My husband and I are getting older, and while we talk of the necessity of making our “final arrangements,” the subject goes dead as it surfaces. So we enlisted the help of our son-in-law, David.

    Why him? His credentials are impeccable. First, he’s a good guy — a little quirky, but still, we like him. Second, he’s efficient. Give him a job and it is done — find an out-of-print book, set the sleep-timer on the television, cook the turkey and bring it over, never a problem.

    Next, and I suppose the biggie, he is the son of a minister and has often told us that as a kid he watched his dad perform the rites for weddings and funerals. He knew the routine. He could serve as an adviser on the finalities and legalities of life’s special moments.

    True, we have a flesh-and-blood adult daughter and adult son, but we thought it would be too emotional for them to make the arrangements while we were still up and running. David would be saddened by our demise, but not devastated as our own kids might be, or as he might be with his own parents. Matter of fact, we never told our children we had given David the assignment. We didn’t want to upset them.

    Perhaps “devastated” is too strong a word. While we avoid serious end-of-life discussion, we freely toss out deadly quips: This is the last new car of our lives. Or at Costco: 45 bars of soap . . . we can always leave it in the will.

    Surely the children have murmured stuff to each other about the folks getting older: What if they get sick? How much longer can they do the steps up to their apartment? Normal existential musings, none of which have gone unnoticed by us.

    David agreed to act as the liaison between the cemetery and us, and we began to formulate the plan. “Where? What?” he wanted to know.

    “We don’t really care,” I say. “So we may as well go to the cemetery where my mother is buried. Whatever they’re charging is probably the going rate, so let’s not dwell on this. Just buy two graves and we’ll reimburse you.”

    “Where do you want the site? New section, old section?”

    “It doesn’t really matter. Wherever they have room. Except I like to be in the sun. That’s a definite requirement. Use your judgment. We don’t need to know anything about it except that it’s done. Where it’s sunny. Don’t forget that part.”

    I told David we thought to get a family plot, but of course he being of the Christian persuasion, and this cemetery being of the Jewish persuasion, he would not be allowed in on any permanent basis.

    “You could visit us, but not for eternity.”

    The upside of this adventure for him was unique. He would be getting the opportunity to bury his mother-in-law, a wish often dreamt of by others, but rarely fulfilled. Who else has such a good mother-in-law?

    A week later, David called.

    “It’s done.”

    “Great.”

    “Nancy [our daughter] went with me.”

    “How’d she take it?

    “She said it was strange.”

    “Send us the deed.”

    “I’ll keep it,” he says.

    “Really? Why?”

    “That’s the way it is.”

    “Okay, so we’re good to go?”

    “Very good.”

    “Thanks.”

   Hinda Gonchor lives in East Hampton and New York City. Her essays have appeared in major newspapers and have been featured on radio.

Mr. Douglass:

    Paul Dickson, the writer, gave me your name. He was a little cranky on the phone today.

    This is my “Hollywood treatment” of the best of my screenplays. Please consider it for Paramount, MGM, and TriStar.

AMERICA ESCAPE (or FROZEN ICE)

    The expedition ship Wildworld Cause, with a worldwide passenger list of 24 wealthy dilettantes, is trapped in Antarctic ice. (Only one of the passengers knows or cares about the natural history, or history of the age of exploration, of the southernmost continent.) They are on board to drink, to eat gourmet food, to gamble. They can easily mistake a skua for an Adelie penguin. I’m hoping that Shirley MacLaine is loose, that is to say, interested.

    The ship is registered in Panama, but owned by Russians. A Russian icebreaker is sent to free her. The rescue ship is called Smasher or Smashed. Its name is unclear as the lettering on the gunwale is Cyrillic and scuffed.

    The relief ship’s electronics fail. Then its cutting-plow cracks and there is no one aboard who can read the Japanese instructions for its replacement. She too is trapped.

    The U.S. is called upon, but her two state-of-the-art icebreakers are at the top of the world: They are very near the North Pole cutting ice for vessels laying cables for a vast N.S.A. network far from the control of any Congress. Almost no one but the deceased Clancy knows of it.

    Supplies are running out on Wildworld Cause. Lights flicker. The sea ice groans and booms.

    The U.S. does have helicopters at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, that can do the job, but only two that can venture as far as the ship’s position and return loaded with passengers. The first flies and picks up 12, but on the return crashes. All survive but they must trek 11 miles in blizzard conditions to find more stable ice. Several die gruesome deaths as ice breaks off the surface sheet and they plunge into freezing waters. Others are consumed by leopard seals, and a pretty blonde is torn apart by skuas. (In an homage to Hitch, this occurs in an ice formation that looks remarkably like an old-time phone booth.)

    And . . . two young people have fallen in love, of course. (Love scene shot from outside a white tent lit orangey with silhouettes cast on the canvas, art imitating life and vice versa, while Vaughan Williams music rises.) As a rescue team on sledges nears from McMurdo, a crevasse opens and the lovers perish. They cling to icicles that drip drip drip as they bid farewell to each other as their bodily heats rise. (I must say, Mr. Douglass, Hitchcock! Hitchcock! Hitchcock!)

    Meanwhile, aboard Wildworld Cause the 12 remaining passengers find out that a malfunction in the second helicopter will require a repair part that cannot be delivered to McMurdo for three months. (The nut needed is manufactured in Pakistan, of all places.) The pilots can make only this one trip! Problem: Twelve people remain, six Americans, four Russians, one Moroccan, and one Costa Rican, and five of the Americans are overweight by 25 percent. Therefore only 11 souls can be airlifted.

