Friends, I thank you for starting another piece from me on this topic; please don’t move on yet. Yes, my efforts to defend Social Security from government and media lies have become familiar, though I fear fruitless, for more than a decade. Still, revelations in recent years of ever more skullduggery by both parties make my efforts even more relevant. Remember Bob Hope’s quip: “No one party can fool all the people all the time. That’s why we have two parties.”

When it comes to bashing Social Security, the media cooperates with both. Two recent New York Times articles conspired to erode public confidence in what I call America’s collective 401(k). So, I’m once again into the fray.

The two articles appeared on the same day last December. A columnist for The Times wrote a front-page piece titled “Aging Society Changes Story on Poverty in Old Age,” and a news report from the presidential races was titled “Clinton Confidently Embracing Her Husband’s Economic Record.” The columnist, Eduardo Porter, wrote of demographic trends “expected to continue for at least the next 50 years” (expected by whom?). And he dismissed any proposed increase in the Social Security tax rate as “politically dead on arrival in Washington” (as though an increase would affect overall government spending). I’ll deal with those matters below.

First, if you wonder what the Clinton story has to do with Social Security, the answer is that Democrats still include “a balanced budget” among President Bill Clinton’s achievements. And that false claim depends on convincing the American people that the federal government doesn’t owe any money to Social Security.

Here’s the background. In 1997, the Clinton administration changed the way the Bureau of the Public Debt had been reporting the national debt for more than 200 years. Ever since Alexander Hamilton was secretary of the Treasury, the bureau has presented “Total Public Debt Outstanding” as a single number. Because Hamilton was as obsessive in crunching numbers as in dissecting arguments, the number has always been calculated “to the penny.” The first was published on Jan. 1, 1790, showing the nation’s debt in 10 digits: $71,060,508.50. Today, it takes 16 digits to show our debt of nearly $19 trillion. (You can view both on the bureau’s website — treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current.)

On Sept. 30, 1997, two additional numbers appeared for the first time on the website. (The federal government’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.) The numbers were shown alongside Total Public Debt Outstanding as subcategories of debt: “Debt Held by the Public,” representing Treasury bonds sold to individuals, corporations, and governments worldwide when the Treasury borrowed money, and something called “Intragovernmental Holdings,” defined on the bureau’s website as “Government Account Series securities held by Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds.” (I wonder who invented the word “intragovernmental.” My computer insists it’s a misspelling.)

The sum of those subcategories of debt — each calculated to the penny — equals Total Public Debt Outstanding. 

So what’s the scam? The Clinton administration claimed that Intragovernmental Holdings is merely money that one part of the government “owes” to another part. It’s as though, the argument goes, you owe money to yourself. (I’ve personally never met anyone who can explain what it means to owe myself money.)

Ignoring Intragovernmental Holdings, the Clinton administration used Debt Held by the Public to represent the federal government’s total debt. And (surprise!) in the four fiscal years between Sept. 30, 1997, and Sept. 30, 2001, Debt Held by the Public actually declined each year. That was the Democrats’ entire rationale for claiming a balanced budget. It still is.

Never mind that in each of those four years Intragovernmental Holdings increased, largely because the government was borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund — a total of some $550 billion over the four years. (More on this below.)

And never mind that Total Public Debt Outstanding — the one number that every administration before 1997, including Clinton’s own, had used to calculate the government’s annual budget surplus or deficit — also increased each year. Over the four years, the federal government’s total debt increased from $5.41 trillion to $5.81 trillion.

All of this data has been available on the bureau’s website. With the media turning a blind eye, however, Democrats believed they could get away with the scam. Apparently they still do.

Of course what Democrats began Republicans were only too happy to continue. In fact, years before George W. Bush became president, Republicans were telling the American public that Social Security was going broke. They still are.

The twin lies on which Republicans make their case were repeated in Eduardo Porter’s New York Times column. First, they claim to have identified, in Mr. Porter’s words, “inexorable” economic and demographic trends that will last “at least the next 50 years” and lead to Social Security’s inevitable demise. Really? Is Mr. Porter suggesting that he, or anyone, knows what the U.S. economy and demographics are going to look like in 2066 and beyond? Social Security’s actuaries don’t claim such prescience. Their fundamental test of “financial adequacy” — the relation between assets in the Trust Fund and promised payouts — is projected for just 10 years. Beyond that, projections are “uncertain,” as they explained in the 2002 Trustees Report: “The degree of uncertainty involved can be illustrated by imagining how difficult it would have been in 1925 to project the world of 1930, much less that of 2000.”

Since the actuaries have been instructed by succeeding administrations to make 75-year projections despite their uncertainty, their solution has been to make three projections: one “high cost,” one “low cost,” and the third, “intermediate cost.” Those projections, however, diverge widely as they extend further into the future. The American Academy of Actuaries, in a 2009 Issue Brief denouncing the futility of such long-term projections, wrote of “sharp disagreements among experts over projecting mortality rates for 75 years.” Projections would also have to be made 75 years out for inflation, interest rates, birth rates, employment, etc. (In the same Issue Brief, the actuaries signaled their frustration by quoting the famous Yogi Berra line: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”)

The Republican lie about long-term trends is built on an obvious fact about how Social Security got started. Contributions began to be collected in 1938 from millions of working Americans, but when the first benefits were paid in the 1940s, only those who had paid in and then reached retirement age were eligible. So at first, more than 40 workers were contributing to the system for every one receiving benefits. The contribution rate was therefore set at just 1 percent, paid equally by both employers and employees.

That 40-to-1 ratio naturally began to drop as more contributors reached retirement age. But by 1975 that trend was over. A stable ratio of workers to retirees was reached — roughly 3 to 1 — and it has remained there ever since.

