I was scribbling “Goya painted with a spoon”

when I heard Jane died (Saturn gnawed

his children without a place setting),

I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.

I never got over

the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage,

when she screamed, “I bargained too much” —

for her murdered son’s life.

The actress wore a wooden spoon as a broach.

So tongue tied, I kept “spoon.”

It is not a kind of decoration.

Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon —

potato fields, Water Mill, pink mallow,

her early painting Leda and the Swan,

nothing we see —

not with everyday palette knife,

brushes or late-invented forks,

useful for painting hydrangeas and eyelashes,

proof painters work like translators,

English into Chinese, everyday English words:

daylight, flower, woman, moon

are different in Ming, Tang, and Song:

different characters, different calligraphy.

She painted with a silver or oak spoon

ponds or stars, bones were oblongs and triangles,

nothing we see. She painted light,

mastered it, was mastered by it,

moved the world by “tipping the horizon up.”

My honor, from a distance she painted

my garden and sandspit, the house

with Corinthian columns on Mecox Bay

along the old Montauk road, the beach plums,

fireweed, roses of Sharon, day lilies, love

mostly washed out by hurricanes.

Then there was her battle of dreams

versus hallucinations, battles without a hero,

the colors of fate, breathtaking, inevitable colors.

She would never forgive

those who think painting and poetry

function about the same as wallpaper.

Sometimes she painted small pictures

easily hidden from search parties

as Goya did, hiding from the Inquisition

because he painted nudes, Protestant fields,

Catholic fields, Jewish fields, like her.

She suffered the heresies of the Hamptons

where most painters of roses,

whatever their personal faith,

and all poets, as such, are polytheists.

Again, she studied the many moods

of the sun and ocean through a window.

I studied Chinese at the Beijing railroad station,

eight thousand years or so of Chinese faces.

Every Chinese knows five cardinal relations:

ruler subject,

father son,

husband wife,

elder and younger brother,

friend and friend.

There was the undiscovered country that began

at the Southampton railroad station,

the beauty and color of Long Island

in the mist . . .

I sit shivering with the old-timers, gossiping

about the steam engines

from Pennsylvania station to Montauk

100 years ago, faster than now, the island’s

chestnut trees harvested for firewood,

the cemeteries, a little away

from the railroad tracks,

cornflowers and poppies,

off Routes 114, 27, Springs-Fireplace Road,

overloaded with painters

and their good ghosts — some comfort,

the osprey and hummingbirds.

                                 *

Often we met at the beach, half-naked

barefooted or in sandals.

We knew where fifty-six swans nested,

why Long Island painters seldom painted

the night, or character. We chased whales,

saved wounded seals. We knew the pagan ocean

was full of surprises:

after an Atlantic hurricane, in our trees,

with salt-drenched curled leaves,

thousands of fooled monarch butterflies gathered

on their way to Mexico.

We embraced 65 years ago —

not a long time for a redwood,

a long time for an oak or an elm.

The day you died Pope Francis

said that dogs go to heaven, I wish ex cathedra,

so fawns, foxes, and rabbits aren’t left behind.

You understood shadow.

At first look, you never painted sorrow.

You picked stemless flowers, homeless

like beauties standing on street corners,

gorgeous juvenile delinquents.

Stanley Moss, who had a house in Water Mill for many years, is editor and publisher of Sheep Meadow Press. His collections of poems include “A History of Color” and “God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike.”

Jane Freilicher died on Dec. 9 at the age of 90.

Living together is an art, not a mere scientific or mechanical adjustment. All the mechanizations of all the social engineers will not help a heterogeneous people to live together in brotherly, peaceable, happy relationship unless the individuals of society begin early, practice diligently, and learn to delight in the art of living with other peoples and different races.

In the United States we have the representatives of all races, but the major distinction in thought, and often in practice, is made between the vast “black” race and the vaster “white” race. This distinction is not biological; it is sociological and historical.

If the problem lay in biology, it would be hopeless for us, for it could be solved only by evolution, and evolution may take a million million years. In sociology we may take relatively short cuts through education, acquaintanceship, cooperation, social reaction. This is simple, but it is difficult, for we are hindered by habits, prejudices, selfish interests, and fear — and the worst of these is fear.

We need first acquaintanceship. People do not get acquainted through caste relationships. The master does not know the slave. The boss does not know the laborer; the employer does not know the employee as a man and fellow-citizen. The relationship of “inferior” and “superior” stands in the way of fraternal acquaintanceship.

Whenever two groups are handicapped by caste-customs, the strong­er and advantaged group can never understand the weaker and disadvantaged group as well as the weak understand the strong. This is not due to any superior virtue in the weak but is due to their necessity: The weak must understand the strong; it is a condition of the survival of the weak.

