976, a gang I would have graduated with had my desperate dad not yanked my family off the South Fork after secretly selling our Wainscott house without my mom’s permission. I was invited to the celebration by fellow graduates of the East Hampton Middle School class of 1972, the same good people who in my one year of East End education helped elevate my life from documentary to 3-D feature.

The road to reunion began with the 2013 publication of my memoir, “The Kingdom of the Kid,” a bittersweet portrait of South Fork kid-dom in 1967-72, when the Gehmans lived in Wainscott’s Westwoods. That summer I promoted “Kingdom” during six events on the East End. At the East Hampton Library I met Merrie Bennett Gay, my middle-school classmate, for the first time since 1972, when we shared post-movie slices at the old Brothers Four pizzeria on Newtown Lane. 

Last summer Merrie remembered me well enough to invite me to join the high school’s ’76 reunion Facebook group. Tickled and touched, I signed on in a minute. I couldn’t wait to swap confessions and revelations with the kind folks who made 1971-72 a year of pivotal firsts: first football heroics. First time on the honor roll. First romantic kisses. First membership in a school tribe.

The first person I told about the reunion invitation was my Wainscott wingmate. Mike Raffel, class of ’76 — baseball buddy, rock ’n’ roll guru, Huck Finn to my Tom Sawyer — was not only my first best friend, he was the first one to make me feel at home in my new home. The second person I told was Mike’s sister, Karen Raffel DeFronzo, class of ’77, whose passion for our Wainscott childhood is second to none. My East Hampton host immediately volunteered to be my reunion date. She even got permission from her husband, Dick, who likes to praise my memoir to passengers in his cab.

On Oct. 15, the day of the reunion, Karen, Mike, and I crowned ourselves the Three Wainscotteers. That night we parked by the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett, a popular spot for East Hampton High reunions. Pulling in behind us was Russell DiGate, my middle-school basketball teammate. A good omen became better as I was greeted inside the club by three favorite eighth-grade grads: Betty Rice, the reunion’s leader; her good friend Judith Markowitz, and their good friend Tracy Freidah Kohnken, my first South Fork squeeze. I couldn’t resist reminding Tracy that we held hands during a class field trip to see “Gone With the Wind.” 

My lucky streak continued at the bar, where I was saluted with “Geoff Gehman, get right over here!” The shout came from another eighth-grade mate, Susan Helier, whose bright voice matched her silver jewelry and boldly patterned black-and-white wrap. We have an unusual history together, Susan and I. I can’t remember a single conversation we had in or out of Mr. Kib­ler’s homeroom. Yet I remember her vividly: the pretty face, the magnetic smile, the lovely poise. Susan made such an impression on me, I made her the only middle-school interviewee for my memoir. During our phone chat we discovered another bond: Edith Mansir, her late grandmother, taught my sister, Meg, in fourth grade at Wainscott’s old one-room schoolhouse. 

Susan and I are reformed nerds who shed our shy shells long ago. In a snap we were rapping about romantic entanglements, agreeing that after three marriages we’re just not the marrying kind. We sealed our kinship when I signed her copy of my memoir, which she bought at a Sag Harbor bookstore, bless her heart. Her reading glasses were in the car, so I read her my thank-you for making the book, and eighth grade, better. And then we hugged for the second time ever.

After dinner I turned the tables, asking Susan and her friends to sign our middle-school yearbook. Nancy Porter Olsen, another Wainscotteer, and I exchanged memories of dead pals, five of whom were in Mr. Kibler’s homeroom. Betty Rice confessed that she was part of a pack of girls who thought I was “cute.” A few minutes later I told Susan that she was my eighth-grade crush. I was pleased that she wasn’t displeased, or surprised. Nancy then took our picture, side by side for the first time since our middle-school yearbook.

I did some serious time-traveling at a table with photos of 15 1976 graduates no longer with us. I spent most of the time remembering how Gregg de Waal and I spent endless hours decoding the lyrics to “American Pie.” I was staring at Gregg’s 17-year-old self when the D.J. played the song. The cosmic coincidence left me feeling sad and glad, spooked and privileged. 

From that point on I shifted between insider and outsider. I told Tracy Freidah Kohnken that I’ve never spent three hours on the phone with anyone else. I reminded John Gale, my middle-school quarterback, that I scored a long touchdown on his pass in our loss to Riverhead, whose players were as big as Paul Bunyan. Russ DiGate called me “Jethro,” my eighth-grade nickname. Michael Stella, another middle-school alum, revealed that I was the reunion’s “honorary” guest. 

