The highlight of my summer on the East End last year was exploring Plum Island.

I had always thought visitors were forbidden, and so did Tom Rawinski, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service botanist I interviewed last winter about deer damage to forests. Like a growing cohort of scientists, he believes that overabundant deer cause more damage to Northeastern forests than does climate change. Since Tom works for the U.S.D.A., which operates the Plum Island research lab, I figured he knew the rules about Plum Island. But having told me that the island has no deer, and thus presents a unique case for what a Northeastern forest should look like, my curiosity was piqued.

So one day last spring I found the Plum Island Animal Disease Center website, which surprisingly lists names and email addresses of key employees. I wrote a short email to the administrative officer to ask if I could interview someone on the staff who might be familiar with the island’s forests. My theory was that someone at the research labs might spend his or her lunch break exploring the outdoors.

I was a bit taken aback when I received a response a week later from the Department of Homeland Security, not the U.S.D.A. employee to whom I had written. He wanted to know why I was asking questions about Plum Island. Uh-oh.

But what did I have to fear? I’m no Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan carrying notes listing Plum Island as a possible site for a “mass casualty attack.” (She’s now serving an 86-year prison term in Fort Worth, Tex., by the way.) So I calmly wrote back saying I’d be interested in any botanical or conservation surveys done on Plum Island that might address the health of its forests, and in particular would like to interview anyone familiar with the island’s forests. And then I crossed my fingers.

For the next nine days I checked my email regularly, wondering how the department would respond. When they figured out I was a 58-year-old mother of four and member of the Garden Club of East Hampton, wouldn’t they immediately conclude I was safe? On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t even bother to answer.

It was a total shock, then, when Tom Dwyer, environmental protection specialist for D.H.S., wrote back extending an invitation to my “colleagues” and me to visit in order to “tour the island and learn about our mission.” Google-stalking Tom, I learned that he is the environmental resources manager for Plum Island, responsible for environmental compliance and waste management, including wastewater and emissions. This was definitely reassuring and intriguing.

Frankly, I was so relieved I wasn’t in hot water that I quickly wrote back to say yes. I also tuned out my husband’s persistent questions about whether I’d return with dreadful germs and require decontamination. After all, Tom Dwyer was on the case!

The next step was to recruit some colleagues. Having spent three months researching deer and forests, I wanted to go to Plum Island with the experts I had interviewed to see firsthand what they had described to me over the phone and in emails. And as Tom Rawinski had triggered this whole episode, he was at the top of my list.

Once assembled, our group included Tom; Mike Scheibel from the Masho­mack Preserve on Shelter Island; Todd Forrest from the New York Botanical Garden; John Rasweiler, a retired medical school professor and researcher of zoonotic diseases; my daughter Anna, who had just earned a master’s degree in environmental science, and other friends from the community.

The D.H.S. and Plum Island staff members who welcomed us to the island were uniformly hospitable. Jason Golden, a public affairs officer, met us at the Plum Island dock next door to the Cross Sound Ferry early in the morning and escorted us throughout the day. Dr. Luis Rodriguez, research leader, who was lively, dedicated, and eloquent, spent over an hour discussing the work done at Plum Island diagnosing and researching foreign animal diseases. Finally, after a brown-bag lunch in a conference room, we headed out with Jason to survey the island.

Plum Island is indeed a remarkable sanctuary for our native flora and fauna. It also hosts many invasive species in what Tom Rawinski dubbed a “free-for-all for plant life.” The fact that the island has no deer means that there is a healthy understory throughout the forested areas of its 834 acres, and I got to see what a healthy understory should look like: a nearly impenetrable riot of varied species of tree saplings, vines, forest shrubs, and herbaceous plants. The forest was cool, shady, and humid throughout.

On a hillside above a large bed of ferns in a depression in the landscape, we found a beautiful specimen of Solomon’s seal, a plant that deer have almost eliminated from wild and unprotected forests on Long Island. We saw osprey, towhees (increasingly rare on the East End), bank swallows, seals, and other wildlife as we toured the island’s beaches and forests, its old lighthouse and derelict military barracks.

But perhaps most remarkable of all, after three or four hours of hiking around the island and through its undergrowth, we found only one innocuous dog tick. No lone star or deer ticks at all.

I’m happy to report I didn’t bring back any dreadful germs or require decontamination. I’m also having fun trying out recipes from the Plum Island Cookbook, available in the gift shop at the main research lab. (Yes, there is even a gift shop!)

But most important, and even sadly, I now know what East Hampton’s forests should look like, and very often don’t, the result of overbrowsing by a deer population that is decimating the forests and destroying the habitat of so many other wild creatures with whom they share space.

Julie Sakellariadis is co-chairwoman of the botanical science committee and chairwoman of strategic planning on the board of the New York Botanical Garden. She has a house in Amagansett.

I could’ve driven the handful of miles to the auto dealer on Old Country Road in Riverhead to buy my new pearl white Honda CRV with the rearview camera and cool-looking dorsal fin-like antenna on its roof, but the thought of returning to a town I called home for 17 years and haven’t visited in six made me smile, so I jumped in my four-door gray Civic, threw on Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” pressed repeat, repeat, repeat, and danced by myself the 85-mile trip west to Levittown, never imagining my sojourn would hurl me back to 1964, when an innocent, very blond-haired boy known as Frankie daydreamed of wearing #7 on his back and owning a 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned crayons with a built-in sharpener.

The other day, one of those dreams finally came true.

Debbie, the salesperson I’ve known since 1990, an attractive Suzanne Somers look-alike, was running late, so when I tried to fill my third bag of the dealership’s freshly air-popped movie-theater popcorn, the receptionist squawked, “Looks like we’re out,” and turned off the machine.

Returning to my seat, a huge red bull’s-eye abruptly beckoned me from the south side of Hempstead Turnpike, a road notorious for many an accident, rather many a deadly accident, so I placed my empty popcorn bag with a few unpopped kernels in Debbie’s peace-and-love-sticker-decorated trash pail and skipped through the sparkling Windexed glass doors, continuing my best Mark Sanchez scramble between screeching Camaros, Firebirds, and a very old lopsided Oldsmobile to enter a store filled with more red shirts than the Chinese Army.

Not certain which direction to take, I took Lee Strasberg’s method-acting advice and put myself in the Labyrinth Metal Ball Maze game and started rolling through aisle after aisle after aisle, hoping something, anything, would catch my eye — not even the Mossimo women’s mix-and-match, multicolored, floral-striped string bandeau swim top at “$17.99 one week only” made me stop, knowing my wife would never wear one. But then I saw it, an entire shelf filled with Crayola products: glue, window crayons, colored pencils, sidewalk paint, paintbrushes, and the item I wanted more than anything else in the world, a 64-count box of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener.

The car could wait.