    A lottery is agreed upon. The loser will be blindfolded and then pushed overboard by the “winner” of another lottery. But . . . we see another passenger pushed (by an unidentifiable character) into the ice-strewn sea! And another! Then as in “Ten Little Indians” our sorry cast one by one vanishes, wishing they had known of the travails of Scott and Shackleton, of Wilson’s watercolors.

    Only two remain alive as the last-chance helicopter approaches — the very slender Costa Rican teacher and an overweight American insurance executive (whose firm insured the Wildworld Cause).

    Blackout.

    Flashback: The Costa Rican is a member of the E.L.F. He coined the phrase, “If you build it, we will burn it.”

    Flashback: The American executive was given the trip as a 45th wedding anniversary gift by his loving wife. She died before she could sail of a dreadful, incurable disease. Only the desolation of the Antarctic will match his own, he thinks.

    Blackout.

    One nut after another pops from a bolt in the ship’s railing in the subfreezing cold as the two men grapple for their lives, like Moriarty and Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. One will fall 40 feet to his death on Antarctic ice. They punch and kick and do jujitsu. We hear the helicopter in the distance. Foof foof foof! The rail gives way. Locked in tragic embrace, over the side the antagonists go!

    We see the searchlights of the helicopter scanning the forlorn ship and the reflecting ice. (This scene happens in deep twilight, perhaps caused by clouds, although it is summer at the South Pole.) The pilot speaks: [crackle, crackle, crackle] “McMurdo. Rescue 2. McMurdo. ‘Ah, a man’s reach should [crackle, crackle, crackle] ’ceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ ” [crackle, crackle, crackle]

    Blackout.

    But die they don’t. Because they are both wearing L.L. Bean winter-ready garments when they hit the water (yes, water); they survive. A warm cave of liquid has been created in the Antarctic ice by an N.S.A. substation. The two men, floating in their duck-down clothes, are sucked into the station by a tremendous undersea vacuum that might have been imagined by Greene’s man in Havana.

    There then they sit, hopelessly holding out hope, dripping, when the N.S.A. man says, “What can I do with you? What on earth can I do with you?”

    THE END

    Thank you for your kind consideration of this work of fiction; no persons alive or dead ever had any of these thoughts, etc.

    P.S. Sequel to follow! Prequel to follow!

    Dan Marsh, a native Long Islander and frequent "Guestwords" contributor, writes from Garrett Park, Md.

    As I make up a lot of beds today, as I smooth the sheets into neat hospital corners, fluff up the down pillows, and erase any suggestion of a crease in the white matelassé bedspreads, I think about my Irish forebears who emigrated to the States and were maids. They made beds just like me. They were Irish just like me. They were all called Brigid, because their employers couldn’t be bothered to remember their real names — Fionnuala, Maeve, Siobhan, and Orla.

    Poetic names oozing with Celtic heritage. You can almost smell the smoke from the earthy peat fires emanating from their names. You can see the Cliffs of Moher jutting into the Atlantic, taste colcannon, a classic Irish dish of mashed potatoes and cabbage, and hear the dum, diddley, dum from the fiddlers playing in the pub, sipping their Guinness.

    The Brigids, with their blond or red hair, blue eyes, freckles, and fair skin, resembled their Viking ancestors, although there were a few who had black hair, blue eyes, and darker skin. They were called “Black Irish,” thought to be descendants of the Spanish sailors who washed up on the west coast of Ireland after the shipwreck of the Spanish Armada of 1588.

    No matter what they looked like, as far as their employers were concerned, all the Brigids were the same, there was no difference between one maid and another, which took away the young women’s identity, sense of self, and uniqueness. The Brigids were happy to have the work, however menial. They were good workers. They cleaned, cooked, and took care of the children. They worked from 6 in the morning until midnight with one day off a month. Later, in the 1900s, they got a half-day off each week.

    But there is a difference between those Brigids and me. Today, I am making beds in anticipation of a 3 o’clock showing of my two houses in Southampton for rent this summer. I’m grateful for the Brigids who preceded me, enabling me to have a good education, a better life, and even own real estate. I am not an Anglo-Irish landlord who condoned the potato famine of 1846 and exploited my tenant farmers. I’m just a property owner trying to make a living to survive in the off-season when the investment bankers retreat to their Park Avenue, Tribeca, and Flatiron condos and private schools and nannies. They are nice people but would prefer to sit in semidarkness rather than insert a new lightbulb. I guess in the city, that’s a job for the superintendent.

    Actually, I have my own Brigid. My favorite day of the week is Tuesday, when my Brigid, Cirlene Alves, a lovely Brazilian woman, comes to clean and makes my bed with freshly ironed sheets. She does laundry, vacuums, and cleans the six-burner stove. Sometimes she prepares pink beans with garlic and a side dish of thinly sliced collard greens she knows I like. Lemon furniture polish tickles my nose as I inhale its clean, acidic scent. Every week my Brigid even washes the covers to the dogs’ beds. They rush to lie down on them as soon as they are put back on. Spoiled dogs.

    I like the poetry of the everyday, the rituals of a domestic life, the rhythm of making order out of chaos — cooking dinner, setting the table, lighting the candles, eating by the fire, even if it’s just my husband and me. The repetition is soothing, like the incantation of Mass being said or the prayers along a blue glass rosary. I like my throw pillows arranged just so with the designer’s chop that my Brigid taught me, a neat indentation just like those that grace the photos in the glossy decorating magazines. I take pride in my house and home, embrace the cocoon, the comfort of the familiar.

    I owe the Brigids. I thank the Brigids — the Fionnualas, Maeves, Siobhans, and Orlas who came before, who I feel a connection to, an affinity with, who worked hard and made a path for later children of Irish immigrants like me.

    Joanne Pateman, a former advertising art director, earned an M.F.A. in writing at Southampton College. She regularly contributes “Guestwords” and fiction to The Star.

