The back row of the East Hampton movie theater is kinda like your own studio apartment with a wide-screen TV on gym candy. Not only can you feast undisturbed in stocking feet on contraband Cracker Jacks, Raisinets, Strawberry Twizzlers, and a large can of Arizona green iced tea with a foot-long veggie delight made fresh by Joe the deli manager at Stop & Shop, but if the movie’s boring, you can nod out, if the movie’s romantic, you can make out, and if the movie sucks, you can sneak out without someone behind barking “Down in front!” 

But the night I caught “Birdman,” none of those three were the issue, except that the audio disturbed me — not its poor quality, but the faint click I heard in Riggan Thomson’s opening monologue, very obvious for someone who has edited video projects for 30 years.

Three months would pass until the East Hampton Library had a DVD of “Birdman,” so I rushed to get my free three-day rental and slowed it down where I found the audio edit, a section of monologue that was purposely cut out by the director. Curious, I called an ex-sweetheart turned actress in Sherman Oaks to get a copy of the first page of the script.

“Just the first page?” she asked.

“I may have unearthed the biggest cover-up since the grassy knoll,” I shot back.

And, as I thought, the original scripted monologue was much different from what was seen in the Academy Award-winning film:

FADE IN:

INT. RIGGAN’S DRESSING ROOM — THEATER — DAY

We slowly tilt up to discover the back of Riggan Thomson (55). He is in the proper Lotus position, dressed only in tight white briefs, and he appears to be meditating deeply . . .

MAN (V.O.)

Smells like — Rawlings, five ounce, made in Costa Rica, 108 double stitches, raised seams, white leather base — balls.

A slight twitch in Riggan’s neck.

MAN (V.O.)

We don’t belong in this . . .

Unaware of the passion for baseball in America and in his leading actor, who had a clause written into his “Batman” contract that should the Pittsburgh Pirates make the playoffs, filming would cease for the duration, the director struck out in red ballpoint ink all baseball references in the original script. 

Anyone who has ever run through a ball field of freshly cut grass, rubbed Mazola oil in the palm of his Wilson glove, connected on the sweet spot of a 33-inch wood Louisville Slugger, or jumped up and down with a bunch of equally minded guys atop a 15-inch clay mound after a hard-fought game, knows there is no scent as intoxicating, as euphoric, as orgasmic as the smell of a little white ball made in Costa Rica.

I love baseball.

Long before my gold Royce Union five-speed bike with banana seat and sissy bar, way before my first broken heart on 27th Street in Astoria, and ages before my four amazing kids entered my life, there was one friend always by my side, always with a smile, forever a friend, and still a friend today: baseball.

My earliest recollection of smells-like-balls occurred at 5 when my brother pointed at the TV, said the blond-haired, left-handed pitcher standing majestically on the mound for the New York Yankees was from Astoria, then lobbed to me a brand-new white piece of heaven he bought at E.J. Korvette’s. I was addicted for life to the smell and game of baseball, hoarding every penny in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar, collecting every Green Stamp my mother brought home from grocery shopping, until I’d saved enough and had filled Green Stamp books for a catcher’s or outfielder’s mitt, another wood baseball bat, or another Rawlings leather baseball with 108 red stitches. 

Richie Shubert stood more than 6 feet, but on top of the mound he could be the center for the New York Knicks, only meaner. William Cullen Bryant High School was Long Island City High School’s nemesis, and on a balmy April day in ’73 a nail-biter game was in progress as our ace pitcher, John Dinkelmeyer, proved a formidable warrior, mowing down batter after batter after batter with his 12 to 6 o’clock curve. I should know, I was his catcher and gloated over every missed pitch.

At 18, Richie threw upward of 90 miles per hour, and as a lefty was scouted by every major league team. When I stepped up to the plate in my seventh batting position, five of the preceding batters having struck out, I thought, “Make contact.” I knew he would throw heat, so I swung at the first pitch, sending a major league mile-high pop to the right side, foul, the first baseman missing it by inches. Surprised, I felt confident he’d throw me another fastball, and remember somehow making it to first base, a single.

Richie was drafted two months later in the second round by the Texas Rangers and John by the Detroit Tigers. It felt nice to catch with and bat against major league players.

I love baseball. 

My first full-time job was with Exxon on Sixth Avenue, where I quickly befriended co-workers around the world, getting invites every weekend, but none friendlier than Roger in Hamilton, Bermuda, where I traveled almost every month, thanks to my girlfriend, a Northeast Airlines flight attendant named Judy, who made me her “buddy” for free travel. I would sleep on Roger’s couch in a pink stucco house in Devonshire Parish surrounded by the smell of hibiscus. 

Carlsberg Elephant beer, Long Island iced teas, and dancing all night at Disco 40 on Front Street were my evening passions, but during the day I made friends playing catch, hitting fungoes, and shagging flies with guys I would never see again on ball fields across Bermuda.

I love baseball.

My mother was near death when she aspirated while eating breakfast minutes after general anesthesia from knee replacement at the Hospital for Special Surgery on East 17th Street, but as in the scene in which Adrian whispers “Win” to her husband, Rocky, she pulled me close and similarly whispered, “Go try out again for the Yankees, Frankie. You’ll make it this time.” 

Sadly, I was not the 23-year-old who’d tried out for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium 23 years earlier, but rather 46.

A baseball field is serene, temple-like, sacred, void of outside influences of everyday life — kind of like its own bubble, similar to Biosphere 2. Pick up a baseball anywhere in the world, have a catch, and you’ll immediately make a friend regardless of color, language, religion, gender, or which side of the aisle he votes.

Albert Einstein said, “I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but I know how World War IV will be fought — sticks and stones.” But when I searched the dark web for his exact phrasing, I stumbled onto Columbia University’s applied physics classified files, where I discovered words scribbled by “AE” on the back of a Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card. It read in part, “WWIV will be fought on a baseball diamond of 90 ft squared using wooden bats and leather balls (bd(90ft)squared + bt + bl = WW4).”

If the enemies of the world discovered the magic of the little white ball, perhaps the world would be a more peaceful place.