The box on the third shelf from the bottom threw me straight back to Miss Allen’s second-grade class in P.S. 122, where my classmates flaunted their neatly positioned 64-count perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener while I cowered with an eight pack of John’s Bargain Store brand wannabe crayons. I envied them all as they proudly resharpened their maroon, teal, and forest green crayons while I struggled to piece together with clear tape my broken red, blue, and black crayons, praying one day to be the owner of a 64-count Crayola crayon box with the built-in sharpener.

Sitting to my left was Doreen, my first crush really, a girl always with a smile on her face and a pink bow forever in her long brown, Shirley Temple-curly, parted-in-the-middle hair, but she liked my best friend, Dan, the most handsome and most likely pitcher in all of Queens to make the New York Mets starting rotation alongside Seaver and Koosman.

“Would you like some of my crayons, Frankie?” she said with a bigger-than-her-entire-face smile, as she delicately placed three colored crayons with names I couldn’t pronounce on my desk engraved with Bic blue ink.

“I’m trying to invent new colors using only these eight,” I said as I picked up one of hers, took a deep whiff of its scent, and put it back on her desk.

I’ll never forget the aroma of Crayola.

Doreen and I went separate directions after sixth grade. Sadly, she was never to be seen again, while Dan and I played baseball together, he the pitcher and I his catcher, on many championship baseball teams all over Queens and Brooklyn. He had an amazing deuce — curveball, that is — dropping off a table from 12 o’clock straight down to 6 o’clock, mixed in with a fastball untouchable by hundreds of batters.

We continued running the wood courts on our junior high school basketball team — he was always the best player in any sport he participated in. Our friendship grew, as long as we were teammates, until one day at age 15 I ran into him in a candy store after a travel baseball game he surprisingly didn’t attend, and he stunk of airplane model glue. Perhaps it was the brown paper bag filled with a tube of the stuff pushed in his rear pants pocket.

We lost contact after that. He was picked up for armed robbery, spent time in Rikers, and I later learned he passed away from a drug buy gone bad in Brooklyn.

I’ll never forget the stench of model airplane glue.

With no red shirts in sight, I peeled open the box I cradled ever so close, leaned over, and took a whiff, a deep whiff, and savored the moment, like freshly cut grass, the spinning pink cotton candy at the circus, the English Leather cologne you wore on your first date. The aroma of Crayola is a scent you will never, and should never, forget, like the wooden sled Charles Foster Kane longed for, it reminds us all of our youth, when wearing #7 on your back and owning perfectly aligned colored wax crayons with peculiar names meant everything.

With my trip back to 1964 complete, I placed the box back in its rightful spot, smiled, and exited the sliding glass doors of the red bull’s-eye, turning back once with a nod.

And for those who travel to that Goliath store along Hempstead Turnpike and search the third row from the bottom for the opened 64-count orange-and-green box of perfectly aligned rows and columns of Crayola crayons with the built-in sharpener, feel free to take a deep whiff, but please leave the memories inside. They belong to me.

Frank Vespe is a regular "Guestwords" contributor who lives in Springs.

The sign with upside-down letters hangs like an alien landmark on the corner of Shinnecock Road and Foster Avenue, and I know something’s up. When I reach the top of the Ponquogue Bridge I can see a helicopter on the right side of the parking lot and a tented area on the left. At the beach pavilion, people are clumped together on the deck.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re filming a New York State lottery commercial. See that sports car by the tent? Some guy’s gonna drive it across the bridge.”

“How cool.”

I am surprised that this scenic vista in Hampton Bays isn’t used more often in advertisements and movies. I’m the last one over the bridge before the copter with the film crew lifts off like a giant dragonfly.

Three months later my husband calls me from where he’s watching TV. “Hey Dee, check this out.” Pointing to the screen, he asks, “Isn’t that the Ponquogue Bridge?”

Cruising in a Jaguar XKE across the bridge a regular-looking guy, somewhere on the far side of 40 with a sense of wind in his cropped hair, muses the question, “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money?” The camera scans the pewter bay and the ocean, a silver screen lit with golden rays.

Since I rarely buy lottery tickets the chance of my becoming an instant millionaire seems slim, but the good news is, as grand as it would be, I don’t need a cashier’s check with a series of zeros to feel like a million bucks.

Throughout my life I have felt rich because of my ability to enjoy others’ good fortune. The next best thing to driving a dream machine of a car, or owning a house with a fabulous view, or taking a trip of a lifetime is to have friends or relatives who do. Rich by association.

This feeling extends beyond possessions. Because my friend Irene Tully is on the board of every museum on the East End, I feel more cultured. Knowing Irene’s husband, Bill, a lobster fisherman, gave me more cred as a local when I was a suburban transplant 45 years ago. Interesting by association. Vicarious pleasure is my winning ticket, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the real thing.

Having coffee with Irene recently, I mentioned that I had perused Isa’s Consignment Shop in Hampton Bays for the first time and was impressed at the quality of the merchandise: Searle coats, designer dresses, high-end bags and shoes. She asked if I had bought anything.

I bragged about the broadcloth white shirt with French cuffs I purchased for $25 and confessed that I was lusting after an Hermes scarf that lured me to the back of the tightly packed shop, where it hung with a few others on hooks behind the owner’s desk. Even from a distance their colorful designs called to me; I sensed Hermes. To me an Hermes scarf is more than a cut of silk. It’s classic elegance with an air of Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, idols of my youth.

I admitted that I have always wanted one but could never justify the price for an accessory, even $250 for a secondhand one. Shoes, pocketbooks, or jewelry, yes, but a 35-inch square of material, no. But as each birthday nears, I think, “This will be the year I’ll treat myself.”

Irene, who appreciates my love of finer things, chirped, “I have one. It’s been a decorative piece in my drawer for years. I never wear it; you can have it.”

The next day she delivered the silken treasure. The gift had outgrown its signature orange box with brown trim, but I was giddy with delight. The scarf was appropriately called Les Clefs, or The Keys, designed in 1965 with a royal blue border and 47 golden keys. When I wore it for the first time with jeans, my new crisp white shirt, and a blue cashmere cardigan, two friends commented on how great I looked. I have arrived. I now own an iconic fashion statement.

At our annual Labor Day champagne breakfast on the beach I posed the question, “What makes you feel like a million dollars?” I prompted my friends, sitting in a semicircle in our beach chairs, the ones low to the sand, to think outside the family and the things we know really matter. I was pushing for something material like my scarf, but except for flying in first class, they listed simple things that make them happy: coming home from anywhere, eating ice cream from the container, slipping into bed under a down quilt, having a good hair day when it counts, laughing until you are doubled over, reading a book you can’t put down.