“I hope you don’t mind a left-handed compliment,” he said. 

“Hey,” I replied, “I wouldn’t mind a right-handed compliment.”

Sitting alone at the yearbook-signing table, I began eavesdropping, the habit of a journalist, a professional insider-outsider. I especially enjoyed watching Mike Raffel talk up a storm with old football friends and old flames. “Mr. Wicked” still has some major-league mojo nearly 50 years after we met on Wainscott’s old rectangular baseball diamond.

After saying good night to Mike, I drove to our favorite beach in Wainscott, where I buried my heart many moons ago. Under a King Harvest moon I thought about the roots I had just grown on the South Fork, where I grew passions for everything from drive-in movies to antique cars, sex to writing. And that’s when I realized that my reunion was really a union.

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

Hate hurts most when you’re not ready for it, when your thoughts after a brutal political season are of the comfort of home. That’s how hate sliced through me recently on the Long Island Rail Road — suddenly. I spotted it out of the corner of my eye. Two K.K.K. fliers, neatly placed face up, inviting passers-by to collect them. “Our Race Is Our Nation” read the banner on one, with a white-hooded figure peering out through slits where eyes should be, his arms folded defiantly behind the safety of symbol and disguise. 

The fliers had their intended effect. They hurled me back to that place of self-preservation I constructed as a child. Fold yourself small, don’t call attention, smile, and you may get by. But you’ll never get in. You’ll never fully be accepted as American. Despite your five-generation presence and fancy degrees you’re still asked pointedly or with guarded emphasis, “Where are you from?” The guy in the hoodie is right: This is a nation defined by race.

As I stared at the flier, I thought of Lexi, my 15-year-old great-niece who lives in my hometown in Southern California. Lexi is a smart and curious kid. At 12 she was an autodidact about World War II, inspired in part by having read the poignant novel “All the Light We Cannot See.” She knows more about the rise of fascism and terrors of totalitarianism than I, or maybe it’s all fresher to her because last year her reading list included “Fahrenheit 451.”

Lexi’s mother, my niece, generally leans Christian conservative. Lexi found Bernie Sanders on her own. She was excited about him even before his unlikely candidacy began to take off. A pragmatist, she took to Hillary Clinton after the convention. While I monitored her political education from afar, I hadn’t tracked her response to Donald Trump’s insurgency, it was too remote a possibility to consider. 

I shared the K.K.K. flier with Lexi’s mom, who in turn shared it with Lexi. When we spoke with Lexi, I realized her world had been shattered by the election. It is now occupied by terror based on half-accurate assumptions. I recognized in her inchoate trauma my own childhood reaction to the Cuban missile crisis, when headlines balled into nightmares from which I’d wake up too scared to scream.

Lexi is afraid she may be deported because her estranged Cuban-born father may never have taken care of the details of his otherwise legal immigration status and was temporarily detained after a run-in with the law. “I’ve heard some people want to make it so that I could get deported because I’m an anchor baby.” No, I assure her, you are not an “anchor baby.” You are a U.S. citizen by birth and through your mother. The Constitution still stands. Oh, the pain of living under political rumors and half-truths when you’re young and your life is at stake.

“Okay,” she replies softly from the phone, but I sense things remain unsettled. I probe. She answers, “I have friends whose parents are undocumented.” She goes on, “I hear things like, ‘If it ain’t white it ain’t right.’ ” 

I look at the K.K.K. flier. I find myself unable to give Lexi much comfort or guidance. I realize we have lost or, at the very least, stunted another generation. Maybe the flier is partly right: Race is our nation.

To steady myself, I try being rational. We live in a world in which fear has been ­­frothed way beyond the rational facts. Wages are up, unemployment down, so domestic economic indicators are solid. The crime rate is generally down. Health care coverage has expanded, albeit imperfectly. Peace exists throughout the Western Hemisphere, indeed throughout the world, with the glaring exception of the raw swaths that cut through the Middle East and eastern Africa. These are among America’s greatest days, our days of greatest potential, but apparently a lot of us don’t see it that way. 

To understand why, I reach beyond reason to my emotions, back to my childhood, to get at the despair created by gutted-out industrial sectors in the Midwest, the sense of abandonment in coal territory, the anxiety of family farmers we once held as our American ideal but who now can’t hold on to the farm without an outside job. 