And now my son Paul pitches for the high school team, forcing me for an hour every day to our backyard, where he climbs his improvised mound constructed with pressure-treated 2-by-8s from Riverhead Building Supply to perfect his good heater and better splitter, hoping to improve his deuce (curve) at U.C.L.A. baseball camp in July.

He loves baseball.

So the next time you take out a free three-day DVD rental of “Birdman” from the East Hampton Library, listen close, real close, for the faint click during Riggan Thomson’s opening monologue, and you’ll know the secret behind smells-like-balls.

Regrettably though, you won’t see me anytime soon checking out movies or CDs or books or the must-see “Mork & Mindy: The Complete Second Season” at the library, as they blocked my privileges. I owe $14 in late fees.

Frank Vespe, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.

The Book of Ruthie

She is there sitting on my shoulder. She is there every Passover, scrunched in the folds of a damp dish towel thrown over my shoulder. She is shrouded in the moist cloth between folds of fabric that hold my memories.

Does she hear my grandsons chopping the nuts? Chop, chop, chop. Can she see me measure the matzo meal into the beaten egg whites? Do the airy spheres of fluff that float in the soup resemble the ones she made? Do the steamy vapors of the chicken soup, the magic elixir of Jewish life, rise up to meet her?

She comes to life for me in those steaming vapors of boiling soup. An unassuming, simple woman, small in stature but huge in heart, she follows me around the table. I set down a plate, stand up a goblet, lay down a book for the service at each chair. She will be with me when it is my turn to read. She is only there for me, for no one else knows her. But that is my secret. Ruthie is why I create this event. I like to think she orchestrates it from above.

Does she see my grandchildren build the Seder plate? I sure hope she does. The warmth of her table is woven into the cloth that covers mine. Every Passover she has been in my mind, from the cramped table she filled in a small apartment to the table where I sit in suburbia five decades later. She blended us all . . . relatives, neighbors, whole Jews, half Jews.

She knew the rule in Deuteronomy, “Welcome the stranger to your table.” It was instinct with her, kindness without borders. Water down the soup, always room for one more! She taught me well without knowing it. As I look across my table I see her, an ordinary woman who was extraordinary.

See you next year, Ruthie. Same time, same place.

The Seder in 602

The candles flickered, reflecting in the glassy mint-green dishes from many Duz detergent boxes. The matzo, bread of Jewish affliction, sat blanketed in a clean dish towel. The charoset, a mixture of chopped nuts, fermenting apples, and Manischewitz wine, looked unappetizing as always. Later we would make tiny matzo sandwiches, cementing the pieces together, Passover peanut butter sandwiches.

And Henry, our Moses, sat poised in the head chair, ready to lead us out of the desert. The stage was set. The performance would begin shortly, and we the willing players were gearing up.

It was America in the 1950s, a place of promises, where Jews were beginning to weave into the American culture. Many had run a generation before into the open arms of Miss Liberty, holding her book, her torch guiding them to the teeming shores of New York City. Now the yarmulkes, little pancakes of velvet, reflected a new history. Left over from weddings and bar mitzvahs they sat at each place on the table waiting to be popped on. They carried the history of family in America while covering those shiny balding heads. . . .

The wedding of Sue and Mike Schwartz. The bar mitzvah of Steven Goldstein. And for the truly Americanized, the bat mitzvah of Amy Greenstein.

This was their new history. Europe left behind — the pogroms, the ovens, the insults. 

Here we sang the songs aloud, dropped wine for each plague with tiny pinkies. It was really wine, not blood from the swords of the old country.

Here we sat, a puzzle of people who formed this extended family every year. Relatives, neighbors, hangers-on, basking in the warmth of that room, around that cramped folding table, knees touching, sharing wine-stained prayer books (never enough), sharing the food, sharing our lives and the promise that was America.

This was America of the 1950s, the real land of milk and honey. Moses should have come this way in the desert. When the Red Sea parted he should have swum toward Miss Liberty. We could have avoided all the crap that came between then and now. A lot more people could have been at that table.

Magic in that little apartment. Magic in the freedom.

What a country!

Jackie Friedman lives part time in East Hampton.

You may have heard of the Sagaponack Village mayor, but let me tell you about the unofficial mayor of Sagg Main Beach.

Every year, from dawn until dusk, Lester Jary Elliston patrols the sands and waters of that beach. In fact, Lester stops by the ocean almost every single day of the year, and he is careful to take both a sunrise and a sunset photo of the beach. While he is there, he feeds an adopted seagull, Harvey.

Some days, the temperature dips below 30 degrees and the wind whips up in a steady breeze, making tears come to the eyes. On those days, Lester makes a perfunctory visit and then is on his way. On other days, there is a hint of spring, with 60-degree weather and a strong steady sun, and on those days, Lester lingers longer and dreams of summer.

Once May hits, the beach mayor shows up early in the morning with two matching beach chairs, an umbrella, several coolers, a supply of water, and maybe a matching beach outfit. Lester takes his job seriously and wants to look the part. He talks to anyone who enters the sand, introducing himself and finding out his or her purpose for being there for the day. He finds out names, the ports that they hail from, the names of their fluffy little dogs, and maybe their political and religious affiliations as well.

If a local issue is being voted on at a town meeting, Lester polls each individual and makes sure everyone knows how the results of the polls are stacking up. He speaks with lawyers and farmers alike. He is especially close to the lifeguards and beach attendants when they take position after the unofficial beginning of the summer, Memorial Day weekend. 

As a result of his daily rounds, Lester is frequently invited to fancy parties at oceanfront homes that only the people on the A-list expect to attend. He duly does his duty and shows up right on schedule to partake of the catered goodies. Sometimes he has to juggle three or more parties.

Back to his duties and obligations, Lester makes sure that everyone is aware of the location and treatment of the restrooms, when the ice cream truck will arrive, the strength of the surf, and the variations and dangers of the riptide currents. He makes sure that all attend the Dan’s Papers Kite Fly celebration in August and sign up for the annual caricatures. In tribute, he has an entire room devoted to these drawings of himself and his daughter, dated chronologically, with side art depicting whatever was foremost in his family’s mind in the highlighted year.