I am not alone, however, in thinking that a piece of clothing can make one feel rich. On my return lap on the bridge the other day I walked with Barbara, a woman who lives down the road. She asked when I was going to have another yard sale since she loved the things she bought at my last one, especially a black fox headband. She told me that she wore it to work during this winter’s polar vortex and her co-workers wanted to know if she had won the lottery.

“No,” she said, but she felt like a million dollars.

Denise Gray Meehan is working on a book of essays called “Bridge Walker.”

Kris Talmage cleans my house and food-shops for me. Every Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, she is here, scanning my face for signs of deterioration and warning me to take care of myself or else, that she’s a tough Bonacker and I’d better not mess with her. I respond that I am a stubborn old Jew, a match for tough Bonackers. She snorts disbelief and then smiles hugely when I tell her I’d just been to Louse Point to see the winter sunrise.

“It was gold dust,” I tell her, “in a frame of deep black clouds.”

“Back in the ’70s,” she tells me, “a friend and I rented a house on Louse Point Road for the winter. We’d get up at dawn and go crabbing in the bay or for a walk through the marshes and grass on the inlet side and dig for clams and mussels. There were tons of them. Louse Point is as beautiful as any place in the world can be and it’s within five minutes of where I grew up.”

Kris Talmage wants passionately to protect Louse Point.

Cile Downs, a founder of the Accabonac Protection Committee, shares this passion and is a marvelous advocate. Ask her anything — about the shellfish, the water table, the farming heft of the soil, or the status of Louse Point’s osprey marriages — and you get a fascinating, informative answer. Cile Downs and Kris Talmage should be active allies.

Instead, there’s a deep divide between them, the East Hampton divide.

Ms. Talmage is vexed by Ms. Downs’s letter to The East Hampton Star in August in which she wrote, “I am so puzzled that there is controversy about formula stores — big boxes, cut-rate outlets, whatever you call them — here in our town. As a customer who goes once in a while up to Riverhead for one of these things, and is glad to travel that far, because heaven forbid it should be any closer to here, I am quite satisfied with the arrangement we have.”

“And as I look at the poor, godforsaken wreck that Riverhead is now, how grateful I am that we never developed a terrible strip like theirs to gradually bleed the life out of our pleasant town.”

Ms. Talmage is not glad to travel that far, even though prices for food, clothing, and other basics are much lower in Riverhead than on the South Fork. “Riverhead shopping usually winds up costing me more,” she says. “I work a long week. I have a daughter and granddaughter to take care of. The travel costs, the lost income from the time it takes, the unforeseen trip to return a purchase that doesn’t work. It all adds up. I have a different life than Cile Downs has. I want a Walmart, here in East Hampton.”

My liberal reflexes kick in. Walmart wipes out local businesses. Walmart workers are so underpaid that in 2013 it cost U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance payments for them, according to Americans for Tax Fairness. (Walmart’s recently announced intention to pay a $9-an-hour minimum is still far below a living wage.) And yes, Walmart stores, “big boxes” indeed, are not aesthetic triumphs. Maybe in my heart of hearts I don’t want a Walmart either.

But fear and loathing of Walmart, however justified, does not tell us how people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck are to get by in one of the country’s most expensive municipalities. Ms. Downs’s go to Riverhead admonition is not an answer.

Perhaps there is no answer. Or are we so wedded to our “pleasant town” brand we don’t look hard enough? Why not negotiate for a modified Walmart, Target, or the like? Maybe with East Hampton’s prestige and some determination from our town government, we can work out an attractive, affordable store that gives decent wages and benefits to its employees.

If it’s vulgarity that dismays us, why do we indulge the summer Montauk partying scene? Or the looming threat of Gurney’s conversion from a community resource to a corporate retreat? Or the disappearance of Sweet 16 birthday parties from Guild Hall? And is the Riverhead strip of malls truly more obnoxious than our Main Street, with its prices way beyond the reach of most of our year-round residents? According to Ms. Talmage, “No way can you claim that Main Street maintains the flavor of old East Hampton. It’s useless to me.”

Let’s man up to our hypocrisy and see what we can accomplish. We glorify the Bonackers’ baymen traditions and work ethic. We chuckle affectionately at their accent and pithy expressions and produce plays and photo arrays celebrating their nobility. But when it comes to their need, and that of so many others here to put food on their tables and clothes on their backs, even one of our leading environmentalists tells them to get in their vehicles and take a ride, at least an hour each way and often twice that, through gas-guzzling traffic to a place she detests.

“East Hampton,” says Kris Talmage, “is an environment of both natural beauty and interaction between people. You don’t have to like everybody, but you do have to care about them.”

“Kris Talmage” is a pseudonym. Richard Rosenthal is a retired town employee and the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on inequality in the Hamptons.

Saturday morning, 7 a.m. Look up the weather. Check. Organize the ads. Check. Comfortable shoes. Check. Wallet full of small bills. Check. GPS. Check. Okay, I’m ready!

With five years of serious yard-saling experience after I moved from a house to an apartment, I feel I have become somewhat of an aficionado of yard/tag/garage sales. So before the season begins in earnest, I would like to offer these tips to a) make your sale more profitable and b) make your visit to a sale more rewarding.

Sellers: Know your market! Someone else doesn’t need to pay the same amount for something used that you paid new. You must decide whether you really want to sell it and maybe do a little research to see what others will pay. That’s what eBay and Craigslist are for.

If you can’t price everything individually, then put items together that you want priced the same and mark the table. If you have a busy stream of people, you will be glad you did this, as buyers won’t have to ask about each item along with the myriad questions you will inevitably receive.

Some items should just be bulk-priced to sell more easily and more quickly. Like books, CDs, and kitchen utensils. Clothing especially falls into this category. Unless you have a special item, like a winter coat, or formalwear, most items can be sold in quantity. I keep a stash of I.G.A. bags for my sale, and you can fill a bag for $5 to $10 depending on the type of items. You can usually fit five to seven pieces in a bag, especially children’s clothing, although I have seen some crafty women stuff them to overflowing and still expect to pay $5. This gives buyers incentive to take more. The more you sell, the less you have to take to the recycling center.

A word about linens. They are a huge seller, but if they are not in good condition, point it out. Many people will still buy (my friend can get any stain out) even if they use it for a different purpose. Just be honest. Actually that goes for everything you are selling.

Many sales I have been to were special because the sellers went out of their way to be friendly and helpful without hounding people while they look. I have even seen coffee and bagels offered while you shop. If you have large items or furniture for sale, try to have a hand truck or other device to help get an item to a vehicle. A buyer may not have intended to purchase something so large, so it would be great to have help getting it to the car.

Layout. Beg, borrow, or steal any tables you can get. Looking at items at ground level is difficult, especially items you need to thumb through, like albums, books, and CDs. I see many people using large tarps on the ground, which is okay as long as you leave room for people to walk across it to reach items in the middle. If you do not have a rack for hanging clothing, a rope from tree to tree will work, but the items tend to slide down to the middle, making it hard to look through. And a full-length mirror ($5 at Kmart) is great to have also.

