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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Florrie Morrisey lives in Southampton Village.

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

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

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

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

The annual Silver Tea, my kind of place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you move along please?” she snaps.

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

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

“Good morning,” I answer.

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

“You notice?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Vespe is a frequent “Guestwords” contributor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we got to drink it.

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

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

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

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

Joanne Pateman is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.

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.

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.

I discovered the eminent economist William Vickrey, a 1996 Nobel laureate, in an odd way. Although I’ve written about Wall Street and money for many years, my academic background was not in economics, but in American literature. So when I was looking for a pungent epigraph for “Up From Gold,” my 2012 book on the development of our modern dollar-based economy, I thought of a quip by Gertrude Stein (the doyenne of American writers in 1920s Paris, famous for “a rose is a rose is a rose”). As I remembered it, she said, “Economics is simple. First there is money in someone’s pocket, and when you look again, the money is in someone else’s pocket. That’s economics.”

When I Googled the quote to test my memory, up popped William Vickrey’s 1992 presidential address to the American Economic Association, in which he offered a snappier version: “As Gertrude Stein remarked, ‘The money is always there, it’s the pockets that keep changing.’ ”

When he died in 1996 at the age of 82, Vickrey was promptly forgotten by most of the economics profession; a small following keeps his memory and his ideas alive. A maverick all his life — a Quaker and conscientious objector — he often disagreed vehemently with what he described in his 1992 address as “the great bulk [of economists] close to the seats of power.” His Gertrude Stein quote came as he was denouncing a “callous tolerance for unemployment” within both the government and the economics profession. He blasted the “monetary authorities” for their “remoteness from the grim realities of unemployment,” and he derided the theory of a “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment,” or NAIRU, which assumes a trade-off between unemployment and inflation.

At the time, most economists believed that 5 to 6-percent unemployment was “necessary” to restrain inflation. Some of them even referred to a “natural rate of unemployment,” a phrase that Vickrey called “one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined.” In words that still reverberate, he told his colleagues, “It is high time we gave human values a deserved priority instead of staying mesmerized by figures on balance sheets. . . . What is urgently needed is to bring the economy rapidly to a point of genuine full employment and keep it there.”

Most Americans instinctively agree with Vickrey and can’t understand why, seven years after the economy collapsed, despite Federal Reserve efforts (the “QE2” quantitative easing, etc.), and despite assurances from policy makers that their focus is on jobs and jobs, unemployment remains a drag on economic growth. Is there an explanation for this? There is, and Gertrude Stein’s imagery helps us find it.

The money that moves through the economy is, for all Americans, dollars, whether in paper or bank deposit form. This is true for all individuals, including economists, and for all corporations or other business entities. Buyers of, for example, Bitcoins measure their gains or losses in dollars. Owners of gold value their holdings in dollars. All players in the economy use their dollars to buy goods and services, and “the economy” is nothing more than the sum total of all the movements of dollars from one pocket to another in exchange for something else.

This process seems obvious today, but, as I related in “Up From Gold,” it took 500 years to create our modern banking system and complete the extraordinary conversion from a gold-based economy to a dollar-based economy. In fact, the conversion was not fully accomplished until the 1960s, yet understanding the implications of so fundamental a change is crucial to understanding our economy.

The difference between using dollars and using gold is that you can dig more gold from the earth, or ship it from overseas mines, but you can’t create dollars in the same way. The German Treasury in the 1920s literally printed marks and paid government employees with them, thereby destroying both the currency and the economy. The U.S. Treasury is prohibited by law from printing money or selling bonds directly to (that is, borrowing dollars directly from) the Federal Reserve. All paper dollars printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are distributed to banks, at their request, to have on hand when existing depositors want to withdraw “cash.”

Nonetheless, there is clearly more wealth, and more dollars, in the nation today than there was 50 years ago. So how does the total number of dollars grow?