    I was a spitfire tomboy and only 13 when I made my first exciting escape, sneaking out at 3 o’clock in the morning, shimmying down the side of the house from my second-floor bedroom window. I was a little shaky at such a height, but I had so much adrenaline before my feet touched the ground that I thought I could fly.

    Less than two miles away, he waited for me, Larry Hermann, the boy with sun-bleached hair and eyes the same color blue as my big sister’s angora sweater. We’d met at a boy-girl party where some of the older kids played spin the bottle and we’d just watched, while stealing sneaky looks at each other.

    He was sitting on his front stoop in the dark when I came up his walkway, and he jumped up to greet me, as if he couldn’t believe I showed up, as if he were really impressed. He surprised me when he linked his hand into mine and he pulled me and we ran together, talking nonsense and laughing, until we got to Bunker Woods, where only wild animals and cool kids dared to go. Neat, I thought. He must like climbing trees too.

    Unexpectedly, under the moon, he wrapped me up in his arms, and lickety-split I realized it was an embrace unlike the ones I got from my parents and aunts and uncles. All my senses seemed to be magnified a hundred kazillion times, including his breathing in my ears, like gusts of wind.

    Roy Orbison was singing “Pretty Woman” on a transistor radio Larry had set down on a log. The high notes went through my body like the bow of a violin. I felt I was floating in the lightness of the moment, confused by his caress, concentrating on all my senses, imagining his at the same time I was studying the mighty oaks around us — what great tree houses and forts could be made in these surroundings.

    As he held me, I thought about something I once read: how bunny rabbits could simply die from lack of touch. I wondered how I’d ever survived up until this point without it. I felt like a wild animal, getting my first jolt when his lips gently grazed mine. I thought of the soft feathers of a baby bird; our lips together and I became a sparrow flying for the first time. I thought, Wow!

    The kiss — it’s monumental, like on the big screen. Every microscopic cell of my being explodes like magic, the stars multiply and twinkle and burst across the sky in applause, and I look at him through kaleidoscope eyes. His skin is tawny and warm. He smells like summer. We blossom as one, and we melt into candle wax too hot to touch and too confusing for me to contemplate.

    My tousled hair fell out of the shiny satin ribbon that held it, and I shuddered, afraid yet not afraid of my very first kiss, the most important one of all, and I was ready for it to tickle me silly, to be the one that I will never forget. And it was perfect because it was among nature with the birch and maples and pines, and small animals as our only witnesses, peeking at us in awe.

    We returned to the empty road, back to my house, and said our goodbyes. We never saw each other again. That was all we needed in our innocence, and it belonged only to us and no one else. Forever!

    I climbed back up to my bedroom window and landed on my mattress with my favorite old stuffed toy. The rabbit’s glass eyes looked frozen, as if he needed a hug more than I did, as if he had once been alive and kept in a cage, untouched, and then stuffed and stitched up with all his feelings stuck inside.

    Unable to sleep, I reached for my water globe on my nightstand, with the plastic boy and girl figurines glued together in a whirlwind of glitter . . . but, this boy, the “real” boy, somewhere not far from my bedroom window, had just shaken up my insides and was unattached to the globe I had within me. I was alone with my thoughts as though it had never happened. Or was I? Would he remember the experience in the same way I would? Would life continue on as before without a kiss review in the local newspaper?

    Mom used to say, “Don’t grow up too fast,” when she brushed my hair late at night. I guess I could have waited a little longer for my first kiss, especially because love is crazy kinda like magic is, and can disappear into the night — like Larry Hermann. Poof!

    Janet Lee Berg is the author of “Glitz of the Hamptons” and “Rembrandt’s Shadow,” a novel. A longtime “Guestwords” contributor, she lives in East Moriches.

    Background first.

    In the 2000s, we got the fictionalized but authentic “Mad Men” advertising agency: Sterling Cooper. Some say it was meant to mimic Doyle Dane Bernbach — the real, the remarkable originator of the best advertising New York has ever known, from the period “Mad Men” took place, the 1960s. Doyle Dane, as it came to be known, ran an ad in those years for Avis under the very famous “We Try Harder” campaign.

    The ad I refer to ran in magazines like Time and Life. The headline: “The writer of this ad recently rented an Avis car. Here’s what I found.”

    Not what he found, but what I found. The interesting, thrilling shift to first person, which proofreaders at other ad agencies would have chided the writer for, remained intact. DDB — another shorthand version of the shop — often delivered these kinds of sophisticated and clever punches. To entertain the reader. To stand out and be noticed.

    And they certainly were.

    The visual was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and the first two lines of copy read: “I write Avis ads for a living. But that doesn’t make me a paid liar.”

    Daring. Open. Honest. Truth. Exposing the brand for being sloppy, the copy continued. It was Avis’s way of saying that they had to be better, more vigilant, to beat Hertz, the number-one rental car company at the time.

    “We’re number two in rent-a-cars. So why go with us?” read another headline, the very first in the series, with the visual of what is also known as a peace sign, two fingers pointed up in a V, #2. It inaugurated the campaign, and each subsequent ad talked about how the underdog, Avis, was planning on closing the gap between the two. By trying harder.

    I don’t know if they ever did emerge triumphant. But since then, Enterprise (“We’ll pick you up” — do they, really? Even in Sheboygan, Wisc.?) and National (“Pick any car in the aisle and go!”) and Budget and Dollar and Rent-a-Wreck (that one is history) and Zipcar and others joined in the competition. A booming market, it seems, renting cars. A business that, like everything in the universe, has expanded. It’s a bit of a miracle that we still have only Coke and Pepsi in the cola wars.

    But this piece is not about colas or cars. It’s about cough drops. Pine Brothers Softchew cough drops.

    Not Luden’s, but Pine Brothers. Brands I remember for decades. Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln featured somehow on the package of one of those brands? No matter, but I wonder: Was he known for a sore throat?

    I keep digressing. I tend to. It’s not exactly A.D.D. or even A.D.H.D. It’s just that thoughts do occur to me as I write, and I find a certain relevance in including them no matter how wayward or off the point.

    But here’s the real point: Back in October of last year, watching something or other on television — although I know it wasn’t “Downton Abbey,” my favorite TV show, because they don’t have commercials on PBS, just fund-raisers, and often — a commercial came on for Pine Brothers. Martha Stewart walks into a room, sits down in a chair, and says: “Hello. I’m Martha. And I don’t do commercials. But I recently came across a product that I felt I just had to tell you all about. . . .”

    I’m paraphrasing a bit, and you can, if you wish, actually go to Google for the exact phraseology, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that she has done commercials. For American Express a while back, where her pool was mosaicked in shards of ripped-up credit cards. I don’t remember the point of that one. And then, there she was, and often, for Macy’s — a lot of spots with Donald Trump and Justin Bieber and others, during Christmastimes. No doubt she shilled for J.C. Penney when her stuff was sold there.

    So what was she saying? “Those of you who know me [does anyone really know her?] know I don’t do commercials.” The commercial ran again during the Golden Globes recently. “It’s because I believe in this product that I decided to do this one.” She actually sounded like she had a sore throat as she read her script.

    Turns out, though, her script was not actually written for her. It was written for Liza Minnelli. Which makes sense, because Liza really is a person who doesn’t do commercials. Oh, wait . . . I take that back. She did a funny Snickers commercial with Aretha Franklin in the campaign “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Betty White and Abe Vigoda started that on a football field during a Super Bowl years ago. Funny spots in a field of mostly mediocrity and worse. (Digression again.)

    But Liza Minnelli is hardly a spokeswoman for anything except, perhaps, rehab.

    Digging deeper into this untruth in advertising, I did find, online, that Liza backed out of the spot — right there! on the spot! — claiming it was way too much pressure. The Pine Brothers people said they turned to Martha Stewart after “our first actress had a nervous breakdown” just before filming. Ms. Minnelli had also sent a list of demands including black Egyptian cotton towels and a $400 coffee service.

    So, amazingly — I assume Ms. Stewart is a very busy lady — she got the call that same morning and presumably said, “Yes! I’m on my way!” The crew was all in place, the Waldorf Towers suite already chosen and paid for as location, and Martha was instantly able to step in.

    For a cool one million dollars.

    Hair and makeup took 10 minutes. The filming itself took all of 30. No quick cuts. No music track. Just Martha in a chair with her/Liza’s spiel.

    Forty minutes total. A 30-second spot. One million bucks.

    The script was not changed — how could it have been? It would have required so much back-and-forth between the agency and the brand manager and the director and who knows who else. The script was in place. Only the performer was changed to keep the star power, the celebrity quotient, intact.

    Astounding that there was not a thousand meetings to discuss this sudden and drastic casting change. Martha is nothing like Liza, though they’re contemporaries — Martha a bit older; one’s hair is platinum blond and the other’s dead black. I doubt that Liza cooks, and Martha certainly doesn’t sing. All they have in common is, perhaps, their diva-ness.

    No, Martha isn’t Liza. Martha seems way too controlled to have a nervous breakdown. Martha is quite professional. And Martha did not request two cartons of cigarettes on the shoot, as Liza did.

    Maybe she needed the cigarettes to make her voice sound even gruffer? Maybe she needed the cigarettes because they would have suppressed the breakdown?

    Cigarettes. Like the butts in the bygone Avis ad.

    Nowadays, cars don’t seem to have ashtrays, although you can still find them on airplane armrests.

    There is no cigarette advertising anymore.

    Avis would have a hard time running that ad that they did in the 1960s. But they still run that tagline from 50 years ago: “We Try Harder.”

    Shouldn’t the advertising industry do the same?

    Hy Abady has worked in advertising for close to 45 years. For 36 years a part-time resident of Amagansett, he will be spending next summer in East Hampton.

    When I was 8, my artistic parents divorced and my mother married an intelligent lawyer who took us from a small house to a much bigger house. The basement in our new house is where I learned to box.

    I was like a small mole, burrowing down into the dark, dank soil of that basement, and it quickly became my new home. It proved a refuge from the verbally violent atmosphere my mother unwittingly got us into. Boxing became my passion. The heavy bag, the light bag, and the brown leather, 16-ounce boxing gloves became my allies. I was a young boy and didn’t do introspection too well; all I knew was punching a heavy bag felt really good.

    The rigors and ecstasies of boxing lasted throughout my childhood. Anger became an exciting and profitable emotion, and now that I knew what to do with it, I refused to give it up. Boxing was brutal and bitter, but I loved it. At least that’s what I told myself.

    The truth was I hated boxing as much as I loved it. Boxing was my successful dysfunction.

    The angry dropouts in school became my tribal family. Ours was a rough clan of punks whose cardinal rules were “Shut up or put up” and “Never start a fight, but always end it” and “Walk softly and carry a big stick.” Our pastimes were sports, hanging out in town, and neglecting homework.

    For me, the ultimate goal of my dark, angry existence was to one day fight in Madison Square Garden for a Golden Gloves title. Throughout my school years I honed my arms, chest, and legs in preparation for my forthcoming epic battle in the Golden Gloves.

    Growing up, I purposely ignored my mind’s development. My deep, underlying belief was in the strength and nobility of my body. Unlike my belligerent stepfather, who battered us with his intelligent tongue, my body was my weapon, not my brain.

    At 18, I finally entered the Gloves. Week after week, I beat my opponents until I reached the finals. The night of the finals, I was sick with the flu and weighed six and a half pounds lighter than normal. Weakened, but still confident, I stepped through the ring ropes of Madison Square Garden and lost a close three-round decision. Losing was horrible.

    Soon, my boxing family began to break up, too. Some guys entered the pro boxing ranks, some went to work, and others landed in jail. Somehow I squeaked into college. I quit boxing as if I were quitting a drug. I was afraid it would fatally distract me from my studies, and I didn’t want to become an occasional boxer.

    So I plunged into a life of books, libraries, and endless studies. I began hitting books instead of people. The classroom became my ring, but I had to work double-time in order to overcome my lackluster academic past. I rarely spoke of my previous life. There were too many clichés and preconceptions about flat-nosed pugs to overcome.

    Years later, in my mid-30s, I found myself working as an English teacher in New York. For me, becoming a high school teacher was like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. I had always convinced myself that I was born with more fast-twitch muscle in my body than quick synapses in my brain. College had proved to be an emotional roller coaster, but it was there where I discovered that punching out a perfect paragraph was fundamentally more profitable and exciting than punching someone’s face.

    One afternoon, after teaching school, I entered a local boxing gym. Although I had never truly abandoned boxing, it set about saving me once more — this time from a gnawing sense of middle-aged alienation and hollowness. I didn’t drop to my knees in great happiness or feel a rush of adrenalin. I was older and wiser, and the youthful fantasy of Golden Gloves redemption had long melted away.

    When I first hung up the gloves as a kid, I was relieved not to be getting smacked on the nose anymore. Life was gentler. I could eat juicy hamburgers and tasty cupcakes whenever I wanted, but I always felt as though something had been subtracted from my flesh. My blood never pumped so fast. Did I miss the human contact?

    I began training again.

    One day, the gym owner called me over. “Wanna be my head coach?” he said. “You c’n work nights, after teachin’.”

    I looked at his damaged face, the sweaty fighters, and the grimy gym. What I once saw as brilliant, beautiful, even magical, I now saw as ordinary, ignorant, and even pathetic.

    Was I too soft for this again? Was I more comfortable with the civility of teaching?

    “In’erested?” he slurred.

    New York City is the mecca of boxing, and there is truth in that name. Many confused young boys have started out as punks in these dark, violent gyms, fought in the Golden Gloves, and ended up world champions. Two of my friends did. But did I want to be part of this wild, dangerous, stupid, crazy sport anymore? Beating people up? Damaged faces and brains?

    “Well?” he said.

    Did I want to burrow down into my stepfather’s dark, dank basement again?

    I looked at the man’s flat nose. “Boxing is stupid!” I said to myself. “I hate boxing. I hated it the first day I laced up my first pair of gloves down in my basement. I hated it 10 years later when I quit. But boxing saved my life. It was the bloodsucking leech that fed upon my anger, my hurt, my hate, and my fear. Boxing purified me. That’s why I love it.”

    “Okay,” I told him.

    A month later, a middleweight named Denny walked into the gym. “You the coach?”

    I nodded.

    “I wanna enter the Gloves,” he said, dropping his duffle bag to the floor.

    What personal pain had brought Denny here? Did he have the same appetite for violence that I once had?

    He continued looking at me.

    Was this the circle of life? There were still so many unhappy memories breathing in my gut about my stepfather’s sad basement. Could I convince myself that by coaching Denny I could sculpt beauty into his body and brain? When a kid moves sweetly, is that art? Does a coach chisel a human statue?

    “Why don’t you get outta here and learn how to write a perfect paragraph instead of learning how to throw a perfect punch,” I almost spit.

    “I need a coach,” he said, rolling his wide shoulders.

    I stared at Denny and saw my own face. “Okay,” I whispered, “suit up.”

    Sure enough, Denny’s past was miserable: a mother’s suicide, a father’s death, and his own heroin addiction. I watched him gracefully punish the heavy bag and murder his reflection in the mirror. Here was a boy-bomb with beautiful muscular violence just begging to be molded.

    If Martha Graham can sculpt a ballerina, I can sculpt a fighter. If she can educate toes, I can educate fists.

    Three months later, I pried the ring ropes open with my foot and arms and Denny stepped into the ring to fight for the Golden Gloves middleweight title in Madison Square Garden. We looked at each other silently, but at the same time held back, afraid of what each other’s eyes were saying. There was a patina of Vaseline and sweat on his chiseled face.

    The bell rang. I sat in the corner and watched him pound out an elegant, passionate, and lopsided decision over his opponent. Denny was a thing of great beauty — a wonderful work of art.

    Boxing is insane. But it’s a healthy insane.

    As the referee raised Denny’s hand in victory and the crowd cheered its approval, I realized that I had climbed out of that dark basement and a part of me was up in that ring with him.

    Peter Wood, an English teacher at White Plains High School who spends summers in East Hampton, is the author of “Confessions of a Fighter: Battling Through the Golden Gloves” and “A Clenched Fist: The Making of a Golden Gloves Champion,” both from Ringside Books. The 2014 Golden Gloves wrap up April 17 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

    The following is a list of upcoming events that, due to unforeseen circumstances, may or may not happen.

This Week

    A benefit for the families of those lost at sea will be held at the New York Yacht Club on Sunday night. The scheduled after-dinner speaker is the actor Alec Baldwin, who has said that he feels a special connection to the charitable organization, Friends of Jonah, which is sponsoring the event, because his great-great-uncle was a waiter on the Titanic.

    Mr. Baldwin has often spoken of his own brush with a watery grave, telling of how he once got soaking wet in a sudden downpour at a beach party in East Hampton at high tide.

Next Week

    HBO Home Video is set to release Alec Baldwin’s “From Fat to Fit,” in which the actor demonstrates his muscle-strengthening exercises, such as high kicks adapted from the Rockettes’ “March of the Wooden Soldiers.” Mr. Baldwin devised a complete fitness program for himself while watching the dailies of “It’s Complicated.” After losing his court battle to have the film shelved, the actor began making simple changes in his lifestyle. Now, all of his contracts stipulate that he cannot be compelled to play a scene that calls for him to eat osso buco.

    And to ensure that he keeps in shape, he has signed on to play Tony Curtis’s role in a remake of “Trapeze,” which will require him to do a triple summersault without a net. Mr. Baldwin advises his viewers to follow his example and engage in activities that keep them active, such as dancing the mambo.

Next Month

    A panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y titled “Celebrity Worship and the Declaration of Independence” will be moderated by Alec Baldwin. The panel will discuss, among other things, whether “the pursuit of happiness” is a euphemism for the pursuit of celebrities. Mr. Baldwin will recount the problems he has faced as a result of being famous, including being turned down by the co-op board of a building on Central Park West.

Late Next Month

    Kim Jong-un will receive a visit from a second Hollywood celebrity next month, when Alec Baldwin will spend a night in Pyongyang on his way to Japan to star in a Kabuki version of “Death of a Salesman.” The North Korean leader has let it be known that he admires Mr. Baldwin more than any other leading man except Ryan Gosling. As a bread-and-butter gift for his host, the actor plans to bring a DVD of Mr. Kim’s favorite movie, “Working Girl.”

This Summer

    CBS announced that it will air a new late-night talk show hosted by Alec Baldwin, despite the notorious cancellation of the actor’s MSNBC show due to his angry rant at a photographer who was trying to take pictures of him, his wife, his child, and his doorman. Mr. Baldwin reportedly ran down the street after the man, calling him a “j-rk.” To forestall further incidents, the actor has agreed to spend at least two weeks a year undergoing sunbathing therapy at a Malibu treatment center.

Next Fall

    Rockefeller Center executives disclosed yesterday that the centerpiece of next year’s tree lighting ceremony will be Alec Baldwin reading “The Night Before Christmas” in Latin. The actor was quick to say that although he has immersed himself in the language by visiting the Colosseum, he does not yet read, speak, or recognize it. “The text will be written out phonetically,” he explained, “the way Torah prayers are written out in Reformed synagogues on Yom Kippur.” (Last summer Mr. Baldwin was guest rabbi at Temple B’nai Shalom in Great Neck, Long Island.)

    It should be a busy holiday season for Mr. Baldwin, who is scheduled to join the American Ballet Company for several weeks, dancing the part of the Nutcracker Prince in “The Nutcracker.”

Next Year

    Simon and Schuster says that it plans to publish “Samuel Johnson: A Busy Life,” Alec Baldwin’s 1,000-page biography of the 18th century’s towering man of letters. The book reportedly took Mr. Baldwin four weeks to write. The actor revealed that he has been enthralled by the writings of Dr. Johnson ever since, at the age of 6, he found a copy of “Rasselas” in the playground.

To Be Determined

    The attorney representing Alec Baldwin, who was found guilty of stalking one of his fans, says that he intends to appeal the verdict. During the trial, the lawyer showed news footage of the actor attending the premiere of a new movie in Los Angeles on the same night that the fan claims Mr. Baldwin followed her into the lobby of her apartment building in Astoria, Queens, and forced her to accept an autographed picture of himself.

    The attorney argued that his client could not have been in two places at once and contends that the jury was unduly influenced by a recent rumor that Mr. Baldwin is triplets, only one of whom is retiring from public life.

    Bette-Jane Raphael is a journalist, celebrity groupie, and onetime Amagansett resident.

    Several of my friends on eastern Long Island have read my new book, “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds,” and they have asked me to weigh in on your deer wars. So here are a couple of thoughts:

    You are not unique. Fights over what to do, or what not to do, about overabundant or nuisance deer (or geese, coyotes, bears, beavers, you name it), or even whether there are too many, are now going on in literally thousands of communities (but they don’t seem to know it or to learn from one another).

    In researching my book, I attended a lot of local “deer problem” meetings — unfortunately. The shouting usually starts early, and one common refrain is that people have “no right” to kill, cull, destroy, slaughter, or whatever these beautiful and innocent wild creatures into whose habitat we have encroached.

    Some people say bring back “natural predators.” Two big deer predators historically were wolves and cougars. They count on killing deer to eat and would (in my opinion) make lively additions to the eastern Long Island ecosystems.

    Another big deer predator worth mentioning is man. In fact, research suggests that since the end of the last Ice Age man has killed more deer than all other predators combined.

    Now, about 10 million deer hunters annually kill about 6 million deer and, in many places, mainly traditional rural habitats, do an adequate job of managing white-tailed deer populations. But in suburban and exurban sprawl, this hasn’t worked.

    Some history: At the end of the 19th century, the conservation movement put an end to 400 years of the unbridled killing by settlers and commercial hunters of anything wild that they could sell — meat, feathers, fur, and anything for which they could find a market. By 1890, white-tailed deer had been reduced to an estimated 350,000 from a 1492 population believed to number more than 30 million.

    Deer were slowly restocked in newly created refuges. In 1906, for example, 50 Michigan whitetails were transplanted to Pennsylvania, which, like many Eastern states, had no deer at all. Wild birds and animals began a slow climb back to plenty under the so-called North American Model in which wildlife belonged to all the people, with equal access for all willing to obey government management rules. It slowly began to work.

    Then, after World War II, Americans began sprawling out of cities and off farms. By 1970, we had more sprawl dwellers than farmers or city slickers. By the 2000 census an absolute majority of Americans lived not on farms or in cities but in the vast in-between. Where family farms once thrived, we now have sprawl that has filled up with trees and, increasingly, wild animals and birds.

    Deer management in the sprawl hasn’t worked because sprawl man has largely opted out of the predation business. He doesn’t hunt and he doesn’t want others to hunt. In other words, he doesn’t want deer managed. Decades ago, before deer were a problem, he began peppering his landscape with firearms restrictions in the name of safety (sometimes a guise for anti-hunting sentiment). Safety is relative. Hunters kill about 100 or so people annually, usually each other in cases of mistaken identity. Nowadays, deer kill twice that many in vehicle crashes, and send 29,000 people to hospitals.

    Bottom line: The historic range of the white-tailed deer is in the eastern third of the United States, where two-thirds of Americans live, most in sprawl. Sprawl man’s prohibitions — laws, regulations, signs, sentiment — mean this: In just the last few decades, for the first time in 11,000 years, huge swaths of the white-tailed deer’s historic range have been put off-limits to its biggest predator.

    Put another way, lethal management of deer by man has a very long history. Nowadays, a rule of thumb says two-thirds of the female deer population must die annually just to stabilize (let alone reduce) the whitetail population. But, suddenly in some locales, we want to opt out.

    So the people who ask “What right do we have?” are asking the wrong question. The real question is: What are our stewardship responsibilities on behalf of the ecosystems we inhabit? As a keystone species capable of managing our landscapes for the good of all their inhabitants — animals, birds, plants, trees, and even people — we are abrogating those responsibilities in these prolonged fights over deer.

    Jim Sterba was a foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for more than four decades. “Nature Wars” was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

    By the summer of 1979, I had lived in New York City for just over a year, toiling away in a lowly position in the public relations office of a dance company. I was 26 years old but still surprisingly starry-eyed for someone that age. I had caught the bug for writing. Not fiction — I can’t make up a story on a dare, has always been my refrain. I saw myself as an opinionator, an essayist, and thought my own name’s resemblance to that of the great E.B. White to be of vague significance.

    My start was humble but true. I was placing Broadway theater reviews in an obscure Village rag, as well the occasional op-ed in out-of-town newspapers.

    That year was pre-AIDS awareness and post-pill, still a heady time of sexual freedom in which a young woman, in possession of a party invitation, could find herself in a passionate relationship by night’s end. The party in question was a bacchanalia on East 79th Street. In true Southern fashion, a homecoming queen and king were crowned and drunkenly carried aloft to I’m not sure where.

    I busied myself exchanging heated looks from across the crowded room with an unusually tall man. As the crowd shifted, we were thrown together. With an Alabaman lilt, he introduced himself as Winston Groom. In a strange coincidence, his name was familiar to me. His first novel, “Better Times Than These,” had been hailed by The Times earlier that week as one of a handful of authentic Vietnam War narratives. I had gone on a fruitless search for the book and told him so. He groaned at what he saw as a line and spirited me off for the weekend.

    That Memorial Day weekend was cold and wet. Winston had rented a ramshackle Victorian place outside Bridgehampton. It still stands on Route 27 today, now a bilious Pepto Bismol pink, though I am pretty sure it was barn red in those days. The house was dark and comfortingly gloomy, bearing no resemblance to the spacious, airy interiors we associate with a Hamptons summer today. It had a Boo Radley aspect. The suspicion that it might be haunted was heightened by the persistent chords of what sounded like a violin emanating out of thin air.

    To our delighted surprise, however, raspberries grew wild by the bucketful at the edge of the property, and the kitchen was so well equipped that it demanded committed forays into domesticity.

    As a newly anointed Southern war novelist, Winston had moved easily into the East End’s extended literary enclave. Though James Jones, the author of “From Here to Eternity,” had died of congestive heart failure the year before, he was still the reigning hero in spirit. His big-hearted widow, Gloria, was the center of this universe. Of Gloria’s many claims to fame, her legs doubled for Marilyn Monroe’s in the subway updraft scene of the movie “The Seven Year Itch.” Gloria, a former actress, was in her 50s by then, but she was attractive enough to make this claim thoroughly believable.

    The Jones house was a hub for much activity. Notably, it was the site of a standing weekly poker game, in which participants wore green visors and burned cigars down to nubs in ubiquitous ashtrays. All made themselves at home even when Gloria couldn’t be found. One afternoon I came across a distinguished man whipping up something in a pan. He explained he was challenging himself to come up with an original dish using the expired ingredients in the refrigerator. I only later learned that it was Craig Claiborne, then the celebrated food critic for The Times.

    That summer was launched with Gloria’s party for the “60 Minutes” anchor Shana Alexander, whose new book, “Anyone’s Daughter,” explored the kidnapping of Patty Hearst — that day’s real-life mystery. That I can’t remember a soul who was there is more a testament to my abject terror than anything it says about the event itself. I was out of my depth and feared that my nascent romance would lead to a summer in which no one would be much interested in talking to me, surrounded as I was by all that literary accomplishment. But Winston’s aura of success rubbed off on me. His friends were unfailingly kind and at least appeared to take my ambitions seriously.

    We spent many hours that summer at Bobby Van’s. Its then-dark interior looked like the set for “The Iceman Cometh” and was the scene of debauchery all would have the good manners not to mention the next day. We met the writer Willie Morris often for lunch. He held court at a front table every day wearing the same polyester tweed pants, as if he couldn’t be bothered to go home to change. Willie was sweetly funny and easy to like. Years before, he had written “North Toward Home” — a revered Southern classic — and was the famously deposed editor of Harper’s magazine.

    At this point in his life, though, he seemed to have run low on energy. I thought of him as old and was shocked to learn that he was only 44. He was completing his friend James Jones’s unfinished novel, “Whistle.” The next year Willie would return to Mississippi, where he married happily and moved on to many more great literary feats.

    That summer I was particularly dazzled by Irwin Shaw, who had come out of the starting gate in 1948 with “The Young Lions,” his World War II epic, but was far more famous for the lurid mini-series, starring Nick Nolte, that had been made from his novel “Rich Man, Poor Man.”

    Irwin was neither young nor handsome, but he radiated a sexual energy that would have been apparent to a woman of any age. His wife, Marian, kept a gimlet eye on his every move. According to Winston, Irwin wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” — his short story about a husband with a wandering eye — in a New York hotel. When Marian found and read the draft, she threw it out the window in a rage. Irwin watched his pages fluttering out of the hotel window on his way back from a walk. “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” was part of his collection “Five Decades,” which came out that year. I still have a copy he inscribed, “To Ellen, who I hope will send me her book after 50 years.”

    Much of what I learned that summer stays with me today, but it was Joseph Heller’s words that truly amazed me. At a dinner party, he told me that his work always depended on the first sentence that he wrote. Sometimes that sentence would lead to a “Catch-22,” but it would more often dead-end into chapters that were abandoned in drawers all over his house.

    Though it doesn’t make it any more excusable, I was more than a little tipsy when I threw myself down in Joe Heller’s lap at a lawn party in Southampton. It led to an epic argument with Winston, but we had no shortage of those. This seemed fitting to me, all part of what becoming a true writer was all about in my mind. Sometimes I would leave for New York in high dudgeon, only to find myself headed back to Bridgehampton the next week.

    I don’t know if it’s the rose-colored glasses, or whether the South Fork wasn’t quite the snarl of traffic that it is today. The vast potato fields, still around then, were sometimes covered in white flowers and a revelation to me. Even the prosaic potato seemed to strive toward a kind of poetry. As I made my way to Bridgehampton on Fridays, the mist hovering on Route 27 at twilight filled me with affectionate awe. I began to see the East End as a place where I might like to live someday, though the thought was a distant reality.

    Alas, my romance with Winston wouldn’t even survive the fall — though, over the years there were spur-of-the-moment rendezvous in attempts to rekindle the romance. The attraction had legs but the relationship wasn’t destined for permanence. He would join the pantheon of well-known writers with his novel “Forrest Gump” and several Civil War histories. He returned to Point Clear, Ala., to live and start a family.

    Life continued on in New York for me. While I thought of the Hamptons often, I would not return for more than 20 years. When I did, it was to a house I bought with my husband in Springs. In a marathon three months, I finally finished a manuscript for a first book I had imagined many years before.

    By then, of course, Willie Morris, Irwin Shaw, Gloria Jones, and Joe Heller were gone. But the memory of the summer of 1979 was and will always be an important part of the landscape that attracts and inspires me.

    Ellen T. White is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” from the Running Press, a humorous compendium of tips from the romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    I was a peculiar young man. People thought there was something wrong with me, and a lot of parents from our local school didn’t appreciate it when I hung out with their kids. I really didn’t like the same things as other kids.

    I wasn’t the first outsider who dreamt of being a writer. However, I didn’t want to be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald. I had no fantasies about being great and showing all those parents and kids who wanted to spurn me back then that they were wrong. Not me.

    I dreamt of being one of the people who wrote the summaries of novels and plays that we bought at exam time. I idealized the writers of Monarch Notes. If there were CliffsNotes, I wanted to have my name attached to the synopsis of a classic.

    On lonely Saturday afternoons when the other boys in our neighborhood were playing touch football, I dreamt of writing the summary of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Hamlet muses about whether it is better to exist or not. Dying, sleeping, and dreaming are all offered as alternatives. But no conclusion is reached during the soliloquy.

    Richard III was another Shakespearean character I was intrigued by. Richard asks if a horse is available and subsequently offers up his worldly possessions in payment for the animal was my succinct précis of the famed “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” speech.

    Everyone is dealt a different hand. You get what you get, as the expression goes, and as it turned out I never got to be one of the authors of a work like the Monarch “Henry IV, Part 1.” Part of becoming an adult involves accommodating reality and learning to go after the possible. You might have been in love with Marilyn Monroe, but you were more likely to end up with Emily Monroe.

    Actually, Emily happened to be captain of the girls field hockey team in college, and while I thought I was lowering the bar in going after her, she had a different perception of her position on the food chain and roundly rejected my advances. This was my first experience of lowering my sights and then having them lowered again.

    Anyway, it’s a long story, but being unhappily married and divorced, I just lived with someone for many years. Recently she told me she couldn’t take it anymore. She informed me she was leaving me for someone else. I tried to explain to her the statistics that most divorced people end up marrying the same person again. But her only response was that it was a good thing we never got married.

    But getting back to my childhood dreams. After being turned down by the companies that produce Cliff, Spark, and Monarch Notes, I tried to raise money from my family and friends to start my own venture. I even opened a Kickstarter account, but the idea of a publishing firm devoted to producing synopses of classic works didn’t seem to fire anyone’s imagination — at least not with me at the helm. So I lowered my sights again and decided to sell the whole concept to Hollywood.

    What about Kenneth Branagh in the Monarch “Richard III”? I would go to the publisher and buy the dramatic rights to the summary of the Shakespearean action. I was sure no one had ever done this before, and I figured I’d finally come up with a realistic plan by which I could attain success in life. Maybe I wouldn’t be the writer of a great Shakespearean summary, but at least I would have the vicarious thrill of shepherding one to the screen.

    As of this writing all the major studios have passed on this project, but there are many blockbuster films that are taken up by independents after the major studios turn them down. And speaking of realism and lowering the bar, I think this is a realistic outcome for my project. I may not end up satisfying my childhood dreams, but I’ll be rich.

    Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post.