Tools are a brisk seller if they are in good working order. If you are selling power tools, have them near an outlet or extension cord so they can be tested by prospective buyers. If you have additional items that go with a power tool (think sanding disks for an orbital sander), make it a package deal and I’ll bet it all goes quickly.

If you have some items that really belong in the dump, please take them to the dump. No one wants your broken appliances, stained or torn clothing, or worn-out dirty toys with pieces missing. So save yourself the effort of putting them out and pricing them.

Personnel. It is very difficult to do a yard sale alone. You need at least two, better three, people just for the selling. Many more to help with setup and breakdown. Try to have someone at the entrance/exit of your sale to make sure people have paid for their items. Small items, like costume jewelry, have a tendency to disappear easily. I have unfortunately seen people who pick up items and just walk away with them. Just a heads up.

Have plenty of small bills on hand. It seems everyone carries twenties but will inevitably want to buy a book for a dollar. There go your singles and fives.

Advertising! You can’t sell if they don’t come. List in the paper and open the ad with the address, day, and time. I hate having to read through a long list of articles for sale to find the location while I’m driving or trying to map out a route. A very brief list of general items is good to have, and if you have a large, coveted item (think kayak), or something collectors may find interesting, do point it out in your ad.

As for signs on the road, they are very helpful but only if they can be read from a car. Use neon paper and a Sharpie. Give only the address, date, and time. Write big and clear. If your address is hard to find, then give a quick direction and make sure to put guidance signs at turns near your house. Too much information on a sign makes it hard to see the address, and then we’ve missed it — and you’ve lost a customer. And please remember where you post your signs and go back and take them down so people aren’t showing up at your house for weeks after.

Don’t forget social media. Facebook has multiple pages dedicated to selling individual items and you are welcome to post your yard sale info on those. Believe me, people read ’em.

Buyers: Know what you’re looking for and what you’re looking at. But also know how to judge value and condition so you are not disappointed.

Keep in mind, you are going to someone’s home and behave accordingly. Keep your children in check, or better yet, in the car, and do not take your pet onto someone’s property. I am sure a lot of people won’t agree with me on these two points, but use common sense. You have no idea if the seller or a family member has allergies or a fear of animals. And children have no interest in a yard sale unless there are toys, and then they will play with them and be in the way of other buyers.

Keep an eye out for unusual items. Retro is big these days, but keep in mind that what you buy is going to take up space in your house, so don’t let nostalgia run wild in your wallet. There have been times when I have regretted not buying something that I impulsively wanted, but much more frequently I regretted buying something I didn’t really need.

Don’t be an early bird! People who put that in their ads are serious. A sale listed for 9 a.m. is not going to be ready at 7, and no, you can’t help us set up. Come back when we are ready, you know, like the time we posted. Sometimes there is good reason for starting later, so respect the owner and be a good guest to his or her property.

Bargains and bargaining. Keep in mind that sellers are looking to make some money here. Don’t insult them by trying to get the price lower if it is already very low. Certainly give your best offer on big items, but if something is a dollar, just pay the dollar.

A word about tag sale companies. As a rule, I don’t go to them. Not worth the time, unless you are looking for antiques or furniture, and they are trying to make a profit so the prices aren’t great.

I could fill this article with stories of the treasures I have found over the years, but I would rather you take all of this advice and make your fortune or find your new favorite trinket. And let me know if you find a good sale!

Megan Collins Ganga is a business manager for a local landscape contractor. She lives in East Hampton.

I flew on the first direct flight from J.F.K. to Havana, March 17, 2015. My six companions were members of several South Fork Presbyterian churches, traveling in mission partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba. Our destination was the country town of Guines, 50 kilometers southeast of Havana.

Traveling that day were Barbara and Dennis D’Andrea, Zanetta Classens, and Karen McCaffrey, of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, John Loper and myself, also from East Hampton, though as pastor emeritus I represent the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, and John White of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.

Anyone traveling in Cuba or going to meetings while there knows that Cuba time is not corporate America time. Sunday worship in the Guines church may be scheduled to start at 10 a.m., but it actually starts whenever everyone gets there and when the leadership and the musicians get their act together. Never mind getting out in time for whatever else someone may have planned on a Sunday. In Guines, with Bible study, a children’s choir in performance, prayers, announcements, then worship with a gospel rock band, preaching, and prayers, plus a break for refreshments between the Bible study and worship, Sunday morning moves along at its own internal pace. It is worship in Cuba time.

I enjoy the leisurely pace. On weekday mornings I rise early and sit on the church porch with a café and watch the neighborhood wake up to the new day. In March it is still dark at 7 a.m., but with a streak of dawning light and on this day a crescent moon just above the one-story rooftops of houses across the street. Children emerge, dressed in colors by school grade, and some of them are taken to school by a parent on a bicycle. Men and women walk to work, with “Buenos dias” said between us as they pass by, or the shortened form, “Buenos.” There are cars and trucks, too, and tractors and motorbikes, and horse-drawn taxis or pedibikes for transport.

One woman sits with straight back, dressed in a yellow skirt and white blouse. Her posture suggests royalty. But there are no royals in Cuba, or corporate officers or lawyers with briefcases, or media entertainers with an entourage. Not in Guines. These are “the people” of the socialist revolution now 56 years on, a revolution that is running itself out in experiments with market economics. Change is in the air, and the question is, what will become of Cuba time when corporate time gets planted on those island shores? It is a prospect both anticipated and worrisome.

Our flight from J.F.K. was on a Sun Country Airlines 737. Because this was the first direct flight there was more than the usual check-in and security. There was a long line taking three hours to get to the first of several check-in desks for passports, baggage, payment for excess weight, and then security. The plane was due to leave at 3 p.m. but left closer to 5:30. It was as if Cuba time had reached up to affect the efficiency of airline punctuality touting “on time.”

About 95 percent of the passengers were Cuban-Americans. When we landed at José Marti Airport and it was announced, “Welcome to Havana, Cuba,” there were shouts and cheers and loud applause. In previous years our mission group has traveled through either Nassau or Miami. Now there are also daily flights for Cubans and Cuban-Americans between Miami and Havana, travel restrictions having been relaxed by both countries. The direct flight on Sun Country at present flies only on Tuesdays, one flight down, one back.

When in Guines, our group visits people in their homes. These are members of the church, some of whom may be infirm or ill, but on this trip we also visited some newer church members. Pastor Abel Mirabel is doing very well in his leadership. The church is thriving, as are other churches in Cuba, all as a result of 20 years of rapprochement between the government and religious communities. There were 200 in worship the Sunday we were there, with 40 in the Sunday school and a dozen in a youth class.

