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.

It’s funny to me when I think about it. Me in circulation. Fifteen years ago my circulation stopped and a man had my heart in his hands and had to put my circulation back together.

I am standing now at the checkout desk of one of the busiest libraries in one of the wealthiest counties in the state of Maryland. Most of the customers, though, like me, are not wealthy. I know this because they have fines on their library cards that a rich person would pay in a heartbeat, but these folks can’t. A problem only arises when the fine owed reaches $25. At that point the county blocks the card and no book, however inspiring, may be checked out to the person presenting book or card.

A woman steps up to the desk, I think it’s her daughter beside her, four books in her hands. They are what we call in libraryese “yellow tape” books for how they are shelved. They are books for those who are truly blessed, those just beginning to read.

I ask the woman for her library card to check the books out. She says that she does not have one. “I’ll make one for you,” I say. No problem. But things turn worse. I need a photo ID. There are rules. Anyone could take a book or CD or DVD from the library and never return it; if there were no customs, someone could use someone else’s card like a credit card without the first person’s knowledge. The book thief could have the library of Alexandria in his garage and an innocent would be responsible for the overdues. Think on that.

I put the customer’s name and address into my computer. She has a library card already. She owes the county $25.05 for returning items late. My supervisor is sharp. She glances at me from her office. She can smell from there that I’m in a jam, but turns back to her own task and waits for flames.

I say, “Can you pay 10 cents to bring your card back into use?”

“No,” the customer replies.

I have 10 cents in my pocket, but the supervisor is watching me now and I have been warned that such largesse is frowned upon. So a bead of sweat forms on the back of my neck. Great people worry about great things. I worry, greatly, at things small.

Then I think to say, “Does your daughter have a library card?”

“No.”

I check the computer. True is true. I create a card that I think is something more. The first book I check out to her is this: “El Gato en el Sombrero.”

That night I read that the summer book fair sponsored by the Montauk Library will no longer happen. Revenues have shrunk, the volunteers have grown older, books seem slightly heavier (perhaps due to the foil-stamping of the dust jackets).

Goodbye happiness. I have been at best an inconsistent spender at the fair, though I have pulled an oar and bought and continue to buy books from the good sellers in East Hampton, Montauk, and Springs. The president of the Friends of the Montauk Library — whose name is Krusch (one wonders if she pronounces it like “Khrushchev” or like “crush”) — allows that the $17,000 taken in by the Friends is not worth the efforts exerted by its crew.

I guess it’s just chump change.

And the folks of Montauk will stroll more easily without tourists or sojourners in the sunshine trolling the green there, their noses in books.

So: The next night I take a book from a shelf at home. It is a work by Paul Scott of which I am very fond. It comes apart in my hands: glue and dust falling and rising. I will name the publisher here, because shame is in order. William Morrow & Co., Inc. This was a hardcover book I expected to last. But no. There’s a lesson here. The cheaply made book will disappear from our shelves and be replaced by electronic books. But the typographer, the printer, the bookbinder, and the publisher dedicated to craft will continue to produce work that will last beyond our lifetimes.

On the following night in a dream I am 9 years old, an altar boy locking my bicycle in the play-yard of a Catholic school. Like Catholic schools most everywhere, the grass and dirt in the field have been paved over. Remember the scene in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Imagine a small boy in his cassock and surplice walking just after dawn through barrenness toward Mass, his robes aflutter. What is this small fellow thinking about? Is it Mrs. Cawley’s equations? Sister John Andrew’s punishments? No. He is thinking about the emerald city of Oz that appeared in the asphalt desert last week.

The bookmobile. A rolling treasure chest of incalculable riches. He knew what Chapman wrote of realms of gold. The last bookmobile in the county where I live rolled to a halt 30 years ago.

Imagine if America, instead of sending tanks to distant deserts, sent bookmobiles to schools, loaded with taxpayer-paid-for books, free to any child inquisitive.

Imagine if a man lit his fire ring in his field and invited the kids in the neighborhood to watch. Imagine if he tossed a shoddily made book in the flames. Imagine his face orange as Satan’s. Imagine him with a wheelbarrow of good books. He rolls them away from the blaze. “Take what you want,” he says. “Take any book you want.”

Dan Marsh, a longtime “Guestwords” contributor, writes from Garrett Park, Md.

In the locker room each day after I swim, I place my wet swimsuit into a small spin-dryer. Centrifugal force squeezes the water out of my black nylon Speedo.

The sign on the spin-dryer says, “This unit is self-timed and will shut down automatically at the end of its cycle. It will not reset.” This message is an epiphany. An inert spin-dryer sign is communicating not only instructions about a device, but also a decree: After 80 years of being vertical, I Will Not Reset.

Friends I haven’t seen in a while greet me with, “You look great!” But youth and middle age have passed me by. So I conclude that “You look great!” must be the third phase of my life.