The contribution rate also rose as the worker-retiree ratio stabilized. It was 5 percent in the 1970s and reached 6 percent in 1988. It has now remained at 6.2 percent for the past quarter century.

The Trust Fund meanwhile has grown to nearly $3 trillion, and as the baby boomers retire it will start to shrink. That is exactly how the actuaries planned it, given the spike in live births in the 1950s and the entry of the boomers into the labor force in the 1970s. By making new 10-year forecasts every year, the actuaries have successfully managed the flow of money into and out of the fund for 80 years.

So much for long-term trends that doom Social Security. The second Republican lie is that increasing Social Security benefits is anathema to lawmakers who want to rein in government spending. The truth is that the government contributes nothing to Social Security. The 1935 legislation establishing the system banned any government support, and that ban still stands. Social Security is a closed, collective, intergenerational system; every dollar in the system comes from workers’ contributions (the correct definition of FICA taxes), and virtually every dollar is paid out to contributing workers after they retire.

The exception is the cost of the Social Security Administration itself, for which the Trust Fund pays out less than 1 percent of its assets. The S.S.A. is the most efficient office in government, having kept track of hundreds of millions of individual workers for 80 years and having paid out every promised benefit to every retiree — including disability and survivor benefits.

The Trust Fund by law invests its money safely in U.S. Treasury bonds. It is unique among federal agencies in that it holds physical bonds issued by the Treasury Department. As the S.S.A. website puts it, “Just as in the case of marketable Treasury securities held by the public, all of the investments held by the trust funds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government.” So the government really does owe the money it borrowed from the Trust Fund — or rather borrowed from the millions of working and retired men and women in the system. That money in a real sense belongs to them.

On the question of whether Social Security benefits should be increased, I hope, my friends, you now understand that the only people who would be affected are those in the system. With many corporate pension funds struggling to fulfill their promises, millions of Americans expect to rely more on their Social Security benefits during their retirement years. A small increase in the contribution rate, unchanged for a quarter century, would greatly help. And the impact on the federal budget would be zero. 

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

“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.

Speaking at the recent climate talks in Paris, President Obama declaimed that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and back in March, Israel’s prime minister famously told Congress about Iran that “the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.” Punditry is alive and kicking. 

There should actually be an academic discipline devoted to it so that students can major in these pithy phrases and graduate students can go on to advanced degrees. Alexander Pope, who said “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” in his poem “An Essay on Criticism,” was a great pundit, and his work should be mandatory reading for scholars in the field. But punditry is also a pervasive part of both history and everyday life. Was it Buddhists with their emphasis on the here and now who discovered that one of the anodynes for addiction was the phrase “one day at a time”?

And then there’s Santayana’s famous “Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them” and Clausewitz’s famous dictum “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Some of these are not puns in the strict sense, since they do not involve wordplay of the kind you find in “Handel with care” or “Haydn go seek,” which are listed as examples of puns in the dictionary. But those who construct these turns of phrase, according to Merriam-Webster, are pundits or persons who know “a lot about a particular subject and express ideas and opinions about that subject publicly.”

And who came up with the pithy phrases “You aren’t what you do” and “Don’t quit before the miracle”?

“One door closes and another opens” is another popular homily, and blatantly untrue. “One door closes and another closes,” almost any recently laid off or divorced person will tell you. You may lose your job at the foundry and go on to sculpt the Venus de Milo, but usually you end up on unemployment. And what about divorcées? One door may have closed, but is there a pun that coalesces around the notion that the price you pay for inevitably marrying the same person all over again (a common dispirited complaint among those who remarry) is a lowering of net worth (due to the combination of legal bills and settlement)? 

Puns are interesting things. Sometimes a pun, like the one you see in some bathrooms, “We aim to please, will you aim too, please?” (a real bona fide one), can be very down to earth, and other times they can encompass a universe of emotions, like feminism’s oft-quoted “No is a sentence.” 

But pundits may find themselves struggling to deal with ideas that are too big for their britches. “He or she is in the hallway” is often used as an extension of the libelous “one door closes and another opens,” but it falls with a thud. What hallway, the one between the bedrooms or the one on the landing outside your apartment, if you live in a co-op or condo? And let’s take F.D.R.’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It’s a nice thought, but after Pearl Harbor one would have wagered that the only thing one had to fear was another attack at a vulnerable installation. 

Does Khrushchev’s infamous “We will bury you!” qualify as a pun? Certainly it’s been quoted, at least humorously, by a whole generation of baby boomers who lived in fear that Chicken Little was right and the sky was falling. Mel Brooks’s “It’s good to be the king” is not really a pun, but it’s become one because of how ubiquitously it’s used and the suggestiveness of its irony. 

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and “Where gold speaks every tongue is silent” are common sayings, created by pundits way back when, that are often used by language teachers who are seeking neat ways to introduce foreign words into one’s vocabulary. For instance, in Italian the latter is Dove l’oro parla, ogni lingua tace. What a good way to learn the nouns for gold and tongue! Here punditry performs a practical function that exceeds merely keeping the toilet seat free from urine.

To quote Dr. Seuss’s classic “The Cat in the Hat,” “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.” One rainy day when you don’t have anything better to do, try to make puns out of your life. You may have words of wisdom and you may remember Polonius’s “brevity is the soul of wit,” but it’s hard to be wise and pithy, two common attributes of punditry, at the same time. 

Or better yet, the next time you’re having one of those power struggles with your significant other, when “Would you rather be right or happy?” runs through your mind, try to think up a pun. You’ll likely become tongue-tied and the argument will end before it’s even had a chance to start.

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

Christmas can be a time to evaluate our collective “goodness.”