The church rocks, and it is also a social center the way churches were in our country in the 1950s, going by my recollection of the Midwest. Indeed, there is this sense that Cuba time is a variant 1950s warp, visually augmented by all the American cars of that era that have been kept going by clever maintenance.

But of course it is not the 1950s, it is revolutionary Cuba time moving into an unknown transition period. I saw a government sign that said something like, Individual opportunity is the new socialism. Will there be a postrevolutionary time? If there is, it probably will be gradual, or that seems to be the hope. There is a reluctance — shared with us in anecdotal conversation — that too rapid a change with a heavy influx of American capital would be disruptive. Nonetheless there is a clear desire to ease relations between the countries, certainly to get rid of the embargo, which the Cuban government calls a blockade.

Each year, I visit a family in Guines who are not church members. I met them through their son who is now 19 and doing his obligatory military service. When I first met him he was 11 playing ball with friends in the street. He was home for a few days. Sitting in their living room, I told them of our flight from New York and how the Cuban-Americans had cheered when landing in Havana. I noticed a certain expression on the mother’s face suggesting displeasure, though being respectful she said nothing.

Her expression reminded me that Cubans in Cuba have mixed feelings about Cubans in America. There are many lines of personal history, but among them is the knowledge that thousands of Cubans fled Cuba or have defected, and among those there is a political base that is hostile to Cuba. Cuban families have also been split by a son or a daughter leaving the parents behind or older Cubans joining married children in Miami, perhaps to find it’s not the paradise they thought it might be. What I saw in a flicker of expression on this woman’s face was a sense of herself as a Cuban who does not easily identify with Cuban-Americans, if at all.

That same afternoon conversation included the young man’s grandparents. The grandfather spoke with skeptical hope about talks that have opened up between our counties. With the people, he said, speaking in Spanish, there is not a problem. He gestured with an open hand, leaving unstated the suggestion that it will be challenging for the governments to work things out.

It is these conversations multiplied a thousand times over for many years that help build amistad, friendship, between our countries. Indeed, the many mission partnerships that congregations and religious groups in the United States have had with Cuban churches for over 20 years have created words of understanding that percolate through the church’s social fabric. The political initiative between President Obama and President Raul Castro might be seen therefore as a conversation that has been happening all along at a local level. Cuba time and corporate America time are now engaged in a dance as intricate as the salsa.

Those of us who travel to Cuba on religious visas are often asked, “But what do you do there?” The inference is that we might engage in hands-on projects, like building or painting or repairing structures. But that isn’t what we do. We are there in friendship, where conversations and home visits and worship are integral to our purpose. As Barbara D’Andrea, our mission group leader, once quipped, when we invite friends to visit our homes here we aren’t asking them to build a room or paint the house. What we do, though, is give money collected from our churches, which the Cuban churches use for their needs and programs. One new outreach in the Guines church is to provide a free lunch once a week for senior citizens.

There is one hands-on project, however, that we have been involved in. Two years ago a water-filtration system was installed at the Guines church. The same has been done at several other churches in Cuba by way of Living Waters for the World, a mission project through the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. For the installation in Guines, money for the project came through the mission budget of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, with the actual installation done by a trained team from the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.

The Guines church distributes clean water to people in town without charge. They come three days a week, 900 people who are allowed up to four gallons of water each visit for their households. The results of drinking clean water are immediate and dramatic. Chronic gastrointestinal problems clear up.

The people walk to the church for the water, each one carrying large clean bottles to be filled. It is still Cuba time, measured by walking, and by talking, sharing the gossip of the neighborhood, the complaints of the day and the good will. People dress for the 80-plus-degree weather — which our group welcomed with exaltation, having come from a severe winter.

To fly to Cuba, even now by a direct flight, is in some respects to fly back in time. But then again it is to fly forward in time because of pending changes. My hope is that Cuba will not be pressed into a model of corporate America “on time.” Perhaps the tropical climate and Latin culture will prevail. We shall see.

The Rev. Robert Stuart, a longtime “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.

Every few months I drive to Sagaponack from the Berkshires, where I live. I come to stay in my childhood home on Daniel’s Lane and visit with family. Each time I arrive, as I round the corner of Sagaponack Road and Main Street, I look over and see my 6-year-old self, pale and skinny with lank hair, sitting on one of the swings in the narrow patch of grass running along the side of the Little Red Schoolhouse (where a swing set still stands), getting an under-push from Sally Kinkade or Cookie Dombkowski.

If I were to compose a timeline of my life, it would connect one school building to another. The first would be in Manhattan, where I attended preschool at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Nursery School (though I was a Jew). Miss Allen, my kind, composed, and elderly teacher, often oversaw the group of 3 and 4-year-olds from a rocking chair.

The next dot on the line would be a preschool in Springs, I think, run by Jackie Jackson. She danced and sang for us, and we made hats, which we decorated lavishly with balloons and brightly colored paper. From there the timeline leads to a kindergarten class at the elementary school in East Hampton, where all I can remember is that a group of 5-year-old boys staged an uprising when I tried to boss them around in the block corner. I cried not in sadness, but in outrage.

Then came Sagg School, where I was first introduced to finger painting, Dick and Jane, the pleasures of peeling open milkweed in the spring, and the confusing fact that there was an S in the printed version of Long Island. Silent letters. Unforgettable. I may have learned the word peninsula that year, as well.

From there the timeline leads right to the Hampton Day School, held, its first year, in the Mullers’ house on the corner of Ocean Road and Paul’s Lane in Bridgehampton. Our playground was one large tree in the backyard. I found out that bats would try to hide in your hair (and learned only recently that it wasn’t true). I acquired encyclopedic knowledge of the Greek myths (and wore my mother’s blond fall, bought for a party, the day I dressed as Aphrodite for our Festival of Greek Mythology). I learned from Tony Hitchcock how to use my five senses to make observations of the natural world.

In a slight detour from the sometimes weird but always riveting years at the Hampton Day School, I spent my sophomore year at East Hampton High School. There I first encountered something called a G.P.A. and the pleasures of walking up and down hallways as a form of socializing. I also learned how to ace an algebra test, though it’s fair to say I didn’t learn one single thing about mathematics. I returned to the Hampton Day School for one last year, where on my graduation night I performed with my friend Coco in a Pinter play about two strange old sisters.

All in all, a quirky educational history.

But I must have liked something about all those teachers, desks, assignments, friends, and foes, because in the ensuing 40 years, I’ve spent the bulk of my waking hours inside of a classroom, or thinking about one. I love school. But I’m beginning to dislike education. And it’s not just that too many schools aren’t good enough for the kids inside, or that standardized tests punish children and teachers without providing much of value, though I do think both of those things. It’s worse than that. Our basic idea about what kids should learn in school has slowly gone farther and farther offtrack, right into the ditch.

Somehow, instead of reasonable, achievable, and humane goals, ones that would actually help all kinds of children, from many backgrounds, become well educated, we’ve created a set of expectations and hurdles that would make the most eager young student want to crawl back into bed and pull the sheets over her head. In a misguided mission to make every child well trained, we insist they complete boring sentences, define words they’ve never used, do a kind of algebra that has little meaning to them, fill in blanks on test after test, sit up straighter and straighter at their desks, become skilled with a bewildering assortment of technology, memorize various chemical formulae, balance a checkbook, recite facts about other continents, speak a second language, pass more tests, and behave kindly and cheerfully even while sitting in dull classrooms with overworked, underappreciated adults.

Even if the current approach succeeded (which it doesn’t), we’d end up with a population of well-trained but undereducated (and possibly unhappy) citizens.

Right around the time of my last visit to Sagg, my younger sister, Jenno, sent me a photo of her son Ike and his friend Max, both 7 years old. In the picture, Ike and Max are standing on the street corner near Jenno’s house in Santa Monica. Next to them, on the ground, lies a red wagon filled with their wares: old toys that they are hoping to sell to passers-by. But these two entrepreneurs had a trick up their sleeves, an unbeatable retail strategy: In the photo, they are holding up a cardboard sign on which they have applied thick exuberant lettering, which reads, “Toy Sale! Toy Sale! Unless you have no money, then it’s free!”

When the picture first popped up on my iPhone, with my nephew’s crazy shock of red curls and asymmetrical grin, I gulped with laughter. But then it hit me. This was what we should see in schools. The boys had such energy for their work. They longed to be industrious, put their good ideas into action, and see the fruits of their labor. It’s hard to know whether their handmade sign reflected their generosity and good values (everyone, rich or poor, should get a toy) or their zeal for getting rid of inventory. Either way, what I saw in that picture was what I don’t see enough of in classrooms — interest, purpose, invention, and teamwork. And joy. They seemed so happy to be working hard and trying out their new idea.

When I revisit all those schools from my past, I can string together an educational story of skills (many of which were learned only to be forgotten), accomplishments, and grades (also of defeats, boredom, and uncertainties). Much more vivid than any of those, however, are specific memories of Aphrodite, kindergarten insurrections, and the surprise of using all five senses to observe a sugar cube.

Mostly though, it’s not what I remember that stayed with me. It’s the habits and inclinations I did or didn’t acquire (some for better and some for worse): the inclination to read everything all the time, to seek and stay in a conversation, to avoid math whenever possible, to savor the process of building an idea slowly and carefully, and, until I was in my 30s, a regrettable reluctance to be equally slow and careful in revising my work.

The dispositions we acquire in school are what last, and they are what really matter. Those dispositions have nothing to do with a mission statement on a wall or the curriculum written in a book. They come from the practices and orientations that are ingrained, day in and day out, while children fill out worksheets, worry about test scores, answer unimportant questions about correct though dull books, and master math skills that appear to have no intrinsic meaning — or, as the case may be, from launching a used toy sale where kids give away toys for free.

Susan Engel is a professor in the psychology department at Williams College and the author of two new books, “The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools” and “The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood.”

Remember game shows? “Concentration,” “The Big Payoff” (with a former Miss America, the late Bess Myerson, in a pre-feminist mink coat)? Remember “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret”? “Queen for a Day”? “You Bet Your Life”? I do.

And quiz shows like “The G.E. College Bowl” or “Twenty-One”? Game shows, quiz shows — you and your family can feud over the distinction and which falls under which genre. But, for the most part, they have given way to reality shows that aren’t really reality.

I mean, how real was Bruce Jenner all those years with all those Kardashians, when, out of the blue, he declares he’s about to undergo a gender reassignment? That we never had a clue? Frankly, with his Peggy Fleming kind of hair back in his reality days as an Olympian, in his short shorts a la Richard Simmons, we should have guessed. But that’s another story left for Diane Sawyer to gather and uncover.

Of course, there is still “Jeopardy!” and the annoying “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Price Is Right,” but that last one is just not the same without Bob Barker, or, prior to him, Bill Cullen. “Let’s Make a Deal” is dull without Monty Hall. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”? I’d rather watch “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

And then there was “Password.” Allen Ludden, the host, dead a century, and his wife, as a contestant, Betty White, living approaching a century, with the odd way the off-camera announcer would tell, no, whisper the password to the studio audience and those of us viewing at home: “Sh-h-h. The password is . . . ubiquitous.” (Try that one on for size — Soupy Sales, a contestant on the offshoot “Password All-Stars,” would have a struggle, as anyone would, with that.)

The password is ubiquitous. And this is where I shift gears and segue and transition to the real point of this piece: passwords!

In fairness, and with ease, the password to unlock my iPhone, when it was the 4 and the 5 and now the 6 Plus, has always been the same. Four measly digits. Just four. No symbols, no combinations of numbers and letters. Easy. Breezy. Memorable. In fact, the same four digits I use at a cash machine.

Beautiful.

But every other password I need — to get into my Chase account online, to sign onto Amazon, to log on for my 401 balances (which I do daily, and you would too if you were retired, as I am, as I have been for three years now) — requires, no, demands difficult combinations: no less than eight characters, no two letters in a row the same, a cap, some lowercase, a symbol, a number or two. Then, to make matters even more humiliating, they tell you (They? Who are they? Some little people inside the laptop, or even littler people inside the phone?), “Your password is weak.” Or “not strong enough.” I need criticism that I am inadequate from an inanimate object? Believe me, I get enough from my life partner.

Netflix, on my smart TV, makes me feel like an idiot. You have to use the remote to scroll up, down, and across to hit the precise password, which I never remember.

Facebook is another killer in the random way it asks for a password. Generally, you just go to the app, but occasionally, and for no good reason other than Mark Zuckerberg is a genius and we are all morons and he constantly throws it in our faces, they ask for a password. “Your login has expired.” Why? How come? Don’t f**k with us, Zuckerberg. We are not as clever or as brilliant as you. I barely know how to work the electric can opener! (Full disclosure: That last line was stolen from a Woody Allen movie.)

But it gets even worse. Yes, it does. If you want to order something online, or respond to a friend’s article, or comment on how despicable technology has become, you are required to type a code of letters and numbers that run together, smash into each other, to prove you are not a robot or a monkey. Believe me, monkeys would be more adept as deciphering those indecipherable collections of numbers and letters. Uppercase? Lowercase? I wind up, after half an hour of ordering this watch or that pair of jeans, frustrated and canceling my cart. I just can’t make out the strung together, no, squashed together, code. Plus, my fingertips are too fat.

How many times have you wanted to toss a device out a window when you are told that after three attempts and failures you need to reset the password? And then you get a series of numbers as a temporary password, brief seconds to find a pencil, write it down, and make the effort to change.

