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.

“You need to put the sound of a Ferrari, a Porsche, or a McLaren engine in the sound system. When the driver starts the car, he turns a dial and can pick out whatever engine noise he wants that day.” Accosting a board member of a European car maker in a Florida post office, my husband was half-jokingly pitching his brainchild with, atypical for him, enthusiasm.

Two weeks earlier, we had witnessed the celebrated Formula One Grand Prix in Monaco, which may have been the genesis of the thinking behind the creativity sparking his automotive must-have, the pick-your-engine sounds. (If my husband had tried to hustle his “gizmo” to the Russian oligarch who shared our table at the Ferrari Club, he might have had better luck. More on that.)

We were seasoned Grand Prix attendees, I a little grudgingly. In any long-term marriage there are deals: He gets the Formula One; I get the south of France. Although the Ferrari Club tent looked out on the Monaco marina, jam-packed with extraordinary mega-yachts that had cruised in for the race days, my husband couldn’t help but ogle the Rivas, the Ferraris of power boats, lining the marina’s docks.

This year, the timing of the Grand Prix coincided with the Cannes Film Festival, which may explain the surprise drop-in by Antonio Banderas and his entourage to the Ferrari tent. For the GQ set, the actor was wearing a fitted navy sport coat, a tie-dyed dark crewneck T-shirt, and slim-legged ripped jeans, from which the toes of spotless camel-colored boots peeked. His handler, in her Ferrari signature-colored red jumpsuit, reported when questioned that Antonio did not own a Ferrari, but she quickly added, “He is thinking about it.”

The waitstaff served the three-course meal with its “gastronomic” aspirations, nearly tripping over themselves in servicing the special requests of the attendees as if we were all Monegasque members of the Grimaldi family. No water glass was ever empty. But try as the caterer might, the food could never be the high point, not when Fernando Alonso, the movie-star handsome, dark-haired Spaniard and Formula One champion driver, took the stage during the dessert course. Responding to questions about the car’s tires, fuel, the engine, and his pole position, Alonso was unnaturally calm, especially considering that in less than an hour he was about to drive the twists and turns of the 78 laps, clocking an average speed of over 140 miles per hour while weaving among the 19 other drivers, all hell-bent on winning.

A half-dozen or so well-placed wide-screen televisions were scattered throughout the tent, but the best viewing of the race was in the grandstand seats that faced the race road and the pits where teams of deadly serious technicians changed sets of tires in what seemed like milliseconds. This year, the engine noise abated somewhat as Formula One officials tried to “go green,” leaving some “can’t get enough of the engine noise” fans to grumble accordingly. The cars flashed by.

So who was there? At our table, randomly assigned, we sat with a heavily tattooed Finnish couple, celebrating his 40th birthday and Christmas. The rest of the table was made up of a Russian group — husband, wife, his son, and either staff or family members. The wife who sat next to me spoke perfect English, which always frustrates me, with my failure to acquire language skills. Old enough to be her mother, I struck up enough of a rapport with her that on the final day Olga and her husband invited us to a post-race celebration at which they had taken a table. Since the party began at midnight — we’re not that hip — we declined. Yes, I know. Still kicking selves.

And on that perfect Sunday in late May, Alonso finished fourth. And much to my surprise, I am becoming, of all things, a fan.

Stateside again, my husband, no sentimentalist, drapes our Grand Prix badges over a glass he won in a car show for his 1958 Jaguar in what he jokingly refers to as his “trophy room.” He now has a growing collection of Grand Prix badges.

Carole O’Malley Gaunt is the author of “Hungry Hill,” a memoir. She lives part time in Sag Harbor.

My 11-year-old self is sitting in a chair from Ebbets Field, drinking from a bottle of Pepsi, checking out the charms of the August 1969 Playboy Playmate. I stop staring into Debbie Hooper’s siren eyes when I hear a shout from John F. Murray Jr. — owner of this deck in Wainscott’s Westwoods, forever Brooklyn Dodger fan, supplier of Pepsis and Playboys to hemi-hormoned boys like me, my honorary uncle, and author of the new novel “The Devil Walks on Water,” my current number-one book. Jake knows I’m curious about writing for a living and he thinks it’s high time for a few tips, Ms. Hooper’s charms be damned.

Write what you know best, says Jake with the gentle growl that says he’s in a pretty good mood. Write what you want to read most. Make a difference. If you can’t make a difference, at least make a racket. And for !@#%&’s sake, don’t be a manic-depressive — writing is bipolar enough without being bipolar.

I thought a &%#@! hell of a lot about Jake’s commandments while I wrote “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons,” which SUNY Press released last summer. Guided by his advice, I made a racket about my first favorite era, 1967 to 1972, when I lived a block from Jake in Wainscott and found all my major passions — from writing to rock ’n’ roll, sexy cars to sexier women, Carl Yastrzemski to Truman Capote. Goaded by his spirit, I created a crazy-quilt, crazy-assed memoir: a Boomer coming-of-age tell-all; an elegy to my tribe, the South Fork’s comfortable middle class; a meditation on a special place at a special time teaching a kid to be special.