My own roots are deep in the working class. My father was a union man who washed the soiled diapers of patients at a large mental institution. My mother a garment worker at a tiny factory that produced itchy gym clothes. Each put in hours after their regular workday to earn enough to make ends meet. Mama stayed on to clean the garment factory; Dad mowed lawns. I know how hard they worked because it was my job to sometimes help them after school. I know how much they worried because I caught my mother behind closed doors, her head hanging while tears formed quietly because there wasn’t enough to carry us through the week. I knew we’d be okay when she got up the next morning at 4:30 to start over again. 

I can feel the ache of white opioid-addicted youth in Maine, rural Ohio, or eastern Kentucky. Despair litters their land, just as it did the land of my childhood, in a small, loving, but ultimately dangerous suburban barrio saddled with drugs and gang activity. One of my close family members ran with the gangs and was left overdosed in our front yard. 

Despair comes from disaffection, a fact we in communities of color have known for generations. With the devil of addiction now knocking at its own door, white America is finally realizing that we communities of color weren’t socio-pathological after all, we were just human, humans from whom hope and opportunity had been systematically withheld, just as our impoverished white brothers and sisters are discovering has happened to them. 

From my now-privileged position I am coming to realize that the fear I saw in the K.K.K. fliers wasn’t just mine, but also that of the people who put the fliers on the seats. It’s a recurrent fear in America. The Klan has come and gone in cycles. The first was during Reconstruction. The second in the 1920s, when the Klan populated Long Island because of an anti-immigrant backlash — ironically enough aimed at the parents and grandparents of many people the Klan hopes to recruit now, citing the newer wave of immigrants. The third Klan wave was during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. All times of change. 

In filming “The State of Arizona,” our documentary about Arizona’s controversial “show me your papers” law, we interviewed a very wise young state legislator. She pointed out that the people who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally had had time to make the emotional journey into change. The communities receiving them hadn’t, however, and so the intensity of their anger could in part be understood by the rapid, unexpected change foisted on them. Her contextualization helped me reframe my perspective then, and I find it useful now as I try to understand the K.K.K. fliers and the sundering of America they are trying to foment. 

So, the next time I speak with Lexi, I’ll explain that we, all of us, need to understand that the challenges America is facing aren’t just its transforming features; after all, people of color are also being impacted by the forces of technology and globalization, even more so. I’ll tell her that despite the pain it will take to get past the scapegoating, I hope that I and others like me who have been marginalized and fought for change can reach out and show how change can be accomplished; we’ve done it. 

I’ll go on to tell her that the person who left the fliers most likely descends from a brave immigrant who chose change, willingly suffering hardships and upsetting the landscape before them, forging America in the process. Maybe someday they’ll realize that.

Carlos Sandoval is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who lives part time in Amagansett.

“Sag Harbor is not the Hamptons,” Robin, my wife, chanted while scrutinizing the real estate ads, weighing the relative values of eat-in kitchens, working fireplaces, and water views. “And, it would be good for you.” 

I’m fortunate to have a spouse who devotes much of her time to what is best for me. She regularly makes home-cooked, healthy, gluten-free meals, suggests exercise options, and discovers cool cultural picks. I like fast food and sophomoric movies, and believe that internet surfing qualifies as a sport.

I was certain that a second home would actually be horrible for me: more bills and more aggravation. Why not just travel the world and stay in luxury hotels? My version of a long-term commitment is a three-night minimum. Why be tethered to one spot at the end of a Long Island Expressway traffic jam? The mere thought of fighting the hedge-fund masters of the universe for an East Hampton parking space or surviving the mean-girl yoga classes gave me a bad case of the jitters. 

I can make a mule seem flexible, and I was dug in. Robin persisted, equally tenacious and stubborn. It was a standoff.

For years I humored Robin, tromping through houses for sale while visiting friends on the East End over long weekends. I was a grumpy tagalong, since the only thing I hated more than looking for a house was being a houseguest — tiptoeing around the host’s routines, trying to flush the toilet quietly in the night, and feigning interest in their pets. Robin and I ran through dozens of open houses and exhausted more than one real estate agent.

“You’re coming with me,” announced a friend who had taken pity on us. She marched us into the Corcoran real estate office at the top of Sag Harbor’s Main Street and introduced us to Cee Scott Brown. Cee’s considerable professionalism and deep experience inspired my faith in his views and valuations. He also possessed the insight and sensitivity to see Robin’s residential dreams. Most important, Cee had the patience to deal with us both, bridging the marital divide. 