The Notes app on my iPhone has a tab titled Passwords. It currently has 28 passwords listed, most already obsolete.

Pandora and iTunes and PayPal and Ticketmaster and Skype. There are also accompanying pins attached to a bunch of them. Twitter and Cargo and J. Crew and God Knows. That last password number never works. Because God, nor anyone else for that matter, knows how or why the universe of passwords has become so . . . hellish.

There should be a new quiz show or game show, a la “Name That Tune.” “I can name that password in four numbers combined with letters and symbols.”

Oh, @#!+*%& it. I can’t.

Hy Abady is just out with a new book, “Back in The Star Again, Again!” — a sequel to his 2010 collection of “Guestwords” and “True Stories From the East End.”

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. A while back, I started making annual visits to Cape Town, not simply to avoid our Hamptons winter. I wanted to measure the changes taking place in what I still consider to be my “beloved country.”

When Mandela was freed, hope surged, as I know it did for all South Africans, and the world. So is that hope being fulfilled? How much has changed?

Let me start with what has not changed. Two elements stand out: one, the staggering beauty of the country, and two, the warmth of its people. In a heartbeat, I would exchange the relaxed “Howzit?” of a white South African or the friendliness of an African for many of their U.S. equivalents. There’s something about the South African joie de vivre that lifts the heart. There are good people at work. Here are a few of them:

I met a farming family that has diversified into making cheeses; their products bring home international awards. I know of an Englishwoman who came here a few years ago, adopted two African children, and heads a charity that delivers health and educational resources to the children of vineyard workers. A young American, Amagansett’s own Mark Crandall, visits Cape Town for months at a time; in crime-infested Crossroads Township, Mark teaches young black kids the skills of basketball.

All these entrepreneurs add vitality and hope to the local scene. Are they fearful of the future? They are realists. One family, recently returned from “sanitized” Australia, summed up their feelings this way: “We only have one life, so you may as well feel the marrow in your bone and not just the wash of multiple shades of vanilla.”

Sadly, the beauty of the land, the energy of most people, and the successes of a few entrepreneurs are the only positive features I discovered on this most recent visit to the sun-splashed country I love.

In the shadows, I detected widespread disappointment. There’s dismay — even resentment — among people of every color at the inability of the government to deliver on its promises. There’s a sense, as Archbishop Tutu is said to have said some years ago, that “the gravy train only stopped to change passengers.”

I found that incompetence and corruption seem to be the defining features of South African governance. Yet, paradoxically, the ruling African National Congress party still pulls 62 percent of the vote. So, what causes this cognitive dissonance? Why do dissatisfied people vote for the source of dissatisfaction? I detected a number of issues at play, all of them a reaction to various forms of what could be called social engineering.

The A.N.C. runs provincial governments in all nine provinces (what we might call states) except the high-performing Western Cape. The governing party is desperate to win control of the Cape’s white-dominated administration at the next local elections. With this goal in view, one of the strategies has been to encourage compliant media ownership. The target is the local morning newspaper, the Cape Times.

The Cape Times was founded in 1876 and has always had a liberal slant. In recent years, though, it seems to have become in thrall to the government’s party line. This loss of editorial independence has had a drastic effect on circulation: Wikipedia reports a drop from 267,000 in 2012 to 31,930 in the fourth quarter of 2014.

A topic of more national import is — as someone described it to me — “affirmative action on steroids” or “reverse discrimination.” A recent newspaper headline, “Half Bok team must be black,” referred to the Springboks, the hallowed national rugby team. The national rugby chief believes “we have got to do our duty in terms of transformation” and implied that coaches are selecting heavier white players over lighter black players. Talent, speed, and ability, the usual yardsticks of potential, seem now to be less important than being of light weight. Many South Africans see this as a policy to make game-winning potential secondary to racial ideology.

Local people speak testily about what they call “reverse discrimination.” Whites agree when I point out that, after three centuries of discrimination, some balancing of the books is bound to occur. But they add, “If only the people who get the jobs were competent.” It is true that many public services are in disarray: the post office, telecommunications, power supplies, national pensions, and passport applications.

What seems inescapable to me is that these examples of sputtering public “service delivery” are a direct consequence of the apartheid era. How so? Because the previous Afrikaner government failed to train Africans for anything other than menial (domestic servants, cleaners) or manual labor (construction, diamond and gold mining) jobs. That karma is now back to disrupt everyone’s daily life.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (1901-1966), Afrikaner prime minister and apar­theid’s architect, once said that he preferred to call apartheid “good neighborliness.” Yet he also believed that his African neighbors would forever be, as his Bible verse (Joshua 9:21) put it, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” So his government decreed where people should live (Group Areas Act), which jobs they would be allowed to have (Job Reservation legislation), and with whom they could — to put it politely — fraternize (Immorality Act). It is, indeed, payback time for such “good neighborliness.”

This embedded incompetence, however much justified by the past, saps the spirit of many South Africans, regardless of color. A mixed-race engineer was told that his job application was rejected because he was “not black enough.” Some African garage attendants laughed when I asked them what they thought of their president: “He’s always smiling because he steals from us and we can’t catch him!”

In a country village in the dusty Karoo, a white health worker put it to me this way: “When I visited America to see my daughter — all my children have left here — I got a fantastic sense of how proud Americans are about their country. Yet here, our national motto of ‘Proudly South African’ is a joke; how can you be proud when President Zuma is stealing from taxpayers to build a 250 million rand [$21 million] retirement home? How can you be proud when we have power failures and our national airline is bust, and broadcasting chiefs plus dozens of other government officials are under suspicion of malpractice? How can you be proud when, after 20 years in power, our politicians are still blaming our failures on the legacy of apartheid?”

Has the “transformation” to a black government affected the lifestyle of ordinary white people? I mentioned to another citizen that the status of white South Africans didn’t seem to have changed much. He smiled. “Sure, we’re still traveling first class, but now we’re on the Titanic.” But he asked me to remember that, in a country of 54 million, of which 4.5 million are white, the largest percentage of tax revenue comes from the white sector (white people earn about five times as much as black people). There are 17 million “indigent” blacks in South Africa, and the government gives them the equivalent of $95 U.S. per month in support. Although there are 13.7 million registered taxpayers, only 5 million submitted tax returns in 2013.

So, most whites feel that they are doing their bit for the country. “Essentially, we are carrying the unemployed and the unemployable,” said my source.

At street level, I did not see much improvement. What I did see: tramps sorting through rubbish bins, poor whites standing at traffic lights with begging notices, criminals living on hillsides and attacking unwary hikers on Table Mountain, the walls of every home spiked with barbed wire. What I missed was any sign of law enforcement. Vigorous but fair law enforcement is a symbol of good government; the lack of it is evidence of a failing state.