The answer is that dollars increase when an economic player, whether an individual, a business, or a corporation, borrows from a bank. This process is rarely explained in official publications, but think of it this way. You and all other economic players know how much money you have; you can envisage a pile of physical dollars that represents your total wealth today. If you borrow a dollar from my pile, yours is a dollar higher and mine a dollar lower, but the economy’s total number of dollars hasn’t changed. If you borrow a dollar from a bank, however, you have not diminished my pile or any other player’s, yet your pile is higher. The total number of dollars in the economy has increased.

It is also true that when you repay that dollar to a bank, the number of dollars in the economy shrinks. Again, this process becomes clear when we ask where you find the dollars to repay your loan. You can only get them by selling goods or services to other players in the economy, who transfer dollars from their pockets to yours. You then return those dollars to the bank that created them, the bank tears up the note you signed, and the created dollars disappear. The economy has grown, but the number of dollars has not.

Dollars do increase over time, but only through additional borrowing by a growing population, in a growing economy. The wealth of the nation, in the form of useable and productive assets, increases through the economic activities that borrowing makes possible, and with that increased wealth, and the larger economy, additional borrowing is possible. The absolute amount of borrowing can increase as long as the economy grows as well.

What I’ve described represents the whole economy, including the U.S. government (that is, the Treasury), which, like all players, borrows from other players, or taxes them, without increasing the total dollars in the economy. The difference lies in the relation of the Treasury to the Federal Reserve.

In the first place, the Fed is a bank — or more precisely a national system of banks. It is not, however, like the familiar banking corporations we all keep our money in. The Fed has just one main customer, the U.S. Treasury. The Fed receives taxes and borrowed money for the Treasury and maintains its accounts. All the checks the Treasury issues are written on its accounts at the Fed, just as your checks are written on your banking corporation.

I’ve said that the Treasury cannot borrow directly from the Federal Reserve, and when it borrows from you or me, the total amount of dollars in the economy does not change. However, the Fed can buy Treasury bonds from economic players who lent money to the Treasury and received the bonds. As a bank, the Fed creates the dollars it puts into the pockets of bond owners when it buys bonds from them. The dollars the Treasury previously received when it sold the bonds went into the pockets of players providing goods or services to the government, and those dollars continue to exist in those pockets. Now the Fed creates new dollars to put back into the pockets of the original bond buyers.

In other words, when the Federal Reserve buys Treasury bonds from players in the real economy, total dollars in the economy do increase. This is the full meaning of QE2 and other phrases. It is the action that commentators are in fact describing when they speak of the Fed “pumping money into the economy.”

The answer to our original question — why Fed actions have not restored the economy and significantly reduced unemployment — now becomes clear. The economic players from whom the Fed buys Treasury bonds haven’t spent the increased dollars on goods or services, because they bought the Treasury bonds in the first place as investments, and they count the bonds or the dollars in their assets. The vast majority of government bonds that are traded are exchanged among those investors — including pension funds, hedge funds, etc. — with dollars changing pockets among them constantly. When the Fed steps in and buys government bonds, it is simply acting as another trader among all the asset traders — and not the largest one. The Fed’s major announcement last year that it would buy up to $100 billion of Treasury bonds per month should be seen in the context of the whole market. Outstanding Treasury bonds now total over $17 trillion, of which some $300 billion to $400 billion trade daily.

In essence, through its purchases of Treasury bonds, the Fed creates more dollars to circulate among asset traders. To reduce unemployment, the government will have to put more dollars into the hands of those who will spend them on goods and services. Their additional buying will encourage more business borrowing and an expansion of the nation’s productive capacity.

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

Though the wages are low, man, I don’t get the willies actually starting a new and vastly different career at the overripe age of 66. A part-time summer salesman job in Amagansett, to help out during the busy season.

I came to this decision out of sheer boredom. What to do now that I was doing nothing? So I agreed to sell antiques and tabletop accessories and beach bags and candles and whatnot in a lovely “lifestyle” store, as I adapt to my new lifestyle of retirement-slash-unemployment.

