Here are some very important tips to optimize your Hamptons summer shopping experience:

    When a salesperson greets you, don’t be afraid to smile and respond. She is just being friendly — it’s an odd local custom. You’ll get used to it, and you can always ignore her if she tries to bother you again.

    If you are a bright star in the human galaxy, the Hamptons retail clerk will assume you desire anonymity and pretend not to recognize you. If you are a not-so-bright star you may get the same treatment. Don’t get all huffy; it could be a compliment. Keep in mind, though, you lesser stars, if you don’t get the service you desire, don’t ask, “Do you know who I am?” You may be disappointed.

    Make sure to complain to the salesperson about the traffic, the parking, and the ticket you just got. It’s all obviously her fault. The weather, especially if it is bad during your vacation, is also her problem. In fact, if you take out all of your summer frustrations on the sales clerk, you’ll feel so much better.

    Ignore all posted signs. “Returns — Store Credit Only” does not apply to you. You deserve a full refund. Neither does the “No Food or Drinks” sign. You would never spill your iced mocha latte on their precious merchandise. The “Employees Only” sign on the bathroom is just preposterous. Why should you use the public restroom? “Shirts and Shoes Required” is only for people with flabby abs or no pedicure. “No Dogs Allowed” doesn’t mean Pookie; she’s part of the family. And the posted store hours are always flexible. If you need something before they open, just bang on the door until someone comes. If you are still in the store at closing time, simply stay until you are good and ready to leave. Don’t feel rushed, even if the sales clerk looks tired and unhappy. Another half-hour won’t kill her.

    Lament the high prices and how everything is cheaper in the city or New Jersey or online. With those prices, the store should have exactly what you want. But if they don’t, order the item anyway, then buy it somewhere else. Remember, it is always worth badgering the salesperson for a special price or discount, especially when she is very busy.

    Don’t ever wait in line. Just push up to the counter and demand immediate service. If the clerk is on the phone, talk over her. If she is waiting on someone else, interrupt them. Become irate if your credit card is declined or your wallet is in the car. Someone else is surely responsible. Wet or sweaty bills pulled directly from your swimsuit or biking shorts are perfectly acceptable. Don’t apologize. Last-minute purchases before you catch the Hampton Luxury Liner? Leave your luggage where everyone will trip over it and make the clerk gift wrap everything while you loom over her and fidget.

    Expect your salesperson to know the exact location of every store, restaurant, and road in every town in the Hamptons and be able to answer every question pertaining to all of them. If she doesn’t answer to your satisfaction, try speaking VERY LOUDLY or veeery slooowly and always E-NUN-CI-ATE.

    When checking out, make sure to comment on deforestation if the store has paper bags, and landfills if they use plastic. If they have both options, complain about how many bags you already have at home. Never bring your own. And if the salesperson actually asks if you’d like a bag, you should reply disdainfully either “Of course” or “Of course not,” depending on your mood.

    Shop with your kids! If they are restless and bored or have dripping ice cream cones and chocolate-covered fingers, allow them to run freely in the store and redecorate while you shop. They can climb stairs and jump from step stools, pull items from shelves, and explore areas marked “No Admittance.” If they are screaming and yelling with excitement or rage, don’t bother quieting them or feel you need to leave the store. Make sure to park all strollers in the middle of the store or in narrow aisles. Never clean up anything.

    No kids? Shop with your dog! Does Lulu bark, growl, and like to bite people? Bring her along when you shop. Is Thor a great fighter? Bring him too. Friendly Rufus should have a long leash so he can drool, shed, and jump on everybody. And don’t worry if your best friend has a little accident. Just ignore any puddles. Why should you have to mop up?

    Please speak extra loudly on your cellphone so that the customers in the back can hear. Better yet, walk around the entire store while you argue with your lawyer, broker, contractor, or spouse. Don’t hang up when you are checking out. You don’t really need to talk to the salesperson anyway; rudimentary sign language and exaggerated facial expressions should be sufficient.

    Remember, the customer is always right, especially in the Hamptons.

    L.J. Gurney has lived and worked on both sides of the retail counter in the Hamptons.

    A perfect game has occurred only 22 times in Major League Baseball’s 143 seasons. More people have reached the top of Mount Everest than have thrown perfect games, and that includes Apa Sherpa, who has climbed it 21 times, one fewer than the total number of perfect games thrown.

    What is so special about a perfect game? Why does everyone make a huge deal about it? Well, for one, there are 3 outs in an inning, 9 innings in a game, and 162 games in a season for a single team (4,860 regular-season games for all 30 teams). So you would think that if a no-hitter happens once or twice a season, a perfect game should happen at least once a season, right? Wrong. A no-hitter is when a pitcher doesn’t allow a hit for a full game but gives up a walk or an error is committed. A perfect game is when a batter doesn’t step on base over all 27 at-bats.

    Over the last four M.L.B. seasons, there have been five perfect games, and two of them have been in the last two months. The only other time that has happened (twice in a season) was in 2010, with Dallas Braden of the Oakland A’s and Roy Halladay of the Philadelphia Phillies, and in 1880 (but those perfect games are considered by some as old-era perfect games). Heck, what do I know, I’m 15 years old. But what I do know is that I have been alive for 8 of the 22 perfect games. Six of them I remember as if they were yesterday.

    Which leads me to my main point: I’m only 15 and I can clearly remember six perfect games. From 1970 to 1981, baseball didn’t see a perfect game until Len Barker did it for the Cleveland Indians. Why? It’s simple: From 1970 to 2004 baseball players were using human growth hormone, or H.G.H. From 1981 to 2004 baseball saw about one perfect game every four seasons — not bad. But that was the golden era of H.G.H. and steroids. Batters used them, or at least we think they did (Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds); even pitchers used them (again, we think — Roger Clemens).

    Some of the greatest players of the era used steroids, and growing up that’s all I knew. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez) and Big Papi (David Ortiz), who had only 58 home runs as a Twin — yes, he was a Twin — both used steroids. Big Papi hit 31 home runs in his first season as a Red Sox player; it is coincidental that Manny Ramirez, a proven H.G.H. user, hit 33 home runs that season. Look, whether Manny gave Big Papi the ’roids or not, it’s a coincidence, which leads me to where I’m finally landing.

    Baseball is at last getting the golden age of pitching. Why? Because players can’t use steroids or H.G.H. anymore, which gives pitchers the upper hand. Halladay, always a great pitcher, got his perfect game in 2010. Mark Buehrle threw his in 2009, which started the trend. Braden, a “nobody,” got his on Mother’s Day in 2010, before Halladay’s. Earlier this season another nobody, Philip Humber of the White Sox, threw his first and probably only perfect game. On June 13, Matt Cain of the Giants did the same.

    Now, I can’t say every batter was using steroids, but it’s my theory that steroids are the reason pitchers are in a golden age at this point in baseball’s history. Johan Santana, not the greatest Mets pitcher of all time, got the Mets’ first-ever no-hitter three weeks ago because the Mets’ greatest pitchers never pitched in the golden age.