Some years there are exciting events to celebrate, such as the upcoming marriage of the daughter of a friend. Other years, there is the news of cancer or disease striking an acquaintance, or a beachgoer collapses on the beach and dies of a heart attack while the local E.M.T.s are valiantly attempting to save him.

Each of these episodes has been taken to heart by Lester, the beach mayor, as he quietly muses about the events and wonders if he could have been of more help in preventing a tragedy. He takes his job seriously and is a constant reminder that someone important is watching the fort, noticing and reporting problems, and forestalling any accidents, losses, or missteps by the many people who blithely dare to walk the sands of Sagg Main Beach.

Alice R. Martin grew up in Sagaponack and has roots there dating to the 17th century. She now lives in Riverhead.

I woke up from a nightmare with the television on. An evangelist was hustling cash. This man had been defrocked by his own church. He had cried on his television show asking for forgiveness for consorting with a prostitute. Then another prostitute appeared. His redemption slow­ed. But he sees himself redeemed by his Lord. And needs cash now.

There are different views on prostitution. Some see it as an evil, some as a victimless crime. I think it depends where the pimp in his sharp suit stands. After all, the televangelist in his midnight maneuver is holding a Holy Bible. And that’s where I learned at 5 years of age of prostitution; I don’t know about you.

The defrocked preacher’s son has of late taken over his father’s ministry. He is taking in $100 from Jay in New York and $300 from Mary in Maryland, who is asking for prayers. The more one gives, the more prayers said, apparently.

It was Emerson who wrote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Once I was sitting at a picnic table in a flyover state with my family, including a man who was also a close friend. We were talking about ranch riding horses (good and ill-tempered), and then he said to me, out of the indigo, “My father and grandfather were members of the K.K.K. in Indiana.”

I was eating franks and beans at the time and nearly choked on a piece of a Nathan’s hot dog from Brooklyn. “They lived outside of Indianapolis but traveled to burn down the houses of Catholics and Jews, to drive them out of other neighborhoods,” he said.

I pushed my food away.

I tried to have a good thought. I thought of a song by an Irish band, the Pogues. They sing, “The boys of the N.Y.P.D. choir were singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.” New York values, maybe.

As I walked back to our room with my wife past the saguaros so familiar from the films of my youth in which cowboys killed Indians, and kids in dark theaters cheered and had been taught nothing up to that point about a Trail of Tears, I was feeling, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “hollow like a cactus tree.”

This brings me years forward to today. The presidential election looms. (As one always seems to be in an endless spin cycle.) The candidates are shrill and, frankly, though some are very sharp individuals, sound idiotic. (This is because their handlers have told them to speak the language of the people.)

I saw in my newspaper the other day photographs made by Peter van Agtmael of members of the Ku Klux Klan. Though I am a Long Islander by birth and temperament, I live at present 12 miles as the raven flies from the White House in Maryland below the Mason-Dixon Line. The photographer nailed these robe-wearers hiding in their masks in houses and barns in Maryland and Tennessee. These are smallish states. One photo van Agtmael made was of a picture of Anne Frank that was tacked to a K.K.K. wall nearer to me than I would like that had this caption: “Hide and Seek Champion, 1942-1944.”

I rushed to a bathroom and puked.

Who stands for “truth, justice, and the American way”?

And what now is the American way?

Dan Marsh has been a “Guestwords” contributor since 2003. His writing has appeared in Newsday and Rolling Stone.

On April 12, President Obama expanded the national park system to include the historic Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C. In designating the site as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, the president honored the trailblazers who fought for women’s rights. President Obama described the site’s significance as “a hotbed of activism, a centerpiece for the struggle for equality, a monument to a fight not just for women’s equality but, ultimately, for equality for everybody.”

The designation of a new national monument is particularly meaningful this year as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the date President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that established the National Park Service. It is a powerful signal that after 100 years, the park service continues to be a vital and evolving agency. Since its establishment, the national park system has expanded area by area, each new site adding integrity to the whole — another thread, another color, woven into the tapestry that is the story of this diverse nation. 

The fight for women’s suffrage is an important piece of the American story told by the park service, but there are more chapters to write, more stories to tell. Women’s rights and the park service have seen much progress in the last 100 years, but there is still work to do. President Obama’s designation of the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument is a step in the right direction.

Today, just nine out of more than 400 national parks have been established specifically to tell the story of women’s history in America. The Belmont-Paul monument is a terrific addition to this small number. I hope to see this number grow throughout my lifetime.

As a former National Park Service employee, I’m proud to support a park system that is growing to more accurately reflect the diverse range of stories and places in American history. We need to share the stories and struggles of past generations so that future generations understand our shared history.

It is essential that this president and those who follow him continue to use their authority to add new, significant areas that, in the words of the park service’s 1970 General Authorities Act, are “cumulative expressions of a single national heritage.” Alice Paul, Alva Belmont, and the National Women’s Party fought passionately and tirelessly for equal rights for women. The history of their fight will now be preserved in perpetuity by the National Park Service.

The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument will offer visitors the opportunity to explore the nation’s most complete collection of suffrage and equal rights movement artifacts: the documents, banners, sashes, and lobbying cards that help tell the story of women in America. Preserving these historical and cultural treasures is a gift from one generation to the next. I believe with all my heart that our children and their children will, in the words of Stephen Mather, the first director of the park service, “become better citizen[s] with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here” once they have spent time in national parks.

Each of us can and should find our own meaning in the national parks. From the glorious peaks and canyons to the sorrow-filled Trail of Tears, the authentic voices of our natural and cultural treasures speak to each of us individually. We need to make sure the National Park Service continues to grow to reflect the breadth and diversity of the American experience.

Jackie Lowey is a member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. She lives in East Hampton and serves on the East Hampton School Board.

On May 16, 1946, 70 years ago to the day I write this, I was in a Quonset hut in Camp Beale, Calif., sitting beside the desk of a graying sergeant who’d lost both his legs above the knees fighting the Japanese on one of those way-out-there Pacific islands. Typewriter keys whacked a form in the roller. He was processing my Army discharge.