Truth be told, I may have always been a sort of salesman. At 15, I helped my dad out in his shoe store in Rockville Centre. But, being a shy kid, I really wasn’t much of a salesman; I had no idea how to close a sale. For example, if an older woman wanted to know if the pointy-toed, multicolored patchwork pump was too “young” for her, I would sit at her feet, dumbfounded for an answer, head tilted, fingernails at my mouth.

My lack of gift of gab often led to a lack of shoes in bag. I was just too tongue-tied, and besides, being paid $15 a week, what I would have gotten anyway as an allowance, I didn’t particularly feel I had to sell. Nor could I — this did not seem to be my calling, nor did I have any interest in someday running the store when my dad chose to retire, as my older brother did.

He was more of a charmer than I was. At the time.

At 20, I entered another form of salesmanship, but I don’t really count writing advertising as selling. In my early years, in the hotshot 1970s, I didn’t give a hoot if my Volkswagen ads sold a single car, or if anybody bought the Sony TV sets or tape recorders I cleverly strung headlines for. I just wanted to win awards, build a career, and make some real dough.

Selling Perdue chickens at my next ad agency job was never attributed to me, even as I worked on that account writing a handful of ads. That gift of selling belonged to my edgy boss, a small man with a big talent. He thought Frank Perdue looked like a chicken and made him the TV spokesman. The fact that there had really never been a branded chicken doing smart advertising before Perdue put Perdue on the map. And sold plenty of poultry.

I wrote some forgettable ads; all ads were forgettable when pitted against the genius copywriter who created the campaign: “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” Remember?

Barney’s next. I wrote newspaper ads but they were nothing more than touting the fact that Barney’s had moved into the world of high fashion from being a bar mitzvah suit specialist. I never knew if any of my work sold so much as a pair of socks.

It’s not really a salesman’s job, being an advertising copywriter, no matter how good I was at it, and I was good enough at it to work at it for almost 45 years.

And then, it ended. With a thud. And a day to clear out my desk, at the time in a shared office, where other art directors and copywriters 45 years younger than me sat outside at communal tables, headsets on heads, baseball caps on heads. Backward.

I didn’t think any of those kids thought of themselves as salesmen. Unless they were selling pot to supplement their incomes, one-tenth of what mine had become.

But enough about me. Well, not really. But now it’s time to get to the point of that title up top.

To pass the time — retirement is a bitch if you don’t play golf or tennis (or sell pot) — I volunteered to help a friend out with her Amagansett Main Street shop. It was a lark for me, at first, something to keep me out of Rowdy Hall at lunch to save a few calories and stop me from getting too early a buzz, which often led to long, snoring afternoon naps.

The hours were 11 to 5, and occasionally weekends. And the place is a potpourri of everything — lots of things that are perfect as hostess gifts or dinner guest gifts. My problem? I had a hard time gift-wrapping. As it happens, her “gift wrap” is nothing more than the sheerest sheets of chic, antique-patterned tissue paper that tears easily and fights you. Ribbons are strips of unforgiving raffia, thin as dental floss. I would break into a sweat whenever anyone said, “It’s a gift.” Wrapping is not one of my gifts. And, frankly, neither does the owner of the store possess that gift, so together, wrapping, we were like some version of the Keystone Kops.

I was relieved and less dripping wet when a buyer said, “Take your time, I’ll go next door for a manicure,” as it took forever to wrap with this filmy, flimsy paper. And I was horrified when people lined up three and four at the cash register, holding bulky salad bowls with servers, an oblong tray that fits in no box, or a set of six wineglasses. Gifts.

Gulp.

Everything looks like a gift to me in that store. Even a $25,000 armoire, French and from the early 19th century, weighing a ton. Wrapping that could take me into the 22nd century.

But gift-wrapping aside, the job had its high points, although the owner hated air-conditioning, and it often felt to me, with hair everywhere except the soles of my feet, that I was working in a sauna. Or a hot yoga studio. Even the stone Buddhas for sale had a film of sweat above their lips.