Yet tourists love the beloved country! Tourism is the chief growth engine in the Western Cape. It’s a beautiful region and with the rand so puny (an exchange rate of about 12/1), it’s cheap to visit. As they say in New York, “What’s not to like?”

Restaurants, many in fabulous settings, are plentiful and serve world-class food. Service, however, is glacially slow. I dined at 25 restaurants in nine weeks (like I said, it’s cheap on dollars) and only twice did a manager walk up to our table to ask if we were satisfied. So I never blame the servers; they’re victims of poor training and supervision.

The impression I took away this year is that South Africans are shrugging off their nation’s dysfunction. (And let’s not forget that only 9 percent of Americans think that their Congress is doing a decent job.) The majority of citizens in my beloved country — as in America, as in the world — treat their self-serving politicians with disdain. People just try to get on with their lives.

South Africans seem to have accepted that this is how Africa works. They’re all passengers in a stolen car that’s steered by a learner driver who seems to treat his incompetence as a bit of a laugh. But the countryside is vivid with sunshine and the sky is blue. Sure, the car breaks down a lot, but hey, that comes with the territory.

Brian Clewly Johnson is the author of “Deep Memory” and a forthcoming memoir, “A Cape Town Boy.” He lives in Amagansett.

We’d have cracked up laughing had we known of the “greatest generation” con that would define us 50 years later. The greatest generation was our parents who saw us through the Depression. Our children, we were sure, would be an even greater generation. We were clearing evil from the earth so that could be.

There was certainly much to praise in our conduct. We were kind and generous to the defeated population, especially to children. Several married men from my battalion took displaced children back to the States and adopted them. We were persevering, brave, loyal, brilliant improvisers with machinery. When the Allied command overlooked the big defensive advantage Normandy’s hedgerows gave the German defenders, it was the G.I.s who concocted solutions to cut through them and enable our 3rd Army’s breakout at St. Lo.

We also displayed greatness as a country. We invested much labor, money, and expertise in restoring the infrastructures of our allies and enemies alike. Yes, it was partly to create markets for our products and counter the appeal of communism, which was taking over Eastern Europe and threatening France, Greece, and Italy, but it was also an action that came from our hearts.

But then, we had a dark side. Many of us profited from Germany’s war-devastated economy and consumer shortages by selling our cigarettes and manipulating our dollars’ pay on the black market. We were intensely racist with Afro-American G.I.s, who were largely relegated to service functions and performed stunning feats of efficiency and endurance trucking supplies to our advancing armies.

And we looted and raped, not to the extent of our enemies, but we did this, and U.S. soldiers shot German prisoners. During the Battle of the Bulge, Wehrmacht soldiers wearing U.S. Army uniforms and fluent in American English infiltrated our lines and were misdirecting our reinforcement and supply convoys. If we believed captured German soldiers knew of the saboteurs’ whereabouts, we would give their top-ranking officer a few seconds to start disclosing it. If he didn’t, we would shoot him, then demand an answer from the next in rank. Either he or another captured soldier would then reveal it.

I have absolutely no criticism to offer on this. I would have done it myself if called upon, held my carbine to their heads and fired until we got the information we had to have and done so without a qualm. And though I have been registered as a conscientious objector since my discharge in 1946, I would probably in a similar situation shoot them today.

But, in addition, I might also shoot a surrendering soldier because I feared him, or coveted his Wehrmacht overcoat, which didn’t get waterlogged like ours did, or in revenge for their shooting G.I. prisoners en masse at Malmedy, or because my squad’s orders that day were not to take prisoners.

Which is to face the essential point. There is really very little room for greatness in war.

Indeed, a reason for us to avoid war is that we are lousy at it. During World War II, our leaders repeatedly made huge, inexcusable mistakes.

Gen. James Doolittle, commander of the U.S. 8th Air Force in England, flew combat missions over German-held territory despite his intimate knowledge of the Allies’ plans for the invasion of France. Had he been shot down and captured, German enhanced interrogation would probably have extracted these secrets from him, and they’d have been ready for us in Normandy.

Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. 5th Army in Italy, ignored a direct order from his superior, British Gen. Harold Alexander, to bypass Rome in order to surround the German 10th Army. Clark got the glory of entering Rome as a conqueror; the Germans got leave to fight in Italy for another year.

In the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a hero of World War II, defied President Truman’s order not to use American forces in his advance through North Korea to the Chinese border. As Truman feared, the Chinese entered the war, sent us reeling, and retook most of North Korea.

The Allies were lax in other crucial ways. We woefully underestimated the Japanese, in part because of our presumptions of racial superiority, and were late to recognize Germany’s ability to produce game-changing weapons, such as jet airplanes, which were 100 miles per hour faster than any warplane the Allies could put in the sky. If Hitler had not insisted most of his jets be bombers rather than fighters, for offense rather than defense, we would not have prevailed on D-Day or in our air campaign to disrupt Germany’s transportation system and war production.

My nomination for the most ruinous and ignorant act of all would go to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In August 1941, Hoover blew off evidence from a British MI5 double agent, Dusan Popov, that Japan was preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoover, a prude, detested Popov, a high-stakes gambler and womanizer. Popov’s most famous conquest was Simone Simon, a kittenish French movie star now renowned by cinema buffs for her performance in “Cat People” of a young woman cursed by her inner panther and also for providing her lovers with gold keys to her boudoir.

Rather than pass Popov’s information to the president and military chiefs, Hoover threatened to arrest him under a federal law, the Mann Act, for transporting a woman across state lines (New York to Florida) for “purposes of debauchery.” That Popov’s paramour was a consenting adult mattered not to Hoover. Four months later, Japan killed 2,400 Americans and crippled our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and proceeded to overrun most of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.

All of these gentlemen were extolled during the war and long afterward. President Truman awarded Doolittle a Silver Star for, among other things, his “personal example” during the very time his hubris was endangering our invasion of Europe. Clark was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, our second highest medal, by General Eisenhower. After Truman fired him for insubordination, MacArthur came home to a hero’s ticker tape parade in New York, an invitation to address a joint session of Congress, and beseeching from Republican leaders to run for president. Hoover led the F.B.I. until his death in 1972.

In tragic contrast, Alan Turing, the young English mathematician whose solving of Germany’s “ultra” code probably saved the war for us, was harassed by the British police because he was gay and in 1954 killed himself. The appropriate outcome was Popov’s, who became Ian Fleming’s model for James Bond.

If Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq mean anything, we are no better at war now than in World War II. The greatest generation will be the one that finds peace.

Seventy years ago today, May 7, 1945, Germany’s armed forces surrendered to the Allies.

Richard Rosenthal served in the 1251st Combat Engineer Battalion during the Battles of the Rhineland and Central Europe. He lives in East Hampton.