I wrote the book to discover why the East End became so special over such a short stretch. The whys came in every size of surprise. My love of nature, I realized, began in the Georgica Association, where I roamed mazes of meadows and slept under trees shaped by the ocean-whipped wind into witches’ fingers. My fascination with history started at Wainscott’s closed general store, a rusty, melancholy relic that buzzed like a beehive in its ’30s-’40s heyday. And my melancholy streak? Blame it on my unemployed, desperate father selling our house on Whitney Lane without my mother’s permission, ending my full-time time in my emotional home.

I wrote the book to honor the people who made the South Fork my emotional home. June and Harvey Morris treated me like a kid, an adult, and a king in their Penny Candy Shop in Water Mill, the East End’s sweetest pit stop for over 40 years. Generous and gracious, they let me wreck perfect rows of candy dots with my teeth, wave the dusty smoke off candy cigarettes, and celebrate every day as my birthday.

Mike Raffel was my baseball buddy, my rock ’n’ roll guru, my first best friend. He turned me, an outsider, into an insider the first day we met, teaching me the treats and tricks of Wainscott’s weedy, rocky, 38-steps-wide baseball field, the world’s only known rectangular diamond.

Jake Murray was my first writing teacher, my first sex coach, my first all-access adult. Charming and crazy, he helped me understand my crazy, charming dad, a fellow manic-depressive, alcoholic adman.

Each of these folks honored me in their way. Jake’s children thanked me for reminding them that their dad could bring out the best in kids even when he was near his worst. June thanked me by telling me the penny-candy chapter cheered her up, which helped her recover faster from a nasty infection. Mike thanked me during a reading in a bookstore by his home in Cambridge, N.Y. That Halloween night we broke out our old Huck Finn-and-Tom Sawyer act, recalling the days we played tennis by a deserted beach mansion to a tape of James Brown singing “Hot Pants” and “Sex Machine.”

I wrote the book to piece together my family’s fractured life on the South Fork, where we were happiest and unhappiest. For nearly 40 years my mother, Pat, has been my friend and hero; it took me nearly that many years to realize that she was my quiet caretaker in Wainscott. Her sacrifices gave my dad, Larry, the time to teach me to pitch, to sing barbershop harmony, to make the East End my kingdom. I pardoned him long ago for forcing me to leave Whitney Lane long before I was ready; it took me a book to know that he started the pilgrimage that the book ended.

I wrote the book to restore memories eroded or erased by divorce, alcoholism, and the neutralizing nature of a farming resort, where summers blur like watercolors. Now there’s a castle between covers where we can all remember Al Capone’s bullet-holed Pierce Silver Arrow at the Long Island Automotive Museum, Mark Donohue’s Camaro Z28 at the Bridgehampton Race Circuit, and Truman Capote’s cabin-cruiser Buick, which he drove recklessly on Saga­ponack’s dragstrips.

I wrote the book, finally, to get my largely secret life off my back. For decades I thought I was the only kid who idolized Capote and Carl Yastrzemski. Meeting other fans of this bizarre double-play team has been a thrilling relief. It’s made me feel more at home in my emotional home.

My comfort must be catchy, because longtime Wainscotteers keep asking me when I’m moving back. I tell them I couldn’t afford to live in my old kingdom even if I sold 100,000 copies of “Kingdom.” The only property I could afford is a plot in Wainscott Cemetery, where Jake Murray was laid to rest in June 1977, six months after he drowned intentionally in the East River. I’d be around the bend from my honorary, honorable uncle, which would be just jake with me.

Geoff Gehman, a journalist, lived two blocks from Sayre’s Path in Wainscott and lives two blocks from the Sayre Mansion Inn in Bethlehem, Pa. He will read from “The Kingdom of the Kid” on Aug. 17 at 3 p.m. at the Wainscott Chapel.

Late last fall, I abandoned my signature close-cropped hair for a look that I thought would be less severe and more forgiving to a man of a certain age. Outgrowing the modest tonsorial skills of my partner, David, I retired the home clippers and sought the aid of a professional. And so that is how I found myself in Dustin’s chair.

My directions to him were simple enough — “Take five years off and I’ll be happy with whatever the cut.” Dustin, with his generous head of black hair, carefully styled to look as if he had just gotten out of bed, kindly proffers that he never aims for less than 10. I was wrong to have been put off by the tattoos scrolling up his arms, across his shoulders, and peeking out again just between his shirt and his jeans. He’s a professional and knows his clientele.

My first barbershop foray in nearly a decade was part of a yearlong effort to prepare for a birthday that signaled an indisputable transition from middle age to what sociologists call young-old age. I had watched friends pursue far more ambitious undertakings than my own — from Botox to facelifts — to stay the passage of time. I confess to having been tempted.