But, on the plus side, most of the customers were nice. Pleasant. (Most.) One exception was on the day that I heard a crash in the next room, clearly a broken something, and a woman called out: “Oh, my. The frame just slipped off the shelf!”

Again, gift-wrapping aside, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of stress except for the time a lovely customer from Ohio bought and requested shipping of $350 worth of vases and artificial flowers that were ultimately lost by U.P.S. Tracking, that totally dependable way of locating stuff, sent out no record of the transaction, and there were no duplicates of what she bought, and paid for, in stock. I still shiver over that one, as it was me who delivered the packages in person to the U.P.S. store in East Hampton. Did I do something wrong with the labeling?

Still, I did get to work my advertising headline chops by creating signs like “Tray chic!” around a grouping of trays. Or “These gifts will bowl them over!” among, you guessed it, a grouping of bowls. But the next day, the placards disappeared. “Not my thing,” the owner said. And it’s her candy store, although no candy is sold, but there is a pretty good fake cake that sits atop a real cake stand.

Best of all, I have found I actually do have a personality. Fifty years on from the days of sitting on the floor surrounded by a stockroom full of shoe boxes that no one actually bought in the end due to my lack of conviction, my lack of salesmanship, I found, with confidence and genuine (ish) enthusiasm, a smile on my face as wide as a berth, and I would say: “This alabaster bowl with its sparkling silver rim goes with any decor!” Or, “This beach bag with a print replicating Missoni is an absolute steal at $22!” Or, “Have you ever seen champagne glasses with this particular pearlized patina of pink?”

The responses were generally as blank-stared as I was in the shoe store. Or, “Just looking,” they’d say. “Thanks.” Or, “We’ll be back. Oh, look! The sun is coming back out!”

Amazingly, though, I did sell a $7,500 grandfather clock! The owner did a jig after that particular transaction, and I thought, well, I did have what it takes, but frankly, the buyer told the owner that she had been eyeing the clock for three years and today was the day she finally decided to buy it. The day being my very first day on the job.

“It’s a nice clock,” I managed, shrugging, smugly, settling into my salesman personality.

Tick-tock. Summer’s over. And so, it seems, is my salesman career.

Tennis, anyone?

Hy Abady, a frequent “Guestwords” contributor, is putting together a sequel to his 2010 “Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End.” “Back in The Star Again, AGAIN!” is due out in early 2015.

With all of the iPhones, iPads, tablets, laptops, and other devices teens have access to these days, you would think textbooks would be a thing of the past . . . right? Guess again. Carrying around heavy backpacks all day can be very detrimental for growing students, causing stress fractures in the back, inflammation of growth cartilage, and nerve damage in the neck and shoulders. Even with the advancements in technology, the burden of the backpack has not been lifted, in fact it has only increased.

As a senior at East Hampton High School, I’ve had to put up with the discomfort of backpacks nearly my whole academic life. I decided someone needed to say something. So I asked a bunch of my friends and their younger siblings who attended schools within the district whether they, or anyone they knew, struggled with back problems related to backpacks.

An (un)surprising majority had experience with back problems ranging from regular chiropractor visits to severe cases of progressing scoliosis, some even resulting in spinal surgery. You don’t need to be a scientist or doctor to see the effect that lugging backpacks has on us. We slouch, shuffle our feet, are slow to class, and use our desks to crack our backs more than anything else (just ask any high school student to explain the technique). These characteristics shouldn’t be chalked up as typical sullen teenage behavior; instead they should be recognized as one of the side effects of years of dealing with overweight backpacks.

The standard high school course requires students to transport at least one textbook back and forth between home and class. This does not include all of the handouts, class work, binders, folders, calculators, books, homework, notes, tests, quizzes, portfolios, and so on. Keep in mind that most binders, once filled, can weigh as much as, if not more than, the books. Over time the “heavy workload” really piles up, figuratively and literally.

During my junior year I began researching reports of overweight backpacks and their prominence in school systems across the country. It was interesting to learn how in recent years backpacks seemed to be getting heavier, causing more and more complaints from the student body despite the influx of technology intended to alleviate such issues. There were articles by doctors and parents all over the Internet about the severe problems that accompany overweight backpacks, but I could hardly find any information on the average weight of a backpack nowadays.