“I see we sent you to Oxford for a term,” he said.

“I’m grateful for that,” I said. “I’m going back on the G.I. Bill to get a degree.”

“How’d you like to join up with the Reserve, Richard? We can get you a bar [an officer’s commission]. The Army needs educated men. War’s become very sophisticated.”

“It’s also become very stupid,” I replied.

He nodded slowly. “There are those nukes now,” he conceded.

And the words spilled out of me, as if I hadn’t been pondering them for months. “I’ve become a conscientious objector, Sergeant. Can you note that in my record?”

He told me he’d be glad to do that and handed me my discharge.

Clausewitz himself said it — Carl von Clausewitz, the enduringly eminent, hard-ass 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist. Friction and fog are intrinsic to warfare. By “friction,” Clausewitz meant that in war there is a tendency for things to go very wrong. Fog, its complement, is the uncertainty in battle, which breeds bad decisions. In short, we can never predict or control what will happen in war. There will always be fuckups.

We have a ghastly example of friction and fog in last October’s U.S. air gunship assault on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The mission was to attack a Taliban compound. According to the U.S. Defense Department report, as summarized in The New York Times, the following “chain of errors” caused the mistake.

To perform an added mission, the gunship was ordered to take off over an hour earlier than planned. The crew was insufficiently briefed. A database that would have allowed them to identify the hospital as a protected site was not uploaded. Then, the satellite radio failed, further stifling the crew’s ability to receive essential information.

Taliban fighters fired a surface-to-air missile at the plane, which veered off course to evade it, confusing the plane’s targeting systems, which directed it to an open field. The crew was left to ID their target visually, for which it was hampered by vague descriptions supplied by U.S. Special Forces and the coincidence that the enemy compound and the hospital had similar visual features and were located within 400 meters of each other.

The gunship, an AC-130, opened fire on the hospital, a total of 200 rounds before the end, some from a 105-millimeter howitzer. Forty-two people, all noncombatants, were killed — 24 patients, 14 hospital staff, and 4 caretakers. The chain of errors had become a tsunami.

Death-dealing confusion also reigned among our military leaders. The hospital telephoned and pleaded with U.S. command in Afghanistan to call off the gunship. But the attack was continued in full ferocity because a U.S. general, his name redacted from the Defense Department report, ruled that since the onslaught was already under way and had been approved by Special Forces, the hospital had lost its special protection status and bore the burden, the impossible burden really, of proving that no Taliban were there. The Defense Department later admitted that no Taliban had been present.

Details of the event’s duration are confused. Depending on which version you accept, the U.S. attack lasted anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and 11 minutes. The first shots were fired at 2:08 a.m. It was 2:20 a.m. when Doctors Without Borders reported the attack to U.S. Afghanistan command and to the Defense Department in Washington, which claims the assault was called off at 2:38, 30 minutes after the first shots and 18 minutes after the department learned of it. But at 2:56 a.m., 48 minutes into the carnage, Doctors Without Borders complained the attack was continuing and did not report a cease-fire until 3:13.

Nothing occurred in the Kunduz chain of errors that is unusual in warfare. Losing one’s way while evading enemy fire, neglecting to upload a guidance device, misidentifying the enemy, maintaining a violent assault on a mistaken target are commonplace. Friction and fog. What’s new from Kunduz is the stark revelation that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system, whether our purpose is the correct identification of a target or ensuring we do not stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

All of these things, all these little oversights, miscalculations, uninformed assumptions that multiply to become whopper screwups are indeed intrinsic to war. Always have been, always will be. The difference now is not that we have developed sophisticated systems that keep us error-free and safer, but that these systems can fail us as quickly as a car, washing machine, or computer grammar check.

Hyperbole? Well, it almost happened twice that we know of: during Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” shtick in the early 1980s and before that during the Cuban nuclear missile brinkmanship in 1962. On both occasions, we were spared by the not inevitable presence of careful people in crucial positions — John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and Nikita Khrushchev in the ’60s, and in the ’80s a Russian colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who refused to credit notice from his early warning computers that the United States had just fired five nukes at Russia from our Midwest that were 20 minutes away from obliterating much of his country. Had Colonel Petrov accepted this misinformation, there likely would have been a massive nuclear “retaliation” on the United States.

We also know of the tragic shortfalls of fail-safe systems at nuclear power plants in Japan and Russia and our near disaster in the U.S.A. at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And then there may be other near tragic mishaps that we do not know about. Of course, we must try, and keep trying, to perfect our capability to avoid civilization-ending mistakes. But it’s a struggle that we humans are not perfect enough to win.

With the possible exception of the unnamed U.S general who refused to call off the gunship when it became likely we were destroying a hospital rather than the Taliban, I can’t find it in my heart to demand, as many do, that the soldiers who participated in the Kunduz event be charged with war crimes.

In the German Rhineland, where I served in 1945 near the end of the European war, U.S. forces did not hesitate to level towns that we’d decided, not always with certainty, were sheltering German troops who wanted to continue the war. We were much too preoccupied with our own survival to consider the small chance that some tribunal in the remote future would be assembled to look back and punish us.

With all my 70 years as an advocate for nonviolent solutions, I am still not sure that in such a time and place as Kunduz, I wouldn’t have acted as the G.I.s in the AC-130 aircrew did. Indeed, God forgive me, I might even have relished it.

Being a conscientious objector may be a futile gesture, I know, especially in these days of president-candidate trash talk diplomacy. But it is one small thing I can do, keep as a part of me and hope that somehow it will matter.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton. A collection of his work, “My Writing and Advocacy, 1943-2016,” which includes his “Guestwords” articles and Star letters to the editor, is available at the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection and at the Amagansett Library.

I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”

While mocking sophomores is classic college humor — “Even freshmen look down on sophomores,” my cousin quipped — in our case, I now realize, the witticism missed badly. Something extraordinary did happen in 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” education for blacks, a common practice protected by law for half a century, was unconstitutional.

