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.

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.”

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.”

When I first came to the Hamptons in the summer of 1981, Tina Fredericks, who died in May at age 93, was the pooh-bah of East End real estate agents. “Realtor to the Stars”: So she anointed herself in her business ads, and so she was. The impression, widely held and not discouraged by Tina, was that she was the Queen Bee, and the rest were drones. It was more or less true.

I had rented (not through Tina) a house in Water Mill: a grand old shingled, veranda-ed, three-story, 12-room, post-Victorian wreck looking out upon a broad greensward that sloped tenderly down to Mecox Bay. There were massive trees. There were rushes at water’s edge. There were swans gliding. There were evocations of Merchant & Ivory. The rent was $12,000 for the summer.

Midsummer, the owners came to confer with me. They were getting a divorce and were putting the house up for sale. Since I was currently in residence, it was being offered to me first. They were embarrassed to tell me the asking price. “Things are getting crazy out here,” the husband said, red-faced. The price was $325,000.

“Buy it!” Tina hissed in my ear as we stood on the veranda gazing upon all there was to gaze upon, which was plenty. “The land alone is worth twice as much.”

Of course, the land alone, in the bittersweet fullness of time, would come to be worth more like — I’m guessing here, perhaps absurdly lowballing it — 10 times as much. Even Tina could not have anticipated the full dimensions of the tulip-bulb craze that would sweep over these golden acres. But she was, in her moment, ahead of the game. She had the eye. She had the nose.

I needed a 12-room house like I needed a hernia. Anyway, it was impossible. I had neither the means nor the spirit. I was recently widowed and still a bit of a basket case, beset by ghosts that prowled the Provincetown house, a dear, decrepit behemoth smack on the harbor, that my husband and I had owned. I wanted to sell it, I didn’t want to sell it, and in the throes of that indecision had taken the advice of friends, who urged a change of scene and found me this place in Water Mill.

I called Tina. There were connections. Way back I had worked for The New York Times, where her then-husband, Rick Fredericks, the Sunday picture editor, had been my pal and colleague. Now she and I met, hit it off, and fell easily into the habit of dining together often. We had mellow dinners in the lovely Georgica Road carriage house (purchased by Tina and Rick in 1950 for $6,500) that was her home and office. We sat rocking, nursing drinks, and trading intimate war stories on my dandy veranda-by-the-bay (which she never visited without sighing, “The land alone . . .”).

Land was much on her mind that season. Land was always much on Tina’s mind, but especially that season. She and a partner were developing something new on the Hamptons landscape: an ambitious amalgam of co-op units and private homes, all spread over 150 rolling acres that had once been a dairy farm.

That summer, her vision existed mostly on paper. By the next, it was almost complete. I saw it often, traveling east along Route 27. It looked like a period etching, a pastoral dream incarnate. Horses peacefully grazing in a huge meadow that sloped upward from the road. At the top of the incline, the silver crowns of two vintage silos gleaming in the sun. Big open spaces. Clusters of co-op units discreetly hidden from one another by the lay of the land, a touch of the Japanese aesthetic, a tad of the potato barn in the way they hugged the ground.

Condos and co-ops, though common enough in the city, were still a rarity on the East End. “It’s the future!” Tina said, waving an arm as though to summon the future now. “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else takes care of the grounds!”

I was still not in the market, and Tina knew it. “Oh, I wish . . . ,” I would say, and she would say, “Well, maybe someday. . . .” But by the time someday arrived, my life had taken several different turns, and I was no longer spending summers in the Hamptons.

In 2000 I was remarried, to a man who had himself been widowed. With his late wife he had owned a vacation house in Springs, which was traded for a house on the Connecticut shore, to be closer to their children, which was traded for no house at all because, he said, the hell with it. Enough of the groundskeeping and the deck repairing and the tennis-court maintaining. No more houses.

And sitting there in our co-op on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I heard a bell. Ping. Or maybe a voice. A remembrance of a voice long past, coming softly, seductively, through the ether: “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else. . . .”

Et cetera. Also, eureka.

“Uh. How about a co-op?” I said.

So we came and we saw and he liked and we bought, and I have never since had any cause to beware the 30-year-old wish that came true.

