You line up like a captive on a pirate ship, steeling yourself for the final walk off the plank. Common sense reminds you that air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation. And yet just to be on the safe side, you surreptitiously glance at the other passengers to catch a sign of any instability that might have been overlooked during check-in.

    Suddenly a voice is heard over the speaker system, “The flight to Miami will be late taking off,” and a collective groan is heard from the passengers on line. Everyone scatters as cellphones are whipped out of pockets to notify the travelers’ friends and families to start dinner without them.

    This simple announcement can trigger a variety of scenarios in the mind of an imaginative passenger. Is it a simple maintenance issue that is causing the delay, or is a temporary fix being applied to an airplane that has made one too many flights? Although the sun is shining at the departure airport, perhaps a decision has been made to delay the flight until a series of tornadoes moves out of the flight path. To the suspicious mind, images of drunken pilots and called-in bomb threats increase an already tense mood.

    There was a magazine article many years ago that advised fearful fliers never to read about or view photos of airplane crashes. However, even without media input, it is very difficult today to insulate yourself from the ominous possibilities of air travel. How many ways can you rationalize the need for removing your shoes when going through security other than acknowledging their possible use as containers for explosives? Or do you start to become uneasy while undergoing the latest hand-scanning for bomb-making residue?

    What determines your level of anxiety as an airline passenger? People fly for business, pleasure, or as the result of an emergency, sickness, or death. Expectations of what awaits you upon disembarking influence your emotions when flying. If you are going to visit your mom in the hospital the entire trip will be spent anticipating her condition. It’s already party time if your destination is a beautiful tropical island or reunion with a loved one.

    We all know people who can never relinquish control of any situation as well as happy souls who are content just to be alive. If we fall into that first group, we become anxious when abdicating our control, but we’ve learned to employ different methods to sooth our anxiety. If felled by a serious illness we still maintain the right to choose the doctor who will care for us and to research his or her qualifications. When we fly we have no idea whose hands we are placing our lives into. That soothing voice telling us to relax and enjoy the ride could be the voice of a severely depressed person planning on flying himself and us into oblivion.

    People with controlling personalities experience an uncomfortable sense of helplessness when they become simply part of the pack. And unless your face appears continuously on the front page of magazines, you will become just another anxious face in the crowd while waiting to board an airplane.

    The social equity seemingly established while waiting to board vanishes when the magical words “boarding first class” are heard. The reality surfaces that there are three classes of people who fly: the wealthy, the frequent flier road warrior, and everyone else. The third class quietly watches while the privileged few elbow to the front of the line with superior smiles on their faces. Their self-esteem plummets to new lows as they contemplate what the words “first class” mean. If they’re not in it does that mean that they are second class? And what does that imply? None of these thoughts help to relax the already disgruntled passenger.

    You have spent the two hours waiting to board your flight thoroughly studying your fellow passengers and are finally satisfied that there are no terrorists on board. Only then do you notice that in the corner someone is hacking away with what is certain to be a highly contagious virus, while several people back is a young family with four children all under the age of 6. Possible death or certain torture — which of these passengers would you want to sit next to?

    Finally you are seated on the plane. It is backing out and your long ordeal is over. The plane comes to a screeching halt and the captain’s voice can be heard thanking us for our patience but he’s sorry to say a minor glitch has come up and we must return to the gate. As we slump back into our seats we wonder what the code words “minor glitch” really mean.

    Maybe that happy soul across the aisle has some extra happy pills he can share.

    Sandy Camillo, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in St. Louis and East Hampton.

    Our proposal began like a dream, with two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes over a candlelight dinner, but quickly morphed into a Greek tragedy starring Italian actors.

    Getting married in an Italian family is not only an event between the bride and bridegroom but also an occasion for them to establish relationships with each other’s families. The success of many Italian marriages often depends on whether the family accepts the proposed mate.

    My boyfriend, John, innocently asked me when would be the best time to meet with my parents to tell them that he wanted to marry me. My immediate response was, “Never.” He smiled and told me that he would drive home from work with me the next day.

    Now, to the average parents the thought of an eligible young lawyer asking for their daughter’s hand in marriage would be good news, especially when that daughter was divorced and living with them with her 4-year-old child. In my mother’s eyes, however, she had not only gotten her daughter back home but was also blessed with the additional bonus of an adorable baby to love. My Italian mother lived for her family and hated the thought of any of us leaving her. So I suspected that John would not get the reception that he was hoping for with his announcement.

    I woke up the day of the big meeting thinking of the many ways I could delay the confrontation that I knew was coming between my parents and my boyfriend. I didn’t have the money to escape to a foreign country, and jumping off a bridge seemed a little extreme. My hours in the office flew by, and before I knew it I was in John’s car on the way to my parents’ home.

    I tried for the last time to convince him that he didn’t actually need to ask them for their permission to marry me, but since he was half Italian he knew the rules and couldn’t be dissuaded. We went into the house.

    My boyfriend had spent many evenings sitting at the kitchen table being stuffed with food by my mother. She fed her family as an expression of her love and was happy to extend that hospitality to everyone who entered her home. When we came into the kitchen the night of the announcement my mother briefly glanced up from her cooking and told us dinner would be ready in a few minutes. My boyfriend told her he wanted to speak to my father and her first.

    There were two things that were immediately working against us that night. One was that my mom and dad were in the middle of one of their “we’re not talking to each other” fights, and the other was that we had asked my mom to delay her dinner. My dad was down in the basement in his recliner watching television and wouldn’t come upstairs. This was not a good start.

    I finally got my dad upstairs and seated at the table. My mom was at her station in front of the sink. My boyfriend began his speech. He got as far as the words “I love your daughter and want her to marry . . .” before the first pot hit the floor. My mom would never think of throwing something at a person but the floor wasn’t off limits. This action was accompanied by her screams for John to get out of her house. Throughout all this my dad sat silent, as if stunned by my boyfriend’s words. I hustled my boyfriend out the door. In the background I could hear my mother and father agreeing, “That boy had some nerve.”