None of the serious historians of our college years mentioned Brown either, although among reminiscences of football, girls, favorite professors, and movies of the day, they did describe social and political events. They wrote of Joseph McCarthy (“We debated the McCarthy censure issue”), Billy Graham (“The campus was, for a week, a hotbed of religious inquiry”), and uprisings in Poland and Hungary (“We pledged money in large quantities for the immediate relief of Hungarian refugees”).

Nor were we unaware of racial conflict. When Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia, defended segregation in a visiting lecture, “We discussed segregation and the problems involved.” Reports of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and of white students “our own age” assaulting blacks at the University of Alabama, produced in us a “willingness to discuss the problem frankly, in a troubled spirit of moderation.” And after graduation we expected to face “crises” — “in public education, in solving the problems of biracial existence, and in all areas of foreign affairs.”

I’m sure this all seemed reasonable to me. And yet, how did we miss the Brown decision?

The answer, I’m afraid, knowing what I know today, lies in what we meant by racial “problems.” In the eyes of privileged white boys in the 1950s, blacks had their roles in society — as baseball players, shoeshine boys, jazz musicians, waiters and maids, singers, actors, and soldiers — and filled them without problem. Nor was it a problem when Marian Anderson, with a voice that Toscanini said appears once in a hundred years, became the first black singer in the Metropolitan Opera in 1955.

I’m not sure we were aware that in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, where seating was segregated, or that Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to 75,000 fans. But if we were aware, I believe we would have accepted it all — the segregated seating in our nation’s capital and the respect shown to a great black singer — as simply the way our society functioned. We might have applauded Mrs. Roosevelt’s resigning from the D.A.R., but for a Constitution Hall recital in 1955 we would have occupied our designated section, devoid of any black faces, without shame.

No, the problem for us was not the struggle between freed blacks and white society — a struggle that began in 1865 and was still engaged during our college years 90 years later. We were as blithely ignorant of that long history as of the Brown decision. The problems we recognized arose, rather, when the status quo was challenged, or, in the belligerent phrase still heard today, when “troublemakers” began to stir things up.

I don’t know whether such a view defined us as racists 60 years ago. For myself, what I’ve since learned about racial struggles has broadened my understanding of our nation’s history.

Most important, it’s clear to me that slavery itself has marked race relations, not only when Southern states fought to preserve it in law, but when, having lost the fight, they attempted to maintain at least its social structure. The claim that the South rebelled against an oppressive central government to defend “states’ rights” — a claim that many Northerners accepted at the time and still believe — is belied by the evidence. 

The government that 11 “Confederate States of America” formed in Richmond, Va., in 1861 was a mirror image of the government in Washington, with precisely the same legislative, executive, and judicial structures, and their Constitution was virtually identical to the 1787 Constitution, except for its protection of slavery. The same restrictions on the Confederate Congress are enumerated, except: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves [my italics], shall be passed.”

Likewise, in planning for new “territory” and new states, the Confederate Constitution copied the 1787 Constitution whole, with one addition: “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery [my italics] as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government.”

As for states’ rights, it is worth quoting in full the “supreme law” section of the Confederate Constitution, which repeated word for word the same section in the 1787 Constitution: “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.”

In short, the vaunted “way of life” that some Southerners still claim they were defending, and what their Confederate flags supposedly “represent” — what in fact their way of life would have continued to be had they won the Civil War — turns out to be constitutionally pretty much the Northern way of life, but with slavery.

So it is not surprising that after the Confederate Army surrendered in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment ending legal slavery was ratified that December, Southerners began to consider how to maintain their way of life. The 90-year struggle was engaged.

It is impossible in a few words to describe the ebbs and flows of the long racial conflict that culminated in the landmark Brown decision. To anyone with limited knowledge of it, I recommend the following: “Simple Justice,” an indispensable 1975 book by Richard Kluger; “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 1973, by C. Vann Woodward; the writings and the life story of W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, and the life of Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. Here are only a few highlights, and lowlights, of those 90 years.

Education came first. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress to help four million slaves transition to freedom, built hospitals and provided medical care and food, but its major efforts went to building more than 1,000 schools for black children and to establishing colleges: Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, named for the general who provided space in a former Union Army barracks, Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867, named for another Union general, and in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, graduated from Hampton in 1875 and in 1881 went to Tuskegee, Ala., to head the new college there. These institutions trained generations of professional black men and women and all remain flourishing universities today.

However, as critical as black schools and colleges were to improving many black lives, the Southern way of life continued to constrain most of the millions of freed blacks. And while the 14th Amendment (1868) extended the “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended voting rights, they also marked the end of most federal efforts to impact race relations. There were no further constitutional amendments until 1913 (allowing income taxes), and the Freedmen’s Bureau was closed in 1872. 

Over the following decades, blacks in the South did manage to vote in sufficient numbers to elect hundreds of local black officials, and between 1869 and 1901, 20 black representatives and two black senators sat in the U.S. Congress. Still, Southern states continued to press for laws limiting black rights, and in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, they triumphed. Plessy ruled that the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to segregation, which left Southern whites free to pass laws further constricting black participation in politics. The intended effect was immediate: Whereas 130,000 blacks were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, by 1904 the number was 1,342.

In the aftermath of Plessy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 by a coalition of whites and blacks, and it succeeded in restoring some voting rights. In 1936 Thurgood Marshall, a law graduate of Howard University, joined its legal staff to focus on educational equality for blacks. The decision he won in Brown overturned Plessy and established the constitutional requirement for equal protection of the laws as the basis for legal challenges to segregation.

Sixty years later, the gross mistreatment of our black citizens continues, in grade schools, legal defense, prison sentences, social services, and municipal infrastructure. I can only view it still as a privileged white, because that’s what I am. But knowing what I know, I would urge a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to continue the fight for equal protection of the laws. I will applaud their successes.

Malcolm Mitchell, who until recently lived part time in East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine.

It used to be that if you called someone and he didn’t answer (and there was no answering machine), you could almost see the silence yawning at you. You placed yourself in that imaginary office or kitchen or bedroom and conjured either a void or something going on that was mysteriously alluring and that you were somehow being excluded from. Your wife, friend, or lover might be betraying you in that silence, but there was always an anchor, a place to which the ringing belonged.

