As we think about planting our gardens this spring, let us not forget to make a special effort to grow some flowering plants, especially for honeybees. These insects pollinate about 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and seed crops in America. You can thank the honeybee for a third of the food you eat every day.

    Honeybees are essential to food production, but populations are almost nonexistent in the wild, and honeybees reared in apiaries are suffering a severe population decline. Colony collapse disorder is sweeping the planet, and honeybees are experiencing an alarming drop-off. A 2010-11 honeybee survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Apiary Inspectors of America reported a 38.4-percent winter honeybee loss. The average yearly loss of honeybees has been about 30 percent, and the decline is steady.

    We now have the fewest honeybees since 1950. A lot of honeybees are missing! They are missing and are not found dead — they are simply vanishing. Can the honeybee withstand this severe annual disappearance? This indicator species may be trying to tell us something. Something is not quite right in the world of the honeybee.

    Many things are not quite right, and there are ways to help. We can propagate the plants that honeybees love and need to survive. Honeybees will travel up to six miles from their hives on foraging trips. They look for a few things on these trips. Like almost all living creatures, honeybees need fresh water to survive. They drink water and store it in their hives for later use. You can help honeybees by placing a birdbath or shallow container with some rocks or seashells in the bottom so honeybees can rest on them while they have a drink. If you see honeybees in your pool filter, this means they are using your chlorinated pool water as their water source. It would be better to provide a supply of fresh water instead.

    The main source of energy for honeybees is nectar, a liquefied natural sugar. Honeybees gather nectar from flowers and make it into honey. Each worker bee makes about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime, which is only about six weeks. Honeybees will travel 55,000 miles and visit almost two million flowers to make just one pound of honey.

    Honeybees also collect pollen, a powdery substance that is their sole source of protein. They feed their young honey and pollen and store it for the winter when food is scarce. They, like us, require a variety of food sources (flowers) to thrive, and they need a steady supply all season long. The brood rearing season is usually between April and September, and honeybees need a continual source of nectar and pollen throughout this time to help expand their hives. A healthy hive can have upward of 50,000 bees in the summer, and they all need to eat.

    Try to combine annual and perennial flowers, herbs and vegetables, and bushes and trees that bloom at different times in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. Check the species carefully to make sure the plants you choose are not invasive. Although honeybees are attracted to blue, purple, violet, white, and yellow flowers, it is best to choose an assortment of colors. Use native plants if you can — just be sure to plant a variety of species.

    Besides providing honeybees with food and water, a very important thing you can do for them is to stop using pesticides. Pesticides are poison and do not discriminate; they kill the good bugs and the bad ones. Two newfangled systemic synthetic neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, are highly toxic to bees. Study after study is confirming this, yet these poisons are still widely used. In addition, imidacloprid is now found in our drinking water, and groups across Long Island are calling for its ban. There are pest-control alternatives we should use to help the honeybees and the planet.

    If you cannot spend a lot of time or money, you can keep the flowering plants that are already in your yard. Many plants commonly considered weeds are great for honeybees. Dandelion, clover, goldenrod, and purple vetch are honeybee favorites. Purple vetch is good because it naturally adds nitrogen to the soil and helps plants to grow. Dandelion is a very important early spring wildflower as well. Also, think about planting clover instead of grass. Like purple vetch, it provides a natural source of nitrogen to your soil, and the honeybees love it.

    A cost-effective, simple way to help honeybees is to allow your lawn to go a little wild and mow after the weeds have finished blooming. You can also sprinkle some wildflower seeds on a sunny part of your lawn and wait for the pretty blossoms and honeybees to arrive.

    In early spring, plant buttercups, crocuses, daffodils, deadnettle, and hyacinth so the honeybees will have something to eat when they start foraging. The dogwood tree produces large, early blossoms. Quince, spicebush, and viburnum are bushes that flower in the early spring, too. Impatiens, white deadnettle, and some heather will flower from early spring well into the fall and are great choices.

    From late spring through summer, many fruit trees and berries flower. In addition to the pollen and nectar provided by the flowers, honeybees are attracted to the juice of soft-skinned berries. Butterfly-silkweed, cotoneaster, forget-me-nots, and Oriental poppies also bloom from late spring through summer.

    In early summer, bearded iris, dahlias, and tickseed are in bloom. Sweet pepperbush and inkberry flower through summer and easily attract honeybees. There is a nectar gap during the summer, and a limited amount of food is available for honeybees. Bee balm, black-eyed Susan, cotton lavender, coneflower, and foxglove are summertime honeybee favorites.

    Honeybees need food in the winter, and plants that flower late in the fall give them one last chance to gather food for the cold winter months. Asters, autumn-flowering crocus and clematis, sedum, and Shasta daisies provide a variety of food choices for honeybees in the fall.

    Plant lots of herbs, fruits, and vegetables as they bloom throughout the planting season and the honeybees will enjoy them as much as you will. Many herbs are great for honeybees. Lavender and coriander are especially useful, as their scented oils may also deter the varroa mite — a parasite that harms honeybees.