If I really do look great, it’s a peculiarly unfair and paradoxical compliment. Why do people expect me to have the memory ability, the physical agility, the quickness of mind, the word-fluency and vocabulary I had in my mid-50s or mid-60s, just because I may sometimes “look great”? At 80, I’m really what would have been considered old in my parents’ era. If my parents were my age now, they would have been dead for seven years. Why can’t I look my age?

People ask, “What’s your secret?” I’ve got well-rehearsed, tongue-in-cheek answers: “First, you have to choose the right grandparents. [I did!] Second, you have to be happily married. [I am!] Third, you have to love your work. [Yes!] Fourth, you have to take naps. [I do!] Fifth, modern medicine. And most important, you have to act immature.” (Check! And double check!)

I get weak smiles at these sophomoric clichés.

I’m kidding on the square, trying to deny the inevitable, making fun of old age and longevity because deep down it is a serious subtext to my every autobiographical thought. I’m dying (so to speak) to squeeze out (so to speak) and convey the defining stories of my life, my memories, before all the juicy life is extracted and wrung out of me. Like the swimsuit water extractor does to my Speedo.

Memoirs are in the air (like avian flu, pollen, and humidity), and I read them — and my own — with a grain of salt (Pliny’s purported antidote for poison).

There is a kernel of truth and tongue in cheek in every grain of salt. “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me.” My version: “A grain of salt, a tongue in cheek, a kernel of truth, and grandchildren reading my memoir.” (Note the first two letters of memoir are “me.”)

How would I define me? With a grain of salt as a buffoon, smart aleck, wise guy? With a kernel of truth as a very sober still-vertical creature wanting to be taken seriously as a man of substance? With tongue in cheek as a jocular extrovert, a semi-hypochondriac?

A friend says, “To know Steve is to be his friend.” Another says, “Steve feels emotions more deeply than others.” A former colleague said, “Winston Churchill was an introvert compared to Steve Rosen.” But Winston said, “We are all worms, but I believe I am a glowworm.” He was. Am I? Or am I simply a voluble candidate for a support group of loquacious people in recovery, to be called On-and-On Anon?

La Rochefoucauld said, “Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set a bad example.” I can still set bad examples, but avoid advice because my life’s lessons learned refer to me alone.

I wrote my memoirs because I had a stroke and was eager that my children and grandchildren know more about me, but they were not amused by what I wrote in the book, “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great: Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.” My memoir was written, not for my children and grandchildren, but for myself, as an exercise in self-interest, as an ironic reincarnation.

A Baroque musician has left us instructions on how to write a sonata: First, find a sonata that you like, so you can use it as a model. Second, replace its treble clef notes with a melody of your own, taking care to ensure it tracks properly and harmoniously with the original existing bass clef notes. Third, replace its existing bass clef notes with your own original notes to harmonize with your new treble clef notes. Then, write it down, and voila, a new sonata!

My life themes (physics, music, helping lawyers, doctors, and scientists) resemble the original old sonata with its old bass and treble notes. My new activities resemble those new bass and treble notes that replaced the old ones and created a new sonata (changing careers, doing welded sculptures, writing songs). Yet the original old sonata still defines, echoes, and reverberates.

But in a memoir, do I really have to define myself, dammit? If I’m to be reincarnated in (or as) a book, my experiences and circumstances, my adventures and misadventures, great happenstances and small occasions, my insights and outlooks, my foibles and legacies, my immodest achievements and embarrassing mistakes will have to speak for themselves. Thus . . .

After Beethoven had finished playing one of his newly composed sonatas, a fan asked him, “But sir. What does it mean?” Beethoven reportedly sat down and played the sonata through again, and when he had finished — refusing to be defined — said, “That’s what it means!”

I said to my naive young proctologist as he was about to insert a fiber-optic device into my lower colon to perform a colonoscopy (as Gloria Swanson says to Cecil B. DeMille in the movie “Sunset Boulevard”): “I’m ready for my close-up.”

Pass the salt. Note the tongue in cheek. And the kernel of truth.

Stephen Rosen lives in East Hampton and New York. “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great” is available for the Kindle.

It was the fourth year we would be staying at Fleuchary House, a sprawling Edwardian bed-and-breakfast in St. Albans, 20 miles north of London, owned by a Scottish woman, Linda Matheson-Titt. The purpose of the trip was to visit my mother-in-law, Violet. We’ve been returning every year since her 90th, when she hired a jazz band to entertain family and friends. I hope my husband, Mick, has inherited her longevity genes. He certainly has his mother’s sense of humor and calm, patient attitude toward life.