    “Well, I think that went well,” said John, and with those insane words he drove away, saying he’d see me tomorrow. I tossed and turned all night, troubled by alternating visions of myself as an old maid or the wife of a clearly delusional husband.

    The next day after work John called to say he’d pick me up as usual. When I got in the car I realized I didn’t know where we were going as there was no way I could imagine taking him home with me. “I wonder what your mom is cooking tonight,” John asked, apparently not on the same wavelength as me. Although I threatened him and begged him not to go home with me after the prior night’s craziness, John kept driving.

    As he purposefully walked through the door, he wrapped his arms around my mother and said, “Hi, Mom, what’s for dinner?” My mother said, “I made your favorite pasta for you tonight. It will be ready in just a few minutes.”

    I think my mom respected John and figured it was better to add another person to the family than to fight what was obviously going to be a losing battle. My mother and John enjoyed many hugs and pasta dinners until the day she died.

    Sandy Camillo, a previous contributor of “Guestwords,” spends her summers in East Hampton.

   Whatever the task, I prefer to do it on my own. Most people with a disability do.

    Some of this has to do with the dangers of overhelp. Sometimes, a well-meaning friend or stranger, possibly unseen, will snatch my shoulder or arm to steer me down stairs or through a fast-closing door. Self-sufficiency also arms me against the hostility many feel for those of us who don’t see, hear, speak, move, or otherwise function ably. Suspicion and impatience of us permeate our language. Check the thesaurus. “Mindless” and “negligent” are prominent synonyms for “deaf”; “stubborn” and “impervious” for both “deaf” and “blind.” “Deaf,” “blind,” and “myopic” in themselves are often insults, as are “cripple,” “retard,” and “dumb.”

    Such attitudes are often extended to our intelligence and capacity to govern our lives. On extreme occasions, e.g., Sparta and the Third Reich, they have led to genocide.

    Not that I don’t welcome help when I need it, but the best help for me and everyone else is help that increases my self-sufficiency. In 1990, Congress decided self-sufficiency was not only compassionate but good for the economy and passed the Americans With Disabilities Act by a huge bipartisan margin — only six nay votes in the Senate. In November 2003, the East Hampton Town Board also acknowledged the value of self-sufficiency when in a unique action for towns with our small population — and also with a bipartisan vote — it incorporated essential provisions of the A.D.A. and the New York State disabilities access code into Chapter 102 of our town code. The village followed suit in 2005.

    About two years ago, with the town, state, and federal laws in place to ease my access to parking and buildings, I pushed my walker into my car and drove to our new Town Hall complex to pay a parking ticket in the Justice Court. Two handicapped parking spaces were located in the back of the building, in a notch just around a corner from the main entrance, which was also in the back.

    The parking area and the walk to the entrance were swarming with serious violations, all but one of which remain as I write this.

    There was no striping to mark the parking spaces, no access aisle between them to enable a disabled person to exit a car with a wheelchair or walker and ascend to the sidewalk. There was sufficient space for an aisle, but an old lamppost, left standing where the curb cut would have to be located, barred the way.

    The curb in the parking area was impossibly high for a wheelchair user to ascend, dangerous even if pushed by an aide and unsafe for people using walkers. The maximum legal height for a curb cut lip is five-eighths of an inch. The actual curb height throughout the parking area was 10 times the legal limit, more than seven inches.

    To reach the court’s entrance, one must wheel or push through the street and around a right-angle turn with limited visibility to spot oncoming cars. The street was pitted, knobby, and clustered with manhole covers protruding from the pavement like Galapagos turtles.

    I reached the ramp that led up the sidewalk and made it to the court’s door. The ramp, a haphazard pack of asphalt that resembled a cow pancake, was bumpy and narrow. I managed it, joined a crowd entering the building, and barely escaped as the heavy front door, probably acting on automatic controls, suddenly slammed shut at me.

    The above happened nearly two years ago, in the spring of 2011. The town board listened courteously to my ensuing complaint. When little happened, I filed a complaint with code enforcement, which promised a response in a week. I also told the Disabilities Advisory Board, ostensibly the town’s eyes and ears on disabilities matters. Only the danger of the slamming door was attended to and I’ve yet to hear back from code enforcement.

    As I write this, the parking scene remains untouched. There is a simple solution. Eight parking spaces facing Pantigo Road at the front of the building, near a short, level path to an entrance, are already in place. They have been reserved for police and court employees. Eight more spaces can be added by paving over a few feet of lawn. There would be more than enough for disabilities spaces as well.

    There were important violations in other buildings. The new town board meeting room lacked an assistive listening device, another requirement of the A.D.A. A thousand East Hampton residents can’t follow town board proceedings without one. Such devices are as easy to install as P.A. systems. I reported its absence in 2010 and again several times in 2011. It took the town board almost two years and several reminders before it was in place. In 1993, Tony Bullock, the town supervisor at the time, installed an assistive listening device in the old Town Hall within a month of his promise to do it.

    The village has also been lax. It took an inquiry from the Suffolk County Disabilities Advisory Board to the mayor’s office before grab bars were installed in the bathrooms of one locally popular restaurant and before another moved a booth a few inches to allow access to its bathrooms.

    How could all this happen, this shrug-off of a pragmatic, compassionate law? Must the Justice Court flout the very laws it enforces and the town board the federal and state laws it must obey? Where were the code enforcement inspectors? How could the project’s architect sign off on its compliance with the A.D.A.? Did some aesthetic vision of a “museum without walls” Town Hall complex override consideration for the civic life and legal rights of the town’s disabled population?

    The dismissive trend suffuses the town. Much attention is paid, rightly I feel, to the spilling out, noisy crowds in Montauk’s summer weekend club scene; none, as far as I’ve found, to how such businesses manage to overlook the simplest disabilities access laws. One example — a popular Montauk club, which received its certificate of occupancy in 2005, has over 60 parking spaces, two of which are reserved for Zipcars, but none for handicapped parking. Legally, they should be providing four.