    It could just be the quality of the teams being faced. Braden went up against the Tampa Bay Rays, who’ve had a top-10 offense in the last three seasons. Halladay faced the Marlins — okay, I’ll give you that one; they aren’t that good. Buehrle pitched against the Rays. Humber faced the Seattle Mariners: again, a bad-hitting team. Last but not least, Cain faced the bad-hitting Houston Astros. Three of those four are bad-hitting teams. But still, since 2009, 5 of the 22 perfect games have occurred; since my birth in 1997, 8 of the 22.

    Steroids killed pitchers for so long, whether it was one hit in the bottom of the eighth that ruined a pitcher’s no-hitter or perfect game or one home run that ruined a pitcher’s day, it doesn’t matter. We could be seeing a lot more no-hitters and perfect games in the years to come, and in this season alone.

    Matthew Lownes will be a sophomore at East Hampton High School in September. He lives in Amagansett.

   I’m lying under a blanket in the back seat of our 1964 Chevy Impala, snoring through “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a blisteringly boring film for an 11-year-old who hates science fiction. Sleeping is my only escape from an incomprehensible, insufferable cast of actors dressed as prehistoric apes screaming at an anachronistic monolith, astronauts babbling about a mission to the moon, and a droning, lullabying computer with a superiority complex.

    I’m jolted awake by a racket rattling the loudspeaker wedged into the driver’s-side window. The screeching comes from a space pod rocketing beyond infinity, the only exciting scene in a movie that Mad, my favorite funny magazine, dubbed “2001: A Space Idiocy.” Drowsiness becomes disorientation as stars explode, colored lights erupt, space haywires, and my brain bobsleds through a psychedelic Times Square plugged into Jimi Hendrix’s amplifier.

    This virtual acid trip happened at the Hamptons Drive-In in Bridgehampton, which was a gas even when the movie sucked. The fun usually began in cars and trucks lined up at the entrance. Being a pretty obedient child, I was amused and amazed by kids hiding under blankets in back seats and pickup beds, laughing loudly because they knew they’d get in for free. They usually succeeded because the cashiers accepted petty crime as normal juvenile high jinks. The guardians at the gate expected to get ripped off just as motorists at a safari park expected baboons to rip off chunks of vinyl roofs.

    Once inside the lot, the first order of business was finding a speaker that worked right. It seemed that every third one was disabled — perhaps by the clammy chill of South Fork nights, probably by frustrated customers jamming the contraption between window and door. My father was famously impatient, and hunting for a sufficiently loud, clear speaker turned him into the kind of petulant patriarch found in so many of Jean Shepherd’s shaggy yarns.

    Once hooked up, the next order of business was racing to the playground swings. Yanking my body as hard and as high as I could, trying to touch the dusky sky with my toes, was delightfully liberating and downright magical. It might have been less magical had I known that the kids’ stuff at Bridgehampton was, well, kids’ stuff. Other drive-ins, I discovered decades later, had pony rides, go-cart tracks, and John Wayne promoting “True Grit” by shooting guns on top of a concession stand.

    The Bridgehampton concession stand was the site of a memorable rite of passage. In that cinderblock bunker I bought snacks by myself for the first time, rewarding my parents’ faith I would return to them safe and with their change. For me, adulthood started the night I purchased a box of Raisinettes and an Orange Crush without adult supervision. Waiting on line I entertained myself by imagining the stand attacked by aliens attracted by the garish fluorescent lights that gave everyone an alien glow.

    Back at the car, I engaged in another act of independence. If the night was fairly warm and the crowd was fairly small, my parents let me watch part of the film in a folding chair or, better yet, in the middle of the hood. I didn’t care that, separated from speaker and heater, the sound clattered and my teeth chattered. I just loved staring at the screen and the stars, tuning in natural and artificial frequencies, bathing in freedom.

    Any ex-teen will tell you that a drive-in is all about freedom. Like any drive-in, Bridgehampton was a cheap, reliable outdoor motel for youngsters in lust and on the lam. Being a junior voyeur, I enjoyed spying on the groping and grinding. One night I returned from the concession stand and followed the sound of moaning to my first vicarious blow job. When I gasped, the fellated fellow opened his eyes and shot me a look that could have blasted asteroids as if they were hemorrhoids. Luckily for me, I was in the driver’s seat. He had to shut up because shouting would have distracted his lady, attracted the flashlight detectives, and blown his ecstasy big time.

    There’s a saying among Woodstockers that if you remember all the musicians who played the three-day festival, you either weren’t there or you didn’t drop enough acid. The drive-in spawned a similar saying: If you remember all the films, you either weren’t in the passion pit or you didn’t get enough passion. Since I wasn’t old enough to get enough, I can honestly, accurately say that many Bridgehampton teens spent so much time fooling around in the car, they missed a lot of fooling around on the screen.

    Like so many drive-ins in the late ’60s to early ’70s, Bridgehampton showed plenty of skin. On one hand, the drive-in’s owners wanted to cash in on the free-love boom. On the other hand, they needed to compete against racier fare on cable television, a threat they addressed with signs proclaiming “Save Free TV.” Perhaps that’s why cashiers let preadolescents like me see “The Graduate,” in which a middle-age, restless woman commits adultery with a restless, rootless young bachelor, and “Easy Rider,” in which bikers use peyote as an aphrodisiac.

    My parents were agents of corruption, too. They took their kids to R-rated films because they knew we’d be bored to sleep, which would give them a relatively rare night out and still maintain family unity. That’s why “2001,” which was originally released in 1968, was my surreal sleeping pill and hallucinogenic alarm clock in the summer of 1969, when it was re-released to feed the frenzy over the Apollo 11 moon landing. That’s why I saw “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas,” a sex comedy about a bored middle-aged lawyer who clicks with a hippie chick who bakes hash brownies — and who gave my proper, scone-baking English mother a burning desire to make chocolate pot.

    Against all odds the drive-in made me a film fan. Despite being bored and cold and distracted and drowsy, I became an aficionado of all sorts of actors, genres, and formats. At Bridgehampton I saw “You Only Live Twice,” which made me admire Sean Connery’s suave, witty James Bond; the 007 satire “Casino Royale,” which made me admire Woody Allen’s clownish kvetching, and “To Sir, With Love,” which made me admire Sidney Poitier’s radiant, raging dignity. At Bridgehampton I saw my first horror movie: “The Sand Pebbles,” a drama about a U.S. Navy gunboat patrolling 1920s China. For a good week I had nightmares about a hot-headed machinist, played by Steve McQueen, who shoots to death a coolie tortured onshore by nationalists, axes a nationalist after he helps break a blockade of junks, and is shot to death by a sniper in a deserted, haunted palace. The violence, so foreign and yet so personal, scared me into thinking I’d be drafted and become the first 11-year-old American to die during hand-to-hand combat in Vietnam.

    Bridgehampton birthed my bizarre fondness for pastel-colored, flawless-skinned, perfectly fizzy pictures like “Sweet November” and “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.” Bridgehampton can be blamed for my love affair with daffy, only-at-the-drive-in double bills like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” a comedy about tourists breaking down, and “Let It Be,” a documentary about the Beatles breaking up. The only connection between those films is that both take place in Europe. That, and the fact that so many people in a summer resort are so bored at night they’ll watch pretty much any kind of crap.