Staying at Fleuchary House is like coming home, amazing when you think of the ocean that separates us. When we arrived, Millie, Linda’s Parson Jack Russell, greeted us, licking my face as I bent to say hello. I thought she remembered me, but Mick thought it was the dog treats I brought that she remembered. She had a fluffy, off-white, coarse coat, with one ear up and one down, and exuded charm and intelligence. We invited her into our room for a visit and then sent her on her way with a “Go on home now, Millie,” and off she went.

St. Albans is an old Roman town with remains of a Roman theater and a small museum filled with artifacts from the first century. First called Verulamium, the city was renamed St. Albans after a British Christian martyr. It has a majestic stone abbey where last year we enjoyed an Evensong service that featured a boys choir. The boys wore long red robes with white surplice overlays and starched lace Elizabethan collars that harked back to an earlier age. As we sat in the hard wooden pews, we could hear their voices carry to the top of the abbey, vibrating like starlings on a wire.

Arriving at Fleuchary House is like visiting the United Nations; one never knows what country will be in residence. Our first morning, breakfast was a full English production consisting of one or two fried eggs, bacon — like Canadian bacon — fried to crisp perfection, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, hash brown potatoes, toast, and coffee or tea. Three French teachers from Lyon had brought a dozen French students to stay with local families for a fortnight to practice their English. They sat down and tucked into their eggs, holding their forks in their left hands, knives in the right, as Europeans do, guiding any resisting bits of egg or potatoes to their waiting mouths.

The women didn’t look at all like schoolteachers. They were well dressed, their faces lightly made up and their scarves arranged with Gallic precision and intricacy. Hermés has a book on 100 ways to tie a silk scarf; it seems they had studied it assiduously.

“What do you do while the students are with their host families?” I asked, using my rusty French.

 “We go into London to the British Museum, to the opera, to the London Philharmonic, and to the latest Shakespeare production at the National Theatre.”

“Wow! What have you seen?”

They reeled off a list that anyone would envy.

An Italian man came down to breakfast. He was from Milan, in London giving a paper on environmentally sound building. Our host appeared during my aria of Italian and said with some satisfaction, “I have someone coming down to breakfast that you won’t be able to speak to.” A few minutes later, Zoran, from Croatia, introduced himself and I laughed. Linda had the last word.

The next morning four Scottish groomsmen in a wedding party assembled on their way to the church ceremony, looking very handsome in their tartan kilts. They were speaking English but I couldn’t understand a word. A translator was needed. I just nodded and smiled.

Another of Linda’s guests, a well-traveled, well-upholstered woman, remarked, “Nothing is lacking.” The instant hot water kettle with tea, coffee, Cadbury’s hot chocolate, Scottish shortbread, heated towel racks, and fresh linens that Linda provides every day attest to her warm welcome. She prints out train schedules, recommends restaurants and local sights, and acts as a concierge.

She is constantly improving and decorating. This year we noticed the imposing suit of armor was gone from the front hall, but otherwise all was the same. Linda is stolidly middle class — nothing out of place on Linda or in her establishment. A financial analyst in London before opening her bed-and-breakfast, she uses her business acumen to run the establishment. She also has great taste and is a good cook, as evidenced by her breakfasts and the alluring smells that come from her kitchen at suppertime.

We have a shared love of good food, nice linens, and home furnishings such as alpaca throws. This year we exchanged cookbooks. I gave her a “Real Simple” cookbook, and she gave me one on classic Scottish cooking that includes recipes for pheasant, venison, and other game.

When we told Linda we were planning a drinks party and supper for Violet, now 94, she asked, “Would you like to go to Costco with me?”

“Yes, that would be lovely,” I replied.

We had a great excursion to the local Costco, a cookie-cutter replica of its American cousin, except that the cheeses, coming from Europe, were better. At the checkout Linda stood next to me as I put an industrial-size package of Yorkshire tea bags on the counter.

“That’s builder’s tea,” she said.

“You mean it’s strong enough for construction workers?” I replied.

“Yes,” Linda said, as if she didn’t approve of my tea selection. But I laughed and bought it anyway.

We had the drinks party and supper in the large common room at Mymms House in Welham Green, where my mother-in-law lives in a small flat. About 25 people joined our celebration. The gathering was a way for Violet to thank all the people who helped her with the computer, took her to doctor’s appointments, and picked up shopping for her. It’s a nice community, and they look after one another, which is comforting to us living across the Atlantic.

Those ladies, ranging in age from late 70s to late 90s, drank eight bottles of Santa Margherita pinot grigio and four bottles of very nice Costco Italian Chianti. The poached salmon, shrimp, salad, cheeses, and apple pies disappeared, leaving only a few lonely lettuce leaves. Violet says they had a great time and her friends are still talking about the party. If consumption of wine thins the blood and promotes circulation, these ladies will be very well preserved and live on into their 100s.