    The fervent frugality of business following the financial panic of 2008 cannot explain violations that long precede it, the nonenforcement by our government, or hesitancy of our advocates. Implementation can’t have been complicated, especially the readily achievable portions, when most of our law merely incorporated provisions that were already in effect at the federal and state levels. President George H.W. Bush implemented almost all of the A.D.A. within a year of its passage. In East Hampton, it’s now nine years.

    The cat’s been away and the mice are playing.

   Richard Rosenthal has been disabilities officer for the Town of East Hampton and chairman of the Suffolk County Disabilities Advisory Board.

   When you need the fat, you need the fat. Jud Banister’s laundry machinery used a particular type of beef fat, and the East Hampton Village mayor routinely filled his need from the local butcher. But times in World War II’s 19th month were different, and suddenly government regulations threw a wrench into things.

    The crisis surfaced during a butcher shop visit to pick up some suet — more specifically, the portion called cod fat (check that out on Google) that greased the mangle at his Race Lane steam laundry. The fat went into the mangle’s lubricating box, keeping the machinery humming despite high operating temperatures.

    The Internet is great. We have family photos from two of Jud’s laundries. The first, on Cedar Street, burned down in 1909. The other photos, taken in 1913 and 1914, show exterior and interior shots of the Race Lane laundry. But the interior photos included equipment that meant little to us without expert review.

    This is where the Internet was handy. A search of “Steam Laundry” produced a link to “Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940,” written by Arwen P. Mohun. Jackpot! Her book is a comprehensive description of steam laundries during the time Jud worked in and owned one. She describes the equipment, including the mangle, used for ironing large, flat pieces such as sheets, towels, and tablecloths. Even better, Ms. Mohun, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, offered to review our photographs and describe the equipment and work site.

    Sure enough, all the key items emerge in one of two interior photographs from 1914, including the washing machine, extractor, and aptly named mangle. Probably not the same one he used in 1943, but functionally the same brute of several thousand pounds and very hot and dangerous to the imprudent. Ms. Mohun describes feeding flat pieces into it as invitations to burns or crushed fingers and hands, giving too-cruel meaning to its U.S. namesake. The British preferred the less belligerent name, calender.

    “Suet for Mangle Takes Mayor’s Coupons” was The Star’s June 17, 1943, story headline. The Office of Price Administration, then in full swing, controlled prices and distribution of many commodities critical to the war effort and in short supply. Families received coupons required to purchase many otherwise common items. One was beef and, as it turned out, any portion of the beef critter.

    “Ever since the laundry has had the mangle Mayor Banister has sent down to the butcher shop to get several hunks of low-grade suet to keep the mangle running smoothly over the town’s flat pieces of laundry,” declared the article.

    But the butcher was told to collect beef coupons for suet, as it was considered food, and the mayor would need to use seven of his personal allotment to purchase cod fat. The Star described his situation: “Sort of a ‘No tickee — no suey’ for the laundryman.” His option was to give up his personal coupons or apply for a supplemental allocation. He did the latter, was granted a four-week supply, and, as The Star noted, “the mangle will be well lubricated and he will still have his regular number of coupons.”

    Jud’s predicament was covered by the New York City newspapers and radio shows, stimulating The Star’s editor, Arnold Rattray, to take on the Office of Price Administration the following week. Titled “Grease the Machinery,” his editorial gave the background and proceeded to question the government’s well-intended, but perhaps misguided, efforts to help the war effort and distribute scarce supplies on the home front.

    Mr. Rattray reminded his readers that the same coupons Jud needed to purchase suet for the mangle were the same ones needed to buy “steaks, chops, fish or even a hunk of liver for the cat.” By the time the editorial ran, Jud was issued extra coupons to cover his need for cod fat, but it was too perfect an example of government gone awry. Something was seriously wrong in Washington, and as editor he had a responsibility to lay out the inanity.

    “What made the story of interest to metropolitan newspapers and radio was the fact that this East Hampton incident of Coupons for Suet was symbolic of a lot of things in the highly complicated machinery of our wartime rationing program. So complicated in fact that lubrication is needed, just as much for the OPA as the mayor’s laundry mangle,” wrote Mr. Rattray. Jud’s predicament, though resolved for his purposes, provided the perfect backdrop to criticize a program that had profound impacts on people despite their understanding the necessity to ration scarce goods and materials.

    Mayor Jud and the village board certified a quiet election returning two incumbents, C. Louis Edwards and Charles O. Gould, to the board two days before his “beef” over suet, but the East Hampton Steam Laundry carried on after receiving extra ration coupons.

    Solving the cod fat problem may have been easier than finding skilled labor by war’s end. Star ads show Jud routinely seeking women workers. He probably couldn’t afford to pay what many were making in shops and factories supporting the war. “Where’s the beef?” was replaced by “Where are the women?”

   Steve Rideout, a frequent contributor of “Guestwords,” regularly visits East Hampton to research family history. He lives in Shutesbury, Mass.

    The second connection between me and Whitey Bulger, the star monster of the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list, never came to light until two years ago when, after some 16 years of searching, they found him hiding out as another harmless-looking, white-bearded retiree in sunny Santa Monica, Calif.

    Before that, whenever investigators or other prying inquirers came snooping around in my paranoid imagination, I was always able to tell them that the only link was his brother Billy: I knew Billy, not Whitey. Billy and I were classmates at Boston College. He hosted the rather raucous bachelor party thrown for me at a rather raucous South Boston nightclub where he worked part time as an M.C.

    (This was before we were sophisticated.)

    Beyond the occasional card or note, our only connection after graduation was when Billy was president of the Massachusetts State Senate and gave copies of my first novel, “Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks,” to some of his friends and associates as Christmas gifts. (Was Whitey, reportedly an avid reader, one of them? You’d have to ask him. Billy never says anything about his brother Whitey.)

    I admit, Billy’s generosity did my book sales no harm. But unless some righteous prig wishes to see anything untoward in the gesture, our relationship remained as fond distant friends and clean as a whistle. Until, that is, the one fine June day in 2011, when a woman neighbor identified and blew the whistle on Whitey in Santa Monica.