He showed us a sweet summer cottage on Madison Street in the heart of the village. It was impossible not to be smitten by its shingled simplicity. Under Cee’s guidance, I cratered.

Not only did we buy the house, but I bought into Sag Harbor’s magic. And, Robin was right — it was revitalizing for me to wash the city off at the end of the week, to quiet my jangled nerves, and to reconnect with long-lost passions. I dusted off my old bike and pedaled along the coast, feeling my lungs pumping salt air. I did something nearly impossible so deeply into my middle age — I made new friends. I found kindred spirits who cared little what I did for a living or about any other trappings of city life.

I also reconnected with my ardor for writing and reading. Many people know Sag Harbor is a writers’ village. Only some, however, are aware that John Street is one of its main literary arteries. Each morning, Robin and I would walk up Main Street and make the right onto John Street past the homes of literary agents, playwrights, and one particular former resident, the author E.L. Doctorow. 

Still fewer are privy to the fact that John Street connects to Bluff Point Road, which leads to Bluff Point Lane, where John Steinbeck’s writing cupola still stands — a hexagonal studio sited on a point under stately trees with water on three sides.

Four years after that first meeting and three years after he found us the little village house, we gave Cee a new and impossible challenge: to find a year-round home (fireplace and garage) that needed no renovation and was on the water in the sacred John Street enclave. Oh, and by the way, it had to be within our budget. The cynic in me — the one who never wanted to come here in the first place — wagered he’d never find it. 

Several months later, Cee called: “You need to come now.” We left immediately to see a house that had just come on the market. Walking through the front door was like stepping onto a boat. The sunny foyer led to a living room with views of Upper Sag Harbor Cove, a blue-green inlet that meets an indigo-gray sky. My legs wobbled from the illusion of being at sea. My shoulders unhitched, my mood elevated, and we made an offer.

Once the terms were agreed on, Cee recommended John Bjornen, a talented local designer who happens to be his husband. Aha! My cynic alarm sounded. These two must be in cahoots. Surely, it was a scam. I was reluctant to schedule the appointment, but my previous attempts at decorating had been not only expensive, but also embarrassing.

My dogged skepticism disappeared upon meeting John. With gentle spirit and good humor, he seemed lighter than air. John’s very presence caused everything to appear more beautiful, to make the mundane sparkle. He listened to our wishes for a warm, casual home and came back with drawings and design boards that brought our vague notion to life. He chose subtle paint colors that, along with the view, shifted with the light and shade. He recommended bold fabrics and bespoke pillows that formed perfect accents to our neutral palette. Daybeds and comfy chairs were arranged into seating alcoves for reading or conversation. All sofas were nap-worthy.

Our second winter on Bluff Point, we toasted Valentine’s Day with friends by the fire. Snow blanketed the neighborhood. The cove was frozen. Feeling toasty and a bit smug, I thought the house looked perfect. That Sunday night as we drove back to the city, I boasted about the beauty of our home to Robin and wondered whether we could get it photographed for a magazine. 

Later, after we had gone to sleep, the phone rang at 2 a.m., jolting us upright. “Ma’am, this is Scan Security. Your water alarm went off, and I’m standing in your basement. You’ve got damage. I’m shutting off your water,” the man said.

The snow was now coming down more heavily. The roads back to the house would be impassable. Despite the hour, we called John. Our friend and neighbor put his parka on over his pajamas and trekked over to our house to survey the damage. I was on the phone with him, directing him to our hide-a-key and listening as he entered the house. “Oh my God,” I heard him say.

John reported that water was pouring down through the light fixtures and the rugs were already saturated. I could hear his footsteps sloshing through our soaked house. Unable to sleep, we left at sunrise to return to Sag Harbor and survey the damage. Within hours, the water had devastated the place. Floorboards had buckled, appliances were damaged beyond repair, and walls were starting to sag. 

I wish I could say I’d had the good graces in that moment to be thankful no one was hurt, but, truthfully, I was just grateful for good insurance. 

The plumber showed up the next day and began to cut into the walls to find the broken pipes. Dozens had split and burst. Expanded ice had shredded steel. Robin picked up a few of the pipe pieces. Months later, when the shock had subsided, we took those pipe bits to a frame shop and had them mounted into an art installation that today hangs on a sunroom wall.

Again, with John’s help, we put the house back together again over the course of a year. We hadn’t wanted to renovate, but when one must, why not make improvements? Our bit of bad luck resulted in a lighter kitchen and wider floorboards. 