At my semiannual checkup with the dermatologist for seriously sun-damaged and cancer-prone skin, I insist he remove at least a few harmless dark brown age spots. They remind me of my parents and their flagging attention to matters of appearance. I want, but am too embarrassed, to ask about the more extensive and costly procedures — the chemical peels, laser treatments, microdermabrasions — advertised so alluringly on his website.

Although I ultimately concluded that such interventions, always temporary, never without risk, were not for me, even considering them suggests the way this birthday was bringing to light my own internalized gerontophobia. Gerontophobia? Yes, I found this graceless word — fear of growing old and of the old themselves — increasingly useful as I grappled with my ambivalent feelings about the event on the horizon.

My good friend James, still luxuriating in his mid-60s, offered words of solace: “You are not an accountant. You don’t have to live by the numbers.” He reminds me that age is a matter of mind as well as body, of how we see ourselves as well as how others see us.

This reminder doesn’t quell the proliferating questions. Am I still living a socially relevant life? Is it really okay to have been me? I decide to confront the challenge by telling friends and colleagues, anyone who will listen, that I am about to have a “big birthday.” And not surprisingly, this bit of coyness invariably solicits inquiries about my definition of “big.”

“Oh I don’t believe it. That can’t be. You look 20 years younger,” the listener replies when I reluctantly divulge the heretofore unsayable number.

At first I tell myself these premature announcements of the birthday to come are part of a strategy to pre-empt the clock, by saying the words before their time. But increasingly uncomfortable with the responses — however flattering and complimentary — I’m forced to acknowledge that this carefully orchestrated pattern of call-and-response is really a setup, a way to seek external reinforcement for what is ultimately an internal task.

I read the generous remarks of others as expressions of their own anxieties about aging. How else can I understand my 60-something G.P., who, upon perusing my chart on a recent visit, insisted on calling in his young colleague from the adjoining office to view the new kind of medical specimen in his examining room: that would be an embarrassed and completely objectified me. I am thankful that my ophthalmologist was a bit more tactful when reviewing his records. Confiding that he is about to turn 50, he hopes that in two decades he will look as good as I do.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful or unappreciative. But summoning the courage to look in the mirror, I barely recognize the drawn face I see there. How did this happen, I ask myself even as I note that the face in the mirror is fast becoming the face of my father and his five siblings, three of whom lived into their 90s. This patrilineal resemblance, less frequently glimpsed when I was younger, was once a source of curiosity, belonging, even reassurance. Now it elicits equal measures of disbelief and resignation.

I don’t linger at the mirror. My feminist self tells me to appreciate beauty in all its diverse forms, including the aging body. My less confident self finds it hard to stave off a culture in which most seek to be younger or, at the very least, to appear younger than their years. Cosmetic adjustments proliferate, hours at the gym escalate, and gurus of style management abound.

While driving to the East Hampton RECenter I hear Joan Rivers, icon of the ageless society, opine on the car radio: If we can feel better about ourselves, younger and more self-assured, then why not make the purchase, undertake the surgery, succumb to the treatments? Encouraging us to seize every opportunity to indulge the fantasy of living longer but never aging, Rivers, like others, does not stop to ask why we might feel bad in the first place. It’s all about the answer, the solution, not the question or, more critically, about how the problem itself was manufactured in the first place.

In calm, reflective moments I remind myself that a postindustrial consumer society creates a constantly escalating set of needs that we experience as our own deficiencies. These supposed deficiencies, read as personal failings, can be rectified only through the consumption of new goods and services.

When roaming the aisles of my local Gap store or perusing the latest issue of GQ in the dentist’s office, I find it hard to resist the products that promise to make me look and feel even a few years younger, hipper and of the moment. When trying on a new pair of summer shorts I carefully assess their age appropriateness. Too trendy, too stodgy — how young can I go? How old do I feel?

This year my internal dialogue also included a new refrain — “You can’t take it with you.” In addition to numerous small purchases, I gave myself a series of more expensive gifts — a visit with my niece in Hong Kong, a longed-for new computer, and sessions with a personal trainer to counter my preference for aerobic exercise at the expense of strength-building routines.

Cushioned by all these preparations, the formal passage from middle age to young-old age was, dare I admit it, pleasurable. The day itself, marked by a small surprise party, lovingly organized by David and a lifetime first for me, was pitch-perfect.

From my new vantage point, I can even see the country of the old-old with far less apprehension than previously. The difficult decade of caring for my frail parents is finally receding into the past. And I look with greater equanimity on the future, less a time of decline and despair and more practically a period for which I will need to prepare. Most of all I suspect that this birthday, my 70th, has given me renewed confidence in my ability to manage life transitions, to meet the moment and make the most of it.

Jonathan Silin lives in Amagansett and Toronto. He is the author of “My Father’s Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents.”

The language of the ocean is vital to anyone who enters. A failure to recognize a rip current or a misreading of the imminent collapse of an approaching large wave can drag any swimmer down in seconds. Comforting thought, I know.