    The stool pigeon turned out to be a former Miss Iceland, whom I just happened to have used in a Noxzema shave cream commercial back in 1979. An aspiring actress, blond, emerald-eyed Anna Bjornsdotter (then just Bjorn) gave her smiling, slightly Scandinavian-accented pitch to camera while shaving a man’s face with a straight razor. It ran a lot, mostly on sports events. Richard Avedon directed, with Jack Horner on camera. I hope mentioning that doesn’t implicate them in any way.

    All sheer coincidences, I know, and yet the feared interrogation tape plays incessantly in my head:

     Mr. Hannibal, we have evidence that you stayed at the Ocean View motel in Santa Monica at least once a year for the past 20 years. Is that true?

     Yes.

     Did you ever meet Whitey Bulger there?

     No.

     Did you ever see him there?

     At the motel?

     In Santa Monica. Or anywhere.

     Not that I know of.

     Meaning?

     Meaning how would I know? If he was in disguise! I could have seen him walking on the Third Street Promenade, or on the beach, and never known it!

     Did you ever meet or see Ms. Bjornsdotter in Santa Monica?

     Not that I know of.

     Did Ms. Bjornsdotter wear a disguise?

     I have no idea.

     Did you see her or not?

     After 20 years or more? You tell me.

     Sir, will you consent to a lie detector test?

    See? Once these seemingly innocent accidents begin to connect, things start getting eerily Kafkaesque. For instance:

     What brought Ms. Bjornsdotter to meet Whitey Bulger’s consort?

     Mutual concern for a stray cat.

     And what do you write poems about for The East Hampton Star?

     Stray cats.

     Hmm.

    I’m just saying.

    I’ve had similar problems with my inadvertent connections to O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake. The Juice posed for me in ads for Dingo Boots. Blake played (a great) Jimmy Hoffa in “Blood Feud,” the TV mini-series of an eponymous documentary novel that I co-authored with the screenwriter Robert Boris.

    How was I to know what horrendous crimes the Hertz Guy or Little Beaver were going to be accused of years later?

    And yet, still, you can’t deny. The connections, once made, no matter how tenuous, lurk there in the shadows of suspicion.

    The same with H.R. Haldeman and Gomer Pyle.

    Haldeman was J. Walter Thompson’s point man for a batch of commercials being shot in Hollywood for various General Foods products. I had written a script for Gomer Pyle. I must admit, there were clues in the tight-ship way the crew-cut, buttoned-down, anal-retentive ubermeister H.R. (“Call me Bob”) Haldeman ran the G.F. project. But come on, not even he could have known he’d become Nixon’s hatchet man and fall guy in the Watergate scandal!

    And whodathunk that Jim Nabors would come out from behind his hillbilly facade as, among other things, a talented baritone opera singer?

    As they say, life happens a day at a time because otherwise we couldn’t stand it.

    With Whitey’s trial finally coming up, even more new books and movies are coming out about the brothers Bulger. The ubiquitous, voracious, nonstop cable and network pundit circuitry wears out the mute button with new and old Boston Globe authors and Hollywood film producers re-airing all the same dirty old Southie laundry yet again. This time, I think, they’re going to find me.

    Maybe it’s only in my mind, but I live in constant dread of some intrepid investigative blogger, prosecutor, bounty hunter, or other insatiable vetting fact-checker, with the entire World Wide Web to scan, eventually deciding to click . . . on . . . me. Let’s see . . . Bulger, Bjorn, Simpson, Blake, Hoffa, Haldeman, Pyle, murder weapons, feral cats, Hannibal . . . and having been fed the data, the computers’ fast-morphing facial scans on the investigating geek’s screens start to resemble . . . me. I’d better shave.

    Where’s that razor from the Noxzema shoot? Oh, right, I lent it to Whitey.

    No! Just kidding!

   Ed Hannibal’s fifth novel, “A Trace of Red,” will be reissued soon as an e-book. He lives in Springs and teaches creative writing on Wednesday nights at the Amagansett Library.

    Is it Presidents’ Day or President’s Day, a question that seems to have divided the nation in the great punctuation war being waged last week in the media. I will leave it to grammarians to settle where the apostrophe properly belongs.

    Either way, as a historian, I think it an outrage the way we are now forced to celebrate George Washington’s birthday (so-called President’s or Presidents’ Day).

    Washington was born on Feb. 11, Old Style. Or Feb. 22, New Style. Whether you use the Julian or Gregorian calendar (it changed in 1752, when anti-Catholic England finally accepted Pope Gregory’s 1582 decision to straighten out the calendar by adding 11 days to make the math come out right once and for all), it definitely ­wasn’t on the Third Monday of the Second Month, as Congress arbitrarily decreed in 1971.

    To his dying day Washington thought of himself as having been born on Feb. 11, whatever the calendar said. In his last two Februaries, he wrote in his diary under “February 11” that he went to Alexandria to attend “an elegant Ball and Supper at night.”

    Not that the first president would have been troubled by the obfuscation in dates. From what I know about George Washington, he would have celebrated all three of them. He was what might have been called in the colonial era, a party animal. He loved to party.

    Nevertheless, I think it’s scandalous that Washington’s name has been downgraded, being dropped in our national holiday system. It prevents us from focusing on Washington, the man and the monument, his glorious achievements and his iconic presence in our history.

    As a people, we Americans are history-impaired. We know more about such historic figures as Lady Gaga and Snooki than our presidents. When I was growing up, to most young people Washington was a white sale in department stores. It’s even worse today. Why bother wasting any brainpower knowing our history when you can look it up on Google?

    It was bad enough when they dropped Lincoln’s birthday as a day-off holiday in some parts of the nation. But things are even murkier with this so-called “President’s Day” confabulation.

    Does this mean we celebrate on President’s Day the birthday of George W. Bush? Or Richard Nixon? Count me out on both. But what about the other 41 past presidents? John Adams (Oct. 30). Or Martin Van Buren (Dec. 5). Warren Harding (Nov. 2). What are they — chopped liver? Shouldn’t they have their own birthday celebrations?