I had so many questions: How early are children being forced to lug their backpacks each day? Exactly how heavy is the average backpack? What about in my school district? I was curious. So in February of this year, with the approval of my principal, Adam Fine, I held my first-ever “Backpack Weigh-In” at my high school.

I arrived at school early one morning with a few of my good friends and set up a table in the front lobby along with posters, fliers, doughnuts (to encourage participation), and, most important, scales. Then the buses pulled up, opened their doors, and immediately students were pouring into the foyer. My friends and I stood near the table calling over our peers to have their bags weighed and in return receive a doughnut. Needless to say, all of the doughnuts vanished within seconds.

Even after the treats were gone, students still came up to the table curious about my project and shocked at the weight they hadn’t realized they were carrying around with them all the time. In the end I had weighed 100 backpacks. The results were astonishing. Doctors say that you should never carry more than 10 percent of your body weight for long periods of time. On the low end of the spectrum, students’ backpacks weighed a minimum of 10 percent of their body weight. Fewer than 20 students were either under, or met, the recommended 10 percent. The average weight was 19 pounds — almost double the recommended percentage.

On the high end, some bags were clocking in at 24, 27, even 30 pounds. Let me say that none of these students weighed anywhere near enough to be within the 10-percent parameters. This meant that about one-quarter of the 100 students were hauling almost triple the recommended amount.

The heaviest bag I weighed was that of a senior girl. She was a petite thing, around 5-foot-2, and when I asked her if she was interested in seeing how much her bag weighed she shrugged and let it drop to the floor with a loud thud. Since the bag was too big to fit on one of my bathroom scales, I asked for the assistance of my health teacher, who hooked it onto one of my scales that works using suspension. My teacher’s eyes popped out of his head as he gave the tiny girl a once-over and then showed me the number.

I turned and asked if she would tell me how much she weighed. At this point she was a little nervous, seeing that something had really grabbed ahold of my attention, but she replied that when she weighed herself the week before she was roughly 113 pounds. Her bag was 34 pounds — just over 30 percent of her body weight. I asked if she suffered from any back problems, and she explained that at the age of 16, almost two years ago, she began seeing a chiropractor regularly.

Amazed at these results, I presented them to Mr. Fine, who was also blown away. After some discussion we both agreed it would be interesting to do the same experiment at the other schools within the district. So at the end of May I met with Charles Soriano, the principal of the East Hampton Middle School, and Dennis Sullivan, the assistant principal of the John M. Marshall Elementary School, and arranged another two weigh-in sessions. Although doughnuts weren’t allowed to aid us in attracting volunteers, we were still able to round up a good 50 bags at the middle school and another 100 at the elementary school.

Again the results left us all slack-jawed and wide-eyed. At the middle school the average backpack weighed 14 pounds, and at the elementary school the average was 7 pounds. Again, just by looking at the students, you could clearly tell that they were beyond the healthy 10 percent. This means by the time some kids graduate from elementary school they are at risk of suffering from back problems accumulated over vital growth periods throughout the years.

The principals were amazing. They immediately showed interest in my ideas, made the necessary accommodations for my experiments, and hopped on board with me to raise awareness within the district and around the town. Most of them admitted they hadn’t heard anything about overweight backpacks within at least the last five years, from either parents or students. They all agreed, however, that the number of children suffering from back pain, scoliosis, and growth problems must be correlated to the increase in backpack weight over the years. The resulting backpack averages from my experiments are enough on their own to show just how extensive the issue already is, and how as time goes by the matter only becomes worse.

Currently there are no backpack regulations for the student body, but starting with this article I plan to raise awareness through the student handbook, the East Hampton School District’s online page, parent emails, and health classes. In the meantime, I contacted Matt Vogel, a locally acclaimed physical therapist, for his advice on how to help ease and prevent back pain:

1. Always wear two backpack straps to evenly distribute the weight. 2. Use a back brace, Velcro, adjustable straps, and/or clips to secure the bag. 3. Stretch as often as you can to keep your muscles warm and flexible. 4. Good posture!