    Your herbs and vegetables will benefit from honeybees, and the honeybees will thank you for them.

    Deborah Klughers is a Springs resident and mother of four. She is new to beekeeping and is a newly elected East Hampton Town Trustee. She has a degree in environmental studies and will complete her master’s degree in marine conservation and policy next month.

   I’ve always been fascinated by credit card fees. When your bank is already charging you any interest rate they like, why antagonize their customers further with hefty nuisance fees? It doesn’t seem to make marketing sense. (Just bump up that “default” rate to something even more usurious than it was before; most of your customers won’t notice.)

    I’m old enough to remember when a credit card was a simple and honest relationship between you and your bank: You paid an annual fee for the service and they charged you an honest interest rate for the money you borrowed. (They also collected 2 or 3 percent from the vendors.)

    But starting in the 1980s, as credit card regulations imploded, you began to see those extra numbers on your statement. For a long time it was just the late fee: Pay before 5 p.m., you win; pay after 5 p.m. — whoops! (Sorry, Hawaii, we’re on Eastern time.)

    Then a few years ago a consultant by the name of Bill Strunk invented the “over-limit fee.” I thought this was sheer genius! What Strunk realized was that you could take a contractual obligation (the limit on your credit), loosen it unilaterally just a little, make it look like a service, and charge whatever you liked for this “service”!

    Now it looks like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is going to put a damper on these fees. The banks will need more creative thinking. Here are some suggestions:

    My wife’s credit union charges her a “rush payment” fee if she pays online after 4 p.m. the day before the due date. (It doesn’t matter, of course, that rush payments arrive at the same time as non-rush payments.) This concept has possibilities: Expand the time frame by a day or two and charge for semi-rush payments made less than 24 hours before the due date.

    No-call fee. I’d be happy to pay, say, $9.95 to eliminate dunning phone calls for a month. Better yet, charge me $14.92 for no phone calls, period, or $4.99 for no phone calls from machines, only humans who dial the number themselves.

    Automatic transaction fee. An increasing number of transactions are automatic monthly subscription payments. I haven’t signed a receipt for these; they are risky for the bank. What if I refuse to pay? What if I’m dead? The bank should charge me $12.95 for each of these risky charges.

    Billing fee. A number of banks have offered me $5 (five American dollars!) if I switch to e-mail billing. Time to reverse this: From now on, if I want a paper bill mailed to me each month I should pay for the privilege — $17.76 sounds about right ($24.95 if I still use those quaint old paper checks and require a return envelope).

    Unredeemed fee. If I foolishly neglect to trade in my bonus points for — whatever — the bank has the extra burden of continuing to account for them. I should pay for my lax behavior and the trouble I cause them. Think of all the bits and bytes they have to spend. I’d say $19 per 10,000 unredeemed points per month would sound about right.

    Then again, maybe there is a bank somewhere whose business plan suggests they can thrive collecting 3 percent of each charge transaction from the vendors and, moreover, charging as little as prime plus 8 percent for money borrowed. (How greedy do you have to be not to be satisfied with a 14-plus percent return on the cash flow running through your bank?)

    They can even add a fee if they want: Call it the “no-fee fee.” Charge me almost anything per year so I don’t have to play this shell game with you. That would be a fee I’d welcome!

    Sounds like a lucrative deal to me. If such a bank, say, Bailey Savings and Loan, offered a charge card on those terms I’d jump at it. So would another one hundred million Americans. Bailey would own the market.

    But that would cause another crisis for the banks that are too big to fail. And another trillion-dollar bailout. Bill Strunk, I hope, would find a way to stop that.

    James Monaco is a writer and publisher in Sag Harbor. He offers a spreadsheet template to help you analyze your credit card overcharges at HEPdigital.com/ccanalysis.xls.

    “I’m sorry, but you have cancer.” There are probably no more frightening words than those. And everyone feels like a potential victim. After all, if one doesn’t die of heart disease or Alzheimer’s or in an accident, then chances are it will be one of the many forms of cancer.

    Brian Craig, a seemingly healthy man, was told he had prostate cancer. His physician recommended surgery to remove his prostate gland. While in a hospital in New York, he underwent a series of tests prior to surgery; he learned that doctors discovered some abnormalities on his liver. An ultrasound examination was called for.

    The good news was that his liver was fine. The bad news was that he had a tumor on his pancreas. The tumor was malignant. Anyone who has read about pancreatic cancer or known someone who has been afflicted with it knows that the survival rates for pancreatic cancer are dismal. At best, treatments are able to prolong life by months; however, it is not unusual for victims to succumb to the disease within weeks of diagnosis, for the cancer is usually discovered after it has advanced to the point of producing symptoms.

    The tumor on Brian’s pancreas, which is next to the liver, had been causing bile to back up into the liver. This was what had alerted Brian’s doctors to the abnormalities in the liver.