    Best of all, Bridgehampton encouraged me to dig movies so bad they’re good. Four decades later, “2001” still makes me yawn, still makes me want to scream like an ape, still gives me a good psychotropic jolt. The only thing better would be my mother finally baking me a batch of Alice B. Toklas-toked brownies.

    Hmm. Maybe the only way to really, truly enjoy “2001” is stoned.

Geoff Gehman is a former resident of Wainscott and a former arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. This piece is excerpted from “The Kingdom of the Kid,” a memoir of growing up on the South Fork circa 1967 to 1972, to be published in 2013 by SUNY Press.

    I love Montauk, and here’s a tiny glimpse of why.

    Some background for our summer guests: While once the site of the first cattle ranch in a land that some 150 years later became the United States of America, Montauk has consigned the cattle drives to history and is now all about fishing. Period. The evidence is everywhere — the rod-holders on the pickups and S.U.V.s, the recreational boats, charter boats, head boats, and monster draggers lined up at the docks, the commercial fish-packing houses at the harbor entrance, and the sheer number of boats of all kinds tied up at the picturesque harbor.

    Montauk’s is one of the finest harbors on the East Coast, given that it once was a totally protected freshwater lake that was opened to the sea in the late 1920s by Carl Fisher, who simply dynamited away the strip of land separating Lake Montauk from Block Island Sound. After developing the swamps of Miami into a resort area, Fisher decided to make Montauk the “Miami of the North.” And he might have succeeded but for the market crash in 1929 and the ensuing Depression. (Put aside, please, that today even thinking about dynamiting a section of land in order permit saltwater intrusion to destroy the ecology of a freshwater lake could get you strung up from a tree being hugged by Al Gore and the Enviros.)

    Back to my story. Fishing today is a far different industry from when President George Washington authorized the construction of Montauk’s iconic lighthouse. Even the Fox News crowd could not lay blame solely on Obama for the intricate web of regulations that have governed fishing for the last half-century. Each category of fisherman — recreationals like me, the commercial charter boat guys, the draggers and long-liners who go out for weeks at a time — is subject to different rules regarding how many of each species of fish can be taken, when they can be taken, and how large they must be in order to be “keepers.” If it is too small, too big, out of season, etc., it must go back into the water, dead or alive.

    No more digressions. Early in June, Pinks and I and another couple were eating at Wok ’n’ Roll, the Montauk main drag Chinese restaurant with a huge sign out front advertising its specialty: “You hook ’em, we cook ’em.”

    We brought to the restaurant our ubiquitous plastic supermarket bag containing some striped bass and fluke fillets from fish I had recently caught. The restaurant manager, Li, gave us a big season-opener greeting, seated us, weighed our bag of fish, gave us our drinks, took our order as to how we wanted the fish prepared (there are 10 options), and went back to the kitchen to get things cookin’.

    As Li disappeared through the kitchen door, a middle-aged man and woman arrived with their white plastic supermarket bag and, seeing no waitstaff, the guy put his bag on the scale. We were sitting adjacent to the scale, and as I turned to chat with our friends, I heard the plastic bag rustle. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I spied the bag move. Nah, couldn’t be, and I turned back to our conversation. Then another crinkle, and this time I swiveled in my seat and saw that the bag was definitely moving. What the . . . ?

    As the embarrassed newcomer reached for it, the bag jumped off the scale and onto the floor! The guy stooped to recover it, but the bag kept on wiggling and slithering across the floor, as if it instinctively knew to avoid the grasp of this kneeling, red-faced predator. But when the guy finally got a grip on one end of the plastic bag, ta-da, out wiggled the fish from the other, open, end — a 12-to-15-inch sea bass. (This is a fish you would recognize if you ever ordered a whole cooked fish in a Chinese restaurant.)

    Now this was the scene: The guy was on his hands and knees trying to bare-hand the freed fish and get it back into the bag, but the fish was having none of it. One needs to be careful with these critters because while sea bass have no teeth, they have spines that are deadly. Grab a sea bass the wrong way, and you have, as my grandson Nicholas would say, a big ouchie.

    The customer’s female companion was standing aside with her hands hiding her face. She was not laughing. Neither was the guy. In fact, he was frantic. Not only had he outed himself as a rank amateur because he did not clean his fish before he brought it to the restaurant, and not only was his dinner escaping before a restaurant crowded with baseball cap-wearing fishermen, he was also now being revealed as a cheat: Even assuming the fish met the 13-inch minimum — which was not at all certain — the season for keeping sea bass did not open until the following week, and this guy was trying, for the second time that day, to catch and keep this illegal fish. It could have cost him $500 if there had been a D.E.C. cop having dinner at Wok ’n’ Roll that evening.

    Virtually everyone else in the restaurant was there because they brought legal fish they caught, and they were enjoying the poacher’s degradation. This could have been a new high in group schadenfreude. An unexpected floor show.

    Sigh, as you might have guessed, this story ends badly for the fish. Even with a hook in its jaw, the bass might have had a shot at escaping as long as it was in the sea, but it had no chance at enduring freedom while gasping and slithering about on Wok 'n’ Roll’s well-worn linoleum. It did give its all, though, and did get some measure of revenge: The guy, on his first reach for the fish, had yelped and pulled his hand back when he got stuck by a dorsal fin. A table of six well-oiled guys just off a charter boat cheered when that happened. Being the nice guy I am, I just smiled into my bottle of Tsingtao.

    The humiliated amateur persisted — after all, what choice did he have? The fish was rebagged, and this time the guy tied the handle loops to prevent a recurrent escape. I don’t know what he ultimately did with the sea bass, because after the rube got it back in the bag, he straightened up, turned to his companion, commanded “C’mon,” and, with chin pressed to chest, stomped out of the restaurant.

    Ain’t life grand?

    Martin London is a retired trial lawyer who lives in Montauk with his wife, Pinks. He writes about life there and in their winter home, St. Barts, at londonsbh.blogspot.com.

   For all animal owners who travel, a reliable pet sitter is a major asset. For those who keep cats, a sitter is virtually indispensable.

    What about boarding our pets while we’re gone?

    For dogs, this can be a fine solution. Some friends of mine swear by it. A lot depends on the personality of the dog and the quality of the boarding kennel. The most trustworthy facilities are recommended by word of mouth. Every prudent owner should, of course, pay an inspection visit before leaving his dog there for the first time.

    Certain dogs, however, don’t kennel well. They’d be far better off in a home environment — perhaps staying with a friend or relative of the owner during his absence. And even the dogs who adapt easily to kennel life would usually be happier staying in their own homes, entrusted to the attentive care of a responsible sitter.

    For cats, boarding is never a desirable option. (Full disclosure! While I’m fond of dogs, my petkeeping experience has been exclusively with cats.) Most felines hate to be displaced from their family homes and don’t adjust well to any change of scene. Boarding should be reserved for unforeseen emergencies only — and then never in a commercial kennel where dogs predominate. Once or twice, when I was hospitalized on short notice with no time to arrange for a sitter, I had to board my cats at their veterinarian’s. Normally I book a caretaker in advance whenever I expect to be away from home overnight or longer.