Now the landline is going the way of the old Royal typewriter, thank-you notes written in cursive, and the un-air-conditioned car. Remember the smell of the ocean after driving for hours through choked highways to get to the beach on a summer’s weekend in a sweltering sedan? Now cars are like spoiled trust fund babies who don’t need anyone. The music is blasting, everyone is on a smartphone or iPad, and nobody even needs the sea.

The old rotary, which looked like a miniature cash register, the Princess, the touch-tone, even the battery-powered handset that you could walk around the house with are all victims of unplanned obsolescence — their half-lives foreshortened by Moore’s Law and the tsunami of cellphone technology that followed in its wake.

But the death of the landline is creating a revolution that was prefigured by developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics many decades before. The idea of quantum entanglement is predicated on the notion that a particle can be in two places at the same time. A quantum universe, if such a phenomenon could exist not only among subatomic particles but human bodies, would give new meaning to adultery and cheating since in theory a certain equanimity would mitigate against favoring one body over the other. Promiscuousness itself would be rendered fairly benign as we would all inhabit a universe of multiversic perversity! 

Pretty soon few if any telephones will be ringing in a place. A phone number will be assigned to a person but that person will be the equivalent of a moving particle. In the past you could envision the geographic spot in which the phone was ringing. In the not too distant future, it will be literally a Pandora’s box in terms of possibilities. I might be persuaded you were picking up in Paris, London, or Moscow when you were, in reality, en route to Nice, Liverpool, or Leningrad. 

The phone, which was a creature of Newtonian l9th-century technology, has finally come into its own. The old version plugged into a jack in the wall created the illusion that space could exist alone. There was something stoic and intransigent about these anachronisms. Now the possessor of his cell truly navigates the space-time continuum, a moving body receiving electronic signals from other moving bodies whose positions are continually changing and whose final resting spot (if such a condition truly exists) is ultimately dependent on the motion of other bodies. 

I might, for instance, be drawn by the inertial force of an economic windfall sucking at me with the magnetism of a black hole. Its gravitational spell might be preventing me from making a desired appearance in London. At the same time I could be involved in a conversation with a new lover while catching a plane at Heathrow for the South of France. 

And where is the admissions office for the online university I have just enrolled in? Not even on the cellphone of a human being, but in the robotic intelligence digitally vetting my application in the ether of cyberspace.

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.

“Tell Mom I’m coming. Tell her to hang on.”

“I have. She knows.”

I’m on the phone with my sister Tish in early February, driving south through a blizzard in western Massachusetts to catch a plane to South Carolina. Mom, a New Yorker, moved there six years ago for the final chapter of her life. She’s stopped eating and drinking.

We’ve said many goodbyes in the past two years. Now, her breath and her beating heart are the only things keeping her alive. I want to feel them one last time — that clear, insistent pulse that’s driven her for 92 years.

I spend the night in East Hampton with plans to fly down from J.F.K. the following afternoon. Tish is at our mother’s bedside all night, and in the early morning she reports that Mom is hanging on. I count the hours: I need her to live 10 more before I can get there.

The following morning is one of those sparkling, blue-sky winter days, with barely a puff of an offshore breeze. A perfect day, but the light in the leafless, snowy landscape is blindingly white and desolating.

Down at the ocean a small swell is running. I have what I need to stay warm in the winter water, and I paddle out on my surfboard. A harbor seal joins me, playfully peering up now and again to watch my progress.

Mom was an avid ocean swimmer; she never missed a day once the water crested 60 degrees in Southampton. She always found ways to swim, wherever she was, bundling her pouf of hair into a bathing cap and breaststroking for hours in any body of water she could find. 

The last time we swam together she was 89. She could barely walk anymore. I carried her into the retirement-community pool, with its elaborate railings and alarming signs warning of the risk of drowning in the four-foot deep end. She hated to be picked up, but it was the only way. I set her down in the water on her back and she stroked away, singing. I can’t recall the song; she had so many.

“I could do this forever,” she cooed. 

But she couldn’t. She began to shiver, and I had to lift her out and warm her up in the hot shower, where I discovered we had come far enough together that we were no longer embarrassed by our nakedness. Goal oriented to the end, Mom figured we’d gone swimming; that was the point. The rest was just logistics.

Swimming, especially in the ocean, is a powerful thread in our lives. We remember places from the swimming — how cold or rough it was, how well we had handled it, how we had come to find a particularly fine beach or pool.

There were epic swims. One such swim was in 1960 in Ghana when Mom was 37. She’d organized a tour of Africa for Louis Armstrong and his band. I wasn’t born yet; I know this story from years of telling and some of it from her unpublished memoir, much of it written by Tish.

The tour, sponsored by Pepsi, was a major offensive in the early Pepsi-Coke “Cola wars.” Mom had been a successful journalist, then a commodities broker. She was charming and prepossessing, and Pepsi had offered her a position leading their international marketing efforts. The job was something of a risk for Mom, who, as her family’s sole breadwinner, was doing well as a trader. And, there would be long periods abroad away from her two children. But the money was good and it came with a chance to see the world, one of her dreams. 

For the African tour, which lasted months, she left my brother and sister — I would come in 1962 — in the care of her mother. The heat was oppressive. The huge crowds carried Satchmo like royalty on a litter through the streets of Africa’s capitals. One hundred thousand turned out at a stadium in Ghana, and just as many in the Congo and Nigeria. The Soviets declared the whole thing a “capitalist distraction.”

The African people loved Louis, but they went crazy for the band’s drummer, a Hawaiian named Danny Barcelona.

As mother hen, travel coordinator, tour guide, and assistant to the band, Mom faced incredible problems. Velma Middleton, the band’s noted, and dangerously overweight, vocalist, died in Sierra Leone from a massive heart attack. In Lagos, one of the support staff accidentally fell to his death from a hotel balcony. Amid those tragedies, it was up to Mom to handle the logistics and keep up morale and appearances. Unlikely though it may seem, the tour continued. 