    While it has been suspected that excessive alcohol consumption, obesity, diabetes, and smoking may be causes of pancreatic cancer, none of those applied to Brian. He neither smokes nor drinks, is neither obese nor diabetic. Look at Brian and you will see a healthy-looking, physically fit man in his middle years.

    A top surgeon judged that Brian’s tumor was resectable (i.e., removable), and so Brian was a good candidate for an operation known as a Whipple. It is an extremely complicated and dangerous surgery. Not only is part of the pancreas removed, but so is the duodenum, gall bladder, part of the jejunum, stomach bile duct, and lymph nodes near the pancreas. Brian was under the surgeon’s knife for seven hours. When he awoke, he felt as if his entire body was permeated with pain; yet, soon thereafter, the pain was controlled by an epidural catheter supplying morphine. Three days later, Brian went home.

    One month after the surgery, Brian had a CT scan and an M.R.I. He had prayed that the cancer was gone, that there were no more tumors. Instead, he learned that he now had four lesions on his liver. Brian said: “My medical team — oncologist, radiologist, and surgeon — thought that these may have been metastasized P.C. and that chemo, rather than more surgery, would be appropriate. This was the most troubling period in my whole experience. The original diagnosis and surgery happened so fast, and with such good results, that the negative possibilities and implications didn’t really have time to set in. This, however, was very bad news.”

    Brian’s doctors were willing to try something that was fully tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration but was not part of the normal protocol of treatment. He was given a cocktail of four different chemotherapy drugs. Over a period of about four months, he had six infusions, which meant eight-hour sessions at a hospital. One chemo drug, however, required a 48-hour delivery period, and so Brian had to wear a portable pump that delivered the drug after its primary infusion. He disliked wearing the pump, but he had no choice.

    Because Brian is not overweight, does not smoke, and is not diabetic, he was able to withstand the highly aggressive levels of chemo. To reduce the likelihood of infection, Brian was given the drug Neulasta, which boosts one’s white blood count. It’s an expensive drug, costing several thousand dollars for each injection. Fortunately for Brian, his medical insurance fully covered the cost.

    In December, Brian underwent another series of CT and M.R.I. scans. To his relief and the delight of his medical team, he was completely free of tumors. In addition to the scans, he was given a blood test to determine if he had any protein markers that would indicate the presence of malignancy. For pancreatic cancer, blood markers are normal from 0 to 35. Above that range suggests the possible presence of pancreatic cancer. Just prior to Brian’s surgery, his markers were about 1,500! His markers that December were 25. A subsequent blood test in January showed markers at 27. Both levels are well within the range of someone without pancreatic cancer.

    I asked Brian how he had dealt with the worst news of his life: that he might die within months of his diagnosis. He said that he had “wonderful support from family and friends, and from my faith. My spouse, Michael, was present throughout and provided tremendous support. I also was lucky enough to have access to some of the best physicians in the world. And, I had faith that God would help me through this, as I do not feel I’ve finished whatever it is I need to get done here on earth.”

    Brian does not need any additional treatments of chemotherapy. He and his doctors believe that he is now entirely free of tumors. He will be checked every six weeks for the next year. If his health remains normal, there will be longer periods between checkups.

    Brian further summarized his future: “I am hopeful that my results will continue to be positive. As you have probably read, pancreatic cancer is very aggressive and spreads; it is statistically likely that it will show up again. If so, I’m sure I will face more chemo — as it worked — and who knows what else. My prognosis is that I very well may be among the very, very few who beat this. There is no evidence of any malignancy. I also believe that incredible progress is being made in the field of oncology, and the longer I stick around, the better chance there is of amazing new treatments.”

    “My life has changed in that I’m far more focused on making good use of the time I have, however long that is. And that is the message I would want to share with people. No matter how long or short your life is expected to be, all we have is one day at a time. Make sure you live during those days, enjoy life, make a difference. Be thankful every day you wake up and see the dawn, and make use of the day. Do not give in to any illness — you must control your own life even if it is from a hospital bed. Recovery from chemo, or surgery or radiation or many other insults we must face, isn’t easy, but you must focus on staying in control of how you spend your days. And remember that your friends and family and faith will help you. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to ask for help — friends and family will want to help you.”

    Brian Craig lives in East Hampton. Jeffrey Sussman, the author of 10 nonfiction books, is writing a book about cancer patients, of which this is part of one chapter. He is the president of the New York City marketing and public relations firm Jeffrey Sussman, Inc., and has a house in East Hampton.

    We live on an island. A long one, if you take into account the entire landmass from the Brooklyn Promenade all the way east past Money Pond in Montauk. The North and South Forks, surrounded nearly entirely by water, can be thought of as islands of a sort, too, connected as they are to the mainland west of Riverhead by the narrowest of threads. East Hampton has always had an exceptionalist, island mentality.

     In this, we have a lot in common with Martha’s Vineyard, an island seven miles off the New England coast that shares our insular nature as well as our fate as a destination for wealthy summer visitors. When it comes to development, the embrace of the sea and bays limits what we can do, and where. There really isn’t much room here for sprawl; what our neighbors make of their property really matters in most cases.

