I remember the writing session as though it were yesterday: Ringo tapped away on a worn-out Liverpool phone book with two skinny, warped wood drumsticks; George holed himself in the bathroom, humming a tune his band mates refused to help him with, “Mmm my Lord, mmm my Lord.” John stuffed another box of Chiclets gum in his mouth while Paul kept pruning his hair in the mirror with a five-inch black plastic comb he was given by a production assistant when he filmed “A Hard Day’s Night.” Me, I stared out onto the Thames from the second-floor rear window of Apple Records’ offices, piecing together lyrics for a song I prayed would never happen in my life: “She’s Leaving Home.”

    Perhaps my recollection is a dream, fantasy, or flashback from the LSD John slipped me as we co-wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” but nevertheless, it feels as though I collaborated with the boys back when we was Fab.

    She’s leaving home . . . for college.

    Elizabeth was born in a hospital on Hempstead Turnpike that’s changed names three times since that glorious day in 1995 when my only and favorite daughter entered my life. When she was 3, I took her every morning at 8 for swimming classes in the white elephant known as the Aquatic Center in the heart of Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. When she was 4, I started her on piano classes twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday at 4:30, never missing a lesson in 10 years. When she was 5, I became her softball coach, shagging flies in any open field we could find, her easily reaching home plate on one bounce from deep center field. And now that she’s 18, I took her this month to Long Island University, where she’s beginning a four-year stint playing violin, piano, and guitar in the music program and joining the softball and swim teams.

    This time though, she won’t be returning home with her father.

    Elizabeth has never been away from home, never. When I met with her college counselor, Candace Stafford, at East Hampton High School last year to choose a college, the realization of her leaving home hit me like a ton of mortar, leaving me unable to sleep for 3 nights, 4 hours, 29 minutes.

    “Are you sure she passed all her classes?” I asked Ms. Stafford, hiding behind my Dollar Tree Wayfarer-type Tom Cruise sunglasses.

    Flipping through Elizabeth’s records, she answered, “Everything seems in order.”

    “I really don’t think she’s ready to graduate, perhaps another year here would be more appropriate,” I said.

    “With a 91 average, it would be hard to find a reason to hold her back,” she replied.

    Standing up, I leaned over, pointing my finger at her face, my diastolic meeting my systolic at 120. “She’s not ready to leave high school!”

    Quietly, she pushed back in her swivel chair, pencil to mouth, and asked with a James Bond-like coolness, “Is she not ready, or are you not ready?”

    Stunned, I turned and bolted out of her office, not seeing her again until the end of the graduation ceremony in late June under the circus tent on the grounds of the high school.

    “Looks like you made it,” Ms. Stafford exuberantly said, embracing me.

    “I guess so,” I answered, but quickly dashed away when I caught Superintendent Richard Burns’s Ultra Brite smile across the lacrosse practice field. I ran toward him — not in a stalking or menacing manner, that is.

    “Congratulations, your third child to graduate East Hampton High School,” he said with the biggest smile next to Jimmy Carter’s.

    “I got a little bad news,” I whispered.

    “Oh really?” he said.

    “I think my daughter was the ringleader in that SAT cheating scandal, so it looks like she’ll have to repeat the 12th grade, right?” I begged.

    “Too late now, her diploma’s waiting in the cafeteria, gotta go,” he said as he abruptly dropped his paperwork, jumped in his gray Jeep Cherokee, peeled away, and popped a wheelie, leaving a 19-foot skid mark in that brand-new $90 million parking lot.

    “See you in a few years,” he yelled as “Born to Be Wild” cranked from his car’s 8-track.

    And as I ponder my daughter’s future away from home, I rummage through my basement, scouring for the “Sgt. Pepper” album with the Colony Records label and the round $4.99 sticker stuck on its cellophane cover, recalling a time when “She’s Leaving Home” was only a song, not a reality.

    Frank Vespe, a previous “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.

    You read all the handouts with pictures of celebrities and society couples, the benefits and political fund-raisers (most recently one for the Clinton Foundation punctuated the summer season) at Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant, Topping Rose House. And then there are the normal covens of notoriety, the Artists and Writers Softball Game, Nick and Toni’s, and the bastions of old-line privilege like the Maidstone Club.

    What you tend not to read about are watering holes like the 7-Eleven in Southampton, which, as one case in point, has its own crowd of regulars who get the same special greeting afforded by the maitre d’hotel at more auspicious establishments. It’s not hard to get a table at the 7-Eleven in Southampton, or a 7-Eleven anywhere, simply because there usually aren’t any.

    So cognoscenti driving along 27 on a crowded weekend are increasingly finding the 7-Eleven to be the perfect stopping-off place, if you’re looking for a three-pack of chocolate-chip or oatmeal cookies, some unripened bananas, or one of the very ripe hot dogs that have been turning on its grill for hours. As mouthwatering as these specialites de la maison may seem, they’re nothing compared to the friendly service and convivial companionship that’s to be found at this unheralded gem of a convenience store.

    You don’t have to be Bill Clinton to get a hot dog at the 7-Eleven (though in the days when he was a fast-food lover, Bill was almost a computer printout of the customer 7-Eleven was marketing to), and where the 7-Eleven beats redoubts like Nick and Toni’s and the Palm is the fact that its casual atmosphere is free from social pressure (though of course if you’re feeling ambitious you can always drive down to Aquebogue and attend an outlier like the Modern Snack Bar, where you don’t have to have the trappings to get a great piece of duck with all the fixin’s). You can collect your Diet Coke, root beer, or Sprite from the 7-Eleven’s amply stocked refrigerated section and find friendly conversation with the small coterie of men and women who cluster outside with their takeout coffee, not having to worry about who you are talking to or who you’ll be seen with.

    There is no power-breakfasting inside or outside 7-Elevens. It’s probably not something that’s stated in any of the documents accompanying the franchise, but it’s a de facto state of affairs that’s almost guaranteed.

    The same cannot be said of establishments like Bridgehampton’s Candy Kitchen, once a user-friendly hangout for locals and even the most anonymous of tourists, which now has the same lack of pretension as the Fountain Coffee Room at the Beverley Hills Hotel.