Tina was long retired by then, and ailing. So she never knew, which I regret. And now she is gone and sometimes, particularly in those hours when we are sitting idle-handed on our little patio and watching somebody else cut the grass, I find myself thinking of her. Salut, Tina, I think, lifting a glass. You had the nose.

Martha Weinman Lear’s most recent book is “Echoes of Heartsounds,” published last year.

Real estate agents serving the Hamptons number in the thousands. This occupation represents one of the largest sources of employment in the area. Based on 2014 figures, agents in the Hamptons achieved income totaling approximately $167 million. This is an enormous amount of income that supports local families and fuels our local economy, yet too much of it is wasted because of poor financial planning.

How often have you heard this tale? A home described as a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath residence on a quiet street in East Hampton south of the highway near the village and ocean beaches. It’s the idyllic weekend summer house for a New York City family who five years ago bought it for a little more than $2 million. Last month, this little slice of heaven sold for close to $6 million.

The sizzling real estate market in the Hamptons has brought with it a wave of spec houses, competitive one-upmanship between buyers and builders alike, and a dramatic rise in commissions for the area’s real estate offices and their agents.

According to Miller Samuel Inc., an independent real estate appraising firm, the average sale price of a Hamptons home in 2014 exceeded $1.7 million, with over 2,400 total transactions through the year. That brings a total transaction value for 2014 of over $4.2 billion. This represents an increase of almost 2.5 times the total transaction value in the five years following the financial crisis; 2009’s total was $1.7 billion. These figures do not include the commissions generated from rental properties, which is a very significant business in itself.

In most instances, real estate agents are not employees of the firms they represent; rather they perform their services as independent contractors and are therefore not offered benefits including health care and retirement plans. There is also no opportunity to earn equity in the firms they support. Agents simply receive cash compensation upon the closing of a transaction. The challenge, then, is to structure their businesses in order to take full advantage of the tax savings available to business owners.

Agents own and operate their own businesses; it is therefore essential they create a well-thought-out financial planning strategy. Agents should consider setting up a limited liability company to receive the revenue generated from commissions and, similarly, use the L.L.C. to pay for all work-related expenses, from taxes to professional services. Use of an L.L.C. can help keep personal and business assets segregated, which provides the added benefit of protecting the agent’s personal assets from liability in the event a client decides to sue.

Agents should also consider setting up Simplified Employee Pension, or SEP, I.R.A. plans. These are retirement savings vehicles for self-employed individuals and are a great way to reduce taxable income and set aside money that can be invested and increase in value on a tax-deferred basis. Every dollar contributed to a SEP plan is deducted right off the top line of taxable gross income. The contribution limits in SEP plans are high, $53,000 in 2015. This is dramatically more than what is allowed inside a traditional I.R.A.

As independent contractors, agents must take it upon themselves to understand their planning options in order to save as much of their hard-earned dollars as possible. After all, everyone should have an opportunity to purchase a perfect slice of the Hamptons, especially those who live and work here full time.

Andrew Stern is a financial adviser with Lebenthal Wealth Advisors in Bridgehampton.

Donald Trump says he would be “God’s greatest jobs president.” So far, the candidate has focused on renegotiating trade agreements, would have stopped Ford from building its new $2.5 billion factory in Mexico, and would have retaliated against China’s recent currency devaluation.

Regardless of whether this would work perfectly, Americans know Trump as a first-rate entrepreneur and businessman. They have legitimate expectations that Trump, at the least, would build an ecosystem that would foster and mentor their entrepreneurial aspirations; secondarily, he would have the best chance to drive the economy and jobs.

Many nonaffluent Americans know that a redistribution of wealth, such as Hillary Clinton’s proposal to increase capital gains taxes, is less likely to increase their standard of living than an increase in the economic pie for everyone. So, candidates must immerse themselves in ways to stimulate entrepreneurship and dramatically and quickly increase our gross domestic product and jobs.

I have been advocating the following silver bullet for the economy for several years. Company balance sheets have an estimated $10 trillion in liquid assets that could be put to work voluntarily, without government involvement or political partisanship, in the following win-win-win ways:

Help employees buy and rent homes.

Assist small companies seeking financing, especially suppliers and clients.

Finance public-private infrastructure investments, such as repairing highways, bridges, pipes, train systems, and schools.