     As we read in the Vineyard Gazette earlier this month, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission may soon regulate the construction of what they call mega-mansions up thataway. These groaning piles — testaments to vanity, excess, and greed — have disturbed many Vineyard residents and are considered a drain on resources. The commission is responsible for land-use planning in all of the island’s six towns, and could soon begin to have jurisdiction over giant houses through its review of “developments of regional impact,” or DRIs. A debate is under way on the island now, about whether to add mega-mansions to the list of developments that come under the DRI purview.

     According to the commission, examples of DRIs include projects that could increase nitrogen pollution in coastal ponds or seriously worsen traffic, as well as those that will have a notable impact on the Vineyard’s scenery as viewed from highly traveled roads or bodies of water. “Out-of-scale trophy houses,” as the Gazette argued recently, are in desperate need of additional regulation. One member of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission said that the most frequent complaints she hears are about large houses that do not fit in with the landscape or with island traditions, what she said are the very things that draw visitors and new residents in the first place.

     Predictably, opposition has been strong to the possibility of regional regulation of giant vacation houses. One island architect, for example, begged the commission not to get involved in matters of aesthetics.

     We can only imagine the howls that would ring out if a similar effort were undertaken here on the East End. A decision on Martha’s Vineyard is expected in the spring. We’ll be watching with fascination.

We are cleaning our windows today, or rather they are being cleaned on the outside by professionals, and, inside, Mary is standing on the sink counter with folded newspaper — pages that presumably aren’t worth reading — doing the Palladian window that gives out onto the bare ruined choirs of the spindly white oaks in our backyard.

    “Don’t you think it’s much better?” she says, standing back and looking at her handiwork. She’s right. I can see more clearly now, and clarity, after all, is what we want, or are supposed to want. I would prefer, of course, that everything were green, but dun will have to do for the moment, and the grayness of the day. Can Christmas be far behind? Friends asked if we were ready for it the other day, and I said that, after all these years, we still had not managed to escape it.

    As I say this I’ve been nibbling at a hangnail. They say the nails are the first to go, chipping and all that. If so, I’m well on my way. But enough of the maudlin. It’s just that this book she had me read this week, the one by Julian Barnes, about how shit can happen, and about how history can be found at the intersection between imperfect memory and inadequate documentation, has put me, the Class of 1962’s Pollyanna, into an unaccustomed reflective mood.

    Meanwhile, calling me back to the present, Mary has just said, arms akimbo, that the Palladian window “looks so much better now,” and that, further, “we hadn’t noticed how disgusting it was.”

    Ah, that’s it. I had been blissfully unaware, content, perhaps in keeping with the dreariness of the season, not to demand sparkling clarity, but to accept rather a hazier version of things. And yet, even for one who’d rather paint a rosy picture of life, keeping his heart rate up by circulating from one lively sport to another, rather than delve into life’s inherent tragedy — as Barnes certainly does — I’ve got to admit that the windows, with all the film off, are pleasingly crystal clear. In fact, I think that’s the name of the company that did them.

    “I hear Santa’s being brought up on charges,” I call back to Mary, who’s gone on to other things. “For unrealistically inflating expectations when an orange or some pudding would do. The greed that’s so rampant these days is born of this. The issuers of credit default swaps and derivatives derived from derivatives and the sellers of subprime mortgages were indulged at Christmastime when they were 2-year-olds. Santa’s a capitalist tool. . . . Do you think if I asked him nicely, though, that he’d put a few more fanciful anecdotes in my stocking. . . ? Anecdotes of an amusing and self-justifying kind?”

    Meanwhile, I’d like to wish you a happy and clear — as clear as you can take it at any rate — New Year.

    Never having spent Christmas anywhere but at home, I wasn’t sure what Christmas in Nova Scotia with my daughter, Bess, and her family would be like. They live in a small town on the southwest shore called Shelburne. There are two inns in Shelburne, but they are both closed at holiday time. The few sightseers who make the drive down from Halifax are long gone at this time of year, and most of the handful of second-home owners are elsewhere, too. Maybe in part because of this isolation, the sense of community is strong.

    My son-in-law, Paul, is a naval architect who builds wooden boats. After he gave up the West Coast, my daughter and he wound up in rural Nova Scotia in large part, frankly, because of the cheap real estate: They needed a home, as well as a waterfront property where he would be free to work in his boat shop without disturbing other homeowners or breaking any zoning regulations. (There aren’t many boatbuilders who could afford to buy a waterfront shop, with deep anchorage out front, on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., obviously.)

    Shelburne has a huge, lovely harbor — ideal for sailing and other water sports — which might elsewhere be a magnet for suburban development, but there aren’t enough people around for that. A few “from away” outliers have been drawn to the town’s cinematically picturesque historic district, it’s true, but fishing and lobstering remain the mainstays of the economy. Like everywhere else, fishermen are enduring hard times in Shelburne County.