    Over the 35 years I’ve lived full time on the South Fork, I’ve developed a pretty reliable sitter system. My basic arrangements apply equally to dog and cat care.

    I use a walk-in sitter for short absences from home: one, two, at most three nights. The sitter visits the house twice a day to feed and water my cats, attend to the litter boxes, check that all is in good order. She gets a typed list of everything I expect her to do and that she might conceivably need to know: safety precautions, veterinarian’s number, a phone number to reach me in emergency.

    It’s not hard to find animal lovers qualified to work as walk-in sitters. Many leave their business cards at local veterinary hospitals, grooming salons, and pet-supply stores. Some advertise in our local papers. All should supply references, easily checked, from their pet-owning clients in the community.

    Sitters’ fees vary, depending on how many dogs and/or cats are involved, the number of daily visits and exercise outings, and the need for medication, grooming, or other special care. If cost is a deterrent, one can try to work out a reciprocal arrangement with a pet-owning friend or neighbor who also travels. I’ve never had the opportunity to do this. But I tend to prefer a straightforward business arrangement to relying on favors from someone I might feel morally indebted to.

    When I expect to be away for more than two or three days, however, I arrange for a live-in sitter. I don’t feel comfortable leaving my pets home alone for days and nights on end, their solitude relieved only by brief caretaker visits. So I look for someone who will sleep in the house and spend most evenings there, even if my cats have to be left on their own during the sitter’s daytime working hours. The ideal candidate — not always available! — is a person “in and out” throughout the day: perhaps working part time, doing self-employed work from home, retired, or on vacation.

    What does a resident sitter cost? In our South Fork resort area, it can depend on time of year. Luckily, I’ve rarely had to pay for a live-in sitter when I travel in summer. Out-of-town friends or relatives, or warmly recommended friends of friends, have usually been available to settle in and take tender loving care of my pets in exchange for a rent-free beach holiday.

    But like many of us, I like to get away for a few weeks in the dead of winter too. Then, I need to employ a local resident to move into my house for the duration.

    Pet sitters qualified and willing to live in — “do overnights,” they call it — almost never advertise this. (Why would they? They’d hardly be left with any time free to spend in their own homes!) Their availability becomes known strictly by word of mouth. You might hear of someone through your pet-owning friends or the staff at your veterinarian’s office. But this research takes time. And even a highly recommended candidate might turn out to be already booked for another pet-sitting job on the very dates you’ll be away. This has happened to me more than once.

    Solution? I’m the one who does the advertising! Whenever necessary, I’ve placed a classified ad under “Pets” in a couple of local weeklies at least two months before my planned trip: “LIVE-IN CAT SITTER needed from _____ to _____. Must be mature, responsible, experienced caring for cats. References essential.” And then my phone number.

    It works! Each time a dozen or more respond. I’m ready with a barrage of questions to fire over the phone: How much experience do you have staying with other people’s cats? Are you at least 25? (I won’t engage anyone younger.) Who will look after your own pets while you’re living with mine? How many hours will you be away from my house at work each day? Phone numbers of at least two references, please. Then, assuming all else sounds satisfactory, What daily fee do you charge?

    This phone vetting streamlines my applicant list fast. Each time it produces one best candidate. After I’ve checked her references — all but one of my sitters have been women — we set up an initial meeting. I also file the name of at least one other qualified respondent as backup, in case a last-minute illness or family emergency cancels my first choice.

    For the sitters I’ve chosen to hire, as well as for the unpaid friends who take on the same responsibilities in the summer, I prepare two detailed documents. One covers house-sitting, the other cat care. The basic data is stored on my computer and easily updated for each of my absences. Together, they add up to far more information than the sitters care to read — or need to know in normal circumstances. But I feel secure only if every contingency has been provided for.

    Summarizing my three cardinal guidelines: First, plan and book a sitter well in advance. Second, scrupulously check all references of anyone not already well known. Third, insist the sitter review all the written instructions before departure date, preferably by mailing them to her, so any questions can be cleared up in advance.

    A time-consuming effort? Right! But a great reward: peace of mind. Freed of worries about my pets’ safety and well-being, I can relax and enjoy my travels thousands of miles from home. Best of all, once a new sitter has been tried and served well, repeat arrangements for future absences become that much easier.

    After three decades, I can flatly claim that my pets have never had a bad sitter experience. True, one young woman I hired neglected to water my houseplants. Another had let somebody’s dog into my basement, because weeks later I found dried dung on its floor. A third forgot (I presume) that she left a pornographic tape in my videocassette recorder.

    But none of this had the slightest effect on my cats. I always came home to find them perfectly well cared for and content. Sometimes even demonstrably glad to see me again.

Susan M. Seidman, the author of “Cat Companions: A Memoir of Loving and Learning,” which came out last year, and “The Pet Surplus: What Every Dog and Cat Owner Can Do to Help Reduce It,” from 2001, is a freelance writer who lives in East Hampton.

    Lillian grabbed my forearm and locked her eyes on me. “Your life is gonna change now,” she said, staring into me as her grip tightened for a few long seconds. “You know that, right?”

    Her husband stood with hands clasped at the French doors that closed around the hallways of Glueckert Funeral Home. She loosed her grip and walked away toward him.

    “Bye, honey.” She waved. “I loved your mom.”

    Her words hovered in the air.

    Across the chapel, my 85-year-old mother lay in repose alongside huge sprays of flowers, black-and-white portraits, and open scrapbooks. The weather, appropriately dismal, seemed to deter not a single friend or acquaintance. They arrived in oilcloth hats and dripping ponchos. Some were tall and robust; others were drooped across wheelchairs. The elderly show up for the dead.

    “I was with Lois that day — the day she joined the band,” said one.

    “Oh, goodness — the trombone. . . .” Those who could shook their heads and giggled.

    “But it suited her, didn’t it?”

    They wagged their heads back and forth, drifting into the past.

    In a twist of fate, by the time my mother was 14 the slide trombone had come to define her. She wanted to play something more feminine, like the saxophone or clarinet, but the bandleader at Foreman High School had other ideas.

    “You have long arms and a straight back,” he said. “You’ll play the trombone.”

    So, she did. Eventually, she would become the trombonist for the Sharon Rogers Band, an all-girl swing band that joined the U.S.O. and ended up touring the South Pacific, performing for thousands and nearly dying together when their cargo plane ditched in the sea at the end of World War II.

    “Oh, you mean your mother was one of those girls who entertained the troops,” said Jake.

    It seemed so much more glamorous to me than that. Until our basement flooded when I was in kindergarten, most of my free time was spent dressing up in the fancy ball gowns and high heels I found in the cellar. I managed to save a single pair of strappy shoes that I wore all through college — clear acrylic stilettos with white ostrich feathers wrapped around the toes.