Invest in solar and other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Today, home ownership is at the lowest level since 1994, with new housing starts off by 40 percent. Consequently, home building is down to 2 percent of G.D.P. from 6 percent. Banks remain very conservative on mortgage lending, and developers are afraid to build middle-income apartment houses because of a lack of renters who can show an adequate history of income and yet collectively have $1 trillion in student debt.

Companies know their employees better than banks do and have much to gain by helping employee living conditions. Likewise, no one can better project the future of their suppliers and customers, so providing them with financing is a good bet in many ways.

Putting to work some of the trillions of dollars sitting relatively idly in company bank and securities accounts — if not needed for acquisitions and stock buyback programs — would be a free-enterprise solution to our most important economic and social challenges.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, our recent prosperity presidents, governed during a dramatic increase in available capital after the U.S. Labor Department ruled in 1980 that pension funds had to diversify their portfolios away from just publicly traded securities into private company investments. The venture capital industry took off, funding whole new industries in computers, telecommunications, and biotech, and new low-tech ideas, such as big-box retailing (e.g., Staples) and competitors to the Postal Service (e.g., FedEx). Other alternative investment vehicles were basic economy drivers, such as real estate.

By the mid-1980s, Reagan could observe it was “the age of the entrepreneur.” Business schools created courses on entrepreneurship, and initial public offerings, which were virtually nonexistent in the 1970s, emerged and liquefied the venture capital portfolios.

Clinton’s term in office fed off this equity capital and hit the technology jackpot through cellphones and the Internet, with productivity increases that would never be fully measured.

In 2016, presidential hopefuls must focus on the federal funding of pure technology research that is too speculative for the private sector, as we appear to be on the verge of another hyper-tech era in areas such as biotechnology, robotics, metallurgy, nanotechnology, and new uses of the Internet. We cannot forget that the Internet was developed by America’s Department of Defense.

More urgent for our economy, however, and crucial for the millions of non-tech workers who are unemployed or underemployed, we need win-win-win help from corporations that can provide a new source of capital.

Americans who yearn for a Reagan-Clinton booming economy should concentrate on finding a president who sees the need to develop new strategies to tap underutilized financial resources for low-tech businesses especially, and who appreciates high tech, too.

Political commentators apparently have such cushy jobs and such a static sense of things that they cannot understand why jobs, the economy, and an attack on lobbyists are a primary concern of so many voters, or why the essence of Trump is not entertainer, where The Huffington Post still has him, but entrepreneur, or why Bernie Sanders is a savior, not a socialist, for many Democrats who lack economic security.

Politicians, like all Americans, have become jaded in thinking there could be a way to substantially increase our economic pie quickly, except for Trump’s focus on our international trade. They do not search for broad, innovative ideas based on what worked before.

There is a silver bullet for the U.S. economy — within our past, our borders, and our will!

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.

You’re not the only one with a summer rental, reads the sign in the window of the J. Crew on Main Street in East Hampton. The store is currently undergoing renovation and the sign is merely meant to direct customers to J. Crew’s “rental,” a pop-up shop just across the way, but when I came upon it the other night all brightly lit, it nearly stopped me dead in my flip-flops.

We have been renting houses on the East End of Long Island for years now, more than a decade at least, and there is something at once both dispiriting and enlivening about coming here on a temporary basis. As renters we are interlopers, transients. If the pecking order begins with those whose families have been here for generations, think the Halseys, the Toppings, and all those who have ever had a street named after them, and then descends to locals and then summer people, well, we are right after them, which is to say just one notch above day-trippers.

But our status — if you could call being a summer renter a status — also has its benefits. If to be an insider is to lose all perspective, and to be an outsider is to have no access in order to gain perspective, then we as outsiders temporarily granted a degree of insider access are well positioned to observe, and keenly.

Every house that we’ve rented here has had its great points and, as if by dint of some kind of Newtonian penance, its equal and opposite not so great points. There was the house on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton that had a swanky address and was, true to its name, walking distance to the beach. But that house also had a garage door permanently lodged in its dining room ceiling, the house having been cobbled together out of the garage of an erstwhile estate plus its various outbuildings. I loved that funky house even though I understood that it most certainly didn’t want to be loved for its funkiness. The house was like the personification of a failed bid at social climbing: It so badly wanted to move up in the world and yet, for all its desire to succeed, it nonetheless couldn’t help but keep exposing its awkward pedestrian roots.