Let us take Georgia for an example: Cultured, intelligent, and refined white homes in Georgia will be well known to colored people, but the homes of the poor whites, the uncultured and disorderly, will be unknown to colored people. Now let us get at the other end of this social telescope and take a look and everything will be just reversed. The better, the more cultured, and the more orderly a black man’s home is in Georgia, the surer we can be that no white man ever entered it. But the low, uncultured, disorderly homes of black people in Georgia are almost certain to be well known to white people, and to very influential white people: the sheriff, the chief of police, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the readers of all the newspapers.

Neither race is to be blamed for this abnormality — it is nobody’s deliberate planning — it is in the very nature of segregated relationships. In such relationships the strong will control the weak and will therefore deal chiefly, almost exclusively, with the undesirable qualities and elements of the weak, while the weaker and poorer people will serve the strong and will therefore develop contacts with the economically better off and generally more cultured and refined sections of the strong.

But while we cannot be blamed for the inevitable results of a given system, we are to be blamed if we do not seek to alter the system and thereby secure better results. A dominant race will have an almost 100-percent knowledge of the crime and criminals of a subject race, because the dominant race will run all the courts and jails; but the dominant race may have an almost zero knowledge of the law-abiding persons in the weaker group, but that the others just have not been caught yet.

This is the only possible apology for the ridiculous statement of impatient and exasperated whites, who have dealt only with Negro thieves, when they say heatedly that there are no honest Negroes; when they have dealt only with ignorant blacks, that there are no intelligent Negroes; when they have had relations only with black prostitutes, that there are no colored women who are virtuous and chaste. If color-caste is capable of such vitiation of human relations, color-caste ought to be destroyed, and men of the same cultural levels ought to be recognized as men and granted the privileges of their culture.

In analyzing the art of living together, it is well to know that a human will like people better when he does something for them and hate them most when he does most against them. It is not the sentiment that causes the deed, it is the deed that causes the sentiment. If we want to like people, let us start doing good to them; if we wish to give nourishment to our hatred, let us feed it with deeds of ill against the objects of the hatred. Hate, in and by itself, is an empty illusion that would tend to vanish; to be kept in the semblance of life, it must be continually fed on the substance of deeds.

Let us see: There are two men in Illinois who are equally indifferent to Negro education, but being solicited, the one gives a thousand dollars toward Negro education and the other gives nothing. Subsequently let both of these men hear the same violent attack on Negro education. The one who gave will feel outraged by such an attack: “Negro education is all right, otherwise I would never have been such a fool as to give my money toward it.” While the one who refused to give will feel justified: “Good! I knew it was not stinginess and the lack of generosity that caused me to refuse to give, it was my good sense about the problem.” So much for the man who refuses to do good.

That explains why those who have for over two generations supported Negro education in America are practically 100-percent defenders of that cause, while some who have opposed it have become more desperate and violent in their opposition and will not acknowledge even when they are convinced. The man who fights a good cause must continually show that the cause was wrong in order to show that he is right.

White people have often marveled at the phenomenon that the American Negro, enslaved and oppressed, has not quite developed the hatred against his oppressors that some of his oppressors have developed against him. This has been erroneously set down as a contrast in racial traits, but it is simply the differences in spiritual need as between the perpetrator and the victim of a wrong. The one who is so unfortunate as to do a wrong has a far greater motive for developing hatred than has the unfortunate to whom that wrong is done; namely, the motive of self-justification.

Evidently, the more cooperation, the better understanding, and the better understanding, the better for living together. Cooperation brings acquaintanceship, and there is no substitute for acquaintanceship. No church creed, no bill of rights, no constitutional article, no wordy resolutions, and no pious prayers can ever be substituted for plain, old-fashioned acquaintanceship in the business of living together.

Segregation prevents or handicaps acquaintanceship. Therefore, no form of interracial segregation that it is practicable to avoid in a given community should ever be tolerated. An evil should not be allowed to spread; like slavery, race discrimination should be confined to its present boundaries and limitations until it can be destroyed.

Infinite patience is needed; sheer force can achieve little. In the present moment force cannot open the public schools of Georgia to colored children, but wisdom and foresight can prevent the closing of the public schools of New York to the children of any race.

This is an excerpt from a 1934 speech written in hopes of improving race relations in America. William Pickens was a member of the committee that founded the N.A.A.C.P. in 1909 and a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Yale University in 1904. Bill Pickens of Sag Harbor is his grandson.

My wife never saw an owl. She would mention this at odd times, fairly regularly. Not just when she was looking at trees in the woods or trees on the street or trees through the car window. And not just when she was refurbishing birdhouses or rehydrating hummingbird feeders or referencing a book of North American birds. She would mention it when putting on her blue snow boots or scrambling eggs, when waiting in line to send a package to our son or get handed a bag of popcorn without butter.

It had become such a longing in her life that for Christmas I gave her a soft, overpriced saw-whet owl to hang on the tree. It could have been seen as a sad substitute — Christmas is always a touchy time — but she liked it fine, and hung it around eye level, somewhere above the yellow submarine and below the tin angel.