    Sad to say, some of us think President’s Day is just an excuse for another three-day weekend. Not that there is anything wrong with that, as the cultural scholar Jerry Seinfeld might say.

    The trouble with society today, let’s face it, is there are not enough three-day weekends. That’s what makes life worth living. A cursory examination of the calendar reveals there are still currently 46 weeks with the less popular two-day weekends.

    I, for one, would be willing to stay home from work an extra day to commemorate the memory of Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president. Silent Cal really understood what it was all about when he said, “When more and more people are unable to find work, unemployment results.”

    For this and other outrages against the memory of General Washington, our first “Prefident” — the f’s and s’s were reversed in ye olde days — today I am announcing the formation of the Justaminutemen, an organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of George Washington’s good name.

    Marvin Kitman is the author of “The Making of the Prefident 1789.” “George Washington’s Expense Account” by Gen. George Washington and Marvin Kitman Pfc. (Ret.) was the best-selling expense account in publishing history. The media critic at Newsday for 35 years, he spent many summers in a tent at Hither Hills State Park.

   The very French movie called “Amour” has created a tsunami of universal acclaim: a beautiful, but tragic, love story of a lifelong romantic couple, now elderly, made even more real by the actors, themselves an aging movie hero and heroine. However, there may be a tragic misunderstanding involved in this universal appeal. The movie seems to tap into a perverse, pervasive, and profound misunderstanding of how we die of chronic, debilitating diseases, and of the critical role of doctors and medical knowledge at the end of life. Unfortunately, what may be satisfying as a work of art is so terribly dangerous and misleading as a guide to how to deal with the realities and necessities of terminal illness at home that I feel clarification is required.

    There may be problems of cultural ambiguity when this movie is viewed through the seasoned eyes of an American doctor (me). The magnificent acting and controlled direction make the audience think it is watching an astonishingly real story of soul mates dealing lovingly with death. Instead, we see a painful example of unnecessary pain and suffering caused by human ignorance, social neglect, and unintended dangers threatening two people so devoted to each other that they close themselves off to the rest of the world.

    Tolstoy, in his religiously fanatical final year, dealt harshly with devoted married love because he felt all humans should help others as much as possible, something that such intimate love prevented. The two characters in “Amour” are certainly shut off from the world. Consequently, the caregiver spouse ends up murdering the dying spouse, and the director wants and hopes to have the audience believe the murder is a generous act of caring love.

    My 55 years as a practicing doctor and clinical professor of medicine dealing closely and thoroughly with patients’ death and dying at home have taught me that much is left out in this film. She is dying slowly, agonizingly, relentlessly from multi-infarct dementia (mini strokes that gradually cause loss of brain tissue). The process is far enough along to cause loss of appetite. So she refuses to eat or even drink. Doctors know this happens because the disease deactivates some genes and activates others, causing complete anorexia, which becomes part of dying. Such dying patients differ from other humans and do not suffer when food and water are withdrawn.

    What does this caregiver do? He feels he must force her to eat. Why? To keep her alive? He knows her situation is hopeless. Yet her continuing refusal to eat builds up after weeks a sense of helplessness, frustration, and exhaustion, causing him to slap her sharply across her shriveled face. This aggression mortifies him, and he begs forgiveness, which he will not feel when daily accrued aggression leads to murder by suffocation.

    What does he say to her before his mortifying slap? “If you persist, I’ll call Bertier [the family doctor] and he’ll put you in hospital. They can force-feed you there. Is that what you want?” Where do such inappropriate ideas come from? This couple are not French peasantry, but well-educated musicians. What’s missing in the script is any conversation between the doctor and the struggling couple, or, if the patient is not competent, with the caregiver alone, perhaps including the daughter.

    Their doctor comes every two weeks and has been observing the helpless deterioration. He would have to be an idiot, and French doctors are not idiots, not to see what is happening to the patient and the caregiver. The script contains no dialogue regarding home management of how to deal practically with death and dying. Even the younger generation, their daughter, does not appear to have been involved. The director and screenwriter, Michael Haneke, has left all this out without explaining why. The audience is left to feel that doctors and medicine are one hideous beast best left outside the door.

    There are really two disease stories here. The dying wife and the overcommitted, caring, grieving husband, who has a relatively new but increasingly well-understood clinical condition we doctors call “caregiver syndrome” in its most severe form. Virtually all his time is devoted to backbreaking, intimate, emotionally humiliating (for both) care.

     Apparently the doctor never discusses this problem. But the audience glimpses it indirectly in two scenes — one with the daughter, who was critical of her father in some ambiguous way, and one with a fired nurse. He answers his daughter angrily, shouting, “Do you want to pack her off to a care home?” — as though that were the only alternative to his caregiving. Then he digs in with, “Do you want to have Mom live with you?” Not, “How about helping me with her care two or three times a week for a few hours to give me a break?” Her inability to answer makes her look bad and blameful to the audience, and what can be missed is the fact of just how overwhelmed he is. He must do everything and only his way.

    This rigidity comes out when he fires the nurse, whom he accuses of incompetence. (Or is it just her refusing to do it his way?) The previously competent nurse’s claim of injustice suggests the possibility of some compulsive irrationality of his, such as we saw with the forced feeding.

    So, suffering from anger and frustration, he murders his wife on an apparently sudden impulse by suffocation, a lousy way to die when conscious and struggling, which you see her doing for an inaccurately short period of time. Mr. Haneke wants us to think this was an act of mercy to end suffering. Whose? The husband’s or his wife’s? He talks it over with no one, not even himself. Don’t he, his doctor, his daughter, his nurses know that if he didn’t feed her for six or seven days she probably would have died peacefully?

    Another big problem the movie ignores is that once the human animal has killed, murdered, that soul is changed forever. Perhaps that is why everything that follows is a blur: Dialogue would be difficult. What you get is him on the phone about a pigeon getting in the apartment and a ridiculous scene with a blanket. It shows him smothering the pigeon much as he did his wife, yet he says on the phone he saved it.