That Arctic vortex, with its razor-sharp winds, heightened my respect for Mother Nature’s capricious power. In fact, it is the intimacy with the outdoors that moves me most about our home. The house is oriented toward the cove. A north-facing orientation means each day is bookended with a sunrise and sunset. Robin and I watch the water as the tides take turns, the fish jump at sunrise, and the ducks pass by at dusk as if on cue. Migrating geese stitch a brown thread across a blue sweater of sky. Clouds move swiftly, and temperatures shift when the seasons shake hands.

I’m grateful to the cove for its endless bounty. I now see that my cynicism was merely a safeguard against fear and failure. In the end, I’m not that fragile. Houses can be rebuilt; people are resilient. And with love to my wife, who was right, this place has been good for me.

Sally Susman is a regular book reviewer for The Star.

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.

With the latest email scandals and accusations of womanizing, all eyes have been on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In the months leading up to the election, it has been one surprise after another, proving to be riveting and entertaining at the least. Who would have guessed, when these two candidates were high-profile presences in the Hamptons these past few decades, that they would end up competing for the highest position in the nation?

Donald Trump and his two brothers, the late Fred Trump and Robert Trump, have been out here for years. When I became a babysitter for Fred and Mary Trump at their house on Lake Montauk as a teenager in the 1960s, I never dreamed that one of Fred’s younger brothers would one day run for president. They were like any other gorgeous young couple, with two adorable kids and a dog with the funny name of Two-No-Trump, which is a poker term. 

Fred had a boat that he kept on Lake Montauk to take his family fishing. I loved to go to their modern house with its sweeping water views, where they would generously tell me to eat whatever I wanted, use the phone however much I wanted (and back then each call cost money), and even have my friends over. 

They used to go to parties until the wee hours of the night, and Fred would drive me home, throwing me $20 bills, which back then was a small fortune for babysitting and helped put me through college. I was sorry to learn years later that he had died at a young age. 

In Montauk we would also see Robert Trump, who spent time around Gurney’s Inn. He dated and eventually started living with Anne Marie Monte, the niece of Nick Monte, the inn’s former owner. I remember seeing them at New Year’s Eve, Halloween, and other special occasions at Gurney’s. The inn used to have theme parties for New Year’s Eve, and one year it was all about Woodstock, with everyone dressed as hippies, including Robert. He had a great sense of humor, parading around in a longhaired wig and wild clothes. 

I first started seeing Donald Trump in the 1990s at polo games in Bridgehampton. He would often take his daughter Ivanka and other family members, and I didn’t know if he was into horses or the game itself, but he seemed to enjoy socializing with other Hamptons celebs in the V.I.P. tent, watching the action from the sidelines. Back then I hosted a television show for WVVH-TV in East Hampton called “Innerview in the Hamptons,” produced by David Nadal of Blue Lemon TV, and we interviewed Donald at those games. 

We also ran into a tanned Donald Trump on the ocean beach, looking more casual in white shorts, white polo shirt, and white visor. He was with Marla Maples, his wife then, at a charity volleyball tournament to benefit pediatric AIDS. “I came here because we are trying to raise money and awareness of this important cause,” he said.

I asked him about his yacht, which he tried to bring into Montauk Harbor, but the draft was too deep, so he couldn’t get it to the Montauk Yacht Club. He talked about how he loved boating, fishing, and Montauk, and how he was enjoying his time in the Hamptons that summer. He was in a good mood. But when we started asking more personal questions, about his plans for the summer and rumors about his marriage having problems, he abruptly got up and walked off the set. That was the last we saw of him, but we left that segment in our show.

I also saw Hillary Clinton many times here, when she came as first lady with President Bill Clinton, later when she was raising money for her Senate race, and more recently during her presidential campaign. She and Bill flew into East Hampton Airport on several occasions to attend parties at the homes of the lobbyist Liz Robbins and the fashion designer Vera Wang, with entertainment by the comedian Jon Stewart and the rocker Jon Bon Jovi. 

I will never forget one of the biggest events they attended, a 1998 Democratic fund-raiser at the Amagansett home of Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger, his wife at the time. It was the height of summer, a moonlit night at their sprawling farmhouse, and hundreds of people paid $1,000 and up for tickets. They sipped wine, dined on hors d’oeuvres, and gathered to dance to Bill Clinton’s favorite band, Hootie and the Blowfish.

