Dear Mr. Amtrak Media Man,

    Thank you for taking my call yesterday. You have no idea how much I appreciate anyone from Amtrak giving me the time of day. You asked me to pass along all the details of my recent Amtrak experience so you could pass along all the details to your superiors so they could . . . well, I don’t know what they could do, or should do, so I’ll get right to the details.

    It started on a rainy Sunday afternoon at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. My companion and I were booked on the 1:30 afternoon train to New York City. Anticipating a gaggle of holiday travelers, we arrived an hour early at the station, which is a beautiful building and deserves some serious gawking.

    Our train was listed on the big board as number 666. Even if you Amtrak people have just a cursory knowledge of Dan Brown novels, not to mention the Holy Bible, you would know that 666 is a pretty frightening number for a train, or any vehicle really. I’m no mathematician, but there must be a zillion other three-digit numbers available to Amtrak number-writers. I can only hope the committee members who dreamed up that number had a good demonic laugh.

    When the departing track was announced, around 12:15, we noticed other people immediately lining up. The line was 40 deep before you could say “The Da Vinci Code,” so we grabbed our bags and hustled into line. A lot of other trains were completely sold out that day, so folks were a little anxious. We boarded the 666 at 1:30. And found two fine seats, stored our bags above, took off our raincoats and hats, and settled in for a sweet ride back to New York City.

    I was reading an Xmas present, Little Star literary magazine, when I felt the first droplet of water bounce on my head. I paid it little attention. It was followed by another droplet, however, and then another, and then I looked up to the ceiling to see the source of the raindrops. A leak. By now, my companion was getting splashed too. Wanting to move, I looked up and down the car for other seats. Instead, I saw the conductor seated nearby and I walked over, introduced myself, and told him about the leak.

    “Oh, yeh, we have a few on this train.”

    “What do you suggest I do?”

    “Find another seat.”

    “I’m not sure there are any. Are you?”

    “I don’t really remember. It’s pretty crowded.”

    “Do you want to know what seat I am in, so you can report it?”

    “I’m sure it’s been reported already. More than once.”

    “But never repaired?”

    “I can’t fix the hole where the rain is coming, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

    “No, I didn’t think you could.”

    “So what do you want me to do?”

    “I don’t know. What do you usually do when someone is being rained on?”

    “I’m doing it.”

    “What do you think I should do?”

    “Find other seats.”

    “I’m not sure there are any.”

    “You’re on your own there, buddy.”

    I went back to my soaked seat and gathered the luggage from the overhead compartment and started walking through the rain, I mean train. And then the next car. And the next. Until I found one seat in one car and another seat in another car. My companion and I did not do much talking on our trip to N.Y.C.

    The next morning, I called Amtrak to register a complaint and perhaps help out the next poor schnook without an umbrella. I waited on hold for 50 minutes, listening to classical music and a tape that said, every few minutes, “Your call is important to us. All the operators are dealing with other customers.” There must have been a lot of unhappy customers, I thought, or very few complaint takers. Or both.

    Finally, a woman’s voice.

    “Hello, my name is Christina. How can I help you?”

    “Hello, Christina. How long do you think someone should wait to talk to customer service?”

    “I don’t know. You tell me.”

    “Well, 50 minutes seems a little long for good customer service.”

    “Can I have your complaint, sir? There are other people waiting on hold.”

    “That was my first complaint, Christina.”

    “What was?”

    “The wait was too long.”

     “Many people wait for over an hour, so I would consider myself lucky.”

    “Over an hour? That’s some customer service you have there.”

    “We have 50 people here and we are busy all the time.”

    “I can’t imagine why that is, Christina, can you?”

    “Can we get passed this issue and onto your complaint?”

    “Okay, Christina. My name is Bruce, by the way.”

    (Silence.)

    “You still there, Christina?”

    I told Christina my story, as succinctly as I could, on account of all the other customers waiting for service.

    “Did your train arrive at its destination?”

    “Yes it did.”

    “You cannot receive restitution if your train arrived at its destination.”

    “Okay, Christina, that’s fine, but . . .”

    “I take complaints. I don’t argue. Thank you for calling.”

    And Christina was gone.

    Geez. That was unsatisfying. So I went online and found the phone number of the Amtrak media person, Northeast division. I left my name and number, and what do you know, he called me back. I told him my story.

    “Mr. Buschel, write everything down and send me an email with the time and date and train number and ticket number and what exactly happened, and I will take it to my superiors.”

    “That’s what I do for a living.”

    “What?”

    “Write down my experiences.”

    “Then your descriptions will be accurate.”