For bodysurfers, timing a wave can make all the difference between a great ride and eating sand the hard way. Before I head into the ocean I take a look around to see how the waves are breaking, and to see if there is a noticeable rip current.

A rip current is easily recognizable — a broad strait of water that has the appearance of water being sucked out to sea. It is often bubbling with sea foam, and the water around it is rippled. The best way to get out of a rip current is to swim parallel to the shore, not toward the shore. This might sound counterproductive, but if you try to swim to shore you will only exhaust yourself. Trust me, I’ve been there.

As the saying goes, “Timing is everything,” in life, in love, and especially when faced with an eight-foot swell casting its shadow upon you. At first blush the dynamic to bodysurfing is fairly simple: Position yourself sideways between an approaching wave and the shore, and with either your right or left leg push off into the momentum of the wave, putting your arms out in front of you.

The difference between bodysurfing and surfboarding is straightforward. One puts you physically inside the force of the wave, and the other puts you on top of it, or as the Beach Boys song goes, “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.” I prefer the former.

Like Olympic diving, bodysurfing is all about form and control. Arms stretched out in front of you, legs firmly together, and feet pointed flat behind you. The wiggle of your waist or midsection can act as a directional rudder allowing you to move left or right during the ride. The sound of the wave churning all around your body is like a 747 airplane taking off.

Some bodysurfers take a different approach to riding a wave. Once the wave has crested and is rolling along, some stick their head out of the white foam of the wave and put their arms flat against their sides, giving the impression of a water-borne bobblehead and allowing the bodysurfer to enjoy the view while riding the wave toward shore.

Not all waves are rideable. Some waves when they break are concave and look like a half-pipe curling into itself. These waves are to be avoided at all costs for bodysurfers, because the power and roll of this particular type of wave will slam you down and have you seeing stars.

Years ago a girl whom I had dated miraculously ended up renting the house next door with her fiancé. After the three of us exchanged the standard awkward pleasantries, her fiancé made his way into the surf.

While my ex-girlfriend and I were getting all caught up by the water’s edge, her fiancé was in trouble. Within a few minutes he had been dragged out and was getting nailed by wave after wave. My face dropped and my ex-girlfriend looked at me and said, “What’s wrong?”

I knew what was wrong — her fiancé, whom she was planning on marrying on that very beach in a few weeks, was drowning. I made a beeline for the water and swam as fast as I could. By the time I got to him he had that deer-in-the-highlights look and was going under. He was in shock. I was cautious and kept my distance — one desperate swing of his fist or elbow could knock me out cold, and then we’d both be on our way down to Davy Jones’s locker.

When his head bobbed up and was above the waterline I took a swing at him with all my might and clocked him square on the jaw. He probably thought I was trying to kill him, and he had that look in his eyes that said, “Hey! Nut job, this is how you save people?” Fair enough, but all I wanted to do was stop him from swinging and grabbing at me. It worked.

I put him in a firm headlock with my right arm and with my left arm I began to paddle sideways, parallel to the shore, to get us both out of the rip current. A decent-size wave came up behind us. I released him from the headlock, grabbed him by his bathing suit, giving him a nasty wedgie, and said, “Try and ride this wave. Go!” I pushed him into the wave as hard as I could. Granted, it was a risk, but I knew if I could get him to where he could stand and closer to shore his odds of survival would be that much greater. Luckily, the plan worked.

We both got out of the water and collapsed on the sand. By then a small crowd had gathered, and my ex-girlfriend was wedding-dress white. Happily, they were wed, and for my efforts I was treated to an afternoon lunch at the Clam Bar on Napeague.

Reading and riding waves for me has led to some incredible days in the surf. The ocean and waves specifically have served as a way to understand the rhythm of life. Waves make their way across the vastness of the ocean, endlessly pushing forward. On their journey waves encounter peaks and valleys. Each set of waves a generation passing through time together, finally playing out their final moments, cresting, turning white, and gently resting upon the shore. At that moment the remnant of each wave is pulled back out to sea, a rebirth begins, setting the stage for a new generation of waves to glide once again along the surface of a sun-burnt sea.

Liam Sullivan is an avid bodysurfer, musician, and writer who lives in Amagansett. His first book, “Making the Scene: Nashville,” was published in 2012. He is at work on a collection of reflections about the East End called “Reading Waves.”

I am led by two extracts of wisdom, both acquired while sitting on porches. From Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” From Charles Baudelaire: “Genius is childhood recovered at will.”

My intention this summer is to spend as much time as I can on a porch recovering this genius and this nature. Depending on how you see it, I have an advantage for this — a new daughter born in June. A week after she emerged, we left the gathering hum of New York City air-conditioners and were here on this porch that wraps around our small cottage in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

The timing of this is fortunate: My teacher’s vacation nearly matches my wife’s maternity leave, which frames the entire summer. In the leafless days of still-windy March, we imagined what three months of time away would be like. I even thought of buying wind chimes to hang on the fire escape to up the anticipation.