    At home we were surrounded by U.S.O. memorabilia, Japanese knickknacks, and group shots of the girls. They were all beauties in one way or another. My mother wore her platinum hair like Veronica Lake back then, and this in combination with hazel eyes and an imperfect nose, the fixing of which occupied her thinking almost full time until she had it “done” in 1985, conspired to take one’s breath away. She stood a statuesque 5 foot 7 inches, tall enough to be tall in the 1940s. But as I tucked my little head in the folds of her apron, to me she was more Donna Reed than Rita Hayworth — cast as the lead in my own primetime drama, capri pants and all.

    By the time she became a mother, the trombone had been long packed away. She’d say, “That was then,” as she wiped her hands with a wet kitchen towel. Still, she regaled us with stories about lugging her trombone to and from school — some 12 ungodly blocks — performing at Chicago’s Wilson Park with the Melody Maids, and meeting a handsome Greek boy one night after a summer concert. I still imagine their eyes meeting under the dim of a street lamp. The fact that he took off that night with the bandleader, Sherry, was not lost on my mother. But in the end, this was the Greek boy who would become my father.

    Her dreams of attending university were squashed by my grandfather, a real-life cattle roping cowboy-cum-car mechanic who insisted college was no place for a girl. But when her gal pals moved to the Big Apple to become famous musicians — that was okay. And so, on a clear day in the spring of 1943, my mother boarded a train to New York City. She had just turned 19.

    When she disembarked at Grand Central Station, she was met by two musicians from the Betty McGuire Band, who whisked her off to Red Norvo’s Jackson Heights apartment. “Mr. Swing” was on tour, and his home was filled wall to wall with performers. My mother’s quarters would be a patch of floor in the dining room.

    The band was rehearsing for the U.S.O.’s Victory Circuit and the schedule was grueling. In between long sessions at Nola Studios they met and sometimes jammed with the greats — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the Dorsey Brothers. My mother quickly changed from a teenager into a full-blown jazz musician — slang, smokes, and slippery handshakes inclusive.

    But the New York gig eventually went belly up, bouncing her from stardom to starvation. She returned to Chicago, her tail between her legs. In the 18 months that elapsed between her New York adventures and the band’s tour through the Pacific, my mother traded in her satin gowns for the jumpsuit she wore while cracking rivets and plugging weld holes at Douglas Aircraft outside Chicago. She became a “Rosie,” building C-54 Skymasters, transport planes that helped win the war.

    As the Melody Maids (now, the Sharon Rogers Band) marched into fame, she must have felt left in the dust. Even my father, with whom she eventually forged a lusty summer romance, seemed preoccupied with the French girls he was meeting as a staff sergeant in Patton’s Army. Fewer and fewer letters arrived. At best, their future was uncertain.

    Providence intervened when the band lost its trombonist before a gig at Coney Island’s Club Atlantis. They called my mother, and I envision her tearing off that sweaty jumpsuit and racing to the train station with her trombone.

    The Atlantis was a wild place — a backdrop for Al Capone and performers the likes of Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante — and the Sharon Rogers Band presided over its stage through Hitler’s suicide, the Russian capture of Berlin, and V-E Day.

    They performed along the East Coast while being vetted by the War Department for overseas deployment. When the green light came in July, they joined the Foxhole Circuit. At every destination en route to their tour abroad — all of them top secret — the girls were met with gushing enthusiasm. The band was tight, the show sizzled, and the troops adored them.

    They boarded the U.S.S. Fallon on Aug. 3, just three days before Hiroshima was gutted by the atomic bomb. Later that week they were advised by sealed envelope that the band was headed to the Philippines, and they would fly the 5,300 miles military style — without creature comforts, seat belts, or oxygen.

    Manila had been liberated only some four or five weeks before, and fighting still raged nearby. The country was awash with carnage. The girls were billeted in bombed-out quarters that lacked much of anything — even rooftops — and they routinely slept under soaking tropical rains.

    But did they perform.

    Their third day in Manila, 14,000 soldiers crammed into the landmark Rizal Stadium to hear them while thousands more were turned away. As the world watched Japan’s surrender, the girls traveled over washed-out roads and mountains of rubble to reach Army hospitals and base camps. They served meals to P.O.W.s and visited with soldiers, entertaining the troops aboard ships and on makeshift stages across the islands.

    At the request of General MacArthur, they would become the first U.S.O. group following the armistice to enter Japan. They packed their bags and headed to Nichols Field.

    Across Japan they performed in elegant theaters and opera houses, sightseeing by private car in between shows. In December, just four months after the atomic bomb, my mother and some of the other girls traveled to Hiroshima. They were the first American civilians to see its ravaged landscape, and it left them speechless. The city, effectively vaporized by the bomb, was gone. It would be decades before they would speak openly of the experience.

    The band, exhausted, continued to perform across the Pacific. At least the end of their six-month tour was in sight.

    On Jan. 22 they departed from Kwangju Airport in Korea for Tokyo on a C-47 equipped with little more than life jackets. The story of this tortured flight could fill a book, so let’s just say that, like war, it was hell.

    By the time they neared Japan’s coastline they had been frozen and flying blind for some four hours. Now in a constant descent the airplane shaved over mountaintops, skimmed bombed-out airstrips, and twice dodged high-tension wires with only moments of fuel left in the tank. Miraculously, the pilot was able to land somewhat gracefully amid the mine-infested waters of the Shimonoseki Strait, a scant 50 feet from an ammunition barge. As the plane sank into darkness, the girls waved their Zippos in the hope of salvation.

    They were rescued by Japanese fishermen and soon returned stateside as heroines, their studio shots splashed across the front page of The Chicago Tribune. They were famous — and now they were home.

    My father had also survived the war and was back in town, too. He would always say he called my mom because he saw her picture in the paper. Whatever the reason, their passion was rekindled. They were married soon after.

    I keep a picture of my mother in a spot that is always in my direct sightline. Like so many veterans, she was an ordinary girl in an extraordinary position. All-girl bands were popular in the 1940s and they flourished in the U.S.O., but the story of the Sharon Rogers Band is extraordinary to me. My mother — the woman who brushed out my knots, taught me to cook, and wiggled her hips to the radio — really did, for a moment in time, become Rita Hayworth.

    And the rest, as they say, is history.

    Special thanks to my brother, John Goleas, M.D., for sharing his insights, research, and memories.

    Janet Goleas is an artist, curator, and writer who lives in East Hampton.

    Okay, I admit it. I’m a golf slut. I golf around. I play golf wherever I’m invited — Shinnecock, National, Maidstone, Atlantic, the Bridge, Deepdale, Winged Foot, and Westhampton. I’ll go as far as Westchester and even to Florida in the winter, especially when we’re covered in snow on Long Island. For a while I was a regular on the member-guest circuit of the top private clubs on the East End. I’m asked to play not because of my golf ability but because I’m fun to play with. Also, I have a very high handicap that comes in handy in competition when I can occasionally par a hole.