But security was tight, and the press was banned, so the only alternative was to sneak in under the gates and bushes. This I did, as I had to get the story, pretending to be a guest and staying in the shadows. It was a thrill to see Bill and Hillary lined up on the porch alongside Bassinger and Baldwin, who was the host and was thought to have political ambitions then. They greeted the crowd with their speeches, and I tried to take notes quickly so I could run back to the bushes and call them in to my editor in the city.

I got much closer to Hillary during her Senate campaign swing, when she spent a day touring East Hampton. This time, the press was allowed, and I followed her as she divided her time between the town’s older and younger generations. I still remember her black pantsuit and bright pink blouse as she shook hands and posed for photos at the senior citizens center. 

Hillary told the seniors she would do “everything possible” to protect Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drug programs and keep the costs down, as her own mother, in her 80s, was in a similar situation. 

She spent the rest of the day at the day care center, where she seemed to be at ease with the children and enjoyed their questions. She asked if anyone knew who the president was, or her cat’s name, or her dog’s name. The kids weren’t so sure of the president, but they knew Socks the cat and Buddy the dog. They asked her if the animals were real, and she answered, “Yes, they’re real, and they live with us in the White House.” 

As she talked with the children, Hillary loosened up and seemed to lose herself in their innocent humor. As she sat on a tiny chair in the middle of the 4-year-olds, they handed her bunches of flowers. 

“Did you pick these for me?” she wanted to know. 

“No, I got them in the flower store,” one boy piped up. “Some of them smell.”

Hillary later burst out laughing when she read a story to the kids about a caterpillar that couldn’t stop eating everything in sight. She told them how caterpillars turn into butterflies, asking if they’d ever seen a butterfly.

A couple of years ago, as secretary of state, Clinton was again sitting with a book before a crowd in East Hampton, but this time it was her own book, “Hard Choices,” which she launched with a signing at BookHampton. I couldn’t believe the line waiting for hours to meet her and have her sign copies — it went from one end of Main Street to the other, and included people protesting problems in the Middle East. 

No matter who wins this Election Day, it has been exciting to see these two candidates in the Hamptons. It seems as though, sooner or later, everyone comes here. We may not be in the pulse of Washington, D.C., but living in a popular summer resort we’ve had the privilege of seeing the rise of these two candidates in a more relaxed, casual, and fun environment — right in our own backyard.

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

If I were a local business owner summoned to court for violating our state or local disabilities laws, I might simply ask the judge, “Why should I comply when your court doesn’t?”

Since its completion in 2010 in the back of our history-themed town government complex, the $4 million East Hampton Justice Court has been defying New York State and town disabilities laws designed to guarantee access to people with disabilities and which the court is charged with enforcing. It also violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, which the federal government enforces.

Some of the court building’s extreme violations have been cleared up over the years, notably a heavy entrance door that frequently and unexpectedly slammed shut. This was particularly perilous to use during periods of congested pedestrian traffic entering or exiting the building. The path of travel through the street to the entrance from the handicapped reserved parking area bulged with an array of bubble-shaped lumps that was especially difficult for disabled people to use and suggested a geyser beneath that was about to blow.

It took more than a year to fix the dangerous door and uneven pavement. Major violations persist in the court’s handicapped-parking arrangement, which is tucked away in a notch around a 90-degree turn past the entrance door. The parking area itself is too tight to provide safe backing out and turning, and has no identified unloading-access aisle and only one marked parking space. Two spaces are required, as was noted in plans the developer filed with the Building Department in 2004.

Most important, the path of travel from the designated parking notch to the court building provides no curb cut or ramp for disabled court users or employees to ascend to the sidewalk and safely proceed off the street to the court’s entrance. The curb throughout the handicapped area is at least seven inches high — impossible to access if you use a wheelchair, treacherous if you use a cane or walker. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires that grab bars be situated on any curb that is higher than six inches. There are none.

As a result, a disabled person must traverse the street, potentially in the face of vehicles driving toward and around the right-angle curve to park there. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

An apparent quick fix exists. Readily reachable parking spaces with ample visibility and a level building entrance that easily can be made wheelchair-accessible are in place at the south side of the structure. Why not designate three of these for disabled people — two for parking plus a wheelchair-unloading aisle between them? If necessary, eight more spaces for the general public could easily be added to this location.

Use of this area looks obvious. I urged the Wilkinson board to check it out at a town board meeting in 2011. But neither this nor any other serious proposal to produce a solution has been undertaken by any town board or by the disabilities advisory board, which I also informed of the dangers and violations five years ago. I reported these issues to the Ordinance Enforcement Department in 2012. I was promised a response within a week, but have not heard back.