I believe the more that students, parents, faculty, and administrators are conscious of this issue, the less likely it will be for overweight backpacks to cause serious health problems later on in students’ lives. School can really weigh a kid down as it is, and this is one burden they can do without.

A year ago Hannah Vogel wrote a “Guestwords” about her mission trip to Cuba through the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

The East Hampton Town Board recently proposed a rental registration law that has become the topic of much debate. Ostensibly it is designed to address the problem the town has long had in enforcing the existing laws prohibiting group and transit rentals. Unfortunately, the proposed law does not really solve this problem in a meaningful way, although with a few tweaks it could be a lot more effective.

As a matter of full disclosure: My wife and I have owned a home in the Amagansett Dunes for 35 years. We’ve never rented it nor do we intend to. A number of the homes around us, however, have been rented to groups and transients over the years.

The proposed law requires that an owner submit an affidavit attesting to the number of persons to occupy the property, the proposed rental period, that there is a valid certificate of occupancy, and that refuse will be removed in a timely manner. This is insufficient. The owner should be required to attest under penalty of perjury that the home will be occupied by one family (as required by the town zoning code) and that no shares have been sold giving rights to individuals to occupy individual bedrooms (also prohibited by the zoning code).

At present, there is no legal obligation for landlords to ensure that their rentals comply with the existing laws prohibiting group or transient rentals. They (and their real estate agents) just take the money and run, often involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is the neighbors who are left with the consequences of loud parties, scores of guests, tenants coming home drunk at 3 and 4 a.m., and illegally parked cars.

Indeed, I would propose that the law also require that in any lease the tenant also represent that only one family will occupy the premises and that no shares have been sold. There is already precedence for this in the section of the town code dealing with affordable accessory apartments; it specifies six provisions that must be included in the lease of such an apartment.

The proposed law is very unclear as to whether a landlord has to get a new permit every time he enters into a new lease. The way I read the current draft, all a landlord has to do is update the affidavit in terms of the number of persons occupying the premises and the term of the lease. I suggest that there will be wholesale violation of this provision, as all an owner has to do is publish his rental registration number in any ad. An owner should go through the certification process every time he or she enters into a new lease, as what could be a legal lease one year could be an illegal group rental the next.

People have to get beach parking permits every year; the same should be true of rental permits, which should only be valid for the term of the lease in question. In fact, the Southampton rental permit law has such a provision.

In addition to issuing a rental permit number, the town should also issue a rental permit decal (again, like the beach parking permit) that should be prominently displayed on the door of the premises and that sets forth the registration number and the period for which it is valid. Given East Hampton’s limited resources devoted to code enforcement, it is really the neighbors who are able to identify illegal group and transient rentals. Unlike Southampton, however, East Hampton does not (and probably in the near future will not) have a database of property permits readily accessible on the Internet. The display of a permit will enable neighbors to easily ascertain if the landlord of a rental property has complied with the law rather than having to do a manual search at the Building Department.

Over the years I’ve been told by various code enforcement officers that the problem with enforcing the group rental law is their inability under the law to obtain access to the premises. Once again, the existing town code governing affordable accessory apartments provides a solution. That law requires that the lease of any affordable accessory apartment contain the following clause:

“The tenant consents to an inspection upon reasonable notice by the building inspector, or his/her designee, for the purpose of determining whether the apartment and all other structures on the property are in compliance with the code of the Town of East Hampton, the New York State Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code, and/or the rules and regulations of any other agency having jurisdiction. The failure to schedule an inspection after due notice from the town or resisting, obstructing, and/or impeding the agents, servants, officers, and/or employees of the Town of East Hampton during an inspection of the premises is a violation of the East Hampton Town Code and subject to the fines and penalties provided herein.”

