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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, @#!+*%& it. I can’t.

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

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.