We get a bad report card because we should have considered protecting the 300,000 Syrians killed by Assad and the 3.5 million refugees still alive — barely. We could have tried harder to put together a coalition for a no-fly zone and safe haven and told how it could be achieved most safely for United States forces.

Senator John McCain pleaded for action three years ago. He knows something about human suffering, international affairs, and military options. This is not the first time that we turned a deaf ear to a huge massacre, even when there was no danger to American troops.

In 1994, the United Nations Security Council voted to send 3,000 peacekeepers to Rwanda to stop an imminent genocide. The U.S. vetoed the troops, who would have kept the simple weapons under lock and key. In the next 100 days, 800,000 people were hacked to death by machetes, except for those who could pay $35 to be shot.

You may have seen this in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” and the documentary “The Last Just Man” shows our U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright raising her arm high in a defiant veto at the U.N. Security Council, presumably knowing it would mean one of the worst 100 days in the history of the world.

At the same time, 100,000 people were being massacred in a genocide in Bosnia. Troops were not sent in until 1995, even though Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who dedicates his life to “never again,” told me that President Clinton two years earlier had assured him that troops were being deployed soon. We suffered hardly a casualty after we arrived.

This kind of devaluation of life was also present in our Desert Storm fight against Iraq in 1991. We gave a ticker tape parade to our returning soldiers for a victory that was nothing more than killing 250,000 poor Iraqi troops sent to the front lines by the madman Saddam Hussein. We killed them in a few days with hardly a U.S. casualty.

We mourn profusely the loss of 14 Americans in the San Bernardino shootings but do not feel connected with the hundreds of thousands of lives lost abroad. Leadership from politicians, the press, and the pulpit could change our thinking.

Two years after Rwanda, Clinton promoted Madeleine Albright to secretary of state. Susan E. Rice, who in 1994 was the president’s director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council and a protégée of Albright’s, was later promoted to assistant secretary of state for African affairs, completing a tandem of diabolical political rewards.

Rice became U.N. ambassador under Obama and is now his national security adviser. Not surprisingly, ISIS has been underestimated and she has opposed a safe haven and no-fly zone in Syria. U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, one of the greatest opponents of genocide, is apparently silenced by Rice, who outranks her.

This reminds me of George W. Bush listening to Dick Cheney rather than Colin Powell, who was against invading Iraq, and the promotion of Condoleezza Rice to secretary of state after 9/11 occurred on her watch as national security adviser.

Supporters of Sanders and Trump sense that they would give important jobs to the best people, and not failed career politicians with poor insight and values.

The press can be a problem too. Abe Rosenthal, once the powerful editor of The New York Times, used the “Black Hawk down” tragedy in Somalia, in which 18 Marines were brutally murdered and more than 70 injured trying to stop a genocide, to rail against intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda because those countries were not in America’s security interests.

I confronted Rosenthal 10 years later and he admitted to telling Clinton he would turn The Times against him if Clinton went into Bosnia or Rwanda. Abe went on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which ought to be revoked posthumously.

Normally, we cannot count on our religious institutions to be leaders on issues out of favor with their congregations, of which saving people in the Mideast might well be one. But it is a new day with Pope Francis, who is unparalleled as a spokesman for the oppressed. In 2013 he urged even atheists to join him in bringing peace.

Caring leads to understanding and understanding leads to solutions.

Violence has always evolved out of poverty more than ideology. Karl Marx said on zero calories a day we are all anarchists. There are hundreds of millions of unemployed Muslims. ISIS gives them meals and a purpose, the way they see it.

I wrote in 2007 that America should be exporting entrepreneurship, not dropping bombs. Now the State Department has the Global Entrepreneurship Program, but it is little and late.

America needs to be known for bringing food, shelter, clothing, and economic opportunity. When we drop bombs, as Obama says we have done against ISIS 9,000 times, even though we are trying not to kill innocent people we are at the least destroying the country’s economic infrastructure. A country cannot make long-term friends this way.

When I was in Israel over 50 years ago the people I met said their future would turn on how much Israel’s economic prowess spills over to its neighbors. It did not do so sufficiently and the consequences were predicted back then, in 1963.

When I see children at Halloween having fun trying to see how scary they can be, I think of how disconnected we are from a big part of the world. Half a billion children go to sleep every night actually scared to death because they are starving; they are thirsty and sick without medicines; they fear they will be kidnapped or forced to be a child soldier or teen bride or prostitute, or left an orphan because their father was killed and mother raped and killed. Nothing could be further from the Halloween luxury of a big laugh.

Hopefully, the next U.S. president will inspire a greater concern for the disadvantaged in the U.S., and the world’s neediest too, because “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.

How did we meet? I’ll tell you.

I was working at the radio station WEHM as a D.J. with a Saturday afternoon show, “Kyle on the Dial.” Rusty listened all the time and fell in love with my voice. Curious as he was, he called the station.

“Is this Kyle?” he asked.

“Yes, would you like to request a song?” 

“No, not exactly. I’m Rusty. Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, just like that. 

“No,” I said.

“We should go out for coffee some day.”

Instead, I suggested, “I get off at 5 — meet me for a drink at Cyril’s. Oh, and can you bring a sweater? It’ll be cold at the bar.”

He came, he saw, he conquered.

He brought me his sweatshirt. It was May 2004. The Kentucky Derby was on the TV. He picked a horse named Rock Hard Ten. Neither of us won the race, but we won the jackpot that day. That first date I saw all the cherries line up on the slot machine. I had hit the big time! A charming, handsome, smart, funny, sexy writer, sailor, skier, surfer, and adventurer. Perfect.

We have a winner. He was my king and I was his queen.

No playing hard to get. We knew what we wanted, and we knew destiny, somehow, had a hand in this.

What a lucky girl I was to have Rusty show me his world. And, I would add, what a lucky guy Rusty was to have me. “We’re both lucky,” he would say. Where every day was fun and full of adventures. 

We went up the coast of California and down the slopes of Zermatt, drinking Swiss beer under the Matterhorn, sipping Singapore Slings in Raffles and Bintang beer in the Mentawai Islands, surfing in Indonesia.

“Let’s go to Tobago, Stowe, Jackson Hole, Hawaii, St. Barth, Cartagena!”

“Okay,” I’d say and start packing. He didn’t have to ask me twice. I was ready to go anytime and anywhere. We had so many more places to see together. His dream was to get on a freighter with armfuls of books and sail the world . . . with me.

In Montauk in the dead of winter, he would check the ice on Fort Pond and come home excited.

“The ice is perfect. Get your skates. Let’s go.”

In our matching Dickie snowsuits we flew across the ice, exhilarated, and would come home to a nice warm fire he would make in the wood-burning stove. He would always say, “Let’s find a good movie on TCM.”

If there was snow, we grabbed a sled and went to the top of the hill at Navy Road and raced down screaming and laughing like little kids. Rusty was a beautiful boy who greeted each day like it was Christmas morning.

In the summer we woke up early, grabbed our bathing suits, and jumped in the brisk ocean together. Rusty body-surfed like a dolphin, carving beautifully through the waves.

When the hordes of summer invaders were at their worst, what did we care? We loaded up our beloved sailboat, Leilani, with rosé wine and “poo poos” and off we sailed to distant shores. Just the sound of the wind in the sails and the waves gently slapping the hull.

Rusty, ever the Master and Commander of the sea, while I his cold-water-loving mermaid, always diving overboard. At night we’d anchor at our mooring and barbecue the porgies Rusty gleefully caught off Gardiner’s Island while I cried and begged him to set them free and not kill them. Sometimes he would release one or two back in the water, just for me, because, believe me, he didn’t want to.

Then after a 360-degree sunset on the lake under the crystal stars we’d sleep the blissful sleep only a rocking sailboat can promise. He believed the fish were singing to him.

“Did you hear them last night?”

I’d wake up early to the aroma of coffee and the sound of his splash into the water for his morning swim. He’d then zip me to shore in his dinghy so we could go to the beach.

We couldn’t walk five steps without stopping a dozen times to greet all the friends he had. Everywhere we went there was a chorus of “Hi, Rusty.” He always replied with his sparkling smile and a hearty hello. It was like being with a movie star, which he was.

My kids and I had a game we played, keeping a tally of all the people who greeted him, knew him, liked him.

“I’m up to 20.”

“Hey, Rusty!”

“That’s 21!”

It could easily get up past 30 at any given time on any day.

He would say in his humble way, “It’s only because I’ve lived here for 40 years,” but that wasn’t it. People just loved him. Everywhere he went he touched lives and made friends for life. From Jimmy Buffett to Joey Flapjaws. He had no enemies. He was an icon.

We saved turtles crossing the road and wounded birds on the beach. We would even save those prehistoric-looking crickets that were always in the bathtub. Rusty would just pick them up and toss them out the backdoor. Every living thing had a destiny. He was Mother Nature’s boy.

Rusty named his beloved trees. There was Daisy the Elephant. And nothing made him happier than seeing his catalpa tree bloom in the spring with fragrant orchid-like blossoms. Every year he took a photo of me standing among them. Who will do it this spring?

I used to say my dog Lucy taught me to love unconditionally, to which Rusty, always with the quick retort, said, “She died too soon.”

He taught me where she left off, to see the good in people no matter how bad they were. It’s a gift; I don’t think you can teach it. But I will try to be like him. My new hashtag: #whatwouldrustydo?

If I complained, he’d quote his mother and say: “Don’t be an oboe solo.” If I boiled over in rage, he just circled, cool and poised, until I ran out of steam, wisely never engaging in crazy moments. No drama.

Rusty didn’t have time for that. He was too busy paddling out on his surfboard to dominate the waves or hoisting the mainsail on his beloved sailboat while quoting poetry. Like he did on our first sail out to sea, from Edward Lear:

“The owl and the pussy-cat went to sea / in a beautiful pea-green boat,” he recited.

I was First Mate Moneypenny, because he, of course, was James Bond.

He would always say, “That’s a beautiful song,” when I played the piano or guitar, or “Fabulous writing,” when I was working on my novel. When I cooked dinner he would yell out, “What smells so good?” every night. Every time I sneezed he said, “God bless you.” Even when it hurt for him to speak. When we got dressed to go out he admired me with a love in his eyes I may never see again.

Always seeing the best, the good, the positive. What an evolved human he was. A super-mortal, maybe even an Ascended Master who came down to visit us just to show us how it’s done.

The clouds looked like horses’ tails, the ocean was Coke bottle green, and the crickets were trying to tell us something — it was a beautiful orchestra, listen to their symphony, he would urge. A piece of driftwood you passed on the beach was more: “It’s a log from a beaver dam. It floated down the Hudson River and washed up here in Montauk. See the teeth marks?” he’d point out. He knew the answer to everything. Sheer brilliance.

He would tackle anything life threw at him with style, grace, aplomb, and always humor, while letting his “freak flag fly.” He was a knight disguised as a beach bum, walking barefoot everywhere all summer long and rolling in the hot sand until he was caked like a veal cutlet and then throwing himself into the surf to get pure. Whenever the day had messed with my “wah,” as he said, he would just drive me to Ditch and walk me down to the ocean.

“Jump in, you’ll feel better,” and he was right. Dr. Drumm knew it was time to take my medicine.

The horrors of the world weren’t going to defeat him and darken his day. Even cancer would be defeated.

Knowing Rusty, how could one doubt he would beat it? Strong, healthy, vibrant Rusty. He’ll never die. How could he? He was invincible. Immortal.

He fought as bravely as he could, never flinching, never complaining, pressing on with faith and utter determination to live. I marveled at his courage, his threshold for pain and torture. He told me spending time in the rigging of Eagle gave him the courage to face anything when you’re furling the royal in the middle of the night 140 feet above the water with blinding wind and rain.

“What do I do with the batteries for Leilani next summer?” I asked, frantic. How would I do anything without him? We did everything together.

“We are going to recharge them and go sailing next summer,” he told me. Even though I was giving him morphine every four hours, then every hour, for his pain. He refused to consider death. It wasn’t in his plan. He had another 20 years! At least! He promised me. I believed him. I had faith. Miracles happen every day, right? If anyone deserved a reprieve it was him.

He subjected himself to the sickening chemotherapy, weeks of radiation, brain surgery, and merciless pain without a whimper.

“We’re going to get through this together,” he said. “So let’s plan a trip, South of France, New Zealand, Australia, Tahiti — all the places we haven’t seen, we’ll write our novels and groove . . . where do you want to go? We can stop off in Hawaii for a few days on the way, would you like that?” He was so looking forward to going.

But he didn’t. His final words to me were, “We had hope.”

If you knew Rusty, remember how he lived his life and set your compass. If you didn’t know him, I feel sorry for you. There will never be another like him, ever. He did it right. He knew how to live. He gets an A+ for his time here on earth. What a stellar example for everyone. If there’s a heaven, he is being feted now. I hope he got his wish. He wanted God to say to him when he arrived at the pearly gates, “Here’s your surfboard and here’s your wax.” I hope there’s an epic swell and his dog Drifter Boy is there waiting for him on the beach like he always did.

In his final days he would get so mad about the stupid, petty, wasteful things people were upset about and occupying their lives with. I saw it too through his eyes. Knowing how brief the time he had left was, he cried over the foolish squandering of precious life and finite time. Foolish humans. With all there is to appreciate in this beautiful world.

So be kind, have compassion, be brave, have fun, and be happy. Enjoy and, most of all, love with all your heart. And stop whining. You’re alive!

I’ll let Rusty finish this with this opening quote from his book “The Barque of Saviors”: “He rises by lifting others.”

Kyle Paseka has lived all over the world and recently finished writing a memoir about her adventures. She was married to Russell Drumm, who was a reporter and columnist for The Star for many years. He died on Jan. 16 at the age of 68.

It troubles me that the East Hampton Town Board has bowed to the Wainscott School Board’s demands and quashed the proposal to build affordable apartments off Stephen Hand’s Path for 48 of the town’s low-income working families.

It also troubles me that our Democratic Party committee people are not calling out the supervisor and the board’s other three Democrats for their nay votes. Eleanor Roosevelt, a hero of this town’s Democrats, and a fierce fighter for affordable housing, must be flipping in her grave. Even local Republicans supported the Stephen Hand’s plan.

Protecting our environment and warning the public of climate change are crucial, but so is seeing to it that working families have decent housing. East Hampton Democrats used to act on that principle with devotion and skill. I am a beneficiary of it, living in a house in Whalebone Woods, a development of more than 100 homes and a product of former Supervisor Judith Hope’s commitment in the 1970s and ’80s. But over the years since, the fate of people low on the economic scale has slipped in the town Democrats’ priorities. We should be asking why.

There is no doubt that the town seriously needs this housing if it is to sustain a viable work force and credibility to its claims that it truly cares about East Hampton’s housing shortage and the effects of the Hamptons’ rampant economic inequality on lower and middle-income families. The Stephen Hand’s plan would have brought $12 million and jobs to the town and cost us next to nothing. The town board’s recent approval of a 40-unit mixed-income project in Amagansett is a positive step, but not sufficient.

The town board’s rejection of Stephen Hand’s was in response to the Wainscott School Board’s assertions that children from these working families would inundate their small kindergarten-to-third-grade grammar school and destroy its “specialness.” The supervisor demanded that the developers of the proposed housing, the Windmill Village board of directors, increase to the satisfaction of the Wainscott School Board the proportion of units reserved for seniors, thereby reducing the number of working families and inevitably the number of school-age children in the Wainscott School District. No agreement was reached, and the town board’s nay vote ensued.

How did the school board pull off this daunting coup? The housing’s proposed site, north of Montauk Highway, does not intrude one whit on Wainscott’s wealthy or other residential sites, or materially affect the hamlet’s school taxes, which are by far the lowest of any school district in town. Nor would it injure Wainscott’s home values, which are the highest median price of any of the town’s hamlets. Further, the school board’s inundation claims are overwrought. A town planning board investigation came up with much lower school-age population figures than the school board’s, and federal rules limiting subsidized housing occupant density further diminish the school board’s claims.

Granting that I am not a lawyer, I see the town’s reasons for rejecting the Stephen Hand’s plan as a clear violation of the U.S. Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988 and the New York State Human Rights Law — and a housing discrimination against children case just screaming to be filed. 

The F.H.A.A. was enacted to empower government to protect children and other groups subject to housing discrimination from landlords and developers who seek to limit or exclude them. With Stephen Hand’s, the players are reversed, but the motives are clear and the result is the same. The developer, Windmill Village, sought to provide housing at low cost to working families. The government, our town board, backed the school board’s efforts to exclude children by demanding that the project be confined to or heavily tilted toward seniors’ occupancy.

Neat little game, isn’t it? And dirty pool. Display compassion for us old folks so you can lock out our grandchildren.

In 1968, when the first Fair Housing Act was passed, President Johnson said he had supported the act so it would no longer be okay to use “little tricks” to exclude people from housing. The town’s and school board’s tilting to seniors can certainly be construed as just such a little trick, and unbecoming of an East Hampton Town supervisor, town board, and town Democratic Party to indulge.

Wainscott is a public school, supported by public money. It does not and must not have the authority to decide where our children may be housed. It astonishes and horrifies me that it has, at the least, been awarded the right to veto a housing project for 48 East Hampton working families.

If we are to be progressive with climate change and other environmental challenges, we must also be progressive with economic fairness. Support of affordable housing is less altruism than a fulfillment of an area’s need: a work force with a commitment to community because they live here.

I am concerned that the Windmill Village board and management are dispirited by this defeat and fearful of retaliation from the town if they fight back. If this is so, I urge them to rouse themselves and decide how best they can challenge the town’s rejection of Stephen Hand’s in the justice courts and in the court of public opinion.

I grew up during the 1930s and ’40s thinking that the U.S.A. was the most just nation on earth, and if it behaved otherwise, especially toward its own people, it was my duty to help fix things. Not only was this my duty, but the country was so great I felt I actually had a chance of success. We are still this nation, and we the people shouldn’t forget it. 

Richard Rosenthal is the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire of wealth and power in the Hamptons.

If the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today and he had to endorse a candidate for president of the United States, who would that be? M.L.K. believed there were three evils that would destroy America: war, racism, and poverty. Let’s unpack poverty for a moment.

In Dr. King’s last speech before his assassination, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” he established a prophetic analogy from Scripture to his life. Moses, who leads his people to the Promised Land, will not get there himself. Instead, the day before he dies, Moses hands the reins over to Joshua, who leads the Israelites to the Jordan River, where God, just like He did for Moses at the Red Sea, splits the river for His chosen people to cross over into the Promised Land. To this day, 12 large stones from the bottom of the Jordan River are clustered together at its shore to create for future generations a point of reference, encouragement, and blessing for what God had done for their families that day. 

In the same way, King led us, black and white people, through the greatest Christian movement in America. Because only an act of God could move the heart of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who privately called the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts “the nigger bills,” to sign them into law. 

It’s been over 50 years since our Red Sea moment, with no stones to show for our future generations. Black churches are still burning. The black prison population is bigger than the total prison population of nine developed countries combined. Black unemployment is double that of whites, and once employed, blacks earn a third less than whites for the same job. 

Meanwhile, we have a sitting black president governing a nation more racially divided than during the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson not-guilty verdict, and the Beltway sniper attacks put together. 

Poverty in Black America today is at a record high. Disguised as a domestic program to fight social and racial injustice, Johnson’s Great Society in 1966 destroyed the black family and the inner city through a policy that promoted government dependency for single moms and offered no hand up for poor two-parent households, further entrenching the multigenerational curse of poverty. 

This is a catastrophe. Because when King said he saw the Promised Land with regard to poverty in his 1967 speech to the National Conference for New Politics, he saw black people controlling their own destiny and setting up their own means for generating wealth, not being taken advantage of by the same political party for 50 years. He saw black people working, feeding their families, and children growing up in two-parent households, not 70 percent of black children being born into homes where they will be raised by single mothers — and this is two times more prevalent with black families than with those of any other race.

Black churches that were once the moral leaders of the community are nothing but a shell of what they used to be, and instead are enraptured by false teachers promoting a prosperity gospel, seeding congregants whose salvation comes by works, not faith, hence a form of godliness, but no power that prospers the community as the soul prospers. To be clear, I’m not talking about the local churches but a national epidemic that took hold in the 1980s. Dr. King would be livid today. 

As of 2014, only a small number, about 6 percent, of black families leave a family legacy for their future generations. In 1955 it was 52 percent. Black folks, we should take full responsibility for this, take full ownership of our mistakes, properly end all demonic strongholds and curses over our families, and stop coddling our young people and teach them about working hard and playing hard — and building character while doing it. 

White folks, not really your fault, per se, but you are not off the hook. Example: Black professional organizations are not racist. They are organized to mentor, encourage, and network, because we have been marginalized from specialized, high-paying career opportunities as a result of racial discrimination. Stop creating moral equivalency by justifying things like the establishment of a white student union because there’s a black student union. And having a black president doesn’t mean racism in America is gone. Very corny. Instead, I suggest adding Tim Wise’s “Colorblind” to your book club’s reading list. 

So, let’s not be phony and pretend to honor M.L.K. by asking each other whether we are living “the Dream” yet. Instead, we have a presidential election this year and can start honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King by electing a candidate to the Oval Office whose vision and moral (not perfect) leadership will directly or inadvertently edify and restore the black family. By doing so, our next president would save taxpayers $2.4 billion in federal assistance payments over eight years, increase tax revenue by $1 billion a year, decrease crime exponentially, and narrow the wage, unemployment, and wealth gaps.

This candidate should be keen on winning businesses back to the U.S., especially manufacturing jobs, and while doing so protecting those jobs from illegal immigrants by at the very least enforcing the laws already on the books. Because in a free market, capitalist society, everybody wins (relatively, and if you make your dreams bigger and achieve them, so much the better). 

Or, you can vote for the candidate who is just using you and creating divisions in the country to get into office to “make history,” only to make government even bigger, make the dream even harder to attain, and make the American people even more dependent on government. Who will you choose?

Daniel Earl Evans grew up in East Hampton and graduated from East Hampton High School. He is the C.E.O. of Earldom L.L.C., a financial planning company in Garden City.

This political season the pundits failed to predict that the nonestablishment candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, would do so well. The pundits deluded themselves into thinking that voters would overwhelmingly stick with establishment candidates, timeworn ideologies, and business-as-usual initiatives. To date, the opposite is true.

I am pleased that my opinion piece in the Aug. 20 Star anticipated that Trump, who is more than an entertainer, and Sanders, seen by many as a savior, not a socialist, would be recognized as viable prospects to be president. 

The pundits are wrapped up in their own lives. They have good-paying, fun jobs, and a large number of them still work for establishment politicians, which they should disclose each time they appear on television. 

The average American lives with daily financial challenges, serving employers who can hold their family’s well-being hostage. Control of their lives, they have not! They dream of having a successful entrepreneur in the family, a focus of Trump’s, or a major redistribution of wealth, the Sanders aim.

Trump and Sanders threaten the pundits in their pocketbooks. These nonpoliticians do less marketing and advertising, less polling and use of consultants.

All the candidates, however, have failed to generate a completely new win-win-win silver bullet for the economy like the one I suggested previously, in which American companies, with $10 trillion in cash on their balance sheets, consider helping employee housing needs, as well as financing customers, suppliers, and infrastructure projects. 

Outside of economic issues, the candidates are delusional about the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the suffering of children and their parents in Syria. It is mystifying that a man with a great heart, Bernie Sanders, says that the U.S. cannot be the policeman of the world. That means almost certain large-scale death and suffering in the Middle East, which our minds hate to absorb so we ignore. 

Senator Ted Cruz would destroy an unlimited number of lives and properties on the way to defeating ISIS, while Trump seems avidly behind a safe zone in Syria. 

On another front, Hillary Clinton rolled out Bill’s United Nations ambassador and secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to say, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” 

In 1994, Albright vetoed the U.N.’s 3,000 peacekeepers who would have prevented the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda who were hacked to death with machetes in a mere 100 days. I assume 400,000 of the slaughtered were women and girls, and Albright is delusional not to realize she should be in hell.

In last week’s Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton reprised Bill’s role in Rwanda by taking pride in her part in the recent U.N. Security Council ceasefire in Syria, when, according to Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, Hillary in 2012 was an “obstacle to a ceasefire . . . only escalating carnage. Clinton bares heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.” 

Actually, the current count is said to be 475,000 dead and 10,000 children missing. 

In Saturday night’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush relied heavily on “my brother kept us safe.” Trump shot back at this truly insane delusion, pointing out that the 9/11 tragedy was on Bush’s watch, and that the invasion of Iraq started the present threats to the U.S. and world peace. 

Trump could have gone further. The last President Bush is a template for terrible leadership. Just look at the national security and foreign policy track record of his top appointees.

Meanwhile, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s billions have detached him from reality. He is considering an independent run for the presidency, saying, “I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters.” Bloomberg insults tens of millions of Trump and Sanders supporters who do not feel banal at all. 

Predicting the future is crucial in every aspect of life. Each time you have to look outside yourself to get the right answer. In 1990, I made 50 predictions, including: “In the 1990s a new international alliance involving most of the countries of the world will be formed in order to fight a common enemy: terrorism.”

In 2003, I wrote: “Increasingly, it seems that the only fervent Republicans and Democrats are people who stand to benefit from belonging to the party — the candidates, their staff, party employees, and others who have infiltrated the party for business or social gain. . . . Politicians can only win now by claiming not to be politicians.”

It is not that hard to be a pundit if you do not delude yourself.

Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.

Your cat needs litter. It’s Saturday night and your usual outlet is closed until Monday, so you go to King Kullen. You better hurry. King Kullen closes at midnight on Saturdays, unlike the rest of the week when it’s open round the clock. You’d like to think that Bridgehampton is the only village in America that can support a Starbucks, a Gap, a T.J. Maxx, a Kmart, a 24-hour supermarket but can’t get mail delivered by the United States Postal Service. 

Your cat has been a resident of Bridgehampton for 20 years. (She has never received a letter.) She deserves a kitty litter she can appreciate, and by appreciate we mean soil, freely. 

You start to peruse the well-lit lineup of cardboard boxes and plastic jugs along a long shelf dominated by Purina products. The first TIDY CAT litter is called Instant Action. Sounds reasonable. The next one is called Breathe Easy.

All right. A third is MULTIPLE CATS and that abuts 24/7 PERFORMANCE. Then there’s one made for “Small Spaces” and another guaranteeing “TIGHT CLUMPS.” That’s a half dozen kitty litters without moving a step. The words are not just footnotes, nor mission statements, they are proud titles, front and center, in large and loud letters, in several fonts and several hues, upper and/or lower cases, willy-nilly, boldfaces and slender script and crazy promises. Innocent that you are, you thought any decent litter would combine all of the above — instant action and 24/7 and easy breathing and tight clumping and all effective in a small space.

Now, on a cold dark Saturday night in January, you find your human self in a metaphorically tight space where breathing is labored and answers are not instant. Your instincts stink. You never realized that 21st-century kitty litters have become, like doctors, so ultra-specialized.

There’s more. There’s CRYSTAL and there’s DUAL POWER and OCCASIONAL and POWER BLEND and a big yellow bucket called SCOOP that screams, in orange letters, “Now! TIGHTER CLUMPS For a CLEANER Litter Box.” It yells, in white, “CONTINUOUS Odor Control.” It exclaims, in aquamarine, “With the Power of ODOR ERASERS.” Odor erasers? Whatever. As you reach for SCOOP, you suddenly notice PREMIUM SCOOP. Above the silhouettes of two black cats, PREMIUM SCOOP says: “Antimicrobial Action Helps Inhibit Growth of Bacterial Odors in Litter.” Antimicrobial? Bacterial odors? Inhibited? I’m sold.

Wait. Right next to PREMIUM SCOOP is 4-in-1, a somber-looking jug with blue lettering and dark gray images against a yellow sky. It says: “4-in-1 Attacks and Neutralizes the 3 Key Odors + Powerful Clumping. TARGETS AMMONIA ODORS, URINE ODORS, FECAL ODORS.” Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. And 4-in-1 is 99.6-percent dust free. And 4-in-1 weighs seven pounds. And your forehead is spinning. And your saliva is clumping. 

