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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I became a gay reader early, at age 9 or 10, when a well-meaning librarian introduced me to the Hardy Boys books. I was mesmerized by the scenes of the brothers, Frank and Joe, and their friends stripping down to swim across one body of water or another or to dry their rain-soaked clothing. These images provided a seductive screen onto which I could project my first unarticulated homosexual longings.

Later, in high school, I sought out the novels of James Baldwin, Andre Gide, and D.H. Lawrence. Hungry for signs of homosexual life, I ignored the fact that desires were mostly unfulfilled and the relationships often self-destructive. In the limited literary landscape of gay life, these descriptions offered me an opportunity to imagine them otherwise.

Eventually I too became a writer with a decided bent for incorporating scenes from my own gay life, whether in journalistic essays, many of which have appeared in these pages, or in scholarly articles and books. My writing, like my reading, focused on the politics of representation: Who tells our stories and why? How are we depicted and with what ends in view?

It is perhaps for this reason that amid the avalanche of journalism following the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage I was drawn to The New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni’s “Our Weddings, Our Worth.” I admired the honesty of Bruni’s autobiographical reflections that led up to his celebration of the SCOTUS ruling. At the same time I wished that he had recognized the many pioneers who had made possible his successful personal journey as a gay man.

For me the essay’s punctum, its most compelling image, is Bruni’s description of himself at age 16 (the year was 1980) slipping away from his friends at the local mall into a bookshop where he came across Seymour Kleinberg’s “Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America.” I empathize with the way that Bruni was put off by the descriptions of gay types with whom he could not identify and even the archness of Kleinberg’s style.

I had a very similar experience 20 years earlier while trolling my own neighborhood bookstore — they were everywhere in 1960 New York — and finding a copy of Edmund Bergler’s pseudoscientific “Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?” I couldn’t summon the courage to bring the book to the cash register. I was determined enough, however, to stand in a back corner of the shop and read page after page.

Admittedly, I didn’t comprehend the virulently homophobic nature of Bergler’s work, but, nonetheless, like Bruni holding Kleinberg’s tome, I knew that as much as I searched, I couldn’t find myself in Bergler’s pages. Or, more precisely, I found parts of myself, but the complete case studies seemed incompatible with my life till then, or even the one I imagined I might lead.

Now I can see that at 16 the root of my confusion in reading Bergler’s stories of unhappy homosexual men was located in the word “homosexual” itself. My growing attraction to other boys and men had already led to a rich interior life that I could not and did not want to deny.

I paused over and over again when Bergler depicted the electric excitement experienced by homosexual men who furtively found each other in the years after World War II. I was far less certain, however, that I was indeed a homosexual. Yes, I was quickly coming to terms with the adjectival meanings of “homosexual,” accepting a word that identified the desires that so often coursed through my body. No, I couldn’t relate to the word when it functioned as a noun, and the all-encompassing nature of a purported homosexual personhood.

As challenging as it was, I understood myself as a person with homosexual desires, but that was different from identifying myself as a homosexual human being and especially those troubled people portrayed in the scientific literature. I was caught between my life as lived and the 19th-century medical label that I knew others wanted to affix to me.

Doubtless I would have been reassured to know that 20 years previously, in an apartment just around the corner from where I was standing on East 89th Street, three unashamedly gay men successful in the trans-Atlantic world of the arts had set up domestic life together — the photographer George Platt Lynes, the novelist Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynes would spend the summer of 1945 here in East Hampton, after the breakup of that arrangement, and while in the midst of a tempestuous relationship with a much younger lover.

Although I was sustained during the 1960s by a proto-gay identity, it took till the end of the decade for others who were more politically sophisticated to reclaim the word “gay” from its complicated history. The shift in terminology from “homosexual” to “gay” was emblematic of the larger social forces that separated my own experience from Frank Bruni’s. In 1984, only four years after finding “Alienated Affections,” Bruni was able to come out to his parents and friends. This, even as a growing number of young people were identifying as “queer,” a moniker signaling more fluid ideas about sexuality than afforded by a simple gay-straight distinction.

The intensity, sometimes desperation, with which young people search for images that help them reflect on who they are and where they might be going is something that Frank Bruni and I have in common with many others. But Bruni and I also have a very particular bond because I might well have been one of the very people he read about as he stood flipping through the pages of “Alienated Affections.”