    We see him silently cutting flower heads to make a pretty scene around her corpse. Who is the director kidding? Death is never pretty and any attempt to make this death pretty with daisies is outrageous, ignominious, and shameful. The death was neither certified by her doctor nor reported. Where does he go? What does he do? Tell the daughter? Look in the mirror? Laws were broken. Does Mr. Haneke want to solve all these complex story problems by simply implying a suicide? Was this a murder-suicide to begin with? If so, suicide frees the husband from human judgment.

    I want to be sure the reader does not take my comments to be a criticism of French medicine. That is not the point. The point is, a caregiver ignorant of recent medical knowledge concerning treatment of death and dying can cause great harm. Lack of conversation and communication between patient and an informed doctor, caregiver and doctor, caregiver and patient, to the fullest extent possible, leads to messy, avoidable tragedy.

    Love is not the only thing needed in terminal care. Common sense, knowledge, and dialogue can be more important.

    Jay I. Meltzer, M.D., is emeritus clinical professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A contributor to The Star for 30 years, he lives in Manhattan and Water Mill.

     “Amour” is nominated for Oscars for best picture, best director, and best original screenplay at the Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night.

    Are you grouchy, grumpy, or gloomy at this time of year? Irritable? Depressed, drowsy, tired? Maybe a headache? Your spirits sag? Or you suffer silently, your mind wanders, ideas elude you?

    If so, you may have a case of spring fever, like Dorothy Parker, who kvetched: “Every year, back comes spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up. . . .”

    Does spring fever really exist, or is it an imaginary ailment? Does your body change its chemistry and rhythms?

    In cool climates, late winter and spring seem to bring pronounced body fatigue. At the same time, resistance to infection, to intoxication, to trauma, to emotional upheaval is at its lowest. In the spring, a young man’s fancy may lightly turn to love, or convertibles, or baseball — but a family man’s duties turn heavily toward household chores that need doing . . . but are done reluctantly during spring fever season, if at all.

    In one study over a 10-year period, blood samples were found to have their acid-alkaline balance shifted toward high relative blood acidity during April, spring fever time, when conceptions diminish and stillbirths and deaths in the population peak. Springtime suicides peak dramatically in Scandinavian countries.

    You are most likely to be susceptible to spring fever (and to weather conditions in general) if you are slender, nervous, shy, anxious, female, and young. You are least likely to succumb to spring weather if you are male, stocky, calm, placid, extroverted, and older.

    Landmark investigations by William F. Petersen, a pathologist, demonstrated that clinical symptoms, mental reactions, and abnormal behavior are conditioned by changing seasons and weather.

    Our entire metabolism is built upon an adequate supply of oxygen, our most important external resource for survival. Take away food, and you can live for a week or more. Take away water, and you will survive for a few days. But take away air — and you will not live more than a few minutes. Air hunger is our strongest drive.

    Indeed, the words “am” and “is” come from ancient the Sanskrit words asmi and bhu, meaning “to breathe” and “to grow.” Existence is breathing and growing. Air is so important that when in love, we “walk on air.” When rejected, he “gets the air.” If she’s superficial, she “puts on airs.” In confusion or uncertainty we are “up in the air.”

    Brain tissue, muscle tissue, cells, membranes, organs, skin — all demand oxygen for survival. Oxygen from air furnishes us with energy during combustion (oxidation) through glucose, a fuel providing our muscle power.

    After the passage of a cold front, when warm blood has departed from the body’s periphery it moves to our central organs and torso to conserve heat. Then the extremities are at a disadvantage and vital tissues may be oxygen-deprived.

    Suppose one of your body organs is below par because of a local injury or fatigue after strain. A cold front would induce blood vessels to constrict, thereby denying blood and thus oxygen to the weak organ. Oxygen hunger may lead to pain, pressure, swelling, hydration, or acidosis. The medical complaint may pass. Tissues may return to normal, if unstressed further, within a few days.

    But suppose late-winter or early-spring air masses with gyrating temperatures come along before the tissues re-equilibrate and return to normal. The passing weather fronts will register internally; migraine, colitis, arthritis, neuritis, and stomach ulcers are but a few examples. Your mild fatigue may develop into deep exhaustion. Your simple headache may blossom into a throbbing migraine. Your throat soreness may emerge as a full-blown hacking cough. Your blood chemistry may change. Your mildly dispirited mood may develop into depression.

    Public health statistics also echo atmospheric temperature changes. Mental and physical disturbances, reproduction and death rates, psychotic admission rates, epileptic attacks, labor pains, cardiac deaths, tuberculosis, suicides, and other dysfunctions statistically mirror the organic rhythms of individuals. Passage of weather fronts constrict and dilate blood vessels, a reflex that regulates our body temperature, and these create biological tides both internally and in public health records.

    Temperature extremes, heat and cold, must be compensated within the body. Reflected in symptoms major or minor, transient or protracted — below the radar or above — the body marshals an ingenious array of mechanisms to meet every change. The blood distribution changes, endocrine activity changes, physical and chemical constituents of body fluids change; mental reactivity, muscle ability, kidney performance, bone marrow and leukocytes, mucous membranes, sensory response, even the retina of the eye — all correlate with weather-front passages, especially during the spring. No wonder we may experience restlessness, vivid dreams, insomnia, nightmares, despondence, and spring fever. Our primeval biology responds. While our consciousness might ignore spring, fibers deep inside us unconsciously echo the air and sky.

    If the physicians measure spring fever but do not understand it, then it is poets who — without measuring — comprehend our “inner weather” and spring fever. “I am what is around me,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. When Byron said, “I am always most religious on a sunshiny day,” he was referring to atmospheric intimacy. Shakespeare was acutely aware of “tides in the affairs of men” — possibly atmospheric tides — or what he called “skyey influences that importuned our creaturehood.” Weather-sensitivity.

    These poets’ subconscious was so closely interwoven with their organic world, with their environment — emotional, physical, even thermal — that they became clearly conscious of it. They are called geniuses. And to the extent that we participate in spring fever, we experience a glimpse of our own genius.