The last morning at Fleuchary House, bags stowed in the rental car, Mick takes some photos of Linda and her dog in front of the deer antlers in the front hall and also next to the six-burner range in her kitchen for possible use on her website. Millie stares patiently into the camera, waiting for the treats I keep in my pocket.

On the drive back to Heathrow along the English country roads, I watch the hedgerows extend their branches overhead, creating a green tunnel with golden, flickering light, beckoning us to return soon to Fleuc­hary House.

Joanne Pateman, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Southampton.

The last Wednesday before the first day of school, my 14-year-old son, Paul, brandished his $49 two-piece shiny black fishing pole with shocking pink string, rather shocking pink line, while clutching a five-gallon white plastic bucket in his right hand, a small plastic tackle box surprisingly identical to my toolbox in his left, and proudly proclaimed, “I’m gonna catch me a big one today,” and skirted away on his neon yellow 20-inch Tony Hawk signature mountain bike like he was chasing the wobbling green overly friendly alien in “E.T.,” swiveling left to right, right to left, as he pedaled down Fort Pond Boulevard toward Maidstone Beach.

Undaunted, I hopped in my 2012 four-door gray Civic and roared down the same road as if Riverhead Raceway had relocated to Springs.

Watching Paul delicately pirouette over the huge gray boulders of the jetty toward the last one, reminiscent of Ralph Macchio balanced atop the wooden piling in “The Karate Kid,” I stared in amazement as he defiantly battled five-mile-per-hour northeast gusts and the occasional blast of sea mist, determined to bring home enough marine life to feed our family of six through 10 harsh winters.

Although Paul didn’t catch the big one, he manhandled 27 snappers, “baby bluefish,” he reminds me, about the same size and sparkling gray color as the guppies in our 20-gallon, algae-infested basement fish tank.

“What are you gonna do with all those tiny fish?” I shouted from a comfortable distance, lounging in my blue-and-white-striped sand chair.

“We’re gonna eat them for dinner . . . after you cut ’em up!” he shouted back.

My son forgot one thing. I don’t kill fish.

The 5-foot-by-3-foot-by-2-foot hunter green Rubbermaid storage bin sits inches behind our six-foot-high unpainted stockade front fence, alongside a three-foot-wide, warped pressure-treated walkway. Baseballs, basketballs, a worn leather football, an assortment of golf balls, softballs, and a lone lacrosse ball fight for space with five various-length Louisville Slugger wood bats that call this bin home. An old-time catcher’s mask, a Mike Piazza blemished black leather catcher’s mitt, an ice hockey-type red face mask, shin guards, and a red chest protector are stuffed beneath everything else, requiring an Act of Congress to retrieve my mitt when Paul demands he practice his splitter, a pitch I swear is laced with that green Flubber invented by Robin Williams’s Professor Philip Brainard, forcing it to drop as if Industrial Light and Magic had spent days designing its trajectory.

Sadly though, it’s not what’s inside the storage bin that’s troubling, but rather what’s underneath: A happy family of hundreds of yellow jackets dance around me when I open it. Luckily, they stare, smile, and continue on their merry wasp-like work schedule, only to return to their condo before sunset after a hard day of threatening the likes of my family and me. Only my wife received a three-bite welcome.

“When do you plan to spray those wasps?” my wife yelled from the front porch the other morning as she waved a 20-ounce value-size green aerosol can of wasp and hornet killer that shoots a 27-foot jet spray.

My wife forgot one thing. I don’t kill wasps.

The doe and her two fawns arrive in my backyard promptly at 6:15 every morning, peering over my three-foot-high, lame and useless green-lattice deer fence, anticipating their peanut butter-laden Dutch Country 100-percent whole-wheat sliced bread I’ve handed them since April, a ritual about which my wife always complains I’m giving them the last few pieces of bread reserved for my kids’ school lunches.

“That was our last piece of bread,” she hollers.

“I’m this close to making contact,” I answer, holding my index finger and thumb an inch apart.

The fawns are more daring than their mom and move microns from my hand. I lurch forward as if to chase, but they stare, don’t even flinch, and munch more on their morning breakfast, as if to say, “Are you kidding?”

One Sunday I worked alongside Joe, a master photographer, at a wedding in Great Neck. I related the story of the family of deer coming to my rear door every morning for their fix of peanut butter-laden whole-wheat sliced bread. Unbeknownst to me, Joe owns a hundred-acre farm in Roscoe, N.Y., where he religiously hunts wildlife, preferably deer, and boasts he makes his own jerky from the venison.

“Hey Frankie,” Joe said, as his eyes widened larger than a summer solstice sun. “I just bought a new bow. I would love to perch atop one of your trees and take me home some fresh East Hampton venison. I’ll even grind you up a few pounds of hamburger meat,” he blared.

Joe forgot one thing. I don’t kill friends.

Frank Vespe is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.