Any recollection of those days is incomplete without an understanding of what it was to be a successful working woman in the ’50s and ’60s. Men made all the rules and women executives were a rarity. When, for example, Mom inquired of her boss on the “Today” show, where she worked in the ’50s, why her male counterparts were getting yearlong contracts and hers topped out at three months, he replied unapologetically: “Well, Robin, we don’t know what might happen.”

In other words, the network didn’t want to be stuck with a pregnant broadcaster. 

As it turned out, she got pregnant. There was no such thing as maternity leave, and she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Though it was illegal and dangerous at the time, she found a doctor who terminated the pregnancy. That fear-filled moment and that decision would drive her forever. She would devote the second half of her life to working to empower poor women, for abortion rights and family planning services around the world, and would become one of the nation’s leading and noted advocates in that fight. 

After several hot weeks on the road, the tour landed in Accra, not far from the South Atlantic. Mom’s predictable first thought: I must go to the ocean. She grabbed a towel, her bathing suit and bathing cap, and grabbed a cab.

The beach at Accra in 1960 was not where one would expect a young white woman from America to go swimming. The main part of the city itself was set back slightly from the coast, which was a place of work and trade. Men hauled fishing boats and nets onto the sand, trucks hauled out the catches. Down the coast the Ghanaian government was building a harbor. Cranes and trucks and garbage dotted the landscape.

Amid all that industry was my mother, peeling off her slacks and blouse to expose her fair skin and single-piece suit. She described the day as brutally hot, and the ocean as murky and rough but nothing she couldn’t handle.

A group of Chinese men who’d been working on the harbor construction watched her swimming out. Afterward, toweling off, she watched as the men followed her example. They quickly were in trouble, caught by currents or scared by the rollers. They waved and called out frantically for help. Mom charged in.

She kept her distance, despite their efforts to reach her. If these guys grabbed her as a buoy she knew she’d go down. Instead, she reassured them as best she could without a shared language, and guided them out of the current. She waited for a lull in the wave action, then yelled to swim hard for shore, leading the way.

Back on the sand, a crowd of locals had gathered, and the men surrounded Mom, effusive with their thanks.

“I remember thinking how lucky I was that my mother had taken my sister Peggy and me to the Maryland shore as girls, and we’d learned about the ocean, how at ease I always would feel in the waves,” Mom would tell me later, recounting the tale.

My mother’s courage has inspired my own since I was a boy, not necessarily her athletic courage or her strength in the surf, although I’m grateful for that example as well. Rather her dignified but unwavering fighting spirit, her belief that doing the right thing and summoning the necessary confidence in the face of adversity and your own shortcomings will see you through. Mom was not the strongest swimmer, but she was there on that faraway African beach in 1960, alone, on the other side of the earth from her family, on a risky break from a dream job she desperately needed. Yet, there was never any question she would try to guide those Chinese workers, who were also a long way from home, also taking a risk, to safety.

In the surf that morning in February in East Hampton I do some laps in the waves, riding in and paddling back to catch more. On one of the return trips, the seal pops up 20 or so yards away. It pushes up out of the water to get a better look at me, its smooth shoulders motioning keenly above the water, its big eyes glistening, curious, eager. 

“I see you!” I call out, waving self-consciously.

When I get out an hour or so later Tish has called. I dial back. She has been with Mom all night.

“She has gone,” she says. 

You prepare for this moment; you believe you’re ready. But you never are. 

At home, unsure of what to do, disconsolate and restive, I read up on seals. The seemingly sociable, happy creatures are said to bring protection during times of change, according to myth and native traditions. They encourage lucid dreaming. Seals’ “medicine” produces imagination, creativity, protection from danger, the rise of one’s inner voice.

The memories begin immediately, flooding every waking moment. And, at night, dreams. For weeks it is as if Mom is on the other side, waiting for me. I am swimming through life with her, again.

“What can I do?” she asks one of the last times we speak, now improbably frail and wheelchair-bound. It was a kind of mantra for her, her great gift and accomplishment, to be of service to me, to everyone, after years of asking “What must I do?” to keep it all together. 

“You’ve done it all, Mom, everything, really,” I reply. “Now, it’s up to us.”

The morning after she’s gone I go back to the ocean. It’s another sparkling day. The surf rolls in. I paddle out. And, I find her there, just beyond the waves.

Robin Chandler Duke, born Grace Esther Tippett on Oct. 13, 1923, died in Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 6. Her son Biddle is the founding editor of The Star’s magazine, EAST.

Days before President Obama’s visit to Havana I saw a yellow Cuban taxi with an NBC sticker on its windshield. I knew things were changing in Cuba, and that logo was a sign of it. I was in Havana with Barbara and Dennis D’Andrea of Wainscott the week that included Obama’s visit. We had not planned to be there because of the president, it just happened that way. 

Presbyterian churches on the East End are part of a partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba in the town of Guines, southeast of Havana. A number of us travel there each March, and recently in alternate years youth from the East Hampton Presbyterian Church have gone to Guines in the summer.

Our trip this year included 12 men and women. Most have been to Cuba before, but one, Joe Haines of Sagaponack, was going for the first time. Joe brought not only his engaging personality but also his music to the Guines church, where he immediately joined Pastor Abel Mirabel, his wife, Sara, and their sons in their gospel rock band. Another in our group, the Rev. Bill Hoffmann, pastor of the Montauk Community Church, joined the rock group on drums in jam sessions before and after a Saturday night concert at the church. Then, for a fiesta with a guest Cuban band, Joe stepped in to play bass. 

The rest of us joined in those festivities — Barbara and Dennis, Bill Hoffmann’s daughter Rachel from Washington, D.C., Patricia Wadzinski and Karen McCaffrey of East Hampton, Mayela Vargas, Iris Mitchell, and Susan Raymond of Montauk, and Maria Studer from the Presbyterian church in Levittown. 

Sunday morning worship in a Cuban church is not exactly in our customary polite style. With classes by age groups, a break for refreshments, then worship, the experience lasts more than two hours. There is much singing in strong voice, the gospel rock band, prayers, and preaching. Bill was the guest preacher. Each of us also extended greetings from our respective churches, including Amagansett, where I am pastor emeritus. 