    Golf, golf, golf, golf, golf. It’s all I think about; it’s turning into an obsession. I have my weekly game with the women on ladies’ day at the Southampton Golf Club, where my husband and I are members. I was the 9-hole women’s champion the last two years at the club, but if I continue to play with them and win a third year in a row, no one will talk to me. So this year I moved up to the 18-holers, the big girls, the more serious golfers, and that suits my competitive nature. I’ve learned a lot from playing with them and, being a visual person, from watching them. I learned to examine my putts from both sides from Theresa Romano, to hit sideways out of bunkers from Nancy DePetris, and not to hit someone else’s ball for a two-stroke penalty.

    It’s a game, not a cure for cancer, so let’s keep things in perspective. There are many positives to being invited to member-guests. I’m out all day in a beautiful, green, park-like place away from computers and cellphones, which are strictly forbidden on all golf courses. They serve a lovely breakfast with fresh berries, melon, croissants, and bagels with smoked salmon before teeing off, and then an elaborate lunch, featuring lobster, tuna or filet mignon, grilled vegetables, and a variety of salads like watermelon and feta, all accompanied by fine wine.

    And there’s always a lovely present for just showing up. Of course if I win longest drive or closest to the pin or low net, there are additional prizes. I have a treasure trove of different-size crystal vases, pewter platters, pitchers, Paul Revere bowls, and wineglasses etched with the club’s name. I bring my husband a hat or a nice polo shirt from the clubs where I play. It’s the least I can do.

    This spring I was playing in a foursome with three other women, and as I teed off with my 7-iron on the second hole, a little par 3, about 115 yards, they shouted, “It went in the hole!”

    I couldn’t see that far and didn’t want to get too excited, so I said, “Let’s see when we get up there.”

    Sure enough, my little white, smiling Titleist with dimples was sitting snug in the cup next to the pin. A hole in one! Cool.

    We all shrieked and shouted and couldn’t believe my good fortune, because luck does play a role. Sure, it’s skill to get the ball on the green, but it could easily bounce the other way or roll off the green into a nasty, cavernous bunker. It was very exciting, but we still had 16 more holes to play. I ended up getting par on two other par 3s and posted my best score of the year.

    I borrowed my partner’s cellphone, strictly verboten, and called my husband to give him the good news and tell him to meet us in the clubhouse after the round. Club members buy hole-in-one insurance at the beginning of the season so everyone in the clubhouse gets a free drink when the person who got it comes in.

    The president of the club happened to be there, and I graciously accepted the kudos and accolades from people I didn’t know. We drank glasses of champagne, and then I bought my ladies a second round.

    I do enjoy my golf. Now the only problem is every time I tee up on a par 3, I expect the ball to go in the hole. Maybe next year.

    Fore!

    Joanne Pateman is a former advertising art director who lives in Southampton. She has an M.F.A. from Southampton College and regularly contributes “Guestwords” to The Star.

   Skipping home after charm school that afternoon, I stopped only once to catch a glimpse of a stranger in the deli’s plate-glass window: teased hair, lips painted fuchsia pink, tweezed eyebrows penciled black — a new me!

    I struck a pose and sauntered on. Mother was waiting. “What have you done?” she cried. “Your father’s legacy. Ruined! Gone! Go wash your face.”

    That night, I stole the single photograph hidden inside an old Sinatra record album and took my dictionary to bed. Legacy? I looked and looked into my father’s smiling eyes. I ran my finger down his straight nose, around cheekbones high and firm, across his bushy brows. I think I fell asleep with his perfect, sculpted lips pressed lightly to my own.

    My mother always says she married my father because he was gorgeous. He was. The photograph, now framed and hanging on my staircase wall, confirms it. Still, a photo shows only a shallow truth. The back story isn’t always as pretty; it’s complicated, murky, sometimes ugly.

    My mother, Norma Jean Pittenger, met my father, DeVoe (Joe) Harriott, in the spring of 1944 at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. “Joe was the best-looking guy on campus,” my mother says. She had seen him around, usually with coeds flocking near like preening pigeons, and admired him from afar.

    One fateful day, Joe staggered into economics class, tardy and drunk. The professor was not amused. Mother was. Joe asked her to go for coffee that afternoon. She accepted.

    “Surely there were other things you appreciated about Joe,” I said to my mother recently.

    “Oh, he was charming, stylish, intelligent, witty, tall, and fun,” Mother answered, “but, God, he was handsome.”

    Mother, with her smooth brown skin, long ebony hair, and perfect Pepsodent smile, got the guy.

    A few months later, after a night of bourbon and 7-Ups, they were married. Joe pulled Norma into his car and drove straight through Kansas. They tied the knot at a justice of the peace off the highway, two friends along for the ride as witnesses. Mother knew Joe had been married before and that he had fathered a couple of kids (he claimed one daughter), but she didn’t care. She was 20 and in love.

    Soon after the elopement, Joe transferred to the University of Minnesota. He and Mother moved to Minneapolis to the bleak Quonset hut village that housed married students. Minnesota winters are brutal and long. I was conceived in November 1945.

    Perhaps coincidentally, Joe took to carousing like an old tomcat right about then. “Let’s see . . . I’ve got my ID. Got some money. Got some rubbers,” he would say, patting his right hip pocket as he bolted out the door.

    Mother fumed, and I’ve heard this tale more times than I care to remember. Mother, miserable, powerless, wrote letters to Gramma, begging her to take the train from Des Moines to visit.

    “Please don’t have any more babies,” Gramma warned, but Mother was already pregnant with my sister.

    Years later, eons after Joe died an alcoholic’s death, cirrhosis of the liver, in a sleazy downtown Minneapolis hotel, Mother, full of cocktails, leaned across the kitchen table and jabbed her finger in my chest.

    “I know why you’re so f***ed up!” she slurred. “I always left you home alone when I went to the laundromat.”

    “Wonderful, I said, “you’d be charged with child abuse for that today.”

    “You don’t have kids. You can’t understand,” she retorted.

    I should have left the room. I didn’t. I longed to hear more. Her stories are like misplaced pieces from the jigsaw puzzle of my life.

    I don’t remember my father; I have no memories of him whatsoever. I know of him only through Mother’s repeated narratives and from what I conjure up in my imagination.

    When I was a teenager, I came across a poem Joe had written in school, scrawled in pencil on a scrap of notebook paper, buried with some snapshots, but I gleaned nothing from it. In the shots, Joe looks pleasant. He’s grinning and cuddling his daughters. In one, I’m sitting on his lap; in another, my sister is laughing down at him as he holds her in the air, his back to the camera.

    Mother says Joe was out boozing the night I was born. He turned up at the hospital the next morning, hung over. He took one look at me and said, “She’s scrawny, isn’t she?”

    “You’re the spitting image of Joe,” my mother says. “And you absolutely adored him.”

    She continues, “You’d stand at the window in the late afternoon and wait for Joe to come home. When you saw him outside, you’d shout, ‘Here comes my daddy now!’ ”

    When picturing this, I feel a great sadness wash over me; I quickly close the curtains on this scene. I’m unable to gaze into the past for too long without wondering what might have been.

    The inevitable end to this tale is actual fact. My mother caught my father with another woman. One rash night, while a neighbor watched us girls, Mother hopped on a bus, traveled downtown to Joe’s favorite hangout, didn’t find him, stalked to a nearby hotel, rode the elevator to “Joe’s door,” and tried to break it down with a fist and a curse.