   Stephen Rosen is the author of “Weathering: How the Atmosphere Conditions Your Body, Your Mind, Your Moods — and Your Health.” He  lives in East Hampton and New York.

    After his triumphant election in November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to wait five months to address the desperate condition of the nation’s banking system, while exiting President Hoover rained down appeals to F.D.R. to endorse a continued gold standard.

    Roosevelt was interested in restoring confidence in the American financial system. To that end, he recruited a non-banker, a pillar of New York City and East Hampton, William H. Woodin.

    In February 1933, Roosevelt approached Woodin about being his treasury secretary. Woodin was a lifelong Republican, but was also a friend and supporter of F.D.R., and he agreed. Woodin had called him “Governor” for so long that he continued to call him that.

    The two men decided to end Hoover’s temporizing. Roosevelt got an opinion from his attorney general that he could legally close all the banks. So, starting the night of his inauguration, he declared a bank holiday, with a promise to reopen only the banks that were solvent. On March 9, Roosevelt convened an extraordinary session of Congress, which extended the holiday with the Emergency Banking Act.

    Woodin got to work. He supervised production of $2 billion in greenbacks to restore liquidity. The new bills were packed in trucks and delivered to the banks, with movie cameras filming. News clips were sent to cinemas around the country so people could see liquidity being restored.

    Woodin meanwhile sent out examiners to determine the solvency of each bank. Based on the financials, the treasury allowed solvent banks to reopen, and in one month deposits in the reporting member banks had increased by $1 billion.

    By the end of April 1933, confidence was largely restored. It was bracketed by two of Roosevelt’s fireside chats on the radio, one on March 12 and the second on May 7. In March, the president told the truth about the banks:

    “Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. . . . It was the government’s job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible.”

    The two of them did it.

    Who was William Woodin? He was a summer resident of the Dunes on Lily Pond Lane, but he was born in the coal-and-steel hills of Pennsylvania, in Berwick. His father and grandfather owned a foundry that made railroad wheels and rolling stock. Will wanted to become a physician but was told to prepare to work in his father’s business. He attended the Columbia University School of Mines, graduating in 1890. He was married in his senior year to the daughter of a judge in Montrose, Pa. — Annie Jessup, later called by her family Nan.

    Will had a great sense of humor. After three years’ apprenticeship, he was allowed to cast a wheel by himself in the Berwick foundry. His grandson Charlie Miner said that when Will showed some visitors how he did it, he changed the mold. So when the mold cooled and the top was raised, it revealed not a railway wheel but a cast-iron frog.

    It wasn’t clear that Woodin would be a business success. He celebrated his graduation from Columbia by leaving his new bride and sailing for the Near East to report for The New York Herald on Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s killing of Armenians. His granddaughter Anne Harvey Gerli said her grandmother resented this gallivanting:

    “Nan was jealous of Will’s love of music and resented his going off to Europe to ‘play music with the gypsies.’ The family recalled him early. His father said he and the business were ailing. He dutifully hurried home.”

    The 1893 Panic doubtless played a part in his father’s appeal to Woodin to come home. But Woodin’s love for music was deep and abiding. He played the guitar and piano all his life. He composed many melodies, some of which are still performed, including the F.D.R. inaugural march. He composed music for “Raggedy Ann’s Sunny Songs,” with the lyrics supplied by his friend Johnny Gruelle, whose characters included “Little Wooden Willie”!

    Woodin’s capacity to entertain made him a good salesman and a business success. After a close second-place finish in a race for Congress, he threw himself into a succession of mergers that formed the giant American Car and Foundry Company, based in New York City. The company made the first steel railway car in 1904 and sold hundreds of cars to the subway systems of London and New York.

    Woodin became the company’s chief executive in 1915, riding the wave of industrialization in the first three decades of the century. Entertaining as well as successful, he joined many clubs in New York City. In East Hampton he became president of the Maidstone Club in 1926-27, as well as the third commodore of the Devon Yacht Club and the founding chairman of East Hampton’s arts center, Guild Hall.

    In 1922 he was made fuel administrator by Republican Gov. Nathan Miller of New York. Reappointed by Miller’s Democratic successor, Gov. Al Smith, in 1923, he supported Governor Smith for president in 1928. He followed this by supporting Governor Roosevelt in 1932 — F.D.R. was a near neighbor, two blocks away from 67th and Fifth, where Woodin lived.

    Will and Nan attended the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and the East Hampton Presbyterian Church with their four children and grandchildren. Mr. Miner tells this story:

   I once asked him, “Grandpa, why do we have to sit up front?”

   “Because,” Grandpa answered, modestly, “I gave the church some money.”

   I asked him, “If we give more money, can we sit in the back?” Grandpa roared with laughter.

    Woodin was a serious coin collector. One hundred years ago, he published a major numismatic reference work, “United States Pattern, Trial, and Experimental Pieces.” Mr. Miner said that when his grandfather called on the King of Siam to sell railway cars, he was lectured on Siamese protocol, including the importance of backing away facing the king. But the two of them emerged later arm in arm, the king entranced with Woodin’s knowledge of rare coins.

    How did Woodin do as treasury secretary? He was crucially important. Unemployment was 25 percent in 1933. Public opinion was set boiling by the Pecora Commission (a Congressional subcommittee), which in 1932-34 was exposing multiple misdeeds on Wall Street. The country needed action.

    Woodin’s first success was in restoring stability to the financial system during April 1933. By the second fireside chat, financial markets were back in action.

    Then Woodin became co-designer and cheerleader for New Deal programs for direct creation of public jobs, and also for the Glass-Steagall Act, which set up a wall around bank deposits and insured them. The deposit insurance portion, which was Representative Henry B. Steagall’s half of the law, is still standing. But Senator Carter Glass’s wall was disassembled and made inevitable the financial collapse of 2008.

