Once there was a woman who wanted to be a children’s writer, so she went to seek advice from the wisest counselor in the land.

“Wise counselor,” she said, “I have always dreamed of being a children’s writer. I long to stimulate the imaginations of young people. I want to give them a love for words, language, ideas, and books. Can you tell me the secret to becoming a children’s writer?”

“Your goal is highly admirable, dear, but it is also ambitious and difficult to achieve. You must overcome three obstacles. First, you must swim the Sea of Books.”

“I am ready!” said the woman. 

So off she went to swim the Sea of Books. She read books by the hundreds: picture books, concept books, alphabet books, counting books, easy-readers, chapter books, middle-grade and young-adult novels. She read fiction and nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, and memoirs. She studied topics ranging from astronauts to zookeepers, zeppelins to ants. She read poetry, prose, rhymes, and raps. She learned to distinguish between trade books versus mass market, pop-up and pull tabs, tactile and die cuts, baby books and board books. She read folktales, fairy tales, and impulse-buy books. She perused craft books, cookbooks, art books, puzzle books, riddle books, and joke books. She learned about writing considered public domain and how to write parodies and adaptations. She flipped through how-tos and guidebooks, magazines, journals, bulletins, and reference books. Her mind buzzed with possibilities.

Tired but hopeful, the woman returned to the wise counselor. 

She said, “I have paddled in the Sea of Books. After some fears of drowning, I have managed to stay afloat. Please tell me about the second obstacle.”

“You are very determined,” said the counselor. “You must now climb the Mountain of Paperwork.”

The woman commenced immediately. She mailed for membership in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She jotted down pages of ideas, themes, and engaging titles. She doodled and dabbled, dabbled and doodled. She acquired the voluminous Writer’s Market, then thumbed the pages to find editors, agents, and educational markets. She scribbled quotes, quips, and questions and learned how to write a query letter. She drew up logos and designed letterheads, found a favorite font and set off to the printer to get business cards, stationery, envelopes, and mailing labels. She bought paper, pencils, Post-its, and all things pertaining to writing. She purchased a desk, filing cabinets, and a comfortable chair. She prepared her office space with paintings, pictures, and photographs. She pinned up poems, phrases, and proverbs to engage her mind and soothe her soul.

The woman’s resolve never wavered. She was ready for the third challenge. So she went to visit the wise counselor. 

“I’m impressed with your tenacity,” said the counselor.

“Yes, I truly believe that patience, persistence, and perseverance will pay off someday,” the woman responded. “Please explain the third task to becoming a children’s writer.”

“This final challenge just might be the hardest. You will journey across the Country of Duties and Commitments. Good luck!”

So the woman headed out. She took classes and seminars, joined a poetry group at the library, and was accepted to a writers workshop with a famous poet. She helped form a critique circle, recited poems at bookstores and a few local meetings of NOW. She attended conferences, lots of conferences: one in New Jersey, the Rutgers conference, and Bank Street in New York City. She signed up for correspondence courses, one sponsored by the Institute of Children’s Literature, several more taught by students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She arranged a work schedule that was often interrupted by telephone calls, plumbers, and various handymen. She sent out manuscripts by the ton: to magazines, newspapers, editors, and publishers. She waited and waited, then waited some more. Many times she never received responses to her submissions, although she always included an S.A.S.E. in every package. Twice she waited one whole year for a return response. Once she was asked for revisions, so she promptly sent them in and never heard from that editor again, despite numerous follow-up phone calls to the office in Boston. Mostly she received rejection letters from hundreds of publishing offices around the globe. This was discouraging, but she soldiered on.

Completely exhausted, the woman returned to the wise counselor.

“I have finished the three challenges,” she said. “I swam the Sea of Books, I climbed the Mountain of Paperwork, I crossed the Country of Duties and Commitments. May I at last consider myself a children’s writer?”

“Why, you have been a children’s writer all along,” said the counselor. 

“But I haven’t stimulated a single imagination!” the woman protested. “I rarely see kids! I don’t make a decent living! I’ve kept my day job! I seldom publish! No one knows me.”

“Oh, you want a living . . . you want to publish . . . you want success? I thought you wanted to be a children’s writer. Well, that’s a different story!”

After writing for many years, Dianne Moritz considers herself a children’s writer. She has published two picture books, “Hush, Little Beachcomber” and “1, 2, 3 by the Sea,” and contributes to Highlights and its related magazines. She lives in North Sea.