On Dec. 26, driving home from a dinner with friends, turning into the driveway, just before midnight, I heard my wife whisper excitedly, “Look. An owl. Shhhhh. Don’t move.” Sitting on the grass in front of our house was a saw-whet owl. He was looking in our direction, alertly, as if he had been waiting for us to come home, like a family pet. My wife turned off the car radio to see better. The owl swiveled his head to the left to look at something as we looked at him. “It’s so small. Can he see us? They’re nocturnal, right? Turn off the lights. Is it a baby or just a little owl? Oooh. It’s so adorable. An owl. An owl.” (Yes, she can whisper in italics.)

The owl was six or seven inches high, white and brown downy, with a black bill and big black eyes ringed with deep yellow sclerae, and he was very still, except for that single sudden swivel of his head. “What is he doing on the ground?” my wife whispered. “Is he hurt? Awww. Turn the lights back on. Maybe he needs help. Or maybe he’s eating something. Do you see anything? Don’t move. Shhhh.”

We sat there, mesmerized by the saw-whet in front of our house until a truck rumbled by and spooked the little owl. After a labored, wobbly liftoff, he was soon flying across the road and through the boughs and into the night. There was just a sliver of moon. It illuminated nothing.

In the house, my wife went directly to her guide book and read aloud other names by which the northern saw-whet owl is called: Acadian owl, sparrow owl, farmland owl, Queen Charlotte owl, and little nightbird. And then she sat there, in a shaft of wonder, looking at something I could not see. She will never say she never saw an owl again.

For Christmases of the future, I am going to shop for her with even greater care, not to say tremulousness, for there are powers at work here, and I don’t understand them. And I have less than a year.

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

When my summer tenants in Southampton asked if they could stay two weeks past Labor Day because their kitchen renovation wasn’t finished yet, I said, “Sure.”

“What would you would charge?” the wife asked on the phone. I knew her husband worked for a wine distributor, so I said, “How about a case of wine? White, red, whatever, maybe a bottle of riesling for my husband.” That seemed fair to me.

She agreed and a week later two assorted cases of very good wine appeared on my front porch. But there were also three bottles of ’82 Bordeaux — consisting of an ’82 Chateau Margaux, an ’82 Mouton Rothschild, and an ’82 Chateau Latour. These wines are among the five first growths of Bordeaux, the rock stars of wine. With research on wine sites, I found them with estimates starting at $2,000 a bottle.

I tried to sell them online and placed them with a local liquor store, but after two years, no buyers materialized, so I decided to drink them instead. The first bottle, the Chateau Latour, I took to my daughter’s in-laws for a roast chicken supper for just the four of us. We always take a bottle of wine when we go to each other’s houses for dinner; sometimes we even take the same $20 bottle the other couple had given to us.

I very casually handed the ’82 Bordeaux to Ron, saying, “Here’s something to drink with dinner.” He said thanks, but then, when he looked more carefully at the label, his eyes widened and he said, “Terrific.”

He knows a lot about wine. I, on the other hand, will drink any wine, any color, and any vintage. My preference tends toward dry whites and reds, but I love a dry rosé from Provence or Wolffer rosé in the summer. The three of us (my husband doesn’t drink red) enjoyed the chicken enhanced by the smooth, elegant Bordeaux, with complex fruit, mineral, and tobacco flavors.

The second bottle, an ’82 Margaux, we took into the city for a special Christmas Eve dinner. My daughter was living in China and my son had plans, so we were alone for Christmas. Feeling sorry for ourselves, we were determined to have fun.

We stayed overnight at our friends’ lovely apartment on Sutton Place the first night and looked at the Christmas windows at Barney’s, Bergdorf’s, and Tiffany, trying to get into the Christmas spirit. We booked a concert to see one of the Marsalis brothers and have a late-night supper at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The following night, Christmas Eve, Laird, our hostess, made osso buco for the four of us. I proudly opened the ’82 Margaux — “Ta-dah!” with theatricality — glad to provide a bottle worthy of her dinner.

But it was vinegar. Awful! Thank goodness our friends had bought other wine. I was disappointed but resigned and realized that wine can go bad like business relationships, love affairs, and leftovers kept too long hidden in the fridge.

Wine is a living, breathing commodity. It’s also food. It gives us sustenance. It made me consider impermanence and how we shouldn’t save things for sometime in the future, but enjoy them today.

The third and last bottle of ’82 Bordeaux, the Mouton Rothschild, was to be a surprise at a dinner I was hosting for new friends we had met at a Paumanok wine-tasting dinner at the North Fork Table. It was only fitting that I break out the last of the big boys.

The Wine Cellar says of the ’82 Bordeaux wine: “The vintage conditions that created the 1982 Bordeaux were close to perfect from start to finish. Flowering took place in warm, sunny, and dry conditions. July was hot and dry. August cooled down a bit, but was followed by an explosion of 21 days of heat. The blast of inferno temperatures worked like magic. The 1982 Bordeaux wine was packed with layers of dense, rich, ripe fresh fruit, opulent, sensuous textures that had not been seen for decades.”