    In the retelling, Joe opened that door and a marriage ended, just like in a B movie. I don’t want to know the grimy details of the encounter and, from there, Mother’s account turns vague anyway.

    Joe graduated from college soon after that, which necessitated our move from married-student housing. He packed us off to Des Moines while he hunted for a place to live.

    We never saw him again. Mother filed for divorce, found a job, and we stayed with Gram until Mother remarried.

    “Didn’t you consider leaving when you knew Joe was cheating?” I’ve asked my mother a thousand times. “And didn’t­ you ever think about planning ahead?” Mother has no answers.

    Joe Harriott was, at best, an attractive, troubled man; at worst, a selfish, colossal jerk. Countless clues pointed to his instability, but my mother chose to ignore them.

    I want to hate my father. I want to hate my mother. As time passes and memory blurs, I’ve come to accept these people, my parents. They’re human, flawed and fumbling like the rest of us, after all.

    For most of my life, I feigned indifference to my father. While my sister tried desperately to make a connection with “Daddy,” through letters, cards, and telephone calls (I have no idea how she got his address or phone number), I didn’t.

    Years later, I learned that I had frequently passed by the very spot where Joe spent his final months while I, full of hope and promise, walked to my first career job in Minneapolis in 1968. I find this both ironic and depressing.

    My handsome, intelligent, screwed-up father died at 50 in a fleabag hotel room, sick and alone, having never reconciled with his two (or four?) daughters. What a waste. What an awful, unfathomable waste.

    Sometimes I indulge in a reverie. . . . I see a reunion for Joe and me. I look him in the eye and ask, “Why? Why did you leave us?” But Joe, too, has no answers.

    The trouble with fantasy is that it distorts truth. When I think of my father, I always see a beautiful, elegant man, a man ambered in time. I see that man in my photograph.

    Reality creeps in . . . as the door creaks open . . . I’m face to face with a bloated, wrinkled, washed-out loser. The drinking life is a hard life; it destroys beauty, glamour, potential . . . everything.

    Still, my mother’s wrong — I do understand. I understand want, I understand need, I understand loss. This is my father’s legacy.

    Dianne Moritz is a children’s book author and regular contributor of “Guestwords.” She lives in North Sea.

   In the late 1950s, I attended catechism classes at a Catholic school called Our Lady of Czestochowa. This particular incarnation of the Madonna had a long history among Polish Catholics because the story goes that her gold-framed portrait hung in Jasna Gora monastery in Poland. One day in the 1400s, a fire erupted and the flames darkened the flesh-tone pigments. The church was miraculously saved and the icon became known as the Black Madonna.

    In another incident, Hussites (Bohemian nationalists) stormed the monastery and stole the icon. One plunderer used his sword to inflict two strikes on the face. As he attempted a third strike, he fell to the ground and died. Matka Boska Czestochowska (Mother of God) returned safely again to her treasured spot in the monastery church.

    The school was run by an order of Polish nuns with odd names, mostly Mexican sounding — Sister Leonita, Sister Jonita, Sister Assumpta. But they were Poles through and through, possessing the wide Eastern European faces and noses found on encyclopedia pages illustrating the Slavs. (I despised that word because it was so similar to “slobs.”) I think I was ethnically confused.

    As an 8-year-old, I prepared for my first communion on Wednesday afternoons during “release time” from public school. For a year, we memorized the Baltimore Catechism’s rote questions and answers: “Who made us?” God made us. “Why did God make us?” To give him glory and honor all the days of our lives. We became dogmatic machines, spitting out phrases we never computed fully yet anxiously recited in front of captive classmates, praying for collective mercy. There’s nothing like the wrath of a strong-willed but weary nun who needs a coffee break or a swig of altar wine.

    Sister Leonita seemed to have descended from heaven, possessing a pale white but beatific face. I remember her slender hands as they straightened a long brown veil; she tugged at each side as if fidgeting with unruly locks of hair. Long fingers that appeared ready to play the harp glided over her wooden cross, a weighty pendant on her chest. Unlike the stricter, older versions of the Felician sisters teaching in the dark cavernous classrooms with desks fastened to the floors, young Sister Leonita wore a perpetual smile and spoke with a slight accent. I don’t think she would call us “Protestants,” as I once heard the older nuns refer to us when we entered the school building after the parochial school kids had left.

    As spring approached, we were readied to receive the Lord in our first communion. In late April, all of the communion classes convened in the ornate church with its multiple bloodied and pain-ridden statues. Every nook and cranny, niche and dome, possessed a glorification of martyrdom and self-immolation, quite a contrast to the Disney characters or our favorite Mouseketeers from black-and-white TVs we watched in our suburban homes. “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true!” No Tinker Bell or moon dust detected anywhere in the otherworldly domain of Polish Roman Catholicism. Just incense during High Mass or special novenas.

    We processed two by two, girls on the right and boys on the left, short in front and tall in the back. Then we filed into long wooden pews and sat, soldiers awaiting our orders. Like clockwork, we rose in unison, walked the spacious main aisle to the altar railing with hands pointing upward, praying for relief. We knelt on the cold marble step, rehearsed receiving the host without dropping it, rose together without faltering, and returned via the side aisles. Nuns stood like centurion guards, signaling with silent gestures and occasional glaring eyes. This was not child’s play. We were receiving the Lord into our bodies, our physical homes, his temples. Were we ready? Ready or not, here I come!

    As part of the tradition, each communicant had an angel, a younger sibling or cousin who dressed in long pastel dresses and trailed behind the priests and altar boys on that special day in May. Our private celestial escorts. My younger sister, Teeny, wore a beautiful pale green dress over a petticoat with a hoop at the bottom edge. Around her head, she wore a crown with dainty flowers and thin white streamers that cascaded on her poker straight blond hair.

    Actually taking time off from school, I shopped for my communion dress with my Polish grandmother Baci and my mother. We drove to the East Side, the Polish neighborhood of Buffalo, where the wafting scents reminded immigrant families of Warsaw’s pastry shops. The artisans from Krakow, who tended the churches on every corner, tipped their worn and faded woolen caps with a “Yak sie masz?” How are you? It was expected that we would stop at Sattler’s Department Store at 998 Broadway, but pronounced “Broadvay,” a tooth bite on the bottom lip for emphasis, almost Yiddish.

    White patent-leather shoes and white tights would accompany the dress. Layers of organza and crinoline gathered slightly at the waist allowed for delightful draping. A wide grosgrain ribbon, tied at the back, hung gracefully over the material. The veil whispered simplicity and had a crown as well to keep it anchored on my big head. It was presented in a small box fit for a bride-to-be. The dress hung on a padded hanger on the back of the bedroom door until the day arrived.