    There is one big, chain supermarket in town, and the most popular of the few shops downtown, Frenchie’s, sells secondhand clothes, delivered in bales from Boston (hence a very magnificent selection of Red Sox T-shirts on any given day).

On Christmas Eve, not long after dark, my husband and I joined in caroling with a couple of other families who live on nearby streets. This is a town where night actually is silent. Only an occasional car passed as we walked along in the road. Knocking or ringing, we were greeted with unsuspicious smiles and open doors. There were seven kids in our group, ranging in age from 31/2 to 14, and even the littlest knew the words to “Frosty the Snowman,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (the first verses, anyway).

    My husband, who walks slowly and with a cane, outdid himself. Our little band circumnavigated the darkened historic district visiting the houses of friends, and then, as we made our way back along Water Street, we stopped in a pharmacy and sporting-goods store to give the few still at work a laugh.

    On Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day, my daughter and son-in-law visited neighbors with plates of gravlax, cookies, or tiny mince pies (Paul’s specialty). Several sets of neighbors stopped by, bringing treats in return: a Middle Eastern dip I’d never tried before, dark English fruitcake, more cookies, more mince pies.

     In New York — and the East End, despite its past, like it or not, is a part of the great metropolis — everyone is always in an irritable rush. In Shelburne, by contrast, everyone has time to make “good tidings” more than just empty words. I can’t imagine such unselfconscious conversation, such natural camaraderie at home. As my daughter likes to say, living in rural Nova Scotia is a bit like living in the past. Civility-wise, 40 or 50 years ago, at least.

    Christmas morning was what we hoped it would be. Santa was generous. Even our stockings, the grandparents’, were full. My granddaughter Nettie, who is 4, and my grandson Teddy, who is 2 (and who had never experienced a true Christmas before, having earlier been living in a care center in Ethiopia) were every bit as giddy and amusing as children are supposed to be.

    We’ll be home in time for New Year’s, though I’ll be thinking of the quiet, warm hearths we left behind in Shelburne. 

If my New Year’s resolution for 2011 had been “dispel with financial insecurity,” I would have succeeded, but not in the way I planned. I always expected to finally feel monetarily secure when a big bag of money, a la Tex Avery, complete with dollar signs emblazoned on its burlap sides, plopped into my lap with an accompanying appropriate cartoon sound effect.

    But that isn’t what happened. Instead, we declared a Chapter 7 bankruptcy in April. I had thought this would be the end of the world, but in many ways it was a new beginning. In the years when my bank account would have been envied by most, I regularly startled awake in the middle of the night, wondering how I would pay my bills and terrified that it would all disappear.

    It disappeared. I survived. Not only survived, but thrived — when the repo guys came for the car this spring, I offered them coffee and took my picture with them. “Why are you so happy?” one of them asked. “Well, what are my other options?” I replied.

    The only thing I have total control over is how I react, or not, to certain situations. Being able to do the proverbial “count to 10” before the reaction comes is one of the gifts I’ve received only recently. I refuse to see this as a permanent state of affairs, but just one that will make me wiser and perhaps able to help someone else who embarks on the same path.

    Although we do not have a savings account, much less college funds or methods of saving for “retirement,” whatever that is, I sleep far better now with a lot less.

    I have settled in at The Star. Although I swore that my desk — which I could actually see way back last winter — would never reach the blaze-inducing capabilities observed in the workspace of my cellmate, Rusty Drumm, I have to admit I would be edgy now if someone were to strike a match near my budding Collyer brothers-style collection of paper.

    But I didn’t fulfill my New Year’s resolutions for 2011. How do I know? Because I’ve had the same resolutions since I was 12: To exercise more and eat less. Although, once again, my physical form fell by the wayside, I feel that I lost a lot of weight from my soul in 2011.

    I’m happy. Not like village-idiot-throwing-flowers-in-the-air kind of happy, but a deep and comfortable happiness that comes from the sweet nectar of Routine. It is based on inner life and growth rather than the sort that is based on external forces like people or situations — “absolute happiness” as opposed to “relative happiness,” the Buddhists say.

    When I lived a big life, there was no room left for growth. There was keeping up with mortgage payments even as we planned an addition, cars that were traded in for shinier models every few years, and a business that looked on paper like more of a hobby (and a ducat-depleting one at that). We lived within our means, but only by a hair — when the means were gone it wasn’t long before destitution set in.

    But now that my life is smaller — getting the kids to school, going to work, a short walk with Eric and the dogs on the beach, a DVD and dinner together, then going to sleep and doing the whole thing again the next day — my soul has had room to expand.

    There may be a time in the next few years when I will once again jump into the fray and spearhead some social cause or chair some huge function or develop a business plan. But if life is a journey, not a destination, then for now I’m glad to simply ride the train, look out the window, and watch the scenery change.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    As the New Year fast approaches — and on the heels of what could perhaps best be called an upbraiding by voters in November — East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and his two-member majority on the town board are no doubt taking stock of where they stand and thinking about what they might do differently in 2012.