Several months after the book’s publication, my partner at the time, Robert Giard, and I were contacted by its author, Seymour Kleinberg. He was working on a new project about the promises and pitfalls of gay relationships. Would we be willing to sit for a series of interviews? We knew Seymour’s work because it appeared regularly in Christopher Street, the magazine that had been tracking the flowering of the new gay culture in the late 1970s. As early and loyal subscribers, how could we not accept Seymour’s invitation?

More fundamentally, as avid readers we understood that books had been an essential way for us to make some sense of our experience. I was just becoming a writer but eager in any way possible to help fill the representational void that other gay readers faced. I wanted both gay and straight readers to have access to real and complex representations of our lives.

In the mid-1980s, after a decade of focusing his photographic attention on the landscape of the East End, Bob would begin to make his elegant, often austere, portraits of gay and lesbian writers who lived nearby — Edward Albee, Dolores Klaich, Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson. The project, eventually including 600 authors, reflected his commitment to picturing the diversity of gay life. Bob was to write in an introductory essay for his book “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers,” “It is my wish that tomorrow, when a viewer looks into the eyes of the subjects of these pictures, he or she will say in a spirit of wonder, ‘These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed.’ So too will the portraits and the words which accompany them respond, ‘We were here; we existed. This is how we were.’ ”

Riffling through my files to find the January 1981 issue of Christopher Street in which we were the lead story, I am struck by the stylized cover drawing of two gay men embracing. I don’t think we saw ourselves in quite this idealized way, and Seymour’s text made clear that although we both placed a high value on intimacy and domesticity, we struggled mightily with questions of monogamy and fidelity, independence and mutual reliance.

I am reminded too that any anticipatory anxiety we may have had prior to the appearance of the issue was short-circuited by a phone call from a friend and Springs resident, Chuck Hitchcock, congratulating us on the story. Working at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in New York City, he had been privy to an early copy and, despite Kleinberg’s attempt to disguise our identities, recognized us immediately.

Fast forward 34 years.

I am driving home from a swim at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on the morning of June 26, 2015, and find myself overcome listening to President Obama’s hastily called press conference about the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision.

I am more than a little surprised by my reaction, because tears are not my way and because gay marriage has never been my political issue of choice. Yes, I married my partner, David, eight years ago in Toronto, and we now enjoy many benefits that would otherwise have been unavailable to us. But for those of us who made a commitment to gay liberation in the late 1960s and hoped for more fundamental social change, marriage hardly seems like the victory that many believe it to be.

And of course the president himself has waffled dreadfully on the subject of gay marriage, holding every conceivable position, from an early defense of the right to marry, to a limited civil unions position, to a 2008 declaration that marriage always and only involves a man and a woman. Only in 2012 did he announce that his “evolving” thinking had led him to support same-sex marriage. I had reason to be suspicious.

But Obama’s words about the slow, small, incremental journey to equality spoke directly to me: “Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. . . . And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

In the end, most of my life has been lived before the thunderbolt of this summer’s SCOTUS decision. I’ve experienced firsthand the frustration of two steps forward and one step back while negotiating work life as an out gay early childhood educator, professor, and AIDS advocate and caregiver. As an activist, I’ve appreciated the slow, steady effort of the many that makes possible the thunderbolt even when the names of just a few are attached to it.

Those of us who contributed to the new gay research in the 1970s and 1980s and who wrote about our lives in the following decades are now part of that long journey to equality, a journey that I hope we will not be blinded to by the SCOTUS thunderbolt.

Jonathan Silin lives in Amagansett and Toronto. He is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.

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.

Generations of summer residents have expressed abhorrence about the changing demographics and mores of East Hampton. They revile the crowds of strangers in odd dress on Newtown Lane (this year’s crop seems to sport a return to formality, with women appearing in high heels and dresses in the middle of a summer afternoon), while forgetting that they themselves were once neophytes.

The other day, with the Vita Coco van ferrying the nouveau something or others through the center of town, the scene was reminiscent of Rome, yes, the Via Veneto of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” Imagine how the townsfolk, for whom East Hampton has comprised both home and work for generations, must feel! Of course these latter are chastened by the reminder that tourism rather than progress is East Hampton’s most important product.

One must always remember that except in the most advanced astrophysics something is generally not considered to emanate from nothing. So we have to have respect for this new class of vacationer, no matter how affluent and devoid of this or that trait that might have been displayed by earlier generations of sojourners.