    “But I have already spent $175 and 45 minutes in line in Philly, and 10 minutes getting rained on, and 15 minutes looking for a seat, 60 minutes separated from my companion, 50 minutes calling Amtrak, and now I am talking to you. It’ll probably take another half-hour finding my ticket stub, and then writing it all down, and, well, I am a very slow writer. I figure another two or three hours minimum. Which would bring us to a total of around five hours of doing stuff I didn’t want to do. And why am I doing all this stuff?”

    “So I can pass along the information to my superiors.”

    “And what do you think they will do?”

    “There will be no restitution, but beyond that, I’m not sure.”

    “Ever hear of The East Hampton Star?”

    “That’s not an Amtrak line, is it?”

    Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

    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.

 

    How do you like them shrimp?

    It was never the shrimp, or the eggs running onto the extra bacon strips. It was not really the view, although it is fabulous.

    It was at those white plastic tables, on a plastic throne, where he held court. He was the knight of the grill, flipping eggs and burgers, filling Styrofoam cups with his best brew.

    There was the thwack of that screen door opening into the grill’s steaming heat that filled the square, enclosed porch. There was the crackle of that grill, the words “Hey, where ya been? I was going to call you.” He would call, you know. He knew if you’d been missing. He worried about his friends.

    Walls lined with necessities of camping, candy everywhere, and the ring of the arcade machines, that was Joe Kaelin’s concert hall. Marshmallows, chocolate bars, containers of milk, eggs, and butter, ketchup, and hot dogs filled shelves alongside charcoal and matches and fishing gear. Joe kept basketballs and volleyballs to lend out so kids could shoot hoops and play at nets just outside the Cedar Point Park store. These reminders of simple things are what bind family and friends, the stuff that memories are made of.

    Joe knew about memories. He and his wife, Mary Ann, ran the store for 31 summers. Many customers who had gone to the park as children were now taking their own children to meet Joe and Mary Ann, to enjoy pleasures that were cheap but priceless — a hot marshmallow glowing with embers skewered on a stick found in the woods, or a firefly lighting up a jar like your own miniature moon.

    Joe had wood for endless campfires and ice cream for late-night snacks. Every Saturday he ran a movie night for the children, who brought blankets and sleeping bags, lying under the stars in pajamas as they watched a carefully chosen movie — Joe was a PG guy.

    He was a raconteur. Not “Joe the plumber” from that famous campaign, but Joe, chief chef and bottle washer, procurer of treats and necessities at Cedar Point. Teller of jokes, weaver of stories that would lead into jokes, food critic. Insisting on a critique of those shrimp — they were the best, it was the sauce, you know!

    Joe got the recipe for the sauce from one of his many cruises. He loved to travel in the winter, visiting Mexico, Europe, and the Caribbean. Did he love those cruises for the cruising or because he always managed to get comps? It was a game, though it came with that recipe for the infamous sauce for the shrimp.

    But it was those bagels, oh those bagels, that kept the locals coming in. Oh how Joe loved those bagels! He picked them up fresh every day at the crack of dawn. No one delivers to Cedar Point Park — too far out of the Hamptons loop, both physically and metaphorically. So Joe would rise early and seek out the bagels, the foundation on which he built his breakfasts of eggs, bacon, ham, and of course his coffee. That coffee was like the nectar of the gods, but it came in Styrofoam cups.

    The meal was presented in a Styrofoam container with three sections. Joe wrapped the necessary plastic utensils in a paper napkin on the top of the box. If the knife or fork was missing he would be visibly upset. Presentation was everything.

    He tallied the number of eggs he flipped, bagels he cut, the rolls consumed, and always the number of bags of ice. Joe kept a tally because it established how many people he served, not how much profit he made. His trips to the restaurant depot for the famed shrimp salad he piled on kaiser rolls became the stuff of legend. His burgers were the best value in the Hamptons, according to Joe, because they sat on kaiser rolls, not the sissy buns of those other places.

    He loved food. He loved good value. He loved his Republicans (for which we forgave him). He loved being at Cedar Point Park because what he really loved was schmoozing with his customers.

    Joe did not need to man the park store. He was comfortably retired from Coca-Cola. Joe was at the park, spending long hours and hot days at the store, because he loved the interaction with the people. His customers were campers who might return year after year and local residents looking for an un-Hampton dining experience. The conversation was on the house, as were his jokes and advice.

    Joe continued to work last summer, although his cancer was getting harder to control. Mary Ann took up a lot of the extra work because she knew how much Joe loved being at the store. The day before he died Joe was planning for summer 2014 at the park.

    We know he is flipping burgers in heaven now, but for some of us he will always be seated on the plastic throne, telling jokes, as he greets us when the screen door thwacks.

     Jackie Friedman is a summertime resident of East Hampton.

    Joe Kaelin, a native of Riverhead, died on Oct. 23 at the age of 71.

 

    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.