Dennis D’Andrea and Joe Haines are Masons, and as part of our visit each year the Masonic lodge in Guines invites Dennis, and this year Joe, too, to a meeting and dinner. The Masons are strong in Guines, as elsewhere in Cuba.

When we return home, we are often asked, “What do you do in Cuba?” and “What changes do you see?”

What we do is visit with the people. Some of that is planned, as in visits to the homes of church members with Pastor Abel. Other conversations are as they happen among friends — at the church, on the street, in their homes. In one poignant visit this time, we went to see Miguel, a man dying of cancer whose wife suffers from dementia. Knowing of our visit, Miguel rallied and in characteristic manner spoke effusively, welcoming us to their home. In his life he was never bashful or retiring. On this visit I recalled to him and the group the time from our 2008 visit when Miguel, seeing us on the street, cried out with exuberance, arms in the air, “Obama, Obama, Obama!”

The subject of President Obama’s visit came up several times. Comments from Cubans were uniformly appreciative. One example: We visited the home of Francisco Llano. He is 90, a retired lawyer, and he speaks English. “What do you think of Obama?” Barbara asked. He was thoughtful before he replied, “I have great admiration for him.” 

We also visited Ophelia Baez and her husband, Hugo, in their home, an older wood-frame attached house with Hugo’s barbershop in the front room. As a young revolutionary Hugo fought at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. For many years Ophelia was music director at the Guines church. She spoke with feeling about Obama’s visit and the improvement in relations between the two countries. She sang a few bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a few bars of the Cuban national anthem. And when she spoke of the Guines church as “my church,” Hugo gently added with a smile, “Our church.” 

It’s difficult for many people here to understand how some Cuban men and women can be revolutionaries in spirit, given their history, and at the same time Christians. We forget or perhaps do not fully realize that our own country was born in revolution. 

It’s also helpful to know that since 1994 the Cuban government officially is secular, not atheist. Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, as did, most recently, Pope Francis, who helped facilitate the opening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S. in December 2014. Churches in Cuban towns and in the cities are important centers of social cohesion, which in recent decades the Cuban government has recognized and supported. That is not to say all Cuban pastors and priests, or congregants, think alike when it comes to their government — no more than with opinions held by us of our government. It’s easy, and false, to generalize.

To speak, then, of change. The obvious major change is the opening of diplomatic relations. It was a thrill to see “Embassy of the United States of America” emblazoned on the embassy building. There are ripple effects. Among people we know, there is a guarded openness to expressing their opinions more directly. The Cuban government is still repressive, so these conversations are private within people’s homes or at the church. But I find a subtle shift toward openness, which I attribute to improvement in our political relations.

There are more obvious changes. Since a year ago, and much more so now, we see Cubans with phone devices. These are of Cuban issue and not tied to the Internet, still out of reach because of the government, with exceptions for medical personnel and the military. The government has set up WiFi hot spots in various places in the country, one in the central plaza in Guines. We saw young men and women gathered in clusters as they spoke on their phones at the plaza. 

What’s more, the Cuban currency will be changing to a 1:1 parity with the dollar and the euro. We heard that an American cruise ship would soon be coming to Havana. And we saw many more tourists than in previous visits, including Americans. Direct mail service between the two countries is another imminent change.

Barbara, Dennis, and I stayed in Old Havana for a week, the others in our group returning on March 15. We stayed in a convent hostel run by sisters of the Order of St. Bridget just around a corner and one block from Plaza San Francisco. It was there that President Obama and members of his entourage were parked before their walking tour to Havana Cathedral. We did not try to see the president since the streets were blocked. 

On Monday the three of us took a long walk, and on the way back we saw a crowd of people outside the National Theater. The Capitol building is nearby. Security personnel and Cuban police were patrolling the street, suggesting that Obama might be passing by. We waited an hour and left. I don’t know if the motorcade did go that way, but we sensed tremendous excitement in the air. One Cuban man on a tall bicycle rode by several times with an American flag and a Cuban flag on his handlebars. Barbara, Dennis, and I, with our Cuban friend Yoimel Gonzales, had been to the National Theater that Saturday to see the ballet. Obama spoke at the theater on Tuesday.

We visited an artist friend, Francisco Nunez, in his Havana apartment. He said of Obama’s visit, “The people are stirred up by it. It is the most important event in Cuba since the revolution.” 

The significance of Obama’s visit obviously is political. But in rising above the shrill, sniping voices, the president achieves stature from a historical perspective. As a student of American and Latin American history, I appreciate that and value my association with it in my visits with the Cuban people.

On Palm Sunday, we worshipped at the First Presbyterian Reformed Church in Havana, where the Rev. Hector Mendez has been pastor for more than 40 years. The church has an extensive social system of services for the people of the neighborhood, which is downtown, adjacent to Chinatown. The church was filled, as it always has been when I’ve been there, at least 200 in attendance. Prayers were expressed in the morning bulletin, as well as orally, for the visit of President Obama. 

Reverend Mendez also welcomed foreign visitors — in addition to us several retired Presbyterian pastors traveling together and visitors from Austria. We Presbyterians were all called up front, where we extended greetings and where by Hector’s unexpected invitation Barbara led everyone in prayer. She did very well, too. I speak Spanish, though not fluently. It is another dimension of the richness of the experience for me to speak in their language.

Barbara has been going to Cuba for 22 years. I have been visiting since 2005. The ties that draw us together are those of amistad, friendship, of long standing, like family. We are excited to see changes. At the same time, as with many Cubans, we are wary, not wanting to see such an infusion of American capital, trade, and business to the point that it unintentionally wrecks the economy or changes it such that it would no longer be Cuba. 

President Obama said it is not our intention to direct Cuban affairs, and I hope that will be true. There are remaining issues, which Cuban Americans are quick to point out. It is to be hoped these issues will be worked through with good will. In the meantime, the good will and pleasure we enjoy with our friends is strong.

The Rev. Rob Stuart, a "Guestwords" contributor for many years, lives in Springs.