So what that there are likely no budding Jackson Pollocks, Lee Krasners, Willem de Koonings, Barney Rossets, James Joneses, James Salters, or George Plimptons in the crowd! So what that the heroes for a new generation of Hamptons summer residents are hedge-fund honchos like Carl Icahn and John Paulson, whose financial machinations form the template by which a whole new generation is able to pay ever-escalating rents. So what that East Hampton is no longer an artists and writers enclave, but the watering hole for stock market tycoons, real estate moguls, film executives, and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It’s still good old East Hampton.

Remember Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”? In that sci-fi classic a human who was born on Mars comes to Earth. But old-timers who were born and raised in East Hampton or vacationed here for decades might experience a similar effect. The windmill is still there and so is White’s Pharmacy (though in slightly spruced-up form), and institutions like Sam’s still provide the illusion of continuity. And after all there is still an Artists and Writers Softball Game and you can still find a few heavy hitters on the rosters of both teams.

Heidegger and Freud shared an interest in the concept of Unheimlichkeit, which means estrangement, literally not feeling at home. So if you’re an alumnus of the ’60s and ’70s, when East Hampton emanated a different kind of class, it’s easy to walk around town on a summer’s afternoon with the latest wave of summer vacationers and feel like you’re living out a scene from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or “Night of the Living Dead.” In those movies familiar faces become zombies.

There’s also Capgras syndrome, a neurological condition in which one suspects that the familiar face is a stranger, or its sister condition, prosopagnosia, in which the sufferer fails to recognize faces. If you’re a repeater you might experience one or all of these symptoms when strolling through town today.

But be assured, that’s how the ancien regime felt back in the ’60s when they spotted you rolling into town in your Day-Glo-painted VW bus packed with Gibson and Fender guitars, paintbrushes, and a Royal typewriter loaded in the back.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” His blog is TheScreamingPope.com.

It is the early fall of 2016. The so-called Iranian nuclear nonproliferation pact is diplomatic history, although accusations of clandestine Iranian noncompliance are rampant.

Then, on Oct. 12, 2016, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the collective fears of Israelis of once again facing mass extermination ignited. Four small nuclear weapons secreted in cars and trucks were detonated in strategic locations in Israel — one near Ashkelon, another in Neve Yaakov, and two in Tel Aviv. Two cars were stopped near Jerusalem before their cargo could be detonated, and the drivers were shot dead.

Early reports had the death count and injuries into the tens of thousands, and the likelihood that because of radiation levels vast parts of the land would be uninhabitable for generations to come.

Shortly after the attack took place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (PM BN) initiated a call to President Obama (POTUS), a transcript of which was obtained through Israeli security channels. It is not a verbatim version of their exchange and, for purposes of brevity, leaves out certain more nuanced aspects of the dialogue.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, before you say anything, on behalf of all Americans, I want to personally assure you that we stand with you during this horrendous time. Our nation will do everything possible to help your nation recover from this unthinkable attack.

PM BN: Mr. President, as we speak, our Air Force and Navy are preparing strikes against Iranian interests and other non-Iranian targets that assisted them in this attack.

POTUS: Are you contemplating a nuclear retaliation?

PM BN: I am not at liberty to say at this time, Mr. President.

POTUS: I must assume that you are contemplating this course of action, Bibi, and if so, I implore you to reconsider.

PM BN: Reconsider? Most respectfully, why?

POTUS: How can you be sure that these weapons were acquired through the Iranian network?

PM BN: We have been following the development of Iran’s nuclear program and we were aware that some of the smaller weapons they were working on were being passed off to terrorist networks through its Hezbollah affiliation.

POTUS: But, do you have irrefutable proof of this? What I’m saying is, why not take some time in ascertaining the exact source? We can take the lead on this for you and present the findings to the United Nations and bring the leaders to justice.

PM BN: We are not looking to have this horror wind up in some criminal court, Mr. President. Our nation is broken; it may, for all we know, be destroyed. We need to defend our people.

POTUS: But, Bibi, there is another direction you can take.

PM BN: What do you mean?

POTUS: You have already suffered a grievous loss to your people, to your land. I know the loss is unimaginable and I understand the impulse to retaliate, but think for a moment, what will be gained? It will destroy another civilization, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

PM BN: We will not perish without a fight; we will not permit our extinction without being heard.

POTUS: But, let it be heard in a world tribunal, maybe the United Nations or the World Court.