And we got to drink it.

John, a wine merchant, cradled the bottle like a newborn baby, carefully removing the cork, which came out clean. Dave said maybe we should decant it, but John said it might “go” more quickly if we did.

John brought an elegant Bordeaux of a recent vintage as backup. And Dave contributed a lovely California cabernet sauvignon from Napa. Anticipation mounted as I told them the history of the other two bottles. Great expectations floated in the air. Would the wine still be good after 31 years? John poured a small amount in each glass, careful not to spill a drop of the ruby nectar; even my non-red-drinking husband wanted a taste of this historic moment.

We sipped. “It’s like velvet,” John said. We all agreed, and as we toasted our good fortune we knew we wouldn’t be savoring such a famous, ambrosial wine again soon. Being united in wine and grapes and good food was intoxicating.

I raise my glass to my tenants, who bartered such a gift of wine in exchange for extending their lease. Cheers.

Joanne Pateman is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.

Long Island from the beginning has had a close relationship with England. On Dec. 24 the United States and Britain celebrated 200 years of unbroken peace.

The peace treaty, the Treaty of Ghent, came after a long period of hostilities. We were on the same side during the French and Indian War, when the wise Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder chased the French out of North America. But as soon as Prime Minister Lord North and George III tried to make the colonies pay for their own protection, the American Revolution was on.

Its end was not the end of hostilities with the mother country. James Madison declared war on Britain in 1812 because British Orders in Council made it harder for the United States to trade with France, and because the British Navy was seizing (“impressing”) sailors on colonial ships and putting them on Navy ships. The British ended the trade restrictions, but not impressment.

After Britain invaded and burned the White House and Capitol, it became clear that this was a war that neither country could afford — Britain was richer but it had been spending a lot fighting Napoleon. In the fall of 1813, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign minister, offered to negotiate. The two countries picked neutral Ghent in eastern Flanders as the venue.

The United States team was led by John Quincy Adams, son of a president and himself destined to become president. Henry Clay played the role of hawk, or “bad cop.” The rest of the team was Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, the Federalist James A. Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, who was U.S. chargé d’affaires in Paris. It took the Americans six weeks or more to communicate with Washington, D.C., so they were negotiating largely independently to restore territory to what it had been before the war, the “status quo ante bellum.”

The British team was led by Lord Castlereagh and Lord Bathurst, secretary for war and the colonies, but they did not attend the talks. Instead, a less skilled admiralty lawyer, Williams Adams, an impressments expert, Admiral Lord Gambier, and the undersecretary for war and the colonies, Henry Goulburn, pursued a goal of “uti possidetis” — each side keeps what it had won militarily.

The outcome of the treaty was favorable for the United States, perhaps because the war was going well for the Americans at the time the treaty was signed.

The Americans had been losing early on, but Lt. Gen. Sir George Prevost was faced in Plattsburgh with a strong New York and Vermont militia and U.S. Army regulars under the command of Brig. Gen. Alexander Macomb. Failing to take Lake Champlain, the British fled north after the battle. Next, Fort McHenry in Baltimore withstood a severe attack and inspired the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

News of these two battles was the last information that negotiators in Ghent received.

The British lost their goal of making the Native American lands in the state of Ohio and in the territories of Indiana and Michigan a reserve that would be a buffer to protect Canada from American annexation. They got none of the other aims of their invasion.

On Dec. 24 the negotiators agreed on the 3,000-word treaty. After approval by the two governments, hostilities ended and “all territory, places, and possessions whatsoever, taken by either party from the other during the war” were restored to what they had been before the war.

Donald E. Graves, a Canadian historian and War of 1812 expert, concludes that what Americans lost on the battlefield, “they made up for at the negotiating table.” Although the United States never got the British to promise not to impress American sailors, with hostilities in Europe ended this ceased to be a concern.

It took a while after the signing of the treaty before the combatants got word, however. The British attacked New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815, with a large army. It was overwhelmed by a smaller and less experienced American force under Gen. Andrew Jackson in the greatest U.S. victory in the war. News of the treaty and the outcome in New Orleans reached a delighted American public at about the same time.

The War of 1812 greatly damaged the Long Island economy. A blockade was maintained at Gardiner’s Bay that led to several clashes between American and British vessels. Many vessels were hidden in inland harbors on Long Island or on Carmans River in Connecticut.

The American privateer Governor Tompkins captured a number of British ships. On its way back to New York, the ship confronted an English brig of war and had its bowsprit shot away and five men killed or wounded. New York City was blockaded at Sandy Hook, so the Tompkins tried to make New London. Seeing the British fleet waiting there, the Tompkins changed course and went through Plum Gut, then a narrow rocky strait between Plum Island and Orient Point, where the brig could not follow. Daniel Winters of Westhampton guided the Tompkins to safety in Gardiner’s Bay.