Once, in the Village of East Hampton, we had a lawyer for a landlord who asked if he could commingle our security deposit, which was legally mandated to be in an escrow account, with his own personal checking account. Trying to be accommodating we said yes, and though it all worked out well for us in the end (we got back the correct amount), we did later learn that our landlord had been disbarred from the practice of law for those very sorts of infractions.

Another year, in Wainscott, we moved into our rental only to find that the next-door neighbor’s house was suddenly, irrevocably gone. This didn’t strike fear in my heart but it sure did strike fear in my husband’s. “It’s the Hamptons,” he said. “Someone will be building a house there in no time.” Perhaps truer words have never been spoken, for the very next morning the incredibly noisy job of laying the foundation and framing the house began and continued right on through till the end of our lease. When I called up our broker to complain he not only yelled at me, but hung up on me midsentence, and then for years afterward, no matter how many times I tried to unsubscribe from his emails, he wouldn’t stop sending me listings.

Much as I remember, and even in some ways hold dear, the ups and downs of each particular house, each particular renting experience, what after all makes up a decent chunk of my life experience, the simple fact is that it’s the memories of the people with whom I shared these houses that matter to me most.

Thanks to both an albeit shakily shot home video and the home video (perhaps also shakily shot) that is my now middle-aging mind, I remember my mother coming to visit me, my husband, and our then-toddler son 11 years ago on Job’s Lane in Bridgehampton. Things were already rather Jobian for my mother by that point as she had Stage 4 ovarian cancer, and yet what I most remember from her visit was not how stressed or depressed she was, but rather how carefree and grateful and happy she was to be there, with us, at that particular home, and how lovingly she trailed my son around everywhere he went.

The home wasn’t large but it had a huge and beautiful breezy backyard that stretched to the shores of Sam’s Creek, and I remember my mother sitting on a wooden swing on our back porch and saying to my father, “Let’s do it. Let’s go for it, Charlie. Let’s offer the owner a million bucks in cash.” She was joking, of course — my father never would have gone for it and neither would have the owner, who well knew just how valuable his land was — but in a way my mother was also very much not joking. Even though the house, which had been built by Leonard Lauder in the 1970s and not really been updated since, was a teardown, my mother loved the house just as it was. It was as if the experience of being there with us freed her chemo-addled mind to be itself again, to play, imagine, and even, for the first time in a long time, to dream about the future. So what if it would never come true?

The next summer we were back at that very same rental, all of us except my mother, who by then had her own piece of Long Island real estate, a burial plot in one of those gigantic godawful mid-Island cemeteries that are so big they practically have their own ZIP code. She was buried on July Fourth and I remember thinking, after a long hard six months of feeling devastated as I watched her essentially disintegrate, is her death going to ruin my summer? But the truth, in fact, was otherwise. Not only did her death not ruin my summer, it made it that much more poignant. Maybe we were all just renters. Maybe we were all just passing through.

This year we are once again in Wainscott, re-renting the house we rented eight years ago, and the experience is a bit odd, like going both backward and forward at once. Last time we were here we had just two children; now we have three. The first time we rented was from someone named Rob, whose nickname, for some reason I’ll never know, was Rebel. Sometime not long after our departure Rebel sold the house to an actress who happens to be a Buddhist, and though I myself am not a believer and the house is substantially the same as it was before, its aura is nonetheless completely different, more expansive, all-embracing, peaceful.

The other day my youngest child, whose very existence we hadn’t even yet wished for or imagined the last time we were here, turned 5, and so my father, now 87 years old, came by with his girlfriend for a family party. My father looked and seemed great, on point as ever, and yet in my mind I couldn’t help but compare him to the him of eight years ago. Last time he was here he walked the 1.2 miles to the beach, swam, and walked right back. This time he barely wanted to get out of his chair on the back porch. “I could just sit here forever,” he said, as the children played around him.

“You know we really should rent out here next summer,” said his girlfriend, who is one year younger than my mother would now be had she lived. But my father said nothing, just smiled, nodded. Later, when the sun went down, my father would admire the sky but then become eager to leave. He was getting cold, and like all good things, summers, rentals, and life itself, this too would have to end.