How did it all come to this — a new justice court’s disregard for the law and the various town boards’ indulgence of it now for so long? A.D.A. compliance in the old Town Hall-court building was excellent, having been seen to by the Bullock administration circa 1993. Why was such attentiveness to the law and the needs of so many East Hampton residents set aside in the construction of our new court? Why has it been left that way by three town administrations that respond to questions and suggestions about it with what amounts to one long Gallic shrug?

An explanation is that the new justice court was built backward. Really. I don’t have the comic genius to make this up. It’s Laurel and Hardy stuff. It’s become a regular joke around town offices that “Ho-ho-ho, they put it in backwards,” which could logically explain how the back became the entrance, requiring contortions to provide handicapped access space near it. But that cannot justify the town’s apathy in dealing with this situation.

We advocates have passively consented to this neglect for years now, regardless of the Gandhi and Martin Luther King quotes we keep pinned on walls over our desks.

Both the A.D.A. in 1991 and our local law in 2003 were enacted with overwhelming bipartisan support. In fact, two Republicans led the effort: President George H.W. Bush at the national level and Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, then a Republican, in East Hampton.

These were good days for the town, the culmination of a respectful, firm activism that promised to bring our 1,000-plus disabled year-round residents out of isolation into the participatory mainstream of the town’s social, political, and commercial life. But for the past 10 years or so, it’s the complacency that has been bipartisan.

A very effective leader during our early endeavors was the East Hampton Village clerk, Larry Cantwell, who negotiated such important settlements as the access compliance of East Hampton’s U.A. Cinema. Other U.A. cinemas in Southampton, Hampton Bays, and elsewhere on Long Island quickly followed suit, installing wheelchair spaces, accessible bathroom facilities, and FM assistive-listening systems. I believe that now, as town supervisor, he would enjoy making things right again.

Which brings to mind a story, perhaps apocryphal, about President Franklin Roosevelt. Early in his first term, a group of labor leaders visited him and urged his support for legislation they favored. F.D.R. listened silently as they passionately presented their case. When they finished, he leaned forward in his wheelchair and said, “All right, gentlemen, you have convinced me. I am in favor of your proposal. Now go out and make me do it.”

Richard Rosenthal was disabilities advocate for East Hampton Town from 1993 to 2002.

It’s been three years since I sold my house in Amagansett. Gone, the Fourth of July 2013.

I had lived there — weekends, winters, long stretches and overnighters, for a little over 30 years. The house was mostly a summer house, heat supplied inefficiently from rectangular in-wall Singer units. They actually sounded like a sewing machine, when they worked at all.

In 2008, we decided to upgrade. Winterize the place, with a fireplace that also supplied heat, and baseboard this and that, plus insulation. During that crazy, recessionary period into 2009, the summer house was a winter house. And how beautiful it was — all glass doors and windows throughout. For the first time, we watched snow pile up outside those glass doors while staying cozy and warm inside.

In time, we got over it. The small, stunning gunite pool that was beginning to show signs of leaks. The cracks around the window frames. The wear and the tear. You’re close to the ocean, and it’s fabulous. You’re close to the ocean, and it’s high maintenance.

I had my time, my years, in that house. Affairs and breakups and, ultimately, shared with the man who would turn out to be my husband.

Then. Now it is 2016, four summers since sayonara.

Summer one, homeless, we did the beachy regions of Europe. Eze in France. Portofino in Italy. Hot and cool. We rented a car, thank God for David (that would be my husband) with his adventurous spirit, driving around the clogged streets of Monaco, figuring out the parking on the streets facing the beach, far below the hills where we stayed at the drop-dead Chateau de la Chevre d’Or with its views and its drinks on the terrazzo, a pool here, another on another level. It was as far away from Amagansett as one can get. Pebbles on the beach instead of sand. The Mediterranean versus the Atlantic.

That trip, a total of two weeks, end of August 2013, might have been the very beginning of really getting over the Amagansett house. It also marked my official leap into retirement, which happened just about a year earlier but was finally sinking in.

Earlier that summer, that first summer, we were invited for a weekend by friends who had a house in Sag Harbor. I at first resisted the temptation to visit my ex-house, but succumbed by sometime on Sunday, on our way back to the city. Mere weeks after we had sold, the house already looked different. New trees. A lawn, manicured and perfect, covered our coveted dunes. Did I really live there forever? So quickly, it felt like it was no longer my own.