A big loss for the British occurred on Jan. 16, 1815, three weeks after the Treaty of Ghent. The 22-gun British sloop of war Sylph, with a crew of 121 men, got lost and went ashore off Shinnecock Point. Volunteer rescuers gathered, but the high wind, heavy surf, and a blizzard prevented a lifeboat from being launched in a timely way. By the time it got to the wreck, only one officer and five men remained to be rescued. A letter from the British Admiralty with the Suffolk County Historical Society says the Sylph lost at least 115 men, including the captain and 10 other officers.

The 21 bodies that floated ashore are buried near Sugar Loaf at Shinnecock Hills, and the wreck is commemorated by a tablet in Southampton’s St. Andrew’s Dune Church. The border and wheel above it are made of red cedar from the vessel’s wrecked timbers.

The Treaty of Ghent has held up for 200 years. But it did not imply an immediate “Special Relationship,” just a cessation of hostilities. In fact, many Irish Catholics opposed the U.S. entry on the side of Britain in the Great War. The famed Special Relationship was really not cemented until the threat of Hitler brought together the United States and Britain, first with Lend-Lease and then with the U.S. declaration of war in 1941.

John Tepper Marlin is president of Boissevain Books. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

A story published in The East Hampton Star on Nov. 27, “Lawyer’s Death Reveals System Failures,” about emergency medical services in the town following the death of Tom Twomey, illustrates the tip of the iceberg. Such stories have played out in the past and will continue to in the future until we implement better solutions.

Simply throwing more money into first responder programs is fiscally irresponsible. System design is a key aspect of turning financial resources into service. The problem lies in that each of the 101 ambulance and first response services in Suffolk functions independently.

Disturbingly, the lack of funding is often cited as a limitation in designing a better system and coordination at a regional level. Yet a 2007 New York State Office of the Comptroller report says that revenue collected by special districts is considerable.

Funding relies heavily on the tax base of the community and contributes to the already high property taxes in the region. This is ironic since insurance companies will often pay for emergency transport, yet all but one known not-for-profit ambulance company in Suffolk bills for its services. Fire districts are not permitted to bill for their services; ambulance districts can.

This excuse cannot be used to continue leaving money on the table that could go toward establishing a more economically efficient model. Excuses such that patients will be discouraged from calling 911 so they can avoid a co-pay are flawed. It would be expected that an emergency department visit would generate a co-pay, as would physician services.

Nor can we continue to hide behind the excuse of “home rule.” Home rule allows governance at the local level. Ambulance service governance is generally at the fire district and town level. Even at the town level, however, town councils generally do not take a role in providing oversight or coordination of the individual agencies.

The culture must change. Agency and political leaders must support systemwide modernization. Change that will capitalize on economies of scale, such as shared municipal services, is necessary to prevent future E.M.S. system failures. Metrics must be established, data collected, and ambulance services held accountable to performance standards.

Several agencies have proved their ability to serve their communities well, but may not have the strength in all three sides of the triangle that are essential measurements of an E.M.S. system: clinical sophistication, response time reliability, and economic efficiency. Many get two right, but achieving all three is the exception. Shortening one or two sides of the triangle may give a false appearance of competency when viewed from a favorable angle.

It may be better to look at each of these agencies not as micro systems, but as individual stations, part of a larger system. In many cases, it is not the individual station that has failed us, but the system as a whole. A well-performing system relies on all links in the chain to function well. We have a system with many broken links.

Lacking is the coordination among the very dedicated men and women who provide emergency medical services. It is time that we recognize a more efficient E.M.S. delivery model that includes improved agency coordination of first responders and ambulance response vehicles. Staffing could be done by both volunteer and career personnel, but integral to coordination is effective communications, command and control of vehicles, and human resources, among other key components.

Resource allocation needs to be managed based on demand, not availability. While change will not bring back Mr. Twomey or those who have died waiting for an ambulance, the little data we have demonstrates that we are better than we were in 2007. There has been at least a tripling of cases of individuals surviving to be discharged alive from the hospital after suffering an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Such accomplishments would not have been possible without the grassroots efforts of the thousands of dedicated volunteer and career E.M.S. personnel, emergency departments, and intensive-care units throughout Suffolk County. But major gaps still exist.

In October, New York State and Suffolk emergency agencies responded swiftly and collectively to the Ebola outbreak in answer to an order issued by the acting state health commissioner, Howard Zucker. While I am not minimizing concerns at home about the Ebola threat, we have not had one individual with Ebola in Suffolk County. We have a much bigger public health emergency regionally — a fragmented and inefficient E.M.S. system.

While protocols are in place to transfer a call to a neighboring ambulance service if a crew cannot respond, data are unavailable to measure compliance. It is essential that leadership at the district level be part of the process, but coordination must happen at a higher level of government.

This is a call for our leaders to come together at the district, town, and county levels to implement sweeping improvements in our E.M.S. system. Your life may depend upon it!

Carl S. Goodman is certified in emergency medicine and emergency medical services by the American Board of Emergency Medicine. A Mount Sinai resident, he has been both a volunteer and a paid E.M.S. provider in Suffolk County and elsewhere for 30 years.