    The 7-Eleven is a home away from home for those who are tired of being vetted for talent or appearance. It’s almost like Marx’s vision of the classless society — though it’s definitely not the dictatorship of the proletariat since it’s owned by a Japanese conglomerate, Seven & i Holdings, the fifth-largest retailer in the world. However, as a polity it’s the closet thing to working anarchy. Whatever you may think of the food, you don’t have to worry about your position on the food chain.

    Sure, you can hang out at the 10 Items and Under line at King Kullen, another gathering spot that’s off the beaten track for those seeking a change of pace after a weekend of frantic social climbing, but there’s a reason why 7-Eleven is called a convenience store. It’s convenient. It’s open 24 hours a day and it’s everywhere. Erewhon was the name of Samuel Butler’s elusive utopia. It’s almost “nowhere” backward, but the 7-Eleven is an example of a utopia that sets the bar low enough to exist.

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

    I have never been so sore from a game of Twister in my entire life. Every muscle in my body throbbed from holding various backbreaking positions while hovering over small, squirming children on the mat beneath me. You see, I was under the impression that Twister was this whole one-day deal, but apparently for kids in Cuba it’s a national pastime. I think we played that game more during this youth group mission trip than I ever did growing up. I’d forgotten how much fun it was.

    There was only one room with air-conditioning in the Presbyterian church where we stayed, and it was the girls’ bedroom, yet we all managed to be outside in the heat laughing and romping around until midnight on most days. Without social media bombarding us, the entire mission group was able to enjoy a different set of values than the ones we have back at home. I found myself remembering the simple joys of a game of cards, or dominoes, or Twister, and the long conversations we would all have sitting around the front porch watching the thunderstorms.

    Our youth group spent a lot of time together bonding and laughing with the children, and it felt like so much more than a mission trip. One night we even taught all the kids how to do the Macarena, which turned into a huge dance party in one of the side courtyards.

    Part of what made us all so close and in tune with the wonderful people around us was that there was no Internet, no cell service, nothing that would’ve passed in today’s plugged-in world as a form of entertainment. It was a total culture shock, or a living nightmare for most teenagers, depending on how you look at it. I only saw that it brought an incredibly varied group of people together in spite of vast cultural and language barriers.

    Our youth group had four boys and eight girls. We all stayed inside the church with the pastor, his wife, and their three sons. The entire family was musically gifted, so we took a few instruments for them, including an entire drum set. Getting that through customs was a story in itself.

    It was worth it, though, because they decided to put on a rock concert open to all who wanted to attend, even those from churches in nearby towns. Pastor Abel was an accomplished guitarist, equally at ease with classic Spanish songs as well as a personal favorite of mine, “Stairway to Heaven.” He wanted to incorporate youth culture more into religion and show this new generation that we could enjoy church and that it doesn’t have to be lengthy sermons all the time. It was a very successful idea, because the large attendance proved it was one way of getting both the young and old involved.

    There were many other people who came from their homes to the church every morning to look after us and make us our meals and keep the house in order while we worked with the kids. When I say looked after us I mean that they really were like mothers to us. Whenever I was outside on a blistering hot day helping distribute water, it was guaranteed that someone would look at me, notice my red hair and extremely fair skin, and immediately usher me into shade. No matter what I said about my already having applied four layers of sunscreen, it didn’t matter. I could have sat there and applied straight zinc to my entire body and the very second I set foot in sunlight a woman would run up to me and herd me back under the roof.

    Those ladies were marvelous cooks; I have never tasted more mouthwatering Spanish cuisine in my life. The savory beans over rice with crispy homemade plantain chips and creamy yucca — even the sea turtle was phenomenal. And the fruit! I mean we’re talking fresh tree-ripened pineapple and mango the color of Cheetos. I couldn’t have asked for a more hospitable, welcoming, and generous group of people to live with.

    It was all too easy to forget that we were in Cuba to work and not on a vacation. For instance, in Guines, the city we stayed in and the home of our sister church, there was no butter to be found in the entire city. The women who worked in the kitchen explained to us that you’d have to travel an hour north to Havana for that type of baking material. The most common means of transportation, other than bike or foot, is horse and carriage. Which isn’t all that convenient or romantic when the street is disintegrating right beneath your feet.

    The biggest wake-up call for me was that the Presbyterian church was the only source of clean water in the village. Last year American Presbyterian Church members built a water-purifying system to alleviate the chronic health problems caused by foul water. Every few days our youth group would help distribute the clean water by filling various canteens, jugs, bottles, bags, jars, and buckets for the locals and putting labels on everything with instructions on how to keep the water from being contaminated. I was taken aback by the number of people who lined up, the number of women who waited patiently in the beating sun because they wanted their babies to be healthy even if it meant there wouldn’t be any for themselves.

    If there is anything these people have shown it is true selflessness and compassion. Despite all of their hardships, the only thing they will ever ask in return from you is that you keep them in your prayers. That’s all.

    Keeping up with those kids and their immense levels of energy proved to be quite the task, but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. But that will have to wait until next summer.

   Hannah Vogel is a junior at East Hampton High School. Her 10-day trip to Cuba in July and August was made through the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

At age 87, with stage four breast cancer and a survival prognosis of three months, Rheba recaptured her revolutionary soul.

“I’m going to try marijuana for the pain,” she told me on the phone from her continuing-care retirement community in Seattle. “Some of my old colleagues are shocked. It’s legal here, but they think the only thing that works are M.D.-written prescriptions.”

“The last time we discussed it,” I reminded her, “you called marijuana ‘habit-forming and evil.’”

“I know I did, Dick, and I’m ashamed. I did some research and found I was wrong. My M.D. knew nothing about it, so I got it from James, an emergency room nurse. I’ll be taking it in prescribed dosages as liquid drops. If it works, I’ll ask him to hold a workshop for the retirees here.”

“I’ll push my walker all the way from East Hampton to Seattle to see that one,” I told her.

“We haven’t the time, my dear,” she said. “I’d love to see you again, but we haven’t the time.”