You look around sheepishly. A well-dressed woman is buying little cans of grilled cat food down the aisle. You ask her how she deals with the mind-blowing variety of kitty litters. She smiles and rolls her eyes and moves along. She thinks you are putting her on or picking her up. You scratch your chin, much like your old cat does. Feels nice.

Although the kitty litter tubs are festooned strictly in English, your first language, the same language by which you make a living, occasionally — but let’s not get into that right now — you are confounded by the excited and descriptive lingo and designs. You assume they all have been chosen with great care, or no care at all. Gives new meaning to hypertext. You have to figure that Purina is pulling your leg. Who could tell the difference between “neutralizing fecal odors” and “24/7 odor erasers”? Who knows the difference between litter for multiple cats and the litter you have been using for 20 years for your singular feline? 

Do humans have anything vaguely equivalent in the realm of toilet paper?

NEW! LightWeight. Your search continues. This one has a gray feather floating toward the ground, casting a shadow just above the words ALL THE STRENGTH, HALF THE WEIGHT. The plastic container with the handy handle is just under four pounds, which is far lighter than the seven pounds of PREMIUM SCOOP, but not really as light as a feather. It also costs almost twice as much. It could read Half the weight, twice the price, with only slight exaggeration.

How do they make kitty litter lighter? What miracle ingredient did they extract? Or add? Why isn’t there a Moore’s Law of Litter, where scientific advances would make it lighter and cheaper every two years? Why are you dripping with questions? You find a King Kullen employee and implore. 

“Excuse me, sir, in your pet aisle, there’s like a dozen different kitty litters. Could you help me out?”

“I have a dog,” he says in a semi-haughty dog owner way and leaves it at that. You want to tell him that your cat is very affectionate and loyal and that the whole species gets a bum rap. You want to tell him that E.D. doesn’t hunt or gather much anymore, though the door remains open for her to come and go as she pleases, and she likes to eat grass and puke. She was named by your kids, who were, two decades ago, gender oblivious and named their newest pet after their favorite baseball player, Eric Davis. Their parents, far more gender sensitive, acronized the name to female-sounding E.D. As her scampering days have diminished, her need for a good kitty litter has increased. And by good, we mean easy to soil.

There is much research to be done. In the meantime, pressed for time, you grab the nearest box and head to the exit. It is Arm & Hammer Clump & Seal. You are a sucker for ampersands. And a fan of revolutions. “Clump & Seal is a revolutionary cat litter . . . with moisture-activated micro-granules . . . and a 7-day odor-free home guarantee.”

Hold on, E.D. I’ll be home any minute now. As soon as I can figure out this self-checkout system, this damn Semi-Attended Customer Activated Terminal.

SACAT!

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur.

“The Duke makes me puke” is what I said to Ben, my 90-year-old stepfather, about his idol, the film star John Wayne, a.k.a. The Duke. Words I can never take back but will take to my grave.

Ben was a tall, broad, and strong man, and I think he sort of fancied The Duke as his second, the one who stood for him, was him, really, had he not been hampered for most of his life by a smashed-up leg. The handicap caused him to stay close to home, but he took pleasure where he could — family get-togethers were big, fixing the unfixable household appliances was big. The Duke was a thrill.

“They don’t make ’em like that anymore!” he often said with a satisfied grin on his face after watching Wayne drive the cattle through hostile territory or teach bad guys a lesson in right and wrong. As far as I was concerned — young moron and faux hippie that I was — that was good news. 

Ben came into my life after I was already married and had children, and while he was never my dad, he was the definite grandfather to my children. They adored him. He parted with very little on the monetary front — he was the kind of guy who owned two pairs of pants: one on him and one in the wash. Rather than forking over the money for an ice cream cone, he enlightened them with worldly information: how to climb a tree, tie a square knot, bake bagels; all this from his chair, bum leg straight out, cane at his side. 

We lived upstairs in his two-family house, so opportunities for togetherness were constant. Over the years, my son Joey had developed a way with tools. Ben had a woodworking shop down his basement. 

“Where’d you learn to do this or that?” I’d ask. 

“Papa taught me.” A much more lasting memory than a trip to the candy store.

Even with the bad leg keeping him close to home, Ben managed to have several wives, one before my mother and one after. He outlived them all, including a couple of girlfriends later on. The widows liked him, he said, because better than the fact that he had all his marbles, his eyesight remained intact. He could drive them to where they needed to be . . . the doctor, the supermarket, the hairdresser. When he finished his daytime taxi service, he went straight to the John Wayne videos. He didn’t care how many times he saw them. 

“The Duke makes me puke” just slipped out. I knew instantly I’d made the blunder of a century. Ben turned white. Although he was already kind of white, his hair, his skin, but now it was like a white shock. And he was sad. I made him sad. It was as though I’d said I hate America, to a soldier who had just won the Medal of Honor. 

Grown-up Joey was present at the height of my Duke stupidity. After said words were spat out, Joey looked at me like he hadn’t heard me right. Of course he was aware of the bond between his grandfather and The Duke. He was as stunned as I ever saw him. I had crossed the line with both of them. The incident gnaws at me.

Now, years since Ben’s death, if Joey and I are in the same place and John Wayne’s name comes up, he looks at me and I know he’s thinking, “The Duke makes me puke.” He knows I’m thinking the same thing. Joey and I are pals, in a way (as much as parent and child can be), but along with our respect and appreciation for each other, there’s always this Duke thing. It’s my everlasting punishment. 

Hinda Gonchor lives in East Hampton and New York City. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times and Self magazine.