Because of the big storm the other day, the howling winds driving sheets of rain, the ocean beach has written a new chapter for itself. The straggly brown ribbons of seaweed mixed with debris have been swept away, the deeply grooved ruts of crisscrossing truck tracks have been smoothed over, and most footprints are gone.

I’m marveling at clearly visible miles of low-tide, hard-packed glistening sand, brand new and shiny as the sun begins to hover over the day’s freshly painted scene before me. But I can see something is wrong up ahead on the shore.

The hundreds, maybe thousands, of gulls I spot in the near distance are flocked together on the sand, not the water, but they’re giving all the signals of frenzied feeding. They’re wheeling, diving, pecking, and fighting from just a few inches up in the air and then setting down while gobbling things I can’t see yet, then they are up again.

As I get closer, I notice that they’re hoisting aloft bloody bits and pieces of what I first think are scraps of just-cleaned fish jettisoned overboard by the gill-net crew aboard the commercial fishing boat so near shore I could almost reach out and touch it. But now I’m right upon the gulls and I notice what they’re fighting over and eating . . . whole baby bluefish, snappers, tons of them, and most are only 8 to 10 inches long.

All the usual clues are here before me: undersized, unmarketable fish, gill nets, a commercial boat still present and setting out a new string of nets as it slowly motors away. This is not the first time or place I’ve drifted into a fish-dumping scenario in my many years as a beachcomber and fishing enthusiast. There was a time during the fall fishing season years ago when I tried to catch every sunrise and sunset and every change of tide; so crazed was I to catch the big, elusive stripers that I spent many an observant hour on the beaches from South­ampton to Amagansett.

After witnessing many scenes like the one this morning, I have been both angry and sad, outraged and offended, and much less enthusiastic about killing fish myself. As I watch the gill netters’ craft smokily chug out past the breakers, I try to face my own history of hooking fish and perhaps being wasteful of such magnificent animals.

In the late 1970s, when I started surfcasting in the ocean off Southampton, bluefish were so abundant that there was no size or catch limit. Striped bass numbers were in an ever-spiraling downward trend, but they were what we were all after, commercial and sportfishermen alike. They were the money fish for some and the gourmet, hard-to-catch prize for others.

It was primarily bluefish, however, that chased our wooden plugs and silver spoon lures from September to December, and it was the blues we let pile up behind us in ever higher mounds; mounds that sometimes I found still on the beach the next day, abandoned for the gulls to eat. For years, before I learned to check my fervor, my heap of dead and dying fish was much more than I could eat or reasonably give away. Having to actively search for hours in my car, door to door, and by phone for willing recipients to give my huge surplus to made me finally realize I had to stop my overkill.

I decided that my transformation into a conservator should begin by unlearning most of the fishing tips I was taught as a child. I would not sharpen hooks anymore, in fact I would smash down all the barbs with pliers in order to back out a hook easily and release the fish. I would not keep the line so taught anymore between the rod and the fish — if it slipped the hook and got away, that was okay now. I would no longer stockpile every fish I captured. I would gently handle them as best I could while removing the lure and try to ensure that all but the bleeding, foul-hooked ones would deservedly re-enter their sudsy world in exchange for the valiant fight they put up.

Eventually, over the years and up to the current day, this alteration of my fishing methods and of my constant pursuit of sportfishing has led to my being able to watch contentedly as others reel in monster blues and huge bass — perfectly happy to be simply an unarmed observer and enjoying the ocean and the beach for all the myriad other delights they have to offer.

Now I stockpile fish and their pursuers, ocean waves and the gulls flying over them, and the sand dunes, with their always changing shadows, in a different way. My instrument of capture now is solely my camera.

Florrie Morrisey lives in Southampton Village.

I’m not a gambler, never have been, except for the 2 bucks I lost on the Jets game in ’68 when they lost to the Bills 37-35 and where #12, my idol Joe Namath, threw five interceptions. After that crushing defeat, and after peeling off two worn George Washingtons, I swore I’d never gamble again, ever, and for 40 years that mandate held true.

But recently I discovered the most unlikely of places to alter my anti-gambling vow from “Never again” to “I’m all in,” and it sits in a church on Buell Lane.

Once a year, usually the first Sunday in December, Most Holy Trinity Church holds its Silver Tea, where the entire sanctuary is transformed into a massive flea market, where hand-knitted cardigan sweaters lie alongside painted-by-numbers paintings, where you can furnish your kitchen with slightly used Fortunoff tableware for under 5 bucks, where any “American Pickers” aficionado might discover a treasure worth thousands, or at least think so, and which a guy from Springs awaits with bated breath.

It may seem lame that a guy with everything he needs anxiously awaits a three-hour event where 80 percent of the attendees are female, where music heard is not rock ’n’ roll but songs played in an elevator, and where women hover over chafing dishes protected like items found in Area 51.

The annual Silver Tea, my kind of place.