Rheba is Rheba Fradkin De Tornyay, dean emeritus at the University of Washington School of Nursing, past president of the American Academy of Nursing, first female trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and my high school sweetheart. We met 71 years ago in Petaluma, Calif., now an exurb of San Francisco, then a grimy small town claiming to be “America’s egg basket.”

We were 16. Our Jewish worlds could not have been farther apart. I was a descendant of German Jews who in the 1850s journeyed by sea around the tip of South America to San Francisco, a precocious city exploding with commercial possibilities. Their offspring tended to be prosperous and conservative. During the Great Depression, my parents voted for Hoover against Roosevelt and with the “drys” against the repeal of Prohibition.

Rheba’s family came from Ukraine in 1920 and acquired eight acres in a budding community of atheist, Marxist chicken farmers. They chose to settle in Petaluma because of its proximity to the Valley of the Moon, which was also the title of a novel written by Jack London, their American socialist hero.

Chicken farming suited them. They needn’t become capitalist bosses and exploit workers. A small family could handle the work, and the predawn to early afternoon workday allowed them daytime to hang out and parse, usually vociferously, their various shades of Marxism.

Rheba and I met precisely because of our different backgrounds. The Petaluma community contained a founder population of Infantile Tay-Sachs, a horrific genetic mutation. If both parents carry it, one in four pregnancies will produce a Tay-Sachs child who will go deaf, blind, and be unable to swallow during its first year and die before it is 5. Marriage within the community was discouraged. The Petaluma Jewish Center called the San Francisco B’nai B’rith and in so many words said, “Send us some of your boys.”

So it was on a summer Friday in 1942 that I along with 30 or so other male teenagers were bused to Petaluma for a weekend of baseball, bowling, Ping-Pong, and on Sunday night a dance in a high school gym, where Rheba and I met, two wallflowers avoiding the dance floor, while others, more suave and nimble, jitterbugged to the drums, saxophone, piano, and trumpet of a very energetic four-piece band.

She was tall, with rosy skin, earnest eyes, no makeup, and wearing a pleated skirt. I wore corduroy trousers and a red sweater tied around my neck and hanging down my back. As we started to talk, the trumpeter went into a Harry James routine — loud, long, harsh high notes. So, we went outside, down a path between a cluster of trees, and found ourselves walking in the valley of the moon. And, truly, it was the valley of the moon, the biggest, roundest, richest orange moon I have seen before or since. Google has found the date for me, July 27, 1942.

We chatted. We both enjoyed our high school history classes. I said I was glad our Navy had beaten the Japanese at Midway Island. She agreed and said, “But isn’t it horrible our government is interning Japanese-Americans?” I said it was sad, but necessary. She stopped walking, turned to confront me, face flushed, and said it was unjust. German-American Nazi sympathizers in Petaluma weren’t being hauled off to live in tents on racetracks.

I replied that it was an “exigency of war.” I actually said those words, as if I were H.V. Kaltenborn, the news commentator who was on the air 15 minutes every afternoon. She scoffed, I went into a slow burn, we kept walking, farther apart and not speaking.

When we got back to the dance, her face softened. She asked me when I would be going into the service. I told her I would enlist next year when I graduated from high school. She wrote her address on a paper napkin and asked me to write to her. I shrugged, trying to be cool, and said I’d try.

I went home and woke up at dawn the next morning wanting to be with her again. I left my parents a note, drove my 1929 Graham-Paige to Petaluma, and found her house. It was 7 a.m. Her mother opened the door, said, “You must be Dick,” and smiled me toward the kitchen. She had black hair and high cheekbones.

Rheba was standing over an iron pan of glorious-smelling bacon strips and fried eggs with yolks the color of ripe peaches. (No dietary laws for atheist Marxists.) Butter that her mother churned, bread she baked, and jam she made from wild berries the family picked waited in unmatched bowls on a round table, where Rheba’s father sat, a short man bent over a ledger. He had leathery skin from too much sun. Rheba put down a spatula, took my hand, and led me to the table.

We dated regularly and in the way of the time didn’t kiss until the night before I reported for duty. She wrote me every day for the two and a half years I was away — newsy, upbeat reports about the home front’s commitment to the war and her frequent and friendly visits with my parents.

I wrote her when I could, about the older men in my squad who took me under their wing and our growing closeness with German civilians, with whom we shared a sense of war’s futility. And we argued, especially when I wrote her that the United Mine Workers had no right to strike when we were at war, and she responded curtly that the right to strike was what the war was all about.

We assumed we’d marry, but there was to be more separation than we could manage. I went to college in England, on the G.I. Bill of Rights. She entered nursing school at a hospital in San Francisco, where she went to war with the hospital authorities. She gave unauthorized morphine to a patient who was dying painfully. She was severely reprimanded. She then tried to organize the nurses into a union. The hospital locked her in her room for three days. When freed, she wrote the head of the state nursing board that nurses’ long working hours were barbaric and a threat to patient safety.

Weeks later, she found the official seated beside her at an annual dinner attended by nursing students. “I asked to be next to you,” the official said, putting her hand on Rheba’s. “You have a great future in nursing, but change your ways or there’s nothing we can do for you.”

Within 20 years, Rheba was dean of the School of Nursing at UCLA, 10 years later, in the ’70s, dean at the University of Washington. I moved in the opposite direction — a department store buyer in the ’50s, a reporter in the ’60s, a street vendor of handbags and belts my then-wife and I made in the ’70s and ’80s. By the ’80s, Rheba was in the middle of a long and happy marriage to Rudy De Tornyay that lasted 55 years until his death in 2008. I was in the middle of my fourth marriage, which, like my first three, was to end in divorce.

The few meetings Rheba and I had were brief and belligerent. In the ’70s, she called me a hippie. “You have weird friends,” she said, “and a big, scraggly beard.” In the ’80s, she remarked how she loved staying in five-star hotels when she traveled with other R.W. Johnson Foundation trustees to inspect their programs in poor urban neighborhoods. It was gross, she conceded, to eat a chic breakfast and then go off to observe the poor, but she felt she’d earned it. I told her I choked on pillow chocolates and got asthma from cellophane-wrapped fruit. She harrumphed. I then boasted I must be the only Oxford graduate ever to earn a living selling in the street. She departed. We were through.

For the next 25 years, we were. But on my 81st birthday, I woke up wanting to be with her, just as I had 64 years before. I forgot we had become disappointed sweethearts with conflicting lifestyles. All I remembered was how I had counted on her during the war. When my best friend was killed, when I cowered in a ditch as a German ME 262 strafed me, when I had to challenge my company’s first sergeant to a fight for calling me a kike, when I awoke from nights spent amid corpses and desperate children, I knew that day or the next there would be a letter from Rheba and, if only briefly, I would feel whole again.

Entering my ninth decade, with friends dying and my body losing force, I knew the letters would still come, if I let them. We could never be incompatible. We were a Baroque concerto — a rush of beats and melodies bouncing every which way, but cohesive and beautiful.

I found her on the Internet. Soon we were exchanging e-mails much as we had exchanged v-mails during the war. She had become a member of the medical establishment, devoted to its dictums; I the radical, eager to savage them. She was appalled I entrusted my back to a chiropractor and that I preferred dandelion drops to prescription medicine to ward off edema and support my declining kidney function. Worst of all, I hoped to find a cannabis prescription to control my asthma. She had never heard a respected doctor or academic discussing marijuana, even as a palliative. She would never use it.

Or so it had seemed.

Her cancer pain unremitting, Rheba started taking her cannabis drops. Six pain-free weeks later, she placed Canny, her potted cannabis plant, on a table before her and introduced James to a rapt audience of over 400 retirement home residents, almost its entire population. “The response was so favorable,” she told me afterward, “that James plans to open a dispensary in the neighborhood.”

She was thrilled. I was proud of her. “I’m not going to die in an opiate stupor,” she added, “I’m going to be alive until I’m not.”

“I hear the government is funding research on the benefits of LSD for terminal cancer patients,” I replied. “How about it?”

--

Richard Rosenthal is the author of “The Dandelion War,” a humorous novel about class warfare in the Hamptons.

    In 1983, I was invited by Rubin Gorewitz (a man known as the accountant for artists), whom I was then dating, to join him for Christmas week on Captiva Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida. We were to be the guests of Robert Rauschenberg, taking residence at the Bay House, one of his three homes on the island. With its expansive view of tranquil water, this house was distinguished from the Beach House overlooking the ocean, where parties were held, and from the Print House, where the artist and his assistants worked on his limited editions, mostly lithographs and silk screens.

    Roy Lichtenstein and his wife, Dorothy, had a home nearby on the island, and they joined in many of our activities during the week, including one double date for dinner at a local restaurant with Rubin and me. After observing how warmly Roy leaned in to Dorothy for advice in choosing what food he would order, and how Dorothy lovingly responded with suggestions, the topic got around to tennis. Rubin, not one to play tennis himself, proudly said, “Linda’s a tennis enthusiast and was the captain of her college tennis team.”

    Roy’s ears perked up. He said he loved the sport and played as often as possible. A game of singles was arranged for the next morning at 10.

    Before continuing this story, some background information is in order: I grew up at a time when boys were supposed to be (or at least appear to be) better, stronger, smarter than girls. If a girl wanted to be popular, she learned very quickly that it was her responsibility to play out this masculinist scenario.

    I was proud, at the time, to have learned my gender lesson well. If a boy was a weaker athlete than me, it was my job to see that he won anyway. So I intentionally threw the bowling ball into the alley and hit the Ping-Pong or tennis ball into the net, and always lost the game. In this way, accepting that the male ego took precedence over mine, I then could take my place as a “proper” female.

    Gender inconsistencies and inequities didn’t click with me then, and I recall asking a gym teacher at Music and Art High School why there was no tennis team for girls. He blithely answered, as if I should have known this already, that it was “because tennis is bad for a girl’s heart.” The absurdity didn’t register with me even though I played tennis every day after school without having a heart attack.

    And so it was with this deference syndrome, my modus operandi toward the male gender, that I walked onto the tennis court to face Roy Lich­tenstein on a sunny day in 1983.

    Barely a few moments into our warm-up rally, it was obvious to me that I was the stronger player. True to form, my main focus as we rallied was on hitting the ball directly to Roy’s racket to give him the best chance of returning it. For the next half-hour I lived in a quandary, fearing that the man across the net would ask me to play a set.

    My distress heightened in anticipating that, if we started keeping score, my old tendencies of deference would crop up and once again, instead of just enjoying the game, I would be in mental anguish. I knew that once a set began, my attention would turn to keeping the score even, which would mean that every once in a while I had to purposely hit the ball into the net.

    But this time I didn’t do it. Maybe it was something about Roy that made me feel safe. Or maybe the dots of gender injustice were beginning to connect in my mind. In any case, I just played out each point. True, I didn’t slam the ball at Roy, or slice it at his feet, but I didn’t intentionally lose any points either.

    When the match ended, 6-0, I was a bit nervous, but I knew that something very significant for me had just happened. I succeeded in doing what I could never do before. I had decided I was entitled to “own” my abilities.

    From that day on, I never again faked my athletic prowess. Roy Lichtenstein will always hold a special place for me in that journey toward my own authenticity.

    Linda Stein, an artist, activist, lecturer, and performer, has an exhibition called “Power and Protection: Bully Proof Vests” at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor through Sept. 2. Her solo show “The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein” is traveling to 23 museums and galleries across the country through 2015. She lives in Northwest Woods, East Hampton.

   Look at Julie Ratner. Radiant Ratner. Trim and athletic. A mane of dark reddish curly hair flows to her shoulders in ringlets. Though no longer running marathons, she is running to save the lives of women with breast cancer.

    It all started with the painfully prolonged death of her sister Ellen Hermanson; it started as a small controlled fire of cancer, but then it spread and consumed her like a conflagration.

    Ellen, like her sister, was known for her adamant intelligence, her devotion to causes. Each day that she lived was a day of absorbing the world, of learning, of committing her intellectual strength to the support of others. She breathed in information and exhaled solutions. She tackled problems like a scientist in a lab. She was on her way to becoming a prominent financial journalist. Her interrupted journey ended in agony.

    Ellen was 35 when she gave birth to her daughter. Prior to that, when she was 34, Ellen had a complete physical, including a mammogram, just to ensure that she would be able to breast-feed her baby. All tests were a testimony to Ellen’s good health.

    Ellen breast-fed her baby for six months, then something went wrong. She could no longer breast-feed. She felt a lump in her breast. Doctors examined her and came to the conclusion that her problem stemmed from a blocked milk duct. But that was not the cause of her pain. She knew the doctors had missed something, and she was right, for the subsequent biopsy revealed cancer.

    Frightened, confused, despairing. Tears welled in her eyes as she held her 6-month-old baby in her arms. Was that her fate? A future with no future? A fire curtain was coming down, isolating her from the lives of those she loved, the lives that would go on without her.

    No. Defiance strengthens the will, the will to live. Ellen would fight. She would fight and win. Not just for herself, but also for her baby daughter, who would have a mother to inspire her. Ellen wanted to write the early chapters of her daughter’s life and then read those chapters that her daughter would write. One cannot bring a child into the world and then disappear. She would go on.

    A loyal, concerned sister, Julie called friends, health care institutions, breast cancer groups. She collected names of surgeons and oncologists. She set up a series of appointments. Ellen and Julie spent more than an hour in the waiting room of one surgeon, and when he emerged, his lizard-like eyes slithered from one sister to the other. He was as cold as any cold-blooded creature could be. Julie and Ellen left, feeling like war-weary refugees who had been denied passports to safety.

    Next on their list was a doctor who seemed to dwell in a far different climate, a temperate zone of warmth and understanding. He was Michael Osborne, and his personality was like a reassuring arm thrown over Ellen’s shoulder. His first procedure was to drain an abscess in Ellen’s breast that was the cause of burning pain. He prescribed medication to stop the production of milk. Next came a modified radical mastectomy, followed by the removal of 20 lymph nodes, each of which proved positive for cancer.

    The verdict was Stage 4 cancer. There could be no worse sentence. To say that Ellen was terrified would be an understatement. She needed a brilliant oncologist to guide her treatment, and she found that person in Dr. Larry Norton at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He offered reassuring words and seemed to believe that the proper course of chemotherapy would send Ellen’s cancer into remission.

    Along the way, Ellen lost all of her lovely hair. She vomited often and painfully. There was no anti-nausea medicine at that time. Debilitation, weariness, desolation were daily companions. And yet, and yet. . . . There was her baby daughter. There were hope and prayers and a belief that each day would lead to another, and that Ellen would wake each morning to the rising of the sun.

    The chemo performed the trick of remission, and Ellen had two years of excitement and fulfillment. She enthusiastically raised her daughter. She wrote annual reports for major corporations. She wrote a book for Sylvia Porter, an acclaimed personal financial guru. As Julie said, “Ellen was on a roll. She was productive and happy and incredibly energetic.”

    To wake with a pain here or there is not unusual for middle-age humans. For a cancer victim, it can be an announcement of foreboding. The pain in Ellen’s clavicle did not diminish after she showered, as many pains do. It did not diminish as she ate her breakfast. And when she took a deep breath, raising her diaphragm, the pain only intensified. She imagined a knife shaving away slivers of her collarbone.

    She returned to Sloan-Kettering, feeling as if she were to be tried for a crime she did not commit. Tests revealed that the cancer had returned. And it had returned with a vengeance. It had invaded her spine and then all the bones in her skeleton; it was waging all-out war on every organ in her body.

    Operations proceeded like failed counterattacks. She received a new hip but still couldn’t walk. She and her husband had to give up their fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Ellen could not even lift her leg to get into the shower. She spent most of her time in a wheelchair.

    Later she would lose control of many of her bodily functions. Her humanity was deserting her, leaving her without dignity. For a woman who was obsessively neat, who loved keeping her apartment spotless, her debilitated condition was an insult to her values.

    And yet, and yet. Ellen was a fighter. She joined the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship and edited its newsletter, Networker. She worked diligently to comfort others and in so doing would comfort herself. She tried desperately to ignore the pain that was her unrelenting, sadistic torturer.

    Finally, the pain and destruction that she endured propelled her back to Sloan-Kettering. She entered on a rainy Thursday afternoon. By Sunday, she was unconscious, yet her body agitated with pain. She was given stronger and stronger pain medications, yet she still agitated. The pain seemed determined to stick around until Ellen was beyond feeling. On Tuesday morning at 4:30, April 11, 1995, Ellen sighed. Her breath and her pain left her.

    To memorialize her sister and to help all women who suffer from breast cancer, Julie Ratner started Ellen’s Run on the South Fork. The 5K is now in its 18th year, and more than 1,000 women, men, and children participate every summer. Ellen’s Run recently pledged $220,000 to buy the first 3D mammography machine for Southampton Hospital. It raised more than $1,000,000 for the Ellen Hermanson Breast Center, also at Southampton Hospital. The center expanded what had been a 1,200-square-foot space to one that is 3,200 consolidated square feet.

    “Ellen’s Run makes sure that no woman with breast cancer is ever turned away from the center at Southampton Hospital. If they don’t have insurance or cannot otherwise pay for treatment, we will find options for them so that their cancer does not go untreated,” Julie Ratner said. “I am determined to make life bearable for all women who get breast cancer. Even if there is no cure forthcoming, I want to make sure that their daily lives are not spent in misery, that they are not left alone to ponder their disease and be depressed. That is one reason why we get together on a regular basis and support one another.”

    “It is my intention to set up an Ellen’s Run in other communities. And unlike other charitable institutions, we want each E.R. to be a grassroots organization that is self-supporting and does not have to support some top-heavy central administrative organization. Ellen’s Run is for everyday people on each and every day that they need help and support. It’s what Ellen would have wanted, and I’m here to make sure it happens.”

    The next 5K Ellen’s Run will take place on Aug. 18 at 9 a.m. It begins and ends at Southampton Hospital’s Parrish Hall. More information is at ellens­run.org.

   Jeffrey Sussman is writing a book about cancer survivors and those who treat and support victims of cancer. A part-time East Hampton resident, he is president of Jeffrey Sussman Inc., a public relations and marketing company.

   Ben is throwing a fit. He’s screaming, “I want go down basement, Dianne. I want go down basement. Now!”

    I try firmness. “No, Ben, we’ve played down in the basement much too long. We’ve been down there at least three times today. That’s enough. What else can you think of to do? Hey, let’s go outside for a while. It’s nice and sunny. Come on. Let’s go.”

    Ben’s not cooperating. “No! I want go down basement, now!” His tone is imperious. He stamps his sneakered foot. His cute little face is reddening with rage.

    Cajoling this angry 3-year-old is not working. A Rolling Stones song pops into my head. “You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want,” I sing, more than slightly off-key, then continue, getting into it, playing air guitar, jumping around with moves like Jagger. “But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you nee-eed.”

    Soon Ben is dancing with me. Giggles and shrieks of delight have distracted him — temporarily, at least. He grabs my hand and we race outdoors to kick a soccer ball back and forth across a pool cover, smack dab in the middle of a huge Hamptons backyard.

    I’ve been hired to baby-sit Ben every Friday evening and some Saturday and Sunday mornings while his single mom, Isabelle, works with clients out here on the East End of Long Island. Friday hours are from 3 to 7 p.m. I meet them at the house in Bridgehampton, usually soon after their tedious trek on the L.I.E. from their apartment in New York City and a morning of preschool for Ben. It’s a long day for a toddler.

    “What are your thoughts about discipline?” I ask Isabelle during our initial interview.

    “Oh, that won’t be a problem,” she says. “Ben is a sweet boy and well mannered.”

    “Yeah, right,” I think.

    My first shift on the following Friday begins well. I toot my car horn as I pull into the graveled driveway. Isabelle and Ben walk outside to greet me. Isabelle hugs and kisses Ben goodbye, hops into her BMW, and heads to work. We wave until she’s out of sight, then Ben announces, “Play car!”

    We scramble into my Miata and play speed racer for a few minutes. Ben opens the passenger door and runs around to the driver’s side. We change places so he can “drive,” then repeat this process seemingly another 28 times. Clouds drift over the setting sun; it’s getting chilly. Time to go in.

    I open the stainless-steel refrigerator to see what’s for dinner. The fridge is almost empty (or is it one-fourth full?). I see a sticky note stuck to one shelf. It reads, “Isabelle’s food. Do not touch.” Another says, “For Ben.” It’s a precooked, organic, microwave meal from Citarella in the city. I pop Ben’s food into the oven and take out the ham-and-cheese deli sandwich I’ve brought just in case.

    We sit down in front of a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD and eat our supper without mishap. Ben helps take our dirty plates to the kitchen.

    “Good helper!” I say, then spot the two-page list of rules on the counter, intended for me for my first foray into baby-sitting since I was a teenager. I am 62, a former tenured kindergarten and K-to-third-grade teacher from Los Angeles.

    The rest of the evening flows smoothly. I return home, exhausted and hungry, with $45 in my pocket, completely smitten with Ben.

    By the second week, I’ve learned, foremost, that I must bring food for myself. So, like a good girl scout, I come prepared. I also learn that Ben will need some discipline. He is headstrong and stubborn. He wants what he wants. Tonight he wants the frozen pizza I’ve packed in my bag.

    “This s’ghetti’s yucky!” he shouts, refusing to eat it.

    “I want pizza! Let’s share, Dianne,” he says, his big blue eyes blazing, and I can’t resist. We enjoy my yummy pizza, then snack on some mixed nuts I take out, along with three Dove chocolate squares each.

    So begins our weekly ritual.

    “Hi, Ben,” I say upon my arrival.

    “Hi, Dianne,” he says. “You bring pizza?” I fetch it from my bag and drop it in the freezer. “You bring nuts?” I shake the can like a maraca. “You bring chocolate?” I hand Ben our stash, safe in a Ziploc, for after dinner.

   One night Ben is suddenly in a fury. He throws a book at me, but misses.

    “Books aren’t for throwing,” I say. He hurls another my way. It bounces off my arm. “Please don’t throw books at me,” I admonish. His tossing continues. This time Ben aims for my face, and a hardcover hits me square on the nose.

    “Ouch!” I yell. “That hurts! The next time you throw a book, it’s timeout for you,” I say. Ben behaves.

    A few weeks later he’s in the mood to throw rocks . . . at my car. “This is your warning, Ben,” I say. “If you throw rocks again, it’s timeout.”

    Rocks go flying. Ben goes to timeout. He pouts. He doesn’t like it one bit, but he stays put as I use my “Supernanny” routine: ignore him for a couple of minutes, discuss why he’s there, then hug and make up.

    When his mom comes home, Ben announces, “I got timeout, Mommy.”

    Isabelle gives me a dirty look, asks, “How long?” and ends the night with a terse, “Good night, Dianne.”

    “I love you, Dianne,” Ben calls. “Bye-bye!”

    From the start, the Rolling Stones tune was a big hit with Ben. One day, walking back from the Children’s Museum of the East End, down the block from Ben’s house, he shouts, “Sing, Dianne. Sing ‘Can’t Get’! I sing it at school. It’s my favrite.”

    “What does Mommy think of it?” I ask.

    “Mommy likes it,” Ben says, then laughs.

    So off we go, as I chant, “You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you nee-eed!” all the way home.

   Dianne Moritz lives in North Sea. Her third children’s book, “1, 2, 3 by the Sea,” was published in the spring by Kane Miller. The names of Isabelle and Ben have been changed.

   Pianofest usually holds most of its concerts at the Avram Theater at Stony Brook Southampton, with occasional events at other venues. With the completion of Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton a few years ago, several concerts have been held there each season as well. On July 24, a number of Pianofest participants presented a concert in this beautifully appointed space with its outstanding acoustics.

Although all of the performances were technically fine and played with presence, I thought that three of them were missing something in interpretation.

   Franz Liszt’s famous Liebestraume No. 3 was played by Elena Fischer-Dieskau with such excessive freedom of tempo in places that it sounded hesitant and disjointed. I think this was a just case of overinterpretation, but at times one wondered if the music was going to continue.

   “L’isle Joyeuse” by Claude Debussy was played by Mathilde Handelsman. Most of the playing was quite full sounding, with not as much variation in dynamics as called for, and was dazzlingly bright throughout rather than having the more subtle shading that is associated with this impressionistic music. I thought that by not holding some of the virtuosic passages in check, the buildup to the high point was lost.

   A number of Franz Schubert’s lieder were transcribed by Liszt for the piano. But these are not mere transcriptions; Liszt embellishes and in effect orchestrates the original piano and voice parts. In the transcription of “Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” Nikita Tonkonogov did a good job of portraying the excitement of the waves of water, but it was at the expense of bringing out the vocal line in the inner voice. I wanted to hear more of that “singing” inner tenor voice brought out, in contrast to the pianistic waves.

    One of the standout performances was Ricardo Acosta’s playing of Wag­ner’s “Isolde’s Liebestod,” also transcribed by Liszt. His rendering of the poignant, emotionally rich “Love Death” had great sensitivity, with coloring and shading that created an aura of its own, and rubatos that were inevitable, not contrived. There was great musicality, no dazzle for dazzle’s sake.

    Johannes Brahms’s Intermezzo (from Sechs Klavierstucke) is a fairly late work in his output. Jun Luke Foster’s reading of the Intermezzo was filled with perceptive shading, reaching a high point and then pulling away, and it had a fine, mature sense of the whole. It was enchanting playing that pulled me in from the very beginning.

    Probably the most demanding work on the program was the Vivace from Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6, played by Allison Lee. It was written during wartime, and has the powerful, strident, tense, and disturbing qualities that one might expect. Ms. Lee knew how to bring out the various textures and discordant themes. She played with great excitement, but, more than that, she played with unfailing clarity. Even though the atmosphere was unsettling and filled with conflict, the listener knew that every note had a place and a purpose.

    The Pianofest concerts are always marvelous events, and there is one more opportunity to take one in this season, on Monday at the Avram Theater at 5:30 p.m. Tickets cost $20 at the door only, free for students. The good seats are always taken early.

    The concerts are just the public face of Pianofest. Twenty-five years ago, Paul Schenly, the festival’s director, had the idea of bringing together a number of highly talented young musicians to not just give concerts, but to live together as well. In a house in East Hampton, with about 14 pianists and 10 or so grand pianos, much of Pianofest’s real significance takes place as these up-and-coming artists live, cook, eat, drink, joke, make friends, party, practice, and support one another.

    Two years ago, Konstantin Soukhovetski, artist in residence at Pianofest, who is not only a concert pianist but has also acted in an indie film, had the idea of making — are you ready for this? — a reality show featuring its participants (“Pianists in Reality Show,” The East Hampton Star, July 28, 2011).

    After countless hours of filming and untold time spent editing and producing, the beginnings of “The Real Pianists of the Hamptons” can be found on YouTube. Although it has been dubbed “the first-ever classical music reality show,” it has also been more accurately called a reality Web series. You can find a teaser, a short bit about the “2013 arrivals,” an “Indian dinner,” and the official eight-minute-long first episode.

    Mr. Soukhovetski said that many additional hours of material have already been filmed, and episodes will be released during the year as his busy schedule allows. Some of the other goings-on can also be found on Facebook — on his page and the one for “The Real Pianists of the Hamptons.”

    Pianofest concerts may be almost over for this season, which is too bad for its large following, but for its fans and those interested in a high-quality and refreshing mix of a pop culture genre and the inner workings of the classical music world, the festival continues.

    Someday the Earth will die. The Sun will die and the Earth will follow suit. The Sun will become a white dwarf star. The solar system will be orphaned and eventually sucked into an oblivion-inducing cosmic siphon, like human waste in a toilet bowl.

    But long before any of this occurs, mankind will have been forewarned by sequences of environmental and geologic catastrophes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tornadoes that make life increasingly difficult to sustain. Carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect will by this time have already played a role, but it will be minor compared to the consequences deriving from the demise of the mother star.

    The biblical tale of Noah and his ark is not only mythological but prescient and iconic to the extent that there have always been and will always be times when man has to escape the existence he has comfortably inhabited and, in the course, find a vehicle in which to do it. There will always be holdouts who complement the old doomsday crowd (who believed in the Mayan prophecy that the world would end on Dec. 21, 2012) and who will refuse to budge from their dwellings, claiming the apocalypse is not here.

    For the rest, the coming Armageddon will be betokened by widespread loss of value in things. Money, real estate, oil, precious metals will all tumble in value in anticipation of collapse. And besides the mystics and the nuts, you will witness little of the holding out that, for instance, happened on the part of ethnic minorities who didn’t see the writing on the wall and insisted on staying in their ancestral homes despite the prospect of imminent annihilation by Hutus or Nazis. There will be few who refuse the ark.

    The only problem is that the nearest planet suitable for habitation by human beings exists next to a very far away star (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1,200 Light-Years From Earth,” The New York Times, April 18) that, even given the possibility of an advanced form of spacecraft capable of traveling near the speed of light (without turning into pure energy) and navigating worm holes (which are the equivalent of shortcuts in space), will still take many millennia to arrive at.

    Thus the crafts leaving Earth will be celestial objects in their own right, self-sustaining biospheres capable of producing water and oxygen in order to allow plant life and all the animals that Noah originally included in his ark. So if Noah had two cows, two geese, we would now be talking about two to the, say, 10th power, for starters, on most ships. Many generations of Earth alumni will not experience a light-filled day. Their only sky will be populated by perennial galaxies of stars.

    It is unlikely that our children or our children’s children or their children will be part of the great exodus by which the population of the Earth will be moved to its new home. But there is no doubt that someday it will happen, with life as we know it not coming to an end, but simply taking place somewhere else.

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

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt 80 years ago faced the worst financial panic and economic distress in the nation’s history. Job 1 was calming the banking panic and strengthening the financial regulatory structure. To do this, Roosevelt recruited as his treasury secretary a business executive — one of three Republicans in his startup cabinet — William H. Woodin.

    Secretary Woodin sold the New Deal to a hostile business community, and the panic and regulatory issues were largely solved by the middle of 1933. Woodin used his brains as a business mogul, his heart as a musician, and his patience as a fisherman to help institute financial regulations that served America well for the next three-quarters of a century.

    The F.D.R.-Woodin achievement can be appreciated all the more today as headlines reveal an unending series of violations of ineffective financial regulations. The 1933 laws fenced off insured deposits from rent-seeking speculators. We should give huge credit to Roosevelt and Woodin for getting this done. And it’s worth looking at their private lives for clues to why it all worked so well.

    One reason Woodin worked well with Roosevelt in Washington is they shared interests besides politics. In New York City, they were nearly neighbors. Woodin took an early interest in Roosevelt’s major philanthropic initiative, the Warm Springs Foundation — the first treatment center dedicated to polio, which led years later to the March of Dimes.

    They also shared a love of boating and fishing. After Roosevelt survived a February 1933 assassination attempt in Miami, he calmed his nerves by going fishing with Vincent Astor, who was much affected by the progressive movement and strongly supported the New Deal. Later that year, in August-September, Roosevelt was picked up in Hyde Park by Astor’s boat, the Nourmahal, and was taken fishing for tuna off Montauk, as recorded in The East Hampton Star of Sept. 1, 1933.

    Will Woodin and his family divided their summers between ocean beaches and tennis courts near Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton and boating activities on Gardiner’s Bay, at the Devon Yacht Club. On the Woodins’ boating and fishing activities I have had the pleasure of interviewing three of his grandchildren.

    Woodin’s grandsons Charlie Miner and Bill Rowe liked to race their jointly owned Star sailboat (#1585) on Saturdays and Sundays at the club. The Rowe grandchildren, boys and girls, were all active participants in the sailing program, and The Star of July 12, 1929, reported that “the Misses Margaret and Grace Rowe, sailing their boat Nippy,” won a race that included a boat of their grandfather’s.

    Woody Rowe, a grandson, remembers eating delicious coffee ice cream on the hot sand of the beach. One of the most vivid memories of the grandchildren is fishing from their grandfather’s yacht, the Nanin.

    Will Woodin was elected the Devon Yacht Club’s third commodore for the six-year period 1922-28, the peak years of what the East Hampton Historical Society calls, in its fine exhibit at the Clinton Academy, the “Jazz Age.” The Devon Yacht Club already had two almost identical 60-foot motor yachts owned by two Devon Colony founders, William Cooper Procter and Richmond Levering, who called them the Heather and the Insep (for “the Inseparables”).

    In 1922 or 1923, Commodore Woodin purchased an 80-foot boat, eclipsing the other boats anchored off the Devon beach. He named it the Nanin, after his wife, Annie (Nan) Jessup. The Nanin was built in 1915 for Albert Y. Gowen of Cleveland by the famed Boston boatyard of Lawley & Son, which had built several America’s Cup contenders. It was initially named the Speejacks, but suffered a fire in 1919. After Lawley & Son rebuilt the boat in 1920, replacing the single engine with two Speedway engines with 32-inch propellers, Gowen renamed the boat Sweetheart, sold it, and took his new 98-foot Speejacks 35,000 miles around the world in 1921-22. At the time it was the smallest boat ever to make this trip.

    Most of the Woodin grandchildren enjoyed fishing on the Nanin, especially Charlie Miner, but Anne Harvey Gerli reports that as a child she used to try to save the fish by taking out the hooks and throwing them back in the water after she was informed that fish, unlike people, did not drown in water and actually prefer it. Besides fishing, the Nanin went on cruises. Charlie remembers making the trip all the way up through the Erie Canal locks to Lake Erie. He also remembers going on the boat to join spectators attending America’s Cup races in Newport, R.I.

    A Woodin family legend told by two of his grandchildren, who suspect that it might indeed be a story created to console them, is that the boat was taken by the U.S. Navy in 1940 to rescue British soldiers from Dunkirk and was sunk by U-boats during the effort. However, the timing of the Dunkirk retreat flotilla, a matter of days in the second half of May 1940, makes the story implausible. The United States did not declare war on Germany until 1941, and small yachts were taken over by the Coast Guard for use only in the American hemisphere.

    A different story is told by Richard Dey in his book “Adventures in the Trade Wind,” about chartering yachts in the West Indies. He finds the Nanin in Trinidad, with the name still on it. From Lloyd’s Register he found that this was the 80-foot Nanin still owned by Will Woodin’s widow, Annie Jessup, in 1940.

    The “Trade Wind” book confirms that the Nanin was taken by the Coast Guard to be refitted for its use — probably with compensation. We know that Astor’s 264-foot yacht, the Nourmahal, built in Germany, was commandeered by the Coast Guard in 1940, for compensation of $300,000. A year after takeover, Astor’s refitted patrol boat quartered 98 enlisted sailors and nine officers. The boat patrolled the coastal waters until 1946, was sold privately, and scrapped in 1964.

    So the Nanin ended up after World War II as a tugboat. The yacht, once fitted out like a racehorse, was now pulling the equivalent of a milk wagon. Its snazzy bronze propellers were gone and its motors replaced by noisy war-vintage G.M. engines, with the staff increased to eight to handle the heavy anchor.

    The postwar Nanin is shown in a photograph in the book — sadly, up on the beach for repair, looking like a huge beached whale. This is one of only two photos of the Nanin I could find. Not a photo you would want to see. Thus passeth the glory of this world.

    John Tepper Marlin, Ph.D., is chief economist for the Warrior Family Foundation. He has summered in Springs since 1981. In the July 28 Devon Yacht Club PHRF race he crewed for the winning boat skippered by Blake Fleetwood. He thanks Swede Edwards of North Sea Radiator for access to his near-complete set of Lloyd’s Register annuals.