    Before the ceremony, I was required to be on a retreat! Contemplation and silence were suggested by the nuns for at least three days prior to our big day. So, left to my own meditative devices, I swung in our swing between the garage and our house, reaching for heaven as I pumped away with my holey aqua Keds. I mused on nature, the pink and yellow roses growing from one bush up a tall white trellis, a grafting miracle, according to my father. Birds sang their carefree tunes about worms and wiggly bugs; maybe they had met God on their gossamer flights. Did they summon each other to get a quick peek at him as pictured in children’s books I’d read, before drifting behind the cumulus clouds?

    I heard the snap of pillowcases and sheets billowing on the clotheslines behind the garage and thought of those thin leather whips I had seen in church art. Had I sinned? Sneaked a chocolate candy from the double-tiered dish on the table in the dining room? Called my older sister a swinie, a pig, when she slurped her favorite pop? Borrowed an arithmetic answer from a classmate? Committed adultery? Coveted my neighbor Wendy’s new bike? Had I taken the Lord’s name in vain? My father had, more than twice in a week! I prayed for him just in case he was busy at work. Kill two birds with one stone. Upiec dwie pieczenie przy jednym ogniu.

    On May 29, I awoke early with butterflies dancing a polka in my stomach. I had fasted overnight, as required in those days before taking communion. Maybe that was actually hunger. I dressed with help from all female family members and then walked the stretch of sidewalk outside our house reserved for our Brownie camera moments. Dad photographed my beaming face as we prepared to leave for church in his 1954 Mercury with leather-tufted seats.

    Inside the church, the ceremony was a blur of white and navy blue rushing back and forth, with the distant sound of Polish hymns and a pipe organ blasting chords as if to raise the dead. Later in the day, I celebrated with bubbling root beer from a large keg and accepted gifts of jewelry and money from friends and relatives. Baci and her brothers, my old great-uncles, sang Polish songs I didn’t understand and drank beer until they fell asleep sitting up. They never smiled. I guess they had forgotten the joy that religion could bring.

    Marcia Mitrowski is the adult outreach coordinator at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, where she teaches English as a second language classes. She lives in Sag Harbor.

    Actually, the Star ad read “Fine Building Lots for Sale” with “On Maidstone Lane” as the next line in smaller print. It was October 1915, and two weeks earlier a brief article in the local-news section had given the background for the proposed road. It would go through the D.H. Huntting farm on Main Street, starting just east of the Presbyterian Church’s Session House, continue to Egypt Lane, and be four rods wide. The paper imagined a large number of very desirable building lots becoming available, with the prospect that the street, to be known as Maidstone Lane, would equal the popularity of Huntting Lane, opened 20 years earlier.

    I first spotted the proposed street on the East Hampton Library’s 1916 Suffolk County map of “Part of East Hampton and Freetown.” At the time, I was hoping to locate the house where I believed my mother-in-law, Beryle Huntting, was born in 1904. My wife, Carol, and I knew she was born in the S. Hedges Miller house on Cedar Street, so the area between Cedar Street and North Main Street was our focus. We also knew that Beryle’s grandfather David H. Huntting had moved to a house on Main Street belonging to his late uncle, Deacon David Huntting, around 1901, stimulating our interest in that part of town as well.

    The proposed Maidstone Lane was clearly marked, essentially parallel to Huntting Lane, starting just east of the Presbyterian Church and continuing across the D.H. Huntting estate to Egypt Lane. A close inspection of a 1902 map of the same area shows that the street had been penciled in, probably in 1915, around the time The Star reported the news. The marks on the map in the library’s Long Island Collection were erased, but the street’s outline is obvious to the careful observer.

    By the spring of 1917, the Huntting estate had proposed to give the road to the town. Hiram Sherrill, a board member, and John Y. Strong, the town clerk, were appointed to investigate the offer and report their results at the next board meeting. “Town Board Accepts New Highway,” The Star said after the board’s June meeting. Many of the town’s largest taxpayers had submitted a petition to the board supporting acceptance of the lane as a public way. Many viewed this new Maidstone Lane as a valuable and highly desirable street for development.

    There was just one problem, and it took only the next week’s Star for it to land squarely back in the town’s lap. Samuel T. Skidmore, secretary of the Maidstone Club, wrote the editor stating that he wished “to make this public protest against the creation of a second Maidstone Lane.” Skidmore having failed in his initial effort on behalf of the club to register a protest against the name the previous fall, the club went public. Skidmore provided ample rationale that the club’s Maidstone Lane, leading to both the clubhouse and the Maidstone Inn, had longstanding precedence in town and was so noted on Belcher Hyde’s Atlas of Suffolk County and in many deeds and legal documents. Exasperated, he asked, “. . . are not the brains of this town equal to thinking up any name besides Maidstone for anything in or near this village?”

    Subsequent letters to the editor advocated a number of ideas, including Deacon’s Lane, but as Jeannette Edwards Rattray wrote in her 1968 book, “Up and Down Main Street — An Informal History of East Hampton and Its Old Houses,” David or David’s Lane (at one time a sign at one end said David and the other David’s) was the final resolution. She said the lane opened in 1923, but as we have seen, it was planned and accepted by the town by 1917. Town minutes show the board appropriated $1,500 to construct a bridge over the creek leading into Hook Pond at the south end of the lane in 1920, finally awarding Stephen J. Lynch the bridge contract for $1,660 the following year.

    World War I may have slowed the early development of David’s Lane, but returning veterans proposed an interesting use for the new street through the open farmland. The mid-July 1919 issue of The Star proclaimed “Aeroplane Here Sunday” on the front page. “Everyone Will Have Opportunity to Fly — Will Land on David’s Lane” touted the subtitles. The Sperry Corporation was intent on demonstrating that flying was both safe and sane! Experienced pilots would take passengers up in a two-seat Curtiss biplane similar to those used by the U.S. government for training pilots. 

    The two pilots arriving with the plane had already flown more than 200 passengers during a stay in Southampton. The article closed by reminding folks that the pilots would be landing on David’s Lane and would make it their headquarters while in East Hampton. They ran a large ad in the same edition exhorting villagers to “See East Hampton From The Air.” Flights would begin Sunday, July 20. Foul weather forced cancellation for several days, but once it improved, people went up, including The Star’s editor. The pilots ultimately used Huntting estate property at nearby Further Lane, but found a willing audience and over several days took passengers up, some of them several times.

    David’s Lane went on to be developed much as the board and petitioning wealthy residents had hoped. But before it was conceived, the David H. Huntting farmland it would cross was part of several tracts of land that went into his estate following his death in the fall of 1912. Beryle Huntting, his first grandchild, had played on that farmland and carried fond memories long into adulthood.

    As Jeannette Rattray described, the Huntting property went down to the “dreen” and Egypt Lane. She continued, “Where the Nature Trail entrance is now, at the foot of David Lane — where the children go to feed the ducks — there was a rustic bridge at the foot of the last David Huntting’s back lot, a generation or two ago; and other little children used to go there and dangle their feet over the black muddy stream and watch the turtles and frogs and dragonflies.”

    Beryle Huntting Stanley, reading those words written more than half a century after she had lived near and played on that farmland, made a one-word margin note embracing those cherished memories. “Me!”

Steve Rideout comes to East Hampton a couple of times every year to research family history. He lives in Shutesbury, Mass.