 

    My father, Edwin Courtland Mulford, was born in East Hampton on March 16, 1896. He first saw the light of day in Congress Hall, the Mulford family homestead overlooking the village green, directly across from Home, Sweet Home and what became known later as the Mulford Farm. The land on which Congress Hall stands had been granted to William Mulford in 1650, and had never been out of the family. His parents were David Green Mulford and Elizabeth Osborne Mulford, and he was descended from virtually all of East Hampton’s founding families.

    When he was 21 years old, the United States entered World War I, and he knew immediately that he would be a participant. He joined the Army in December 1917 and was sent to Camp Upton for training. From there he was sent to France, where he participated in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. He survived, and was shipped home early in 1919, returning to the family farm. He married Charlotte Davis, his high school sweetheart, and I was their only child, arriving on the scene in 1931.

    As a boy I knew my father had participated in the war, not because he talked about it, because he never did. It was as though that period of his life had never happened. I became aware of it when I found and subsequently pored over two books. One was titled “History of the 77th Division,” and the other “A History of the 305th Infantry.” These books, plus his Army helmet and uniform, which I discovered in the attic, opened up a whole new chapter in my father’s life that I scarcely knew existed.

    That was only the beginning, however. Much later, some 80 years after my father returned from France, I discovered a packet of letters tied in a faded ribbon. They were letters exchanged between my father and his parents during his time in the Army. As my wife, our two adult children, and I read those letters, tears streamed down our cheeks. For those letters caught the horror and sense of separation experienced by those young men huddled in the trenches of France, as well as glimpses into life in East Hampton nearly 100 years ago.

    The first group of letters and postcards, dated from Dec. 3, 1917, until April 9, 1918, deals with life at Camp Upton. A number of them refer to the trips home over the weekends, provided by Ed Schaefer, owner of a taxi service in East Hampton. On Dec. 18 Dad tells of a trip back to Camp Upton. “We spent 2 hours in Bridgehampton looking for one of the fellows. One of the headlights went out and we got a lantern. We got there at 4:30 a.m.”

    As spring approached, the mood of the letters changed. He writes: “Oh, how I wish I was home beginning the spring work. Never mind, I will be home next spring anyway, don’t worry.”

    Two letters, one dated April 29 and one May 2, indicate that the Atlantic had been safely crossed. From this point on the letters are heavily censored.

    His thoughts went frequently to East Hampton and to the members of his family, as his letter of May 24 indicates: “France is a very pretty country but I think England has it beat a little. Tell Papa I have seen some of the best looking horses that I have ever seen. By the way the paper [The East Hampton Star] looked, I should think the Old Town was pretty lively. Two or three dances a week, what more do they want, but that isn’t doing me any good, is it?”

    His almost casual references to the horrors of the trenches are interspersed with concerns about life at Congress Hall. He worries that the houses might not be rented for the summer, or that his father was working too hard. He asks how many chickens his father had raised that year, and whether the hay was in.

    Since Dad knew his letters were censored, he would often write “I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.” One letter in the packet, written by his friend George Eichorn and somehow sent by George “on the sly,” paints a gruesome picture. George writes, “I am in a place called Fiames . . . and we captured a few towns and two big hills. It cost us a few men but it cost the Germans a good many more. We also captured a lot of prisoners. The gas the Germans send over us is awful. It burns the skin right off any place where you sweat.” George then mentions the names of some of “our boys” who were wounded, and then the name of one who “was blown to pieces as we could not find any trace of him at all after the battle.”

    On Oct. 20, only a few weeks before the end of the war, Dad wrote to his sister: “Well, Sis, I have seen a little fighting but I didn’t mind much. You can tell Dr. Stokes [the former minister of the Presbyterian Church] I had the chance to get eight German scalps for him, but I took pity on them and took them prisoner instead. Tell Mother I have received her letters and, O, how glad I was to have Pop write those few lines.”

    On Nov. 17: “Of course by this time you have heard of the wonderful news. Well, I was right at the front when the last shot was fired. I won’t bother to write much about the war, because I soon expect to be home to tell you all about it. Of course, after everything is over, I had to go to work and have a nice little boil come on the top of my instep caused by a bad shoe.”

    That boil turned out to be more than Dad had bargained for, as it continued to bother him for months and led to his return home on a hospital ship. By March 1919, Dad was back in East Hampton. His parents, about whom he fretted while in France, both lived into their 80s.

    The song “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” certainly didn’t apply to Dad. During the rest of his long life, he left East Hampton seldom and always reluctantly. He maintained the family property on the corner of Main Street and Buell Lane meticulously until his death, at age 80, in 1976.

    David E. Mulford is a retired Presbyterian minister who continues his fascination with family and East Hampton history. He and his wife live near Princeton, N.J.

    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.

 

    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.

    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.

    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.