    The supervisor and his board majority, as a group, do not seem temperamentally inclined to seek the opinions of those who could be seen as adversaries. Still, government, to function at its best, should be a collaborative process in which opposing views are heard and considered. And so, in that spirit, we offer a few thoughts about how the board might more effectively lead us and ease the partisan acrimony in our community.

    Here is our suggested list of resolutions:

    • Wean the town budget off the use of surpluses

    • Halt the sale of irreplaceable town assets

    • Restore the rate of community preservation fund land acquisitions to pre-crisis levels

    • Decline Federal Aviation Administration money and bring all parties together to seek limits to aircraft noise

    • Commit in earnest to the East Hampton Town Trustees’ fight to safeguard public beach access

    • Work with the trustees to provide better storage for nonpolluting watercraft

    • Begin work on a comprehensive strategy to deal with sea-level rise

    • End closed-door, one-party discussions of town issues

    • Slow down decisions on controversial matters

    • End the practice of “walk-on” board resolutions (except in cases of real emergency)

    • End the illegal growth of businesses in residential neighborhoods

    • Eliminate illegal signs and other prohibited eyesores

    • Restore social-service and arts funding

    • Restore recycling collection in town parks and other public places

    • Seek to limit illegal, multiple-family rentals

    • Abandon the general assault on the zoning code

    • Develop additional, dispersed ocean-beach parking

    • Restore the Amagansett Life-Saving Service station and open it to the public

    • Express meaningful support for the Planning and Natural Resources Departments

    • Appoint people to boards and other leadership roles based on their qualifications, not their political stripe

    • Return nonpartisan, nonideological procedures to the Ordinance Enforcement Department

    • Take steps to limit political and outside influence on the town attorney’s office

    • Improve Building Department permitting procedures

    • Manage town employees with support and positive guidance, not browbeatings

    • Create procedures for better communication with the public in hurricanes and other natural disasters

    • Expand and enforce a program to limit septic runoff to local waters

    Certainly, the board also deserves credit, as the year draws to a close, for its accomplishments in 2010 and 2011. These jobs well done include holding the line on town expenses, improving efficiency at Town Hall, helping the Springs School with space for its pre-K, and getting the inlets dredged. Yet so much can be done to improve town government’s relationship with the public and its protection of neighborhoods, quality of life, and the environment — if Mr. Wilkinson and the board only wish it.

   My parents’ house was almost empty. The movers placed some things in storage. The rest, items my parents could live without, were being sold today piece by piece. They needed extra cash to help pay for the move. It was a tag sale inside my family’s home, strangers shuffling through rooms, eyeballing furniture and bric-a-brac. Then, by the end of the day, just one more suburban tract house owned by the bank. My mother couldn’t bear it so I came to pick her up for the weekend while my father oversaw the sale before shutting the door behind him for good.

    I parked on the street in front of the mailbox and waited. I wanted no part of this surreal event either. Were I to wander inside a houseful of strangers looking for bargains my gut instinct would be to start tossing bodies like a crazed bouncer. I did not have the financial means to bail my parents out of this mess. I gripped the steering wheel tightly and just stared out the window.

    To see my mother’s face was to view my own 19 years later, the cut of her jaw, the bridge of her nose, the same blue eyes. I was her only child and knew exactly why she was taking so long to come out. She was saying goodbye to the place, visiting rooms she’d once decorated, bidding farewell to birds and squirrels she fed each day in the backyard. Hers was a wildly beautiful creativity that eventually unhinged itself through drugs and depression. I was hoping for a quick getaway when I first arrived, but instead I waited. There was always time for one last tour.

    That cherry tree planted in the middle of the yard was a housewarming gift from my great-grandmother. Just beyond its thick branches was the window to my room, where I dreamed awfully big dreams, suffered my first hangover, and lost my virginity. The hallway light was usually on while I slept as a kid. My mother would come home late from her shift as a waitress, doggie bag in one hand, wad of cash in the other.

    “Remember those football cleats we put on layaway?” She held the money up to the light. “We can pick them up tomorrow.”

    On the opposite end of the house was the den, where the family dog died in my arms and choking sobs spilled out of me. In the kitchen sat an old rotary phone long since disconnected. It once rang in the middle of the night and shook the whole house. “Dad . . . I got jumped tonight driving the cab. Can you get out here?” It was a part-time college job that went horribly wrong. I still don’t know how he did it, pounding the back of the ambulance before it left and screaming my name. My God, I thought. How did he find me so fast? It wasn’t even possible.

    Then, years later, by that worn-out spot of grass next to the drive was where my father and I fought like demons, an unnatural act that will haunt the rest of my life. I don’t recall the exact moment when my parents became partners in drug abuse. It may have developed over time, or perhaps it was always there, carefully hidden from me. But after that fight the two of them simply shut the door, drew the shades, and quit the whole thing.