For the past six years, beginning the second week of December, I religiously horde every penny, nickel, dime, and quarter, including the occasional Canadian coin, in an empty glass Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar hidden behind my collection of 45s and Bay City Rollers albums in my basement, a spot my wife and four kids would never look. The following first week in December, I gingerly sneak the jar under my coat and head straight to America’s oldest supermarket in Bridgehampton and deposit them in a coin-exchange machine near the front door, discreetly making sure no one I know sees me; usually at 2 a.m. is best.

Even though the coin machine charges a 9-percent fee, I couldn’t care less, the 200 dollars in found money is used for my once-a-year vice: to buy raffles at the Silver Tea, where the chance to win a basket of assorted chocolates, a hundred free gallons of fuel, or that coveted witch’s broom, a weekend at Gurneys Inn, looms in my heart.

But the one who stands in my way is the picker, a blond woman who happens to be my son Paul’s religion teacher.

“How are you today?” I say with a big smile.

“Good morning,” she says, looking through me.

“These are winning tickets” — praying she sees me drop my pink and yellow stubs in her basket.

“Can you move along please?” she snaps.

Undaunted, I head straight to the tables of well-adorned food, where my favorites, the triangular white-bread cucumber and tuna sandwiches, await me, but they’re staunchly guarded by Mrs. Grogan, who repeatedly reminds everyone, “One serving per person . . . no exceptions.”

“Hi Frank,” she greets me with a half-smile.

“Good morning,” I answer.

“Usually you make it to church near the end of Mass when communion’s being served,” she whispers. “Nice to see you’re finally early.”

“You notice?”

Off to the side, I see Renee McCormack, a strikingly attractive brunette with a Victoria’s Secret figure who could easily grace the cover of Glamour magazine and who makes me quickly forget I’m happily married with four great kids.

“Hi Renee,” I stutter as though meeting a movie star.

“Should I distract Mrs. Grogan like last year so you can grab a few plates of those tiny sandwiches?” she mentions.

“That would be amazing,” I answer, kissing her left cheek but careful not to be seen by her Edward Burns-look-alike husband, Owen, whose chiseled good looks also make me quickly forget I’m happily married with four great kids.

With a plate filled with enough sandwiches to feed my high school son for a week, I clutch my raffle tickets tight, confident I’m going home with a magnificent prize my wife will look forward to, such as a weekend at Gurney’s, or at least a basket of chocolates to feast on during Christmas break, or a hundred free gallons of fuel to keep us warm during January.

Sadly, after sitting on the edge of my seat for three hours, I bring home only a Lenox butter dish I found for a dollar and a handful of home-baked brownies wrapped in a napkin I slide under my jacket, already looking for spare change for next year’s Silver Tea.

Frank Vespe is a frequent “Guestwords” contributor.

For the first two decades of my life, Thanksgiving was our only whole-family gathering of the year. The cousins loved the reunion, laughing and hugging and playing an annual game of hide-and-seek. Grandpa cupped his hands, yelled his familiar if not creative “Come and get it,” and the first wafts of Grandma’s wonderful cooking greeted us as we stumbled up the front steps.

I remember the year I graduated to the grown-ups table, everyone holding hands, heads bowed, as I nervously read my blessing, an obligation of that rite of passage. Then we faced the challenge of carefully filling our plates, squeezing a bit of everything from the huge buffet featuring Thanksgiving-only dishes like creamed onions and corn pudding without spilling gravy on the antique lace tablecloth. There was something sacred about ritual and tradition. It was reliable and unchanging, comforting and reassuring.

Almost unnoticed, something began to change. Maybe it was the teens lobbying successfully to amend the “No TV on Thanksgiving” rule. Maybe it was noticing that the parade we watched had become the Macy’s Day Parade, the commentators constantly referring to “Turkey Day” — both “thanks” and “giving” had disappeared.

And something quietly but decisively arose to replace them, it seemed. Thanksgiving, compromised at first, seemed steadily eclipsed then thoroughly co-opted by the following day — Black Friday. Retail businesses sensed and seized the irresistible opportunity to create a single shopping day unequaled in sales and profits. The retail media blitz that starts after Halloween reaches its peak the morning after Thanksgiving.

Frenzied shoppers descend on the malls, crowding against entrance doors, awaiting the stroke of midnight, then stampede in, the rush each year resulting in serious injuries, even deaths. A deep shadow falls across the sacredness of Thanksgiving, darkening a season of light, gratefulness, love, and gracious gift-giving.

We can choose differently. We can reconnect to Thanksgiving in a way that reclaims our relationship to the life force that yields the food we eat and animates those we share it with. We can model for our children the wonder of communion at the heart of our Thanksgiving holiday — honoring the abundance of the earth from which we have evolved and that we share.

We can also reimagine holiday gift-giving. We can affirm our connection to our communities by shopping locally or, better yet, making our gifts from local materials as an act of devotion that honors the recipient. We can consider eliminating TV from the Thanksgiving celebration and joining Buy Nothing Day as a response to Black Friday.