But beyond this calendar coincidence, a deeper connection is growing. In our emergence from our respective wombs — my small, airless city apartment stuffed with emails, her viscous sac; in our afternoon sways in the hammock, and in our appreciation of being peacefully swaddled — we are emerging into the real world.

Every nap of hers offers a lesson. When I first take her onto my chest, she is all mouth, bobbing her little head and pecking at my sternum, slipping down the side of me, clenching, de-clenching, grunting, yawning, clenching, and wriggling dozens of new muscles to do it all again. Sometimes it takes walking a few lengths of the porch, sometimes singing, but then her 8 or 10 pounds (all of them!) settle into a puddle and the weight goes away, like sand that clings and dries into the whispers of the wind.

Her sleep is so deep on that porch she can fit the whole outside into the rhythm of her breathing. A gust of wind that blows the sea grass back, a truck hauling a house-worth of lumber, the distant whine of a leaf blower — that halo of her head is in its own land. Still, I don’t want to risk the journey to the kitchen and disturb this downy newness, so I can do nothing but sit and stare, and go through a de-clenching of my own.

I look at the line the tree trunk makes against the telephone pole, follow this down to the salvia I’m also trying to bring into life, which leads to the bumblebee, and along its wing into the woods across the street, where it disappears into the thorny twines, and the world becomes edgeless and unbounded, a continuous realm of lines waiting to be connected.

Eventually, she opens her eyes. Right now (we are told), she can see faces and checkerboard contrasts, but quite literally the scope of her vision grows by the day. Even the color of her eyes will change, from dark gray to another surprise. Of course, I have watched this all evolve with her sister, who will soon turn 3 and suddenly seems like a giant. She is all eyes now, hoping each dusk to go out and look for deer.

And so I put her on my shoulders and we sneak into the meadow across the way to look for anything moving. She brings a focus to this that I sometimes forget can happen. Deer are probably the only thing she is thinking about. At her request one night to go farther into the field, I nearly walked into a wild turkey. It jolted up with a horrible squawk and wide and unfamiliar wings and took a couple of steps right at us, perhaps protecting babies of her own.

It was a terrifying shock to the senses; I’m certain the moment was as new to me as it was to her. This meadow became not just a place to perhaps see a deer, but a vital habitat for lives otherwise known only from storybooks. I felt as small as I do walking on the beach in February.

But the biggest surprise of this summer, so far, has been how much things have actually slowed down with this addition of another child. True, there are more diapers and there is less sleep, but there is also more porch time, where the “inward and outward senses still truly [adjust] to each other.” Vacations like this are an anomaly; the aim is always to re-treat “normal life” with as much relaxed vigor as can be sustained. But with the baby now, we have another source of discoveries.

Since coming here a few weeks ago, she has begun to look and sound less pterodactylian. Still, her face sometimes gets that drunken daze you see outside the Memory Motel, and her brow furrows at the shock of this new world, but over all, she shows the milk of human kindness. Her wrinkled flesh is smoothing over, her dry skin is flaking off, she has the suggestion of hair. Things are better for everyone on the porch.

Tim Donahue is a high school English teacher and writer from New York City who comes frequently to his house in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

I used to own a home in Amagansett. It was a lovely home, with a pool. A block from the ocean! It was a lifetime ago that I bought it, and a year ago that I sold it.

I move on. Or try to.

I rent now. I rented before I owned — that was a couple of lifetimes ago, and also in Amagansett. A half share, a full share, a couple of thousand dollars, if even that.

Owning has its privileges, but also its expenses. Upkeep, pool maintenance, trees that wither and die. Hurricanes that come and destroy. The roof. The new roof. The new new roof.

Renting has its privileges, but also its expenses. The garbage collector that I paid $70 a month as an owner now wants $650 for three months. Their “seasonal” rate, I am told.

As a renter, I had to write out checks for a security deposit, of course, and utilities up front. And pay for the lawn guy once a week. And every other week, a cleaning person — I’m used to that. As an owner, it’s what I also had to pay.

But I didn’t have to deal with mice! Or, more accurately, a mouse. A dead one. Frizzled and fried and smelling up the house like nobody’s business, day two as renters.

Let me backtrack, way back to December 2013, a snow day when my partner, David, and I came out to look for a summer place. After owning for 30-plus years, we weren’t quite ready to call it a day. We wanted a more gradual cessation of the crowds, the traffic, the expense, the beautiful Hamptons. And so, we found a sweet little cottage right in town, in the most beautiful town in all of these Hamptons, as far as I’m concerned — East, just past the windmill, steps from the post office, Citarella, Rowdy Hall, the Palm, J. Crew, Ralph and BookHampton and all the rest of the places we frequent frequently.

Adorable.

Very different from our modern and spare home as owners, this house was small and quaint and dark and perfect. No pool? No problem. The most gorgeous beaches are just a bike ride away.

It’s exciting and thrilling to settle into a new place, like a hotel, but this was with two floors, two baths, two bedrooms, and another cozy half-bed overlooking tall trees and Amaden Gay Realty. Private, yet right out there.

Lovely.

The cable TV worked. Wi-Fi, audio equipment, check. Toilet paper and paper towels in abundance.

The woman who rented us her place has lived in this house for over 20 years, so there was no shortage of plates or glassware or towels or cleaning supplies. She was used to renting. I guess a lot of her renters left a lot of stuff behind come Labor Day. It was totally equipped.

Memorial Day weekend came. Doesn’t it always? And so quickly? Our first weekend out here. David and I arrived the Thursday before — actually, we had come two weeks earlier for a meet-and-greet with the owner to learn about the place: where the lounge cushions were stored, the quirkiness of the clothes dryer, how to operate the heating and the air-conditioning and whatnot.

And then, when we officially arrived for the season, a book awaited us on the dining room table with the phone numbers of the plumber, the caretaker, the cleaning person, the lawn guy, Internet passwords, and so on and so forth. Extremely organized. An orchid appeared as a thank-you. Along with a bottle of champagne.

Everything perfect.

We have this tradition. Though we are a bit reclusive and mostly content with our own company after 27 years of togetherness, we have this longstanding tradition of inviting this couple to our beach house every Memorial Day weekend for years. No reason to discontinue that routine now that we are renters and village people.

So we invited Sam Shahid and his sister Carol Lee and her six-pound poodle named Summer, as black and lightweight as a shadow, for the kick-off weekend. They were scheduled to arrive on Friday, for lunch, a warm late-May welcome to summer. David was preparing a chicken, buttered under the skin and dusted with lemon salt, tarragon, paprika, and pepper. Pearl-sized potatoes of all colors, purple to yellow to brown, accompanied the dish. Little buttons of beauty.

Our guests were scheduled to arrive at 1 p.m., and precisely at 1 p.m. David popped the chicken into the oven. David (and Ina and Martha) say to turn the oven up high for a chicken at first. To 450 degrees.

And right on schedule, the splashy Shahids in a brand-new white Porsche arrived in a hail of Louis Vuitton luggage with gifts of rosé wine. I was quick to admonish Carol Lee to make sure little Summer, the shadow dog, did not do any of her business on any of the rugs, particularly pissing, and she walks in and says, “Smells like someone else has been urinating in this place.”

And so it was: The stench of urine, or something equally unpleasant and repelling — kitty litter? (there are no cats) feces? mice? — wafted through the small, snug downstairs.

Carol Lee started coughing. She is extra sensitive to fragrance of any kind — we have to make sure she has unscented soap, and I don’t dare spray any of my vast collection of colognes when I know we are going to be together. We had to remove a bottle of those room scent diffusers with those sticks from the guest room and relegate that to a closet.

We were all mystified as we looked at one another and opened every window, upstairs and down, as the scent got worse. Clearly, something under the stove set the stench off.

What to do?

We were so thrilled day one that we didn’t have to email or text the owner about how to work the TV or where were the trash cans or when does the cleaning person show up. But then, this unbelievable olfactory disaster.

“You’re gonna have to call her. And call the broker,” David said.

I left two voice mails; it was the Friday before Memorial Day, and people were busy welcoming guests, just like we were, and serving them lunch, just like we were.

The broker said that it’s best to email, and I did. And the owner, mortified, emailed right back. A very nice woman, apologetic beyond belief even though nobody knew what the cause of all this was.

I wasn’t exaggerating when I told her that the odor was so odious that the four of us might have to go to a hotel for the night, the scent wafting up to the second-floor bedrooms. As if we could even find a hotel room or two that weekend.

It was then 3 p.m., the chicken long done and resting outside on the outdoor picnic table. The owner alerted the caretaker, Tom, a friend who rebuilt the house, and also Nardy Pest Control and various neighbors for help.

In time, hours later, the scent diminished. The caretaker came, moved the stove, found nothing. Nardy couldn’t make it until the next day, and Tom agreed to come back and do a more thorough job.

The scent was totally gone by 6 p.m. The chicken lunch became a chicken dinner. Delicious. The incident seemingly forgotten.

“I haven’t used the oven in months!” the owner told us.

Who knows what evil lurks underneath?

Saturday came. A barrage of people arrived — the owner, the caretaker, a couple of assistants, and a friend of the owner who lives nearby. We were a curiosity, apparently.

And, sure enough, after quite a while, a frizzled mouse was found, dead, burnt, stuck to the pipe that transmits the heat. And that little sucker was hard to scrape off! Stuck for dear life, or, rather, death, to the pipe. I refused to watch as they gathered long sticks, vacuums, and dust busters to dislodge the vermin.

To break the ice, the broker friend of the owner assured us that everything happens on the first few days when renters take over: “Once I got a call at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday from a renter asking, ‘Where are the placemats?’ ”

“Someone else wanted to know where was the dustpan.”

 Renters, spending now, oh, 50 thousand, 200 thousand, or, if you’re a Kardashian, 2 mil, feel a certain entitlement.

I’m easy. Ish. But this was quite a welcome-to-renting-after-owning experience. No one knows — no nose knows — what can befall.

But all is well now, oven on again, windows closed against the rain and chill that arrived, again, after a beautiful Memorial Day weekend.

We drank the rosé and laughed about it. Surely, the owner now had a more powerful story to tell than a wayward placemat or Wi-Fi that needed a forgotten password.

Mice! Or, more accurately, a mouse. Freaking, no doubt, no longer squeaking, if indeed he (or she) was still alive as she (or he) hit the gas.

Things happen. It was certainly no one’s fault after a crazy, frozen winter. The poor mouse, looking for warmth.

Seems that particular mouse found that warmth in the extreme.

    Hy Abady is a frequent contributor of “Guestwords,” and a number of his pieces appear in “Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End.” He is at work on two new books, nonfiction and a novel.

It was 20 years ago, and I had just written “Visiting Mr. Green,” my first play. The title character is an 86-year-old. Someone introduced me to Eli Wallach, 78 at the time, who without seeing the script or knowing me agreed to do a reading of it.

I was thrilled, until I was told that Eli wouldn’t rehearse the play before the reading. I didn’t know whether this was a star trip, or some kind of Method approach to a new play, but I wasn’t happy about it.

Nonetheless, I rented a theater, invited producers, and at intermission of the unrehearsed reading (Tony Goldwyn was the co-star), I got three offers to produce the play. The next day, Eli called me and said, “I think we should do another reading.”

I didn’t understand, given the response. It turned out that Eli hadn’t invited anyone, and in the course of the reading discovered that he loved the play, and now he wanted other people to see it.

Since that day, well over a million other people in 43 countries have seen this play, and some of them were lucky enough to see Eli Wallach as Mr. Green in the two pre-New York City productions and for seven months Off Broadway, or the one-night-only reading at Guild Hall in 2009.

Eli knew exactly how good he was, which is why he knew he could do a reading without a rehearsal. That is not to say he was arrogant. There could not have been a more generous actor, when it came to working with his co-stars, directors, and a neophyte playwright. He had strong ideas, but he was the most respectful collaborator I’ve ever worked with. His kindness extended to every single person on each production, whatever his or her status. Having worked with other stars since, I can tell you that this is not always the case.

Seven months into the Off Broadway run, Eli decided to leave the production. It was still selling well, but at that point in his life, he usually appeared onstage with his brilliant wife, Anne Jackson, and he couldn’t stand the fact that he was working every night while she was home alone.

Eli always put his family first. He had a wonderful film career, and maybe it could have been even bigger, but he thought his beloved wife and three children would be better off in New York and East Hampton.

Eli Wallach was part of the fabric of both places. He loved attending plays and other cultural events as much as he loved performing in them. He took his talent and celebrity seriously and humbly. He always had time to talk to a stranger. He was always willing to donate his time for a cause he believed in, or to a first play by an author he never heard of.

Jeff Baron is a playwright, screenwriter, and the author of the Sean Rosen book series, from HarperCollins. He lives in New York City and on Shelter Island.

“The wonderful thing about football,” the actor and satirist John Cleese says in a two-minute monologue on YouTube, “is how creative it is. And this is why it never caught on in America.”

By football, he means the game played with your feet and with a ball. In our parlance, soccer.

“You see,” he continues, referring to American football, “in America the action is deliberately kept short so that the sponsors can get in as many commercials as possible.”

Cleese’s political jab — that our football, like America itself, is obsessed with money and business — is nothing new. Politics and soccer go hand in hand. I reckon that’s one reason why the sport is less popular in America than in the rest of the world.

Everywhere else, soccer is a matter of life and death. Or more. No sport elicits more worldwide tension, more joy, more crazy riots, more national periods of mourning and pride than soccer. It’s all on display for a month every four years in the FIFA World Cup. And, in case you’ve been lost on the L.I.E.: It’s happening right now in Brazil.

National stereotypes are on display. Historic and current foes go head to head. Old colonial powers take on their former colonies. Always with the backdrop of historic tensions, perceived wrongs and rights.

Some of the prickliest moments in World Cup lore: Dark, crazy, militaristic North Korea stepped around its south-pointing missiles and played democratic South Korea to a draw in 2010; Iran versus the United States (a k a the Axis of Evil versus the Great Satan) in 1998 in France (Iran won); cleaved in half in the Cold War, Germany came together in an East versus West World Cup game in 1974 (and, in a classic political metaphor, East Germany won the match, but West Germany went on to win the whole shebang).

Argentina’s run in soccer is among the most politically charged. In a brief bloody conflict Argentina’s military was slapped away by the British in 1982 from their occupation of the Falklands (known as the Malvinas by the Argentines). Then, later that year as the Argentines emerged from the darkness of their “Dirty War” dictatorship their soccer team was humbled and summarily dismissed early on from the World Cup in Spain. It seemed appropriate.

Four years later the nightmare of the dictatorship seemed to fade at last on a sun-splashed afternoon in the mile-high Azteca stadium in Mexico City. It was the World Cup quarterfinals against the English, and Diego Maradona and his squad took their revenge.

Gifted and opportunistic, Maradona scored first with his controversial “Hand of God” goal. He followed that with another touch of magic, dribbling past five English players to knock in another. The second goal was voted the best goal of the century by FIFA, but both are legend.

Soccer, like life, is imperfect and messy. Sometimes you get ahead because the ref isn’t looking. Maradona knew he’d gotten away with what amounts to soccer murder. A kid who’d grown up in the slums, he likened his hand goal to the delight of robbing the British in broad daylight.

“I sometimes think I preferred the one with my hand. . . . It was a bit like stealing the wallet of the English,” Maradona said in his autobiography. “It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team. . . . Although we had said before the game that football had nothing to do with the Malvinas war, we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.”

There are no such huge political moments this time around, although political undertones are everywhere. The Africans surged (Algeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria), great European powers stumbled out of the tournament (Spain, Italy, Portugal, England), there is uncanny strength by the Americas (half the final 16 were from the Americas), and there is the ever-optimistic, scrappy United States, which was voted the team “you are most rooting against” in a New York Times poll in 19 nations. Australia, Mexico, Italy, Russia, and the U.S. itself named the U.S.A. as least popular, the poll said. Australia and Italy? Huh? The American vote was probably just an anti-soccer vote. The rest? Politics.

Which is why we root for the home team, why we rooted against the damn Russians and relish that Italy and Australia were sent packing. But we didn’t hold it against the Mexicans. Mexico should have gone all the way. Sure, they say they want us to lose in soccer, but they also know we’re joined at the hip forever.

Biddle Duke is the publisher of weekly newspapers in Vermont. He married into an East Hampton family and finds his way to the South Fork beaches when the surf is up.

As it has for the past 30-odd years, my White Dawn rose has blossomed the third week of June. I call it the Tuna Rose as the bloom coincides with the arrival of giant bluefin tuna into our local waters. Or so it was in the ’80s when I planted this young rose.

Back then at this time each year, the activity level around the docks in Montauk would step up like the degrees on a summer thermometer. The excitement generated by these magnificent fish was evident everywhere. For decades after the first giant was caught by a Montauk angler in the late ’40s, these monster tuna, sometimes weighing over 1,000 pounds, were prized only as a sportfish. The sushi craze had not yet exploded, and the cost of ice to ship a giant to the New York fish market exceeded what might be gained from the sale.

But by the ’80s that had all changed. Tuna, especially giant bluefins, meant big money, with a single fish selling for more than $10,000. As a result it was not unusual to find 40 or more boats on the fishing grounds before the June sunrise so as not to miss the dawn bite.

Montauk fishermen were by no means alone in their pursuit. From all over the world bluefins were packed in ice and next-day air-freighted to the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. Japanese buyers paid to have locals trained to inspect tuna at the dock for fat content, which translated to market value.

As the rage accelerated, what little remained of sportfishing sensibilities vanished. I doubt there are many left around the docks who can recall what the International Game Fish Association (IGFA, the governing body of sportfishing) regulations dictate. Fish were no longer gaffed, but rather harpooned when they were brought close to the boat; line strengths jumped to 200-to-300-pound test, more than any category recognized by IGFA, and “anglers” caught fish without ever removing the rod from the rod-holder.

Today I dropped by the Montauk Marine Basin to see what was happening. Not much. No giants.

Bluefin tuna stocks worldwide have fallen dramatically, with the western Atlantic stock down by 82 percent compared with 1970, a time when bluefins were already in decline.

Recent decades have seen efforts to manage tuna worldwide. This is an exceedingly complicated and controversial subject. Catch limits have been exceeded for decades, enforcement is unimaginably difficult, and progress almost nil. Trapped and ranch-raised tuna is a booming business, while wild stocks of young fish are depleted to supply the ranches.

In 2013 a Japanese sushi supplier paid $1.76 million for the honor of buying the first tuna of the year.

My Tuna Rose is still going strong and costs less than two pieces of maguro in annual maintenance, but the words of John Sawhill, a past president of the Nature Conservancy, float on the scent of the rose: “In the end, our society will be defined not by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.”

Bill Akin is a Montauk resident. As a boy he fished out of the Montauk Yacht Club in the 1950s and ’60s, catching giant bluefin tuna, swordfish, and both white and blue marlin before he turned 16. He is a past president of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, past board member of Wild Oceans, and the author of “Montauk Is,” a collection of haiku and short poetry.