    Cocaine has a way of possessing human souls, inhabiting them completely before running them straight into the ground. It was no longer my parents I was pleading with and screaming at to go for help. My mother was incoherent. My father was plain evil. I stayed away for two and a half years. The only news I received was when bills arrived in the mail for credit cards I didn’t have. My dad and I shared the same name.

    It was the house that would come to offer the tiniest shaft of hope. One holiday season I buzzed through the neighborhood to check for signs of life when I saw it, a sad little string of lights blinking back at me like some wayward ship signaling through the fog. I watched them twinkle for a good five seconds or so as my car sped up the block and out of sight, the quickest family Christmas ever.

    When I was younger and still capable of hero worship I would track down the haunts of great authors, their houses, pubs, and hotels. I’d stand on sidewalks or sit in my car for minutes at a time and wait for the magic to start. Now? How ’bout now? It took me years to come to my senses, realizing I was just staring at fragments and shells of other people’s lives.

    Yet even today I persisted in old habits. The classroom where I taught in Brooklyn this past year had the Empire State Building perfectly framed in one of its windows. I ate lunch each day sitting atop a desk just taking in its majesty and waiting for Kong to appear. In the afternoon I would drive past the house where “Sophie’s Choice” was filmed. The place was large and gorgeous but never once did I glimpse the profile of Meryl Streep in any of its windows. It was just a pretty house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood.

    So the thought of knocking on a stranger’s door one day, asking permission to glimpse my own life’s shell, left me greatly distressed. After college I made the mistake of doing my student teaching at my old high school. I would rattle around hallways in the early mornings, passing old lockers or staring out at the football field until it meant almost nothing. In time, it just became the building where I was learning to teach. I didn’t want that to happen to my family’s home. I wanted to keep the magic intact, if there ever was any to begin with. I swore that as soon as my mother got inside the car we would pull away for good and not look back.

    When a relative called after nearly three years to tell me my parents were sober and slowly making a comeback, I didn’t know how to receive it. There had been other comebacks in the past. What was so special about this one? I made tentative arrangements to visit my mother at the facility where she was being treated for her depression. She had been undergoing something called electroconvulsive therapy, an intense treatment that could leave her suffering from amnesia. I knew very little about it other than the horrific “Cuckoo’s Nest” images I conjured in my head. The three of us sat in the visiting room like strangers and chatted. My mother looked tired and haunted.

    Her roommate was sneaking boyfriends in late at night and my father was trying to have the room switched. I remembered how gently he tended to her and how much older they both looked. It was going to be a long way back.

    I started to visit regularly. The therapy seemed to be working, and my mother went home. We slowly morphed back into a family, could even poke fun at ourselves a bit. “Hey, Pop, remember that time on the front lawn? Good times, boy, good times.” They met my fiancée and came to adore her. She, in turn, couldn’t believe these were the same people I needed to stay away from for so long.

    Life was returning to normal except for that one constant of nearly 40 years. My dad had refinanced the house just prior to their troubled years. The money had long been spent and the new mortgage subsequently exploded. Now they were in their 60s, healthy and clean and sober, with two weeks left to vacate the premises.

    My mother finally emerged from the house with my father in tow, carrying her things. I could see strangers behind them in the doorway darting back and forth, while more cars pulled up to the curb. I took my mother’s bag and nodded toward the house. “Have they picked us clean yet?”

    My dad smiled as if I was being overly dramatic, as if our home wasn’t filled with jackals and grave robbers haggling over jewelry and silverware. “It’s just crap,” he said, “a bunch of junk we don’t need. We’re moving on, pal. This is a good thing.”

    With the three of us outside all at once and the house crawling with strangers, the property was already taking on a foreign look. My mother and I walked over to the car. Across the street was a neighbor’s house that had been filled with girls when I was a kid. Occasionally, they would invite my younger lunatic self over for a movie. Directly opposite their television was a window framing my house in the exact way I would one day view the Empire State Building.

    I always wondered what those girls thought of the family across the street. Over a stretch of four decades they saw me concuss my head flipping over handlebars or jumping off the roof. They had ringside seats to an epic front-yard brawl and watched ambulances light up the sky as they carried my mother off to detox programs.

    Shouldn’t we be leaving something behind, I thought, slowly accelerating from the curb, something other than buried pets and a collapsed swimming pool? Maybe a plaque of some kind: The embattled McGeever family slept here from 1973 to 2011. The parents had their demons. Their kid was wild, with delusions of grandeur. But they loved each other hard, survived the whole damn thing, and were very much American.

    J. Bryan McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, Newsday, Confrontation, and Thomas Beller’s “Lost and Found: Stories From New York.” A graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program who grew up in Port Jefferson Station, he teaches writing and literature in the New York City public school system.

   How do we measure the value of a life? For some of us it’s by the wealth and fame amassed, for others it’s by the good works done.