Rather than buying things, we can give things that cost no money: a walk in the woods, a backrub, doing dishes for a week, sending a handwritten letter of gratitude. We can gather our families for an afternoon of community service, volunteering at an organization chosen together, giving our children an opportunity to learn about those in need, to realize how good it can feel to contribute to someone or work side by side with those who have less than we do.

There are endless ways we can revive the original spirit of the holidays so they are an expression of thanksgiving and love that honors and celebrates our loved ones, our communities, and the greater web of life of which we are a part.

How we choose to celebrate the season may just impact the world we live in. This holiday season, let us reflect carefully on the values we wish to live by and reconnect the thanks and giving. Maybe it’ll be contagious. Let’s start a “good news epidemic”!

Howard E. Friend, a former pastor of the Montauk Community Church, is an organizational consultant, teacher, and writer who lives outside Philadelphia. He is active in the Pachamama Alliance, which helps indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest preserve their land and culture.

Cruising T.J. Maxx for designer markdowns and admiring ambitious women are two of my non-guilty pleasures. So when I first heard about Coco Chanel and how she started out as the illegitimate child of street peddlers and ended up a fashion icon and one of the most powerful women of the 20th century, I was hooked by my dolman sleeve.

My exposure to fashion goes way back, “bias cut” and “peplum” having been among the first words I probably ever heard. My father, you see, was a dress designer and pattern maker who spent his working life — more than 75 years — in women’s dresses. He knew more about a dress than a dress knew, and he passed his design know-how on to me.

Not that I can craft and cut a pattern, but fabric and color, texture and form, and how they work together have always intrigued me, directing me to a long career as an interior designer and teacher of the decorative arts — my favorite design period being the ’20s and ’30s, the heyday of Art Deco, when Chanel was in her prime.

While I was researching Art Deco for a course I was giving, Coco Chanel kept coming up. The things she did. The people she knew. The remarkable life she led. And I said to myself, “This gal deserves her own lecture.” So I began to study her, and let me tell you, she was quite a study.

Determined, confident, unafraid of her instincts, she taught women a new way to dress that allowed them to move freely inside their clothing. Out with crinolines and on with pants! Chanel created a 20th-century woman never seen before in the Paris of the 1920s, or for that matter anywhere.

She gave us knit sweaters and short pleated skirts, turned-back cuffs on our man-tailored shirts. The turtleneck? Thank you, Chanel. She slung rows of phony pearls around our necks, and made it chic to wear junk with the real thing. She draped us in jersey — prior to Chanel, jersey was only used for underwear. Cardigans, flap pockets, and quilted leather — derived from the quilted vests jockeys wore — were all part of her visionary approach to fashion: the masculine transformed into the feminine.

Daring and audacious, everything she did was different, including Chanel No. 5. She not only taught women how to dress, she taught us how to smell — the perfume that Marilyn Monroe said was all she wore to bed. Cloaked in drama — a Chanel cloak to be sure — the formula was shrouded in secrecy and said to have been stolen from another company.

Anyone worth knowing, Chanel knew. She bedded Picasso and hunted wild boar with Winston Churchill, who in a letter to his wife said, “. . . she is very agreeable — really a great strong being, fit to rule a man and an empire.”

Agreeable, yes, to those she liked, and very generous. She gave money to Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Russian ballet, to keep it going. The ballet was high Parisian entertainment in the ’20s and ’30s, and chronically in debt. She also bankrolled her brother, who was always in and out of trouble. Not out of love, but to keep him away from her and her past.

Well known for her vicious temper, the woman was not without flaws. She was spiteful and never forgot an insult or a slight. One reason she charged so much for her clothing was to get back at the socialites who had snubbed her in the early days of her career. “One day, I’ll make them pay,” she had said. And she did. Through the nose for her clothes.

She was sexually bold, and though she had both women and men as lovers, she openly hated gays. A known anti-Semite, maybe learned in her convent school and never unlearned — Jew-hating was taught in convent schools in that era, and fashionable in society — she warmed her bed with like-minded bigots.

Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, or Spatz, as his pals called him, was her lover for many years and a Nazi intelligence agent who posed as a sun-worshipping tennis man while building an espionage operation to spy on the French Navy. The Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, Bendor to those in the know, was another. “I cannot bear those bloody Jews,” he said after one too many whiskeys at a dinner party, a Rothschild in attendance.

And there lay her darker side, the side that for me threw a shadow on her many accomplishments and took away her shine. Fashion maven, trendsetter, savvy businesswoman, kudos to that. But what was in her heart and how she thought about her fellows left me cold.

Today, the House of Chanel is worth in the neighborhood of $2 billion to $3 billion — nice neighborhood, right? It’s owned by the Wertheimer brothers. That the Wertheimers are Jewish is a bit of irony worth noting.

Rita Plush will give an illustrated talk about Coco Chanel at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. She is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel, and “Alterations,” a collection of stories.