The proposed rental registration law should have a similar clause. It should provide that by applying for a rental permit the landlord consents to an inspection by the building inspector to ensure compliance with the law, and it should require that the lease of the premises contain an identical consent by the tenant.

Absentee landlords have been thumb­ing their noses at the laws relating to group and transient rentals for years. This has become a real quality-of-life issue in numerous areas of the town. If the town is serious about getting this under control, it needs to do more than what is currently being proposed.

Jack Hassid is a lawyer who practices commercial litigation in New York City.

In 1961 I was 8 years old and Sandy Koufax was the most dominant pitcher in baseball. He was also my favorite player. It wasn’t common in those days for girls to collect baseball cards, but I did. The only card I did not have was Sandy Koufax.

One day walking home from religious instruction at Our Lady of Lourdes in Massapequa Park, I felt something hit me in the head. I quickly looked around, thinking someone had thrown something at me, but there was no one around and I was in an open area. The only thing visible, lying at my foot, was a Sandy Koufax baseball card. I was duly flabbergasted at this stroke of luck, but of course immediately began to consider that since no one was around this must be divine intervention, having after all just come from religious instruction. Or it was just baseball magic.

Going into this last week of the regular season in baseball, I find myself hoping for more of that baseball magic. I find it hard to imagine that Derek Jeter, my favorite player these last 20 years, will play his last game in Fenway Park on Sunday, unless somehow not only do the Yankees miraculously play flawless baseball down the stretch, but all the teams in front of them in the wild card race collapse. As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over,” etc.

Whatever happens, baseball will not be the same next year — that is, New York baseball, and in particular Yankee baseball. And as rocky as this season has been, I’m glad Jeter announced his retirement early and shared it with baseball fans throughout the country. I grew up in an era when many baseball players were not very cordial to each other, to say the least, but Derek Jeter has brought a civility to the game that proves that the only things necessary are talent and sportsmanship.

In an era of performance-enhancing drugs, Jeter is the epitome of what a baseball player did not have to do to be great. In 20 years Derek Jeter never embarrassed himself or baseball. He understood that as the captain of the Yankees he was a leader and he had to set an example. He was respectful and therefore respected. He never kicked the dirt or argued with an ump. He played the game the way it was supposed to be played. He worked hard and he played hard. If he hit a ball deep he never stood and watched it. He ran out every hit. He fielded every ball as if he could make the play, and many times that meant going deep in the hole behind shortstop, fielding it bare-handed, and releasing it midair, accurately, to Tino or Teixeira at first base.

We remember those plays and hits: the 2001 “flip” play along the first-base line to Jorge Posada to tag out Jeremy Giambi at the plate, the dive into the stands along the left-field line in 2004 when he made the catch but came up bruised and bloody, the home run for his 3,000th hit, and the many playoff and World Series clutch hits and home runs. He wasn’t called Mr. November for nothing. Jeter has been thrilling to watch. We came to expect near perfection.

Watching as Jeter went from stadium to stadium this season has been a delight. This was not an easy season for the Yankees or Jeter, as both struggled, the Yankees with pitching and Jeter with hitting, although Jeter’s bat has gotten hot again, and he still managed to make some spectacular fielding plays throughout this final season. But to see fans in the stands all over the country wearing their home team’s hat and a Jeter T-shirt was great. To see opposing teams stand on the top step of their dugout while Jeter was paid tribute to. And to hear active and retired players pay tribute to him has been heartwarming. My favorite was young Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals, who said that Jeter was “not just the captain of the Yankees, but the captain of baseball.”

This is in no way to say that Derek Jeter is a hero or the greatest baseball player of all time. A hero is someone who cures cancer or saves someone’s life or sacrifices his or her own life. And I think Derek Jeter would be the first to agree with this statement. Jeter is someone who loves to play baseball and feels he owes it to the fans to play it the best he can.

So it would be selfish on my part to want more of that baseball magic after what he has given us for 20 years. What Derek Jeter deserves now is simply this: Thanks!

Diane Spina York, a retired social studies teacher, taught at East Hampton High School for 20 years. She lives in Springs.