PM BN: Mr. President, most respectfully, this conversation is tending toward the absurd. Our nation is under siege, we have suffered a deep, penetrating wound, perhaps a mortal one, and you are hectoring me about some justice initiative?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, you have already suffered grievous loss. But what is to be gained by killing 10 times or more of the casualties that you have suffered today? Wouldn’t that be an act of pure retribution and vengeance?

PM BN: Our people will not stand for us to sit quietly by, as we have in the past. We also have to make sure that another attack doesn’t come.

POTUS: I give you my word; there will be no further attacks. We assure you of that. We will convene an emergency session at the United Nations so that your nation can be convinced of its continued safety.

PM BN: How can you say that, sir? Is this another red line of yours? You gave us your word that you had our back — that you would prevent Iran from developing nuclear capability. And so we let up on our guard because we thought that your words and assurances would be backed up.

POTUS: Listen, I don’t need to be lectured by you. Our foreign policy is and never will be based on anything other than our national interests — not the interests of any other country.

PM BN: Most respectfully, Mr. President, was your alignment with Iran really in the interests of your country? You know, Mr. President, before this conversation veered off, I was going to inform you that our security network has been reporting picking up sustained chatter about extending the attack to your country involving some small nuclear weapons being secreted on cargo ships headed toward your West Coast, or perhaps already there.

POTUS: I appreciate your heads up, Mr. Prime Minister, but we have carefully monitored our ports of entry and have turned up nothing. We are confident that a threat inside our borders is remote at this time.

PM BN: As you say, Mr. President, I was just trying to pass on some useful information that you might not already have.

POTUS: Look, thanks, but let’s try to get beyond these personal differences. Recrimination won’t help us now either. You must look ahead and see things through a different prism — that of starting over. And, we can help you.

PM BN: What in the world are you getting at, sir?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, there are large, unoccupied swaths of land in the world for which resettlement arrangements could be facilitated. I can assure you that something like this could be fashioned with the cooperation of world leaders.

PM BN: Mr. President, that is utterly out of the question. Our existence is inextricably tied to our historic land. It is the land of our forefathers and of the prophets. We cannot have an identity in what you call a “swath of land” located somewhere on earth. In any event, Mr. President, I don’t want to take up any more of your valuable time. I just wanted to make sure that you understood our predicament and resolve and that our military was preparing a counterattack. And, as I indicated, I also wanted to make you aware of our latest intelligence for your benefit.

POTUS: Bibi, please reconsider; you can call this off.

PM BN: We will not, Mr. President. You should know that they will find ways to infiltrate your nation as well, I warn you.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, as I just told you, our intelligence has been working around the clock and have found no such initiative here. You are trying to not only change the focus of our conversation but to frighten us as well. It won’t work. We would prefer that you not implement the course of action you are alluding to; it is in our national interest that nuclear proliferation not expand. Your intended strikes threaten those interests.

PM BN: Mr. President, I’m not sure I understand you. Are you threatening us? We are not asking for your help. I called you as a courtesy to provide you notice of our impending counterattack and to also provide you with a warning about a possible impending tragedy in your country.

POTUS: I cannot let you start the world down the path to a worldwide nuclear holocaust. You must stand down for the good of humanity.

PM BN: Mr. President, with all due respect, this sounds pathological. There is no peace. We didn’t start anyone on this path. We are victims.

POTUS: But, Bibi, as I told you, you have already suffered this crushing assault. Nothing further can happen to you. Your country is in ruin. Your attack now is one of pure retribution. Let us help you recover.

PM BN: With all due respect, Mr. President, we cannot agree with your position. We are not asking for your support or help. We can only depend on ourselves. Remember what is written in the Ethics of the Fathers, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” That is all I have to say. Good night, Mr. President.

POTUS: Bibi, please. Listen. Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep the world from descending into an abyss. Don’t test me.

PM BN: You mean to say that you finally may start a military option and we are your target?

POTUS: You heard what I said, don’t test me.

PM BN: Test you? Test you? This is not personal to you, Mr. President. This is about Israel, about Jewish people everywhere. We were unable to protect Jews in Europe from the scourge of the Holocaust. We can protect ourselves now.

POTUS: Don’t do this, Mr. Prime Minister. Don’t go there. Uh, wait a minute — hold on. I’m being alerted to an emergency call that I must take. I have to go.

Click.

David B. Saxe divides his time between New York City and North Haven.