Johanna Berkman has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Harvard Review, The Observer, and Glamour. She is working on a novel called “(M)Other Life” and writes about family life on her eponymous blog.

Stella Goldschlag was a German Jew from the Berlin provinces who worked with the Gestapo during World War II, identifying Jews stuck in Berlin who were masquerading as Aryans. Those German Jews who performed this betrayal service for the Nazis were called “catchers.” There were many in her profession, more than one would like to think, their Aryan good looks protecting them.

They could pass, at least for a while, unless a catcher turned them in.

The Jews in hiding — also protected by a non-Jewish mien — were referred to as U-boats, after German submarines, taking refuge underwater, false identities, so to speak, coming up for air in busy public avenues that they thought were the safest.

With Stella’s Nazi collaboration, the U-boats’ cloak of concealment became a shroud for those German Jews she unmasked.

She was a great-looking Aryan-type German Jew who, to be fair, had suffered an arrest, torture, and imprisonment by the Gestapo. Then a release, because her captors understood the potential Stella had in their racial cleansing of Germany.

Raised in 1930s Nazi Germany, growing up with Hitler, Stella Goldschlag attended a special school, the Goldschmidt School, for Jewish children founded after the Nazis removed all non-Aryan, that is, Jewish, children from public schools.

Her family did not get away while getting away was possible, while one could go to Hamburg, take a boat to Shanghai, where no visa was required and important Jews were looked on as Europeans, as opposed to their non-Aryan brand in Europe. Her father had failed to swiftly ask his St. Louis relatives for an affidavit of support then needed for Jews to emigrate to America, to the United States, to be more precise. Basically, the U.S. was not too sympathetic to migrants.

First, to save her family on a promise from the Gestapo that, with her complicity in disclosing Jews in disguise, they would not be deported to the death camps, Stella betrayed other Berlin Jews, the U-boats who were living in public as Aryans. When the Nazis reneged on the deal and shipped her family off with the others, however, Stella continued her work for them, to save herself. She would eventually become known as the “blond poison.”

The adage “one becomes what one does” applies to this Jewish woman whose self-serving tip-offs aided the Nazis in their Jew-hunts. Stella Goldschlag was responsible for the capture and subsequent deaths of hundreds. And she continued to help the Nazis long after her family was deported.

She would sit in an outdoor cafe on the main drag, and when she recognized a Jew she would high-sign the Gestapo agents who were there as well. They would efficiently leap — no, trip over each other — to action, to pull in the prey. She stalked and hunted down German Jews — U-boats — for the Gestapo, as well.

What is one willing to do to survive? We cannot know about ourselves in similar circumstances. But clearly, to this writer, the first step is the critical one. That is, the first step can embody all the others. The logical extension of an act flows from that first decision.

In the two major Western religions, Christianity and Judaism, the first believes in mercy, forgiveness, and love, while the second subscribes to justice, that is to say, acts have consequences for which we are responsible.

In Western philosophy, Kant writes that humans are responsible only for the intent of an act or decision, because consequences are out of one’s control. For the ancient Greeks, however, like Aristotle, referred to as the Philosopher by early Christian theologians, remorse is not a virtue. Sorry just won’t hack it.

Would any of us be Stellas, be catchers in Nazi Germany to save our family’s life? To save our own? Remember, the first decision is the trap.

So, more about Stella and the catcher crews some other time. She had three trials after the war, and her one daughter moved to Israel and would have nothing to do with her.

But now we look today at the Kentucky clerk jailed for not issuing a marriage license to a gay couple. She was put in jail, pleading that a higher morality she held to would be transgressed if she did her job, that is, if she followed the law of the land, in this case.

Now let’s go to the post-World War II Nuremburg trials. Nazi judges were tried and convicted for crimes against humanity because they did follow the laws of the land at that time, Hitler-time.

Oops! Are we hypocrites? Is an act a crime if and only if we don’t sympathize with the cause for which it was done? Hmm. And what kind of decisions would you entertain in order to survive?

Survival, betrayal, immigration, marriage licenses . . . if you live long enough there’s too much to think about! Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?

Lona Rubenstein moved to East Hampton more than 50 years ago. Her books include “Itzig,” a novel set in Germany from 1900 to 1935.