The next summer, 2014, nostalgia unexpectedly surfaced, and we decided to rent in East Hampton. In the heart of town, opposite the windmill, just to the side of the post office. Gay Lane. (Appropriate.) Sweet and small, no pool, but within walking distance of the Palm, of Rowdy Hall, Nick and Toni’s, the 1770 House, the Maidstone. We drank. We didn’t drive. We walked.

Retired from advertising, I decided to take a different kind of sales job. At Decorum in my old home plate, a store that sold plates and antiques and run by my sweet friend Elaine. A fun summer. I would drive again to the old house. Nope. No longer mine at all.

In 2015, my head was totally turned around by another summer resort town: Provincetown. P’town, as it is affectionately known. Tip of Cape Cod. A gay haven in many ways, but not gay like Fire Island Pines or the Hamptons, or even Palm Springs or Key West (elaboration about all that to come).

I first went there with my first New York boyfriend, Jim, and I do remember the dunes and not much else. It was the ’70s. And I was in my mid-20s. Drugs prevailed. Don’t ask.

And then there was the odd trip during the winter with my last New York boyfriend, now husband, David, in the early ’90s. We drove, Presidents Day weekend, and caught the Village People playing at Town Hall. It snowed.

But that summer of 2015, we spent close to six weeks in Provincetown, and it proved to be the best reason to have sold in Amagansett. To discover new!

It’s similar, in ways, to the Beach Hampton region of Amagansett. Dunes everywhere, low-lying vegetation. Evergreens. Cottages. But Provincetown is its own species of place.

For one thing, it just fells free. Everyone is friendly; most people are there vacationing for a week, renting a place with a bunch of guys. They are bartenders and schoolteachers and lawyers and flight attendants residing in Boston. No Beyoncé or Jay Z renting a place for $250,000 for two weeks. No Clintons either, as they also rented in the Hamptons for hundreds of thousands for a month.

We found a great little condo, centrally located, for less than $3,000 a week. Two bedrooms, two baths, outdoor shower, outdoor space with a high-end grill. Plus Wi-Fi, a smart TV, and a newly designed kitchen. We settled in not really knowing what to expect.

One thing we did not expect was the high level of entertainment. Broadway stars, top comedians, appearing for one or two nights only. Night after night, the likes of Norm Lewis. Audra Freaking McDonald! Shirley Goddamn Jones! Kathy Griffin and David Sedaris and Margaret Holy Crap Cho. And Sarah Jessica and Matthew. Neil Patrick Harris and his hubby. And the forever Marilyn Maye. And then some.

There were hilarious drag shows. Yes, the classic impersonators of Bette and Babs and Joan and Cher, but also of Carol Burnett and Elton John and Barry Manilow, and other impersonators of astonishing talent. Sometimes for just 20 bucks a show. Nightly!

And daily? Let’s just say that every other person, make that three out of five, is gay or lesbian. Men in Speedos; women wheeling strollers. Macho men with beards and young thin hairless types. Women with short-cropped hair and young, voluptuous beauties. Free and holding hands and soaking up the sun and loving the easy, casual acceptance everywhere. Free. (Oh, and the bicycles — billions and billions of bicycles!)

It’s quite democratic in its gayness. It’s not cloned or muscley like the Pines. Not snooty or pretentious like the Hamptons. (I know this. I was that.) Not overly “senior” like Palm Springs. And it’s got beaches that put Key West’s to shame.

In fact, there is no place quite like it. It’s a carnival and a parade and a circus. It’s $1 oysters (Wellfleet only) and lobster rolls everywhere along Commercial Street, the main, shall we say, drag. I keep repeating that it’s free, but it’s also cheap. Drinks are half the price of what they’d be in New York (or the Hamptons). Two people can eat an amazing dinner with a bottle of wine for under $100. 

And the scenery: water, water, everywhere. The sunsets!

Plus the culture and the history. The writers who resided. Tennessee Williams loved it there, one back-room bar in particular. Jack Kerouac wrote part of “On the Road” there. Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer spent time. And now, there’s Michael Cunningham and Andrew Sullivan.

I write more in Provincetown. I feel more alive. More, there it is again, free. I’ve lived in and loved the Hamptons and Key West. But I left and never quite looked back.

My love affair with Provincetown, back again for six weeks this past summer, may very well fade as well. But, in addition to the ocean, the bays, the lakes, and the ponds, there’s also John Waters!

Hy Abady is the author of “Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”