    Last weekend we lost an icon. Even those who are not sports enthusiasts have come to know the name Joe Paterno, but I am not sure they have come to know the man and the value of his life. Born in Brooklyn in 1926 to a good Catholic family, he excelled in sports and was intelligent, attending Brown University. When he graduated, his parents wanted him to go on to law school, but he followed his former coach to Penn State to be his assistant. There his life would forever change. For the next 61 years Paterno devoted his life to the university he came to know and love.

    The events that unfolded this past fall, the alleged sexual molestation of young boys by a former Penn State football coach on Paterno’s staff, sent shock waves throughout the country. The press lambasted Paterno for a crime he did not commit. They judged him guilty by association, and all the naysayers became Monday morning quarterbacks, offering advice about what he should have and could have done. Few came to his defense. Few spoke about his life’s work.

    Tragically, this man who had done so much for so many students’ lives over the last six decades was cast aside by the university he worked so tirelessly to help build. He accepted his fate with respect and dignity because he knew the institution he helped lead was more important than one person.

    Penn State alumni and students were devastated by the events. They, too, became victims by association for a crime they had no part in. They were angry and upset that their beloved head coach was being maliciously attacked by the press and that public sentiment was crucifying him. Some students rioted when the 85-year-old was fired by telephone for a crime he did not commit.

    And now he has passed on. The official diagnosis was lung cancer, which had been found just two months before, but those of us who have grown up with him suspect that he died of a broken heart.

    As you might surmise, I am a Penn State graduate. My P.S.U. family is in mourning. As the head coach of the football program, Paterno was in reality the face of the university — a father figure and our leader. During an exemplary career as a coach, he played by the rules and encouraged players to put education first. He and his wife, Sue, lived in the same modest house they raised their family in. They donated millions to the Pattee Library on campus. His core values were ours, and we respected and valued his dedication.

    It was ironic over the weekend how anyone who is anyone in the sports world was touting his virtues. Where were all these notables in the fall? Paterno not only did not commit any crime, he, too, was a victim. A member of his staff took advantage of his own power and position and allegedly victimized young boys (and I use that word “allegedly” not because I don’t believe crimes were committed but because I graduated with a degree in journalism and live in a country where you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law).

    My dad is almost Paterno’s age. He also grew up Catholic in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Topics dealing with our bodies, sex, and any deviant behavior were never discussed; even now those subjects are not something my dad is comfortable with. I am not condoning anyone’s actions. Paterno realized that he should have done more to follow up, but I can understand how he had a hard time wrapping his head around the events that were brought to his attention. He did not try to cover up what had taken place; he called his boss to report it. JoePa would never do anything to intentionally hurt a child. He devoted all of his adult life to helping young adults.

    I wasn’t born a Nittany Lion (the name comes from nearby Nittany Mountain). I did not grow up in Pennsylvania. But as a 17-year-old I arrived on campus in the fall of 1978, and I spent four of the most magical years of my life there. I got a terrific education, and, more important, I grew up.

    I met wonderful people. People in central Pennsylvania are grounded. They work hard and are happy with the things their hard work affords them. They don’t look at what others have, jealously searching for more. It’s no wonder that many of my lifelong friends are those I met at Penn State. Almost every year since I graduated I go back to my alma mater for homecoming. When I drive onto the University Park campus, a calm comes over me. I am home.

    I believe Joe Paterno felt the same way about State College, so much so that what was supposed to be a temporary move ended up becoming home for the rest of his life. Over the years he had many lucrative offers to coach in the pros, but he turned them all down. His heart was in Penn State.

    In the 30 years since I graduated and moved back to New York, I have had the chance to travel quite frequently. It pretty much never fails that during one of these trips I will strike up a conversation at an airport or a convention and meet a fellow Penn State graduate. The university has the largest alumni association in the world. What makes being a Penn Stater different is that immediately there is a bond. I have many friends who went to other big universities with rah-rah athletic programs. When they hear my college stories and meet my P.S.U. friends, they tell me how their college years were not like mine. They enjoyed college and made friends, but when they left they moved on with life.

    Penn Staters don’t want to move on. We leave the campus to build careers, marry, and have families, but we always come back. Yes, football was huge there; it was the rallying event each fall weekend that brought so many groups together. But there was so much more to the place.

    Philanthropy and charity were encouraged. My freshman year I danced in a 48-hour dance marathon to raise money for the Hershey Children’s Cancer Hospital, then still in its early stages. Now the largest yearly collegiate fund-raiser in the world, it was just one of many such events I participated in. To this day my friends here applaud my fund-raising efforts and ability to host charity functions.

    That is the face of a Penn Stater. In the aftermath of the awful headlines this fall, we didn’t just pray for the victims and their families, we began fund-raising for organizations associated with the prevention of child abuse.

    We now grieve for those victims of the alleged crimes, their families, and our coach. We know down deep in our hearts that Penn State will be stronger because of this. Though the naysayers insist that the events will define Coach Paterno and Penn State, we know better. The university is not the buildings or the athletic fields or the football team. Penn State is made up of the hearts and souls of its students and alumni, and we are a strong force.

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    Mary A. Lownes, Penn State class of '82, lives in Amagansett.