I was late coming to Stephen Sondheim — 1979. I was 31 years old, and now I can’t remember why but I got two tickets to “Sweeney Todd.” This was after “Gypsy” and “Follies” and “Company.” It was 25 years or more after “West Side Story.” “Send In the Clowns” was also behind him, recordings by many voices, including the Voice himself.

A late Sondheim bloomer.

Not that I didn’t have some history with musical theater. In the mid-’70s, in pretty much three back-to-back weekends, my boyfriend at the time took me to see “The Wiz,” “A Chorus Line,” and “Chicago.” And early on, possibly around the time that Sondheim was writing “Maria,” I was transfixed in my parents’ living room listening to a cast album my older sister had bought: “Oklahoma.”

There really is no reason I know of why gay men are attracted to Broadway musicals. (But then, so is my straight older sister.) I can’t explain why. But I’ve seen “The Sound of Music” a hundred times and I’ve seen everything from “Xanadu” to “Something Rotten.”

But nothing and no one compares to Stephen Sondheim.

(There’s a buzz, a terrific to-do about “Hamilton” and how it will transform Broadway, but I haven’t seen it yet. Sondheim himself heralds Lin-Manuel Miranda as the new, or next, him. As Jonathan Larson was supposed to be before he died prematurely.)

Nothing and no one comes even close.

So, we’re back to 1979, and I remember every minute of “Sweeney.” The weird Angela Lansbury wig. “The worst pies in London. . . .” The story of revenge. I know Sondheim doesn’t write the story, often he does work on adaptations, but the music and, especially, the lyrics led me to think, even upon exiting the theater that winter night, that I had experienced something I would never forget.

It sent me on a trail; forward to “Sunday in the Park With George,” which I saw during its original run three times, and five times more when it was revived with animation at Studio 54 not too very long ago. Further a few years to “Into the Woods,” which I’ve seen umpteen times: in Central Park, in London, with Vanessa Williams and Joanna Gleason. I believe I can listen to the song “A Very Nice Prince” every day from now until the day I die.

“Passion” next. “Company” revivals. “Follies” over and over. “Gypsy” — every single Mama Rose.

I remember one night on a date, the guy played a Sinatra album and I heard “Good Thing Going,” mesmerized and transfixed and sure enough, a Sondheim song, from a “flop” called “Merrily We Roll Along.” Even the flops get revived. Seen it and marveled at it.

I’ve been to every concert version of every show. Patti LuPone playing Mrs. Lovett with a tuba. Of course I went to his 80th birthday celebration, now almost six years ago, at Lincoln Center.

The man has many fans. But I don’t think there is a single person, an unknown like me, who can claim this particular association with the man.

Back when Bernadette Peters did “Gypsy” — oh, 10 years or maybe more ago — I was there and he was there. I told my partner, David, that at intermission I would find him and have him sign my Playbill. And I was so excited, trembling with the program in my hand, when I did see him, gushing and sweating — just nuts — he said to me: “Cool it!” (Boy, boy, crazy boy, stay cool boy. . . .) And signed it for me. It sits in a baggie on a top shelf in my bedroom closet.

Fast forward, 2015, London, “Gypsy.” Of course we got ourselves tickets to Imelda Staunton doing Mama Rose — we heard about the performance an ocean of miles away, that it was a smash and that Staunton was even better than Ethel Merman.

We entered the theater and who was right behind me at the ticket taker? No less than Steve himself. I freaked — what was he doing there? It was far from opening night. In fact, the limited run was scheduled to end in a week.

But there he was.

I surreptitiously took an iPhone photo and then headed to my seat, which turned out to be three rows in front of his.

I often cry, well, not bawl, but tears often stream down my face during most of his music and songs. The song before the intermission, odd now, I can’t remember which, found me glistening around the eyes. I passed him in the aisle and looked at him, then down, and, as cool as I could, said simply, “Thank you.” I looked up and he smiled broadly at me.

There was an obvious buzz about his being there and, crazily enough, as I headed back to my seat after intermission, a woman in my row stopped me and, trembling with a program in one hand and a pen in the other, said to me: “Oh, please, will you sign this for me, Mr. Sondheim?”

I mean, there may be something of a resemblance (although he’s 18 years older). I laughed and said, “I’m not him!” and she started laughing too. I kept moving to my seat, dumbfounded and flattered and all aglow (I felt pretty), giving her a thumbs-up all the while.

Had I absorbed so much of Sondheim that in someone’s eyes I was him?

Obviously, I didn’t sign her program. You have to pay for the Playbill-like programs in London. What would a “Hy Abady” signature mean to her? Though I was tempted to sign my name, just for the sake of proximity, next to his name in something someone else, a Londoner, would keep forever.

Spottings are one thing, signed Playbills another. So I ask you: Aren’t these “Gypsy” episodes interesting? Bernadette and Staunton, Sondheim there both times on different continents with me there. It gives one (anyway, me) pause. Some kind of sign?

I could have been him. I could have even signed “Stephen Sondheim” on this woman’s program and, for a brief shining moment, I would be him. I would have the genius to write an introduction to a brilliant song from “Saturday Night” early, early on:

I thought the man for me would have a castle.

A man of means he’d be, a man of fame.

But then I met a man who hadn’t any

without a penny

to his name.

I had to go and fall for so much less than

what I had read from all the magazines.

I should be good and sore.

What am I happy for?

I guess the man means more than the means.

So many people in the world. But only one Stephen Sondheim.

--

Hy Abady, until recently a part-time resident of Amagansett, is out with a new book, "Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond."

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.

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.

A New York Times headline on Nov. 10, 1919, read: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens: Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs: Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.”

Albert Einstein turned universal gravitation into geometry. He converted space into space-time curvature. His equation of general relativity “rules the universe,” as the science reporter Dennis Overbye vividly put it, “describing space-time as a kind of sagging mattress where matter and energy, like a heavy sleeper, distort the geometry of the cosmos to produce the effect we call gravity, obliging light beams as well as marbles and falling apples to follow curved paths through space.” 

Because Einstein had upended Isaac Newton’s theories and our homespun intuitions about space, he said: “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.”

Bill Bryson quoted the best compliment: “As the creation of a single mind, it is undoubtedly the highest intellectual achievement of humanity.” I agree.

Einstein became not merely famous, but what we would today call a “rock star.” Everyone wanted a part of him. He was asked to speak at so many science conferences and ceremonial public occasions that he tired of fame. There’s a photo of him sticking his tongue out at the photographer. 

A reporter encountering him on a train said, “Dr. Einstein, I’d like to interview you for my paper.” Einstein replied, “I’m not Dr. Einstein!” The reporter said, “But you are; I’ve seen your picture many times!” Einstein said, “Who should know better — you or me!”

Explaining General Relativity (1915)

How would you explain this to your parents, kids, or grandchildren? Here’s how I do it: Smartphones with global positioning systems use satellites, which need instantaneous corrections because their speed alters space-time (a la special relativity), as does the gravitational field of the earth (a la general relativity). 

For your kids who inquire: “Space-time” has replaced our daily intuitive notions of space and time as separate entities. “Mass tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells mass how to move.” Still puzzled? Einstein himself had trouble understanding all the nuances of his own theory, which others later improved on. When stumped, he once said, “I’m no Einstein!”

For grandchildren, I rewrote “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:

Al/bert Ein/stein what a guy!

Had more thoughts than you and I

Spe/cial rel/a/tiv/it/y

Yeah yeah Em See squared is Eeeee.

Grav/i/ta/tion holds us down

It bends light a/round the town

It makes G/P/S/es right

Squee/zes space-time oh so tight!

Genius

There are two kinds of genius: one, the garden variety who’s just like your smartest friends and colleagues — only much smarter; the other kind’s abilities and profundities are so extravagantly beyond the first kind’s that their mysterious gifts seem to imply they came from another planet . . . like Einstein.

When he was only 5 years old, Einstein discovered a magnet and, mystified, later observed, “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” At 12, he was enchanted by plane geometry and its lucid methods of axioms and theorems. In 1905, he wrote three papers — each worthy of a Nobel in Physics. 

A Dimple in Space-Time

General relativity is simpler to visualize by analogy. Imagine a rubber sheet stretched like a drum skin. Push down at the center, depressing and stretching the sheet (like putting your finger to your cheek creating a dimple). Now imagine many small BBs rolling along the dimpled drum skin toward the depression. Some of the BBs will strike the central depression and some will skirt it, curving around the depression as they follow the easiest path (called a “geodesic”).

The BBs resemble particles of light (photons). The depression resembles a dimple in the (four-dimensional) space-time continuum, like the one that surrounds a massive object: our sun. Its huge solar mass “warps” the surrounding four-dimensional space-time fabric enough to cause the BB or photon’s path to “bend” enough to be observed astronomically. Gravitational warping of space-time is enough to really bother a satellite, to cause galaxies to act as a lens, magnifying objects far beyond them, and to produce gravitational waves. Their detection is the next frontier for astronomers.

Special Relativity

More subtle and slippery to grasp, special relativity (1905) started when Einstein tried to define simultaneous events as seen from a moving train versus as seen from the station. Einstein knew the startling experimental result that the speed of light is constant no matter whether the light is coming or going from a moving or stationary source of light. He postulated there is no preferred absolute reference frame. Time has to slow, space has to shrink, and mass has to increase when viewing a moving train from the platform, or when viewing the platform from a moving train. This is why Einstein (a great wit) asked a train conductor, “Does Oxford stop at this train?”

Einstein’s Long Hair

My mentor, Banesh Hoffmann, has his name on a scientific paper with Einstein and spoke about their work together in the 1930s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. 

Sitting side-by-side in Einstein’s office, they were baffled by a problem in the complex equations of general relativity. To contemplate a solution, Einstein got up and paced the floor while twisting his famously long hair (now fashionable), muttering, “I vill a little think.” After a few moments, he sat down with a good solution. 

After Einstein died in 1955, Banesh told me that whenever he got stuck on the same equations, he would get up from his desk, pace the floor, twist his hair, and think. “But,” he said, “it never worked.”

Dr. Stephen Rosen, a physicist who lives part time in East Hampton, is the author of a memoir, “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great!” He will discuss “Einstein’s Jewish Science” on Dec. 20 at 1 p.m. at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor.

When I give tours to children and adults at the Parrish Art Museum, I always tell them, “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.” So when I visited the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green in Much Hadham, England, I was in for a surprise. 

The 70-acre estate revealed a landscape dotted with Moore’s sculptures. Children and entire families were stroking them as if it were a petting zoo. There was no security to say, “Don’t touch.” The guards at the Parrish would be scandalized. At the Parrish I give my intro speech on “museum manners” — no touching, no running, don’t get too close to a work of art, raise your hand for a question. This was indeed a different kind of museum.

I read in the brochure that Henry Moore was born in Castleford, England, on July 30, 1898, and died Aug. 31, 1986. One of the themes of his work is suggestive of the female body, and there is a series of sculpted family groupings. The undulating form of his reclining figures reflects the landscape and hills of his birthplace, the county of Yorkshire.

As I walked through the grounds, the sun warmed the sculptures, making the bronze glow as if lit from within. Shining a spotlight on a nude as if she were a Hollywood star, the sun created its own special effects. Then the flat field opened into a panorama of lush green and sky and sculpture. I was humbled by the monumentality of Moore’s art, its heroic, larger-than-life quality. I felt small and insignificant as I reclined my head against a massive bronze for support.

But the sculptures were easy to relate to because of their universal themes of mother and child, family, and positive and negative space. “Harlow Family Group,” of a mother, father, and child, reminded me of when we were a young family and my son sat on my lap for a group portrait. I touched the figures; I caressed the curves of a nude woman, willing her to come alive. I felt the texture of the crosshatch work Moore had applied. 

I could see his dedication in “Large Reclining Figure.” She sits atop a hill like a Greek goddess surveying her subjects from Mount Olympus, slightly removed from the world of mortals yet still able to see their machinations, desires, and foibles. She beckoned me to pay homage to her strength and grace, to her sexuality. I walked closer to receive her blessing. She is regal; she is woman, earth mother, and creator of life. She is silhouetted against the celestial blue — part of the sky and part of the earth. 

I stepped onto her pedestal, mimicking her pose in my black leggings and black quilted jacket, leaning on my elbow the same way she was leaning, with one leg bent for balance, giving my best “come hither” look. She is bronze, not flesh, not going anywhere, impervious to weather, to time, to the elements, but gaining a lovely patina of age. I, however, am acquiring wrinkles of experience, but we looked good together, each relaxed in our own way.

Moore masterfully combines opposites — hard bronze with voluptuous curvy body shapes that I traced with my fingertips. Some sculptures form a puzzle with shapes within shapes like a fetus in a womb. He shows me the texture of an expression, the arched angle of a neck, a hollow look to an eye, a hole for an ear that listens to the wind.

But my favorite is “Sheep Piece,” a sculpture of large sheep shapes, one appearing to be humping another from behind. The forms are roundish, dirty gray like the color of the real sheep munching grass contentedly nearby. The real sheep and the sculpture sheep mirror each other, overlapping and making the perfect foil, creating an echo that reverberates across the field. I maneuvered gingerly around the black, shiny balls of sheep excrement, careful not to step in them.

The real sheep didn’t seem impressed by their bronze cousins. One sheep wandered over to join his friends. With determination, he leaned against Henry Moore’s sheep-inspired sculpture and energetically scratched his backside on it. Perhaps he felt a proprietary relationship to it, an affinity with it, and could do as he liked. 

My docent dictum, “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands,” went out the window. I smiled.

Joanne Pateman is a regular contributor of “Guestwords.” She lives in Southampton.

I don’t play tennis. I don’t golf. I burn easily. Even with a hat and an S.P.F. of 30 on my face and my surfeit of sunglasses, still I freckle and burn. And mosquitoes always make a beeline to my elbows and ankles.

I am retired. My hobbies are limited to things indoors. Of course, I write. You know me from here, “Guestwords,” “my occasional column,” as I refer to it when I want to come across as a serious writer.

But I have lately discovered bridge. You heard it: bridge.

I grew up watching my parents playing canasta and poker and even mah-jongg. I would sit in the living room in Brooklyn, fresh from my bath, my hair still wet, in pajamas, and watch my parents play games on a card table. Smoking. And betting. And the whole thing — mostly the clack-clack-clacking of the mah-jongg tiles, one bam, two cracks — stays with me. My mom and dad seemed the most serene and focused and pleasant while playing games on a card table.

In my early 20s, I found gin rummy and played with a solid group of friends every Sunday afternoon. And lost $40. Or won $15. Or broke even. I even had a poker group (I was terrible at poker), and during one night, after losing $120, I left for home and found a $50 parking ticket on the windshield of my car. And this was 1970! What can $170 be in 2015 dollars? At least a grand.

I like playing cards. Solitaire was something I played often, even obsessively, as a kid. But I’m not a kid anymore. A fairly recent retiree looking around for ways to fill my days, I found bridge and went online and found a link to a bridge club in New York’s East 50s. For $25, you can sit and play for a couple of hours and learn.

I Kindled some bridge books and figured out a bit about bidding and conventions, but there’s nothing like playing to learn the game. 

I frequent this uptown bridge club every Tuesday morning and every Friday afternoon, and I feel like a kid again. At 67, I am among the youngest members in the crowd! Except for the patient guys who supervise the playing — a funny, self-effacing, self-professed bridge nerd in his 30s and another instructor, a sweet, edgy Asian guy who recently colored the top of his head platinum. He seems to be somewhere in his late 20s. 

But everyone else in the room is 100. Or 85. Or anyway older than me — one of the reasons I like it. (Even though I’m glad I’m not young anymore, to borrow from a lovely song from “Gigi.”)

But I also like it because it’s a great distraction. You really need to concentrate when you play bridge. You really need to pay attention.

The bidding is one thing. Conventions, as they are called, abound — you can bid clubs when you don’t have a single club. Of course, if your partner doesn’t know the conventions, he, or, most likely, she will want to club you over the noggin for falsely bidding clubs.

There are conventions named after people, ordinary people, who decide an unnatural bid will offer your partner more information about your hand. (It’s endlessly confusing.)

And then there’s the play. Difficult! You agree to a contract, an agreement to take a certain number of tricks, and you struggle to figure out how. Luckily, the bridge club I attend is basically for beginners-slash-intermediate players. So I am as awful at it as anyone else.

My partner, Mona, a gorgeous grandmother with a sexy, indeterminate accent, loves the game, and we relate to each other in all the mistakes we make. So it is fun. And you do meet people.

Mona lives in the Time Warner Center and once a week arranges a game with a small group in the game room of that glorious building. The nerd instructor we have come to love and look up to shows up, and maybe a fourth. They are private lessons in a posh, posh place.

(I love walking into the Time Warner Center. The game room, a large apartment-like dwelling with a kitchen and a plush conference room, is available to all well-heeled tenants and also features drop-dead views of Central Park from the 51st floor. Okay, I’m superficial.)

But the club itself! Jam-packed with people at all times of day and night, it is the real experience. 

I know that memory is a quality that recedes as the years pile on, but here, at this bridge club, you really get to see it firsthand over hands dealt. Ten times during the course of play, someone asks: “What’s the contract again?” “What’s trump?” “Who dealt?”

The repartee is also fairly interesting. Like the day an opponent, an older man wearing a hearing aid, looked at the bracelet I was wearing. An Hermes bracelet, with an “H” insignia — my first name’s initial, if you are paying close attention, is H.

“That’s a nice bracelet,” he leaned in to me and said.

I said, “It’s Hermes.”

He said, “What?”

“Hermes,” I repeated, louder. “Hermes!” (Okay, I’m pretentious, too.)

“Oh,” he said. “I’m so sorry you have MS.”

You’re only young once. Or, when I was an advertising writer, I tried to write a line for a line of anti-aging moisturizers: “You’re Only Young Twice.” But it never ran, and it is totally irrelevant to the story, I was just itching for a quick reference to my pre-retirement, pre-bridge life. . . .

And when you find yourself pushing 70, and find yourself not playing tennis or golf, your life turns to:

“One diamond.”

“One heart.”

You gotta have a heart to appreciate the experience of discovering bridge — and the discovery of meeting new people, people of a certain age.

An inspiring age. One that’s fun, delightful, daffy, and annoying.

Hy Abady, late of Amagansett, is recently out with a new book, “Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”

I am sitting in my car waiting for the Quogue courthouse to open when I see this on my mobile phone: “Results of a study by AAA indicate that motorists using hands-free technologies in their cars could miss stop signs, pedestrians, and other vehicles while the mind is readjusting to the task of driving. Drivers can be distracted for 27 seconds after changing music or dialing a phone number.” 

The courthouse opens for business. I am patted down by an unjolly officer. He is looking for cellphones and guns. I am clean. In due time, the bailiff offers me a deal: plead guilty, pay $250, and receive one point on your record. If you want to fight the ticket, a court date will be set and you have to engage a lawyer and costs will spiral upward and the points will be between 3 and 5. 

All this because my left hand held my smartphone to my left ear as I sat at a red light and talked. Talked is not quite accurate. Listened is more like it. A dishwasher had been arrested the night before and needed bail money. I only answered my cell when it was the restaurant calling; we have a brief history of fires, firings, fights, and intransigent inspectors. It took two minutes to hear the bad news and another minute before I got pulled over. The policeman was curt and disinterested in the details. He saw what he saw. I was using my mobile phone while driving a vehicle. It was not hands-free. Nothing is free.

That was three years ago. I had forgotten all about it until I received a very belated summons last month. Upon reading, I called the courthouse in Quoque and asked if there had been some mistake. 

“Mistake?” echoed the voice. “No mistake. You’re a lucky guy. You had three years to save up and prepare.” 

I called my attorney to find out if this were kosher, hoping there was some statute of limitations. “I’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “Go to court, plead guilty, pay the fine, pay the surcharge, go about your life. Nothing I can do about it.” (Just yesterday, I received a bill from said attorney for the sage advice that he had no advice: $56.25 for one quarter hour. Nothing I can do about it.)

The judge asks how I plea. I take a deep breath. I look at the bailiff. I look at the American flag. I am one patriotic sonuvabitch who has had a full month to think about this moment and what I want to say.

“I drive an old car, your honor. My dashboard has buttons and levers and my flat tire can’t fix itself. There’s no compass, no screen, and no bells or whistles to warn me about black ice or when the Ice Capades are coming to town. I drive an actual car, not a computer on wheels. It is therefore deaf and dumb. No Bluetooth.” 

“But I am a safe driver, your honor. Check the record. I steer clear of dangerous activities. Like eating French fries. For some reason, French fries don’t come in normal cups that nestle into cupholders. They come in upside-down paper ziggurats that are impossible to hold or stand up in a stationary fashion and they need catsup and catsup comes in those little plastic packets that require hands (and teeth) to open and you squeeze them and invariably squirt dribs on your pants or shirt and then you have to find a napkin and wet it and rub the right spot and let’s face it, your honor, French fries are far more intensely hands-on and hazardous than listening to a cellphone for two minutes.”

“While we’re at it, what about cats? Not the Broadway cast album — though that can make you want to drive head-on into oncoming traffic. I mean the actual felines who sit smugly on their owners’ shoulders and get spooked if they look out the window or see a fly buzzing around the windshield. They may be cute on YouTube, but not so much when their sharp claws are untethered in the front seat of a moving vehicle. And don’t get me started on the perils of driving with a loose ferret. Or hot coffee. Or my wife.”

“You married, your honor? I love my wife as much as the next guy, but, er, oops, that came out wrong, you know what I mean — anyway, she blames me when an S.U.V. cuts us off and then she carps about how I pick the wrong route and always end up stuck in that perpetual bottleneck called Water Mill. This is not good for my concentration. Worse is when she gets a call from a girlfriend and they yak interminably and I have to listen to that palaver and, well, there ought to be a law, your honor — DWM. Driving While Married.” 

“On the other hand, if you’re single, that first hot date can be a killer. You’re a nervous wreck to begin with so you have a drink to calm down and then your date slides into the car with a short skirt and smells so sweet and tells you right off the bat that she just got a new tattoo on a particular swath of skin and you figure you might as well drive directly to this courtroom and pay a large fine and be done with it. Distraction in extremis. DWH, your honor. Driving While Horny, even though some have misinterpreted that acronym to mean Driving With Hard-On, but that would constitute a law with gender bias. Am I right?” 

“One more thing, your honor, I don’t know your politics, but when Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity start spewing the news and rearranging reality, they can drive any right-minded person off the road. You start to pound your fist on the steering wheel and your blood pressure skyrockets and if you’re smart, you switch the station to some music, but if it’s a live Phish jam, the trance might dislodge your gyroscope and that’s not good. Some friends are convinced that ‘Bouncing Around the Room’ triggers acid flashbacks, so they avoid the radio altogether and pop in a talking book. If it’s ‘The Notebook’ or ‘My Sister’s Keeper,’ they end up sobbing, all bubbly and blurry-eyed, and that makes them more of a menace to society than a smartphone.”

“In summation, your honor, as much as I try, I can’t get my head around all this money and punishment for a two-minute phone call that led to getting someone out of jail three years ago. You probably don’t remember him. He hasn’t been back here and I don’t think he will be. He’s a good guy who learned his lesson. Which is more than I can say for myself.”

How does the judge react to all this? Well, truth be told, hand to Bible, I didn’t really deliver the above monologue, not a word of it. I thought about it, but what I ended up saying was, “Do you accept credit cards, your honor?”

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

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Newly (and consciously) coupled, we needed to be comfortable driving each other’s cars. What better plan than to drive the vehicles to the car wash, followed by a leisurely lunch at Southampton’s Sant Ambroeus?

So we set out from Amagansett, she in my Mercedes and I in her Range Rover. Emerging from the car wash 45 minutes later, I can’t spot my Mercedes. Surely the smaller car would be finished first? I park on the shoulder of Route 27 and wait for my car to emerge. Five minutes pass before my cellphone rings. This dialogue ensues:

She: “Where are you?”

Me: “Waiting for you to come out of the car wash.”

She: “I’m out. I’m parked on the Southampton road. I’ll wait for you on the shoulder.”

I gun the eight cylinders and hang a right toward Southampton. After a few minutes, I spot her glossy gray hair some hundred yards ahead. She waves and eases into the traffic. I follow her. In less than a minute, I realize I must have lost her. There’s no Mercedes convertible in the knot of cars ahead.

Arriving at the outskirts of Southampton, I parallel park the big vehicle and call her. More dialogue:

Me: “Where are you?”

She: “I’m in the village parking lot. Where are you?”

Me: “Parked on the street just outside town.”

She: “Well, what are you waiting for? Drive in and go straight to the village parking lot; you’ll see a sign. I’ll meet you there.”

I work my way out of the parking spot and drive into town. Before I can turn into the parking lot, I see her waving me toward an empty parking space on Main Street. I slide the Range Rover in, lock it, and we head for lunch at Sant Ambroeus. It turns out to be a long lunch enlivened by a glass of wine, and then we window-shop for a while to let the alcohol neutralize.

“So,” I say, “should we head back?”

“Guess so. I have an appointment in East Hampton, so why don’t you keep my car and I will bring yours to your place and we can swap them there.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say, and we part, she to the parking lot, me to my spot on Main Street.

Forty-five minutes later and four hours since we left the car wash, I swing into my Amagansett driveway.

My cellphone rings. “Southampton Car Wash here. Sir, when are you coming to collect your car?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your car, the Mercedes convertible? It needs to be picked up. You took the wrong Mercedes.”

Blood leaves my body. “I’m on my way. How did you get my cell number?”

“We rang the cops. They ran the plates. Your name popped up.”

“Great, so now I’m a felon. And where’s the other car?”

“You mean the one that’s missing? You’re driving it, I hope.”

“Not exactly. But I think I know where it might be.”

“Well, sir, I suggest you bring it back as soon as possible. We have a very unhappy customer here who’s been waiting nearly five hours for his vehicle.”

“Like I said, I’m on my way.”

I call her.

“Where are you?”

“At White’s Pharmacy. Why?”

“You drove away with the wrong car. Don’t move. I’m on my way.”

At the parking lot, I can see it’s a Mercedes, but it’s not my Mercedes.

“But it’s a Mercedes,” she says.

“Yes, that much is true, but it’s blue, not gray, and it’s a sedan, not a convertible. All I could see when you waved at me was your hair, not the color of the car.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” is all she says.

I leave her with her Range Rover and drive the blue Mercedes to the car wash, but not before filling it with gas.

I hand the keys to the car’s visibly irritated owner. “Is it driving okay?” he asks. Fortunately, he avoids eye contact.

Assuming this to be a man-to-man question, I say, “Well, actually it’s pulling a bit to the left.”

He looks alarmed. “It wasn’t doing that this morning. I’m going to drive it around the block. I’ll be back if there’s a problem.”

He doesn’t return.

For weeks afterward, the car wash staff call out the same greeting: “Hey, here’s the guy who drove off with another guy’s car!”

Eighteen months later, we’re still together.

Brian Clewly Johnson recently published a memoir, “A Cape Town Boy.”

There’s no doubt formality has gone the way of the typewriter, and I have to tell you, I’m sorry to see it go. I write that with the humbleness of one who has flouted convention along with every other flower child and anarchist dating back to 1968. To say I’m not a prude is to put it mildly. I lust after sexy entertainment, have been known to shout out a vulgarity or two, and like to ride fast roller coasters.

But in separating formality from everyday encounters, we’ve blurred relationships and made living more complicated than it used to be.

Witness my visit to a fast-food restaurant. I don’t usually eat fast food, but when I heard a certain establishment was selling a turkey burger, I thought it might be easier to swing by a drive-thru rather than try to make my own after a hard week’s work. After ordering at the speaker box, I approached the window and encountered a busy clerk holding a half-filled soda in one hand and a stack of napkins in the other. She had a sour look until she saw me, immediately perked up, opened the glass window, and said, “Your order will be up shortly, sweetie.”

I wasn’t quite clear that I’d heard correctly. Being of a certain age, illusion and hearing loss often substitute for reality and silence, and some people like it that way. But when the glass doors swung open a second time and she said it again I knew what I’d heard — from someone half my age. She followed up our encounter by waving me through and telling me to “Have a nice day, sweetie.”

I could have excused the fact that it was Friday and she was busy, but not too long after that something similar happened at the bank. This time with a male clerk who looked all of 21.

As he handed me money from a transaction, he blurted out, “Is there anything else I can do for you today, Jill?” and when I said no, he said, “Thanks for your business, Jill,” with a tone that made me think the next words out of his mouth were going to be “And where are we going for dinner tonight?”

Leaving the bank, I got the idea for this essay. I know the world doesn’t stop. It revolves, evolves, and the generation that’s blooming withers, fades, and provides compost for the next crop of flowers.

The fact that I’m no longer in charge is evident in the way I now communicate with my children. We’ve gotten rid of the telephone and replaced it with Facebook and IMing, as in, “IMHO, LU, TTYL.” But as we’ve all found out, mistakes can happen. When I messaged my daughter to tell her we were having potatoes with LOL — as in Land O’ Lakes margarine — she corrected me: LOL means laughing out loud, living on line, and even League of Legends.

I’ve since learned I’m not the only one to misinterpret computer chatter. After all, who can forget when Sarah Palin made the unforgivable faux pas of believing that “WTF” means “winning the future”?

But let’s face it. A line in the sand has to be drawn. When people I don’t know start calling me by my first name, I lose a little bit of the respect I think I’ve earned after living through political assassinations, the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, and more deaths than births in my family. When solicitors call, they often ask, “How are you doing, Jill?” before they pitch me their products. Do they really want to hear about my arthritic hands and sagging skin? I mean anyone can be Jill. But not everyone is Mrs. Evans (though I have to admit I hated being called Mrs. Evans when I was first married, because I’d look around the room for my mother-in-law).

It’s not that I’m crotchety, but informality has gotten out of hand. Everyone would turn and freeze if I addressed the clerk in the bank as “bro” and the girl in the drive-thru as my “BFF.” Even in my most radicalized youth I still addressed my friends’ parents by their surnames.

We live in a casual culture; I admit it. But is everyone I encounter allowed to address me as though I’m their best friend, even as they’re handing me change or inquiring if I have any coupons? No clerk behind a counter asking “How are you?” really wants to know how I am. I reserve my most personal conversations for people who have my shared experiences and those I want to learn from — be they old or young. Everyone fights depersonalization, and no one wants to go unacknowledged, but it’s the form of acknowledgement that’s important.

So, henceforth, I give everyone fair warning. The next time someone I don’t know addresses me by my first name and asks me how I am, I’m going to tell him — right down to my aching ankles — and then I’m going to ask him where we’re going for dinner.

Jill Evans teaches a continuing education class in creative writing at Suffolk Community College. She lives in Patchogue.