    Woodin disagreed with F.D.R. on going off the gold standard. Roosevelt favored devaluing the dollar against gold to allow for more fiscal policy flexibility. Whenever he brought it up, Woodin would say, “Oh no, not that again,” according to Mr. Miner. Roosevelt both devalued the dollar and forbade private citizens from owning gold for speculative purposes. Woodin worked to make it happen, while extracting an exemption for private ownership of “rare or unusual” gold coins.

    The pace of change, constant stress, and sleep deprivation set up Woodin for an illness that persisted into December. He was burned out in less than a year and resigned as secretary as of the end of 1933. He died on March 3, 1934, two days short of one year from the day he was sworn in. Mr. Miner said the cause of death was probably strep throat, for which there was then no cure. His austere funeral service was held at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Roosevelt was there, himself no stranger to the challenges of illness. In his eulogy he called Woodin “a martyr to public service.” Which he was.

    What lessons can we draw?

    Neither F.D.R. nor William Woodin was an expert on bank liquidity or fiscal policy, but they both understood that the country had elected F.D.R. to act to end market illiquidity.

    Both were creative people with instincts nurtured by years of executive decision-making. They set the course for the New Deal.

    Their instincts were right. The country recovered until anti-deficit hawks in 1937 pressed for premature budget reductions that reversed the progress of the previous four years.

    The experts had not helped. The Federal Reserve created inflation and cycles and the Treasury Department adhered to the “treasury view” that fiscal policy is not an appropriate tool for tackling job creation.

    The joint success of F.D.R. and the man from Lily Pond Lane is a vindication of the American democratic system of putting elected nonexperts and their trusted appointees in charge of the career experts.

    As Woodin’s granddaughter, Ms. Gerli, put it to me:

    “Grandpa could deal with the bankers because he wasn’t one of them. He was a businessman. When J.P. Morgan lost his mink coat, Grandpa went shopping in second-hand stores for ratty old mink coats and sent several of them to Morgan with a note saying he thinks he ‘found’ the man’s missing coat.”

    You have to admire a man who could poke fun at J.P. Morgan. And we should appreciate the contribution he made to America’s recovery from the Crash of 1929 and to a financial system that worked well for the rest of the century.

   John Tepper Marlin has served as chief economist for three New York City comptrollers and as senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. He is now chief economist for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

    We of a certain age and perhaps a certain degree of affluence may not have a huge store of old photographs. Certainly nowhere near as many as are being accumulated in this digital age. But, thank God for the ones we have! They capture past moments of a reality, for the most part, a reality that had a gala edge. One can almost enter an old scene and re-experience the moment. Sometimes that step-in even will allow you to supply your own soundtrack.

    There is one that I treasure of my wonderful, large-souled, big-bosomed aunt who never married. She was the taker of our pictures, the owner of the cameras, the photojournalist of our family’s very insignificant significant moments. Born in 1900 — so her age was always easy to remember — Big Gert — her figure and her largesse earned her that name — was the only one in her family to complete high school. She immediately landed an excellent job that launched a career as a legal secretary. Her beauty and brightness made her the pet of a set of some nouveau riche Irish lawyers. The job led her into a life of generous opulence where she became another family backbone and was referred to as our rich aunt. She livened up all our lives, enriched them, and bailed out many of them, especially that of my own widowed mom, Maggie Murphy.

    The picture was taken in 1956. She is standing in a darkened hallway that fed into a living room where I know a party was taking place. There is a flashbulb jammed up each nostril, and she smiles toothlessly, dentures having been removed to add to the comic effect. The youngest child of widow Trepold, she had lost those teeth during an impoverished childhood in an old Brooklyn neighborhood that they used to refer to as the Northside.

    She must have done that flashbulb trick a lot on other occasions that were not caught in film. I recently attended a wake more than half a century after the taking of that picture. An elderly woman (a rank that I am gingerly and reluctantly joining) whom I hadn’t seen in scores of years said, “Oh, I remember those Murphys. They were high steppers.”

    I had never heard that expression before. How quaint, how colorful, and how ego-gratifying to have my simple tribe referred to as high steppers. And she then added, “I remember your aunt with the flashbulbs up her nose.”

    I have that picture and others like it. I also have the one of her stripped down to a corset and very wide, skin-covering bra; she is twirling a recently shed garment in the air. Sadly, there is no soundtrack to accompany this act. The song was always “Rosie, the Queen of the Models,” and always a command performance at family gatherings. Gatherings of beer and highballs and very simple fare, sometimes spontaneous, always inclusive. Gatherings of songs and recitations — “Gunga Din,” “Ivan Skavinsky Skavar,” “Levinsky at the Wedding,” “Oh Willie I Forgive You,” “Oh They Built the Ship Titanic,” “To Arms, to Arms,” “There’s a Ring Around the Moon,” and all the world wars’ sing-alongs.

    Yes, pictures hold memories. The frozen memory is but a snippet of a life. The before and the after are not told or sung there. The births and the deaths, the transitions, the proverbial ups and downs and twists and turns become the books that frame the events.

    My wonderful aunt fell victim to depression as she aged. We saw her lose her “affect” and we were helpless and saddened. Had we been more knowledgeable of psychology or social services (had they existed as they do today), perhaps we might have suggested some sort of therapy. Perhaps we wouldn’t have dared because of her spiritedness and our own timidity.

    Another picture that she left me was taken the day after the flashbulb incident. I know the date precisely. I am in it, standing on a street corner in New York City. Kneeling at my feet are three grinning teenage friends in mock piety; their laughter was prompted by their posturing as though in a holy card. (Holy cards were the things that Catholic kids used to collect prior to Vatican II.) My arm is stretched over them as if in bestowing a blessing. Actually, there is a cigarette in my hand.

    And that picture always stirs up the memory of another song:

She sailed away in the merry month of May on the back of a crocodile.

“You see,” said she, “I’m as safe as safe can be,” as she sailed off down the Nile. . . .

At the end of the ride, the lady was inside, and the smile was on the crocodile.

    The date of that picture was Sept. 8, 1956. It was the day I entered the convent.

    Gert Murphy is a retired public school teacher who lives in Montauk. She recently joined the Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop.