Aren’t you sick of the lame, violent, and techno-heavy dreck Hollywood’s been dishing out for the past couple of years? I am. With movie attendance at an all-time low, it’s time for drastic measures. Hollywood needs a hit. What Hollywood really needs is a sequel to “Pretty Woman.”

    Let’s demand a meeting, A.S.A.P., with the powers that be: the director, Garry Marshall, the screenwriter, J.F. Lawton, and the silver screen’s most lovable couple, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. If they’re not available, what about Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst?

    Has Hollywood forgotten how it feels to exploit a good thing? “Pretty Woman,” by all accounts, was a very good thing — one of the top-grossing films of all time, with $463 million at the box office, according to the trade mag Variety. Not to mention all those $19.95 DVD sales in discount stores across America.

    A few years ago there was a rumor afloat that another film was in the works. I’d even heard of this plausible plotline: Gere’s character plans a run for the Senate but is worried about how his live-in relationship with an ex-prostitute would affect voters. Hmm, sounds like a winner to me.

    Richard and Julia think the characters have not evolved and grown in mature fashion in the intervening years? Simple — let them sit in on rewrites. Then, before you can say “Mrs. Roberts-Moder,” they’ll be scouting locations for “Pretty Woman III,” IV, and V. It’s what we need. It’s what we want.

    Megabucks talk. At least they’re talking to me. I’m joining the ranks of those Hollywood hopefuls. Today, I’m a screenwriter after a piece of that delectable dollar pie. I’ve just completed several synopses for possible sequels to one of the most moneymaking movies in history. Here’s a glimpse:

    Idea I: In the heat of passion, one steamy night in the sauna, they forgo the practice of safe sex. After some mild symptoms, they visit the doctor. Diagnosis? S.T.D. Seven days of treatment with tetracycline cures both, but he continues to feel betrayed. He moves to the Hilton. She gets the penthouse. It could have been worse.

    Idea II: Lately, he’s gotten bored with walking barefoot through the park with her, along with all those other spontaneous activities she’s prone to. Then, giving in to impulse once more one morning, he punctures his big toe on a rusty nail. A tetanus shot is in order. But wait. Add fear of inoculations to his ever-expanding list of phobias. As jaundice sets in, he lies dying. His last words: “No one ever really changes much. But I tried.”

    Idea III: Anxious to cure his vicious acrophobia, he seeks therapy with a well-known Beverly Hills psychiatrist. After only weeks on the couch, he discovers he suffers from low self-esteem. Hence his attraction to hookers from Hollywood Boulevard. After months of aided and intense self-examination, he is encouraged to attend a few networking functions to ease those feelings of social isolation. As luck would have it, he meets an assistant executive officer and V.P. for Estée Lauder. They run off to Australia for a scuba vacation and fall deeply in love. “I was ready,” he explains.

    Idea IV: Always told she should have been a model, she first, through his connections, secures a contract with the Ford Agency. Next she is chosen for a spot in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition. While on location for the shoot in Curacao, she takes up with ___ (fill in the blank), a member of a rich and famous rock group who is partying nearby. “He may not be as cute,” she says, “but he’s got more money. Plus, he sings.” (Might not ex-hubby Lyle Lovett, “music’s quirkiest and most talented un-hunk,” as Time magazine put it, be cast opposite Roberts in this meaty role?)

    Idea V: Generous to a fault, she asks her best friend from “the Strip” to join them on their next weekend getaway to Aspen. Over a bottle of vintage chardonnay at Pinons, he is simply smitten by this prostitute with a heart of gold. He confesses: “I live life for rescuing.” Back home in Los Angeles, Julia splits and he takes his new love on a spending spree — yep, you guessed it — along Rodeo Drive. She buys nice clothes, too, except this gal eschews the hats.

    Idea VI: Unable to curb her fascination with the low life, she secretly walks the streets in the wee hours of the night. In an attempt to control insomnia, he takes long drives, and gets lost, in the city most evenings. They bump into each other, literally, on Sunset and fall in love all over again.

    Venturing a guess, I see idea number six as a shoo-in. Sap sells. And Hollywood loves a happy ending. Now, if Garry and Julia can discern potential talent when they see it, I’m willing to write up a complete script. For a small percent of the profits. And a bit part.

    Look for me in the credits.

    Dianne Moritz is a regular contributor to “Guestwords” who lives in North Sea. Her second children’s book, “1, 2, 3 by the Sea,” is forthcoming from Kane Miller.

   Metaphors don’t come easily to me. Having a limited imagination doesn’t help. But even I couldn’t miss this one.

    My wife, Carol’s, grandfather died almost seven years before she was born, but she heard stories about him, none very flattering. Jeremiah Miller Huntting became a sixth-generation East Hampton Huntting on June 10, 1882. Carol’s grandmother Edith Banister, former Village Mayor Jud Banister’s older sister, took her first teaching job in East Hampton’s Union School in the fall of 1901. Within 18 months, she met Jere, as he was known locally, and they married in October 1903. Beryle Huntting, Jere and Ede’s only child, was born the following year.

    We never knew when the divorce occurred, but it was sometime between 1909 and 1910, when Beryle was 5 or 6. A census search for Jud found the entire family, minus Jere, living in a corner apartment on Newtown Lane and Main Street in 1910. But no Jeremiah Miller Huntting under any reasonable spellings in the federal census. Where was he?

    The Huntting genealogy in Jeanette Edwards Rattray’s “East Hampton History” from 1953 opened the first door to the family history. She reported Jere’s first marriage to Ede and noted the divorce and the subsequent second marriages of both, Jere to Edna Remsen McKay and Ede to Christopher Cordes. Jere’s trail grew cold after 1910, though in time pieces started to come together.

    During the winter of 1905 to 1906, times were fun. The Ladies Village Improvement Society, just 10 years old, was planning a fund-raising home talent drama in Clinton Hall in December 1905. Mrs. Fred Dayton, Mrs. J.M. Huntting (Ede), Mrs. Everett Edwards, and Mrs. Dempsey formed the production committee. The Star, interested in supporting the play, identified the key cast members, Miss Elsie Tillinghast, Mrs. W.B. Robonson (sic), Miss Florence Sherrill, Fred Dayton, Ned Dayton, Charles Stuart, J.M. Huntting, and Harry Hedges, for the comedy-drama “What Became of Parker?”

    “The advance sale of seats for the presentation by home talent of the comedy ‘What Became of Parker?’ began this morning and there was a rush for tickets. The play is being rehearsed now almost nightly and the performance promises to be of high order,” The Star claimed on Feb. 16, 1906. Fred Parker, a dry-goods merchant, was played by Fred V.S. Dayton, and his business partner, William Torrence, by Jeremiah Miller Huntting.

    Finally the big night, Friday, Feb. 23, came, with The Star pronouncing, “The seating chart at Edwards drug store gives evidence that the greater part of the population of the village will be at Clinton Hall this evening to witness the presentation of ‘What Became of Parker?’ ” The following week a lengthy column enthusiastically praised the program, reporting the L.V.I.S. netted $110 from the play. The society lauded the production committee publicly for its efforts. How could Jere and Ede not be happy? So what did become of Parker, er, Jere?

    Baseball played a role that became evident only after more research. Although he initially managed and played right field on the town team, by 1906 he was actively umpiring. Soon he was recognized as one of the best umpires, and not just in East Hampton or on the East End — teams in New York City sought him and routinely asked him to attend annual league meetings to schedule umpires for the semipro games. New York City seemed a favorite place.

    The 1920 federal census and his World War I draft registration card started filling blanks. Jere, going by Jerry at this point, was head of household with his “wife,” Helen, and “their” two daughters, Eleanor and Mary. Except that Helen and Jere were not married. Her married surname was Weber and her husband was still engaged in the plumbing trade in another part of the city! A few years earlier on his draft registration card Jere had listed Helen, a friend, as the person the government should notify in an emergency. The address on the draft card and 1920 census was West 178th Street, Bronx Borough. Ten years before, Helen and Eleanor and Mary were the wife and children of husband and father Charles Weber, who owned a plumbing business.

    Meanwhile, Edna Remsen McKay, daughter of longtime North Hempstead Supervisor Cornelius Remsen, was living alone on West 94th Street as a New York City artist in 1920. And sometime between 1920 and 1926, when Jere and Edna married, he had left Helen. Star news items between 1910 and 1928 mentioned his brief visits back to East Hampton to see his mother after his father died in 1912 and Sam, his brother, died in 1914. Other East Hampton trips included visits with old friends, but New York City was home.

    Edna, previously married to Mahlon McKay, perhaps had a fix on Jere’s personality, because in the spring of 1928 they returned to East Hampton, renting a cottage on McGuirk Street. In 1929 they moved to a new home on Mill Hill Lane. He umpired baseball games in the East End League; he and Edna entertained friends, spent time at Edna’s Adirondack camp, wintered in Florida, and otherwise lived quiet lives. But at the age of 55 in 1937 Jeremiah Miller Huntting died after a long illness and was buried in the David H. Huntting family plot at Cedar Lawn Cemetery.

    Ede survived all her Banister siblings, and when she passed away in 1973 she joined Jud, Stella, and Howard Banister in the family plot at Cedar Lawn. As fate would have it her headstone faces Jeremiah Miller Huntting’s, about a good baseball throw from right field.

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

    Last summer was kind of a bummer for me. Living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with two young children, I didn’t get to the South Fork much, the place where I spent the majority of my youth as a year-rounder. And when I did make it through the constant knots of traffic to the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of Memorial Day to Labor Day to stay at my mother’s in East Hampton, it became a harried journey to avoid the clots of people and whole swaths of overrun villages.

    While it was great as always to see old and dear friends, I felt estranged from a nostalgic sense of place. Was it the increasing wealth and population? Maybe it was the seemingly amped-up presence of police and “brownie” traffic cops. Or maybe it was the dissociation between visitors and locals, part-time residents and full-time workers.

    These are, of course, issues and questions that are not new to the South Fork. Ever since people with means (and some with not so many means) discovered the beauty of the beaches and bays relatively close to the metropolis, the area has held its sway. But these questions have grown as wealth has moved from the buttoned-up, traditional place it stayed for much of the 20th century (I worked for a few weeks busing tables at the Maidstone Club when I was a teenager) to the flashier and more ostentatious role it had in the late ’80s and ’90s to the perhaps inevitably more entrenched role money (and the entitlement that often goes with it) plays into the 21st century.

    While not all of this is connected to Wall Street, the show of wealth in certain environs around New York City is not disconnected from the infamous bonuses that came, and still come, from the growth of financial services — investment banks, hedge funds, and the like. Naturally these bonuses also helped develop and fund many local businesses and livelihoods on the South Fork, including my mother’s landscaping and garden design company.

    But, as we now look back over the last few decades, it’s clear to most analysts — and certainly to Occupy Wall Street and those who support it — that the pressure on these industries to make more money out of money and the shenanigans that went along with doing so have not only been corrosive but have also exacerbated divisions in American society to such a degree that the slogan of the Occupy movement — “We are the 99 percent!” — has caught on more than anyone could have imagined.

    In December a Pew Research poll found that a majority of Americans agree with the issues that Occupy Wall Street brought up — such as that too much power is in the hands of too few individuals and corporations — even if they do not agree with the tactics of the movement. Evidently, the subcutaneous pressure in American society generated by unemployment, foreclosures, Wall Street bailouts, and the growing realization that democracy on some fundamental level is not working for much of the middle class had found a way to break through.

    On a personal and professional level, I have pursued a path in writing and documentary film producing in which I have always tried to engage with social-political issues that intersect with many of the focal points of Occupy Wall Street. These would include economic inequality, social justice, media, and all the tendrils of thought connected to these somewhat vague but powerful categories.

    So I went to Zuccotti Park, where the movement started, a number of times, taking my 6-year-old son with me on one occasion. I went to the massive protest that took over Foley Square in early October. I wasn’t a camper and didn’t become part of a working group, but I’ve become involved in producing an independent collaborative feature documentary that includes more than 100 filmmakers from around the country — a film that I hope will be a compelling and honest portrayal of the beginnings, the occupations, and the evictions and try to engage on many levels about what this movement actually means for the future. (More is at 99percentfilm.com.)

    Because if you look at what happened with the seemingly sudden rise of Occupy Wall Street and what it means, it’s clear that whatever the vagueness, whatever the complexities, it has vigorously injected an awareness of many of these economic issues back into American society (the last time they were as present, one could argue, was in the 1930s). It’s not the drum circles, the sign waving, the “people’s microphone,” or even the direct consensus that have so much defined the face of the movement; it’s those overarching issues that resonate with Americans from most walks of life. While there is a grassroots element to Occupy Wall Street, it feels at this point — after the evictions of encampments around the country — that, rather, the roots of this new movement are growing and merging with previous micro movements, be they MoveOn. org, community soup kitchens, or religious and artistic nonprofits, and maybe burgeoning political candidates.

    And it’s come to a point where even Republican presidential candidates, stalwarts of the unregulated free market, are using examples of corporate raiding and greed to garner votes. In part, that’s because the issues of the movement are not solely about a left-right divide, as some might think. But instead they come from a need from many quarters for an honest conversation — one that the Republicans and even the Demo­crats seem unable to handle — that looks at the real consequences of unbridled markets and blind deregulation. One that would honestly assess, for example, what a health care system without government involvement would look like. One that would open up a discussion of new systems in finance, law, intellectual property, and other fundamentals that would change and maybe make healthier the broken economic culture of the country.

    In other words, the ideas that most economic historians might agree began their ascendancy with the election of Ronald Reagan, and have been dominant ever since, have come home to roost in a big way.

    What does this mean on the South Fork? The gorgeous small spit of land that much of the world now automatically equates with colossal wealth and celebrity? I can’t comment as someone who is living there now. But I hear and see things: that villages are at risk of losing some of the last remaining mom-and-pop stores and meeting places, that seasonal high-end boutiques have propagated even further, that real estate is ridiculous, and what about the cost of living? (Well, I’m sure most reading this get the picture.)

    As an area that is populated by a disproportionate number of the 1 percent, the Hamptons are a world apart from the dried-out and boarded-up towns and neighborhoods around the country that have taken the brunt of the Great Recession. But perhaps that’s the point and not the point. Occupy Wall Street is not so much a “class issue,” as there are plenty of people with money who are interested and involved in the movement. It’s more about perspective and change. It’s about “hope,” but not solely as a campaign slogan (sorry, Barack). Young and old alike can see this.

    And I hope, when the teens of the current Hamptons have kids, that, in their middle-aged grandeur, they will hold on to the kind of nostalgia for the area that I do.

    Williams Cole’s credits as a documentary film producer include “Giuliani Time” and “Gun Fight.” He is a founding contributing editor of the arts, politics, and culture publication The Brooklyn Rail.

   Howard Miller, from an old family in Springs, was elected the first president of the East Hampton Baymen’s Association in March 1960. His involvement in community life did not begin with this election, however.

    By the mid-1950s, many local people had recognized that the building boom after World War II was not an unmixed blessing. In July of 1955, a civic group calling itself the East Hampton Inland Waterways Association was formed, with Miller as vice president. It sought betterment of the town’s harbors and creeks, The East Hampton Star reported, expressly for the purpose of the “preservation and increase of East Hampton’s only free natural resource, the shellfish industry.” That was Miller’s way of talking, but the group also announced it would seek “dredging of inlets . . . reclamation of land, and the increase of boating.”

    Miller supported improving the channels of the town’s waterways by dredging, but he did not favor “reclamation of land” (that is, the filling of wetlands to create marketable real estate), and he strongly believed that too much “boating” caused pollution. But he knew that taking hard and fast stands on issues could make enemies. Among real estate dealers in town, some certainly favored filling in wetlands to make home sites (with canals for private docking). Among the Inland Waterways Association’s early members, though, there were marina owners for whom building lots of private docking in the town’s harbors was not an idea to be supported.

    The Inland Waterways Association took its time getting organized — about three years, in fact — but finally, on April 14, 1958, the group held a public meeting at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, overlooking Pussy’s Pond. Although The Star of April 10 carries on the front page separate announcements for three different club meetings and a piano recital at Guild Hall, no mention is made of the Inland Waterways’ public meeting. (There was still about a year to go before Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who was quite attuned to the social life of the town, would turn over editorship of The Star to her son Everett, who was an early environmentalist.) The group nevertheless collected $1 in dues from 102 people and compiled a membership list of 95 names, including at least 20 baymen.

    The minutes, neatly typed by the group’s secretary, Joseph Dreesen, state that Steve Palmer, a marina owner, asked the town supervisor, Richard Gilmartin (who was in attendance along with other members of the town board), “if there couldn’t be a way of setting up a program such as Southampton has for taking care of the waterways.” But the group’s real focus was on Accabonac Harbor, which one man said was “in very bad need of having the channel opened.”

    This had been a concern of small-boat owners for some time, and the president of the Inland Waterways Association, William Daub, thereupon appointed a six-man committee, including Howard Miller, to work with the town board to that end. The result was that eight months later Supervisor Gilmartin was able to invite the public to his office to examine “large aerial photos, with transparent overlays showing several possible plans” for the future of Accabonac Harbor, The Star reported. The plans were the work of a private consulting engineer named H. Lee Dennison.

    Dennison had begun work as an engineer in 1927 for Suffolk County and must have been among those who watched in amazement during the late 1920s and early 1930s as Robert Moses’s grand scheme for parks and parkways on Long Island became a reality. That was engineering on a truly monumental scale. In 1951, after writing a scathing report on the planning operations of the Republican-controlled county government, Dennison was fired and entered private business.

    Dennison’s plans for Bonac Creek, The Star reported, “went beyond the mere dredging and stabilization of an inlet.” In fact, they included establishing four town parks with marina areas, extensive private marina facilities at the southern end of the creek, digging a system of canals in the wetlands to create home sites that would have private docking, and dredging two permanent channels to the bay — one at or near the existing inlet and one in the northern part of the harbor.

    Cutting these two inlets would, of course, leave many small summer houses stranded on a new man-made island. So the plan called for construction of “a causeway with a wooden trestle bridge” across the creek, connecting the mainland to the new island. In other words, a causeway would be built starting from Fireplace Road and crossing the wetlands to connect with a bridge that would span the open waters of the harbor. It was reasoned that such a causeway and bridge “would be safer in northeast storms than a bridge across one of the inlets.”

    To its credit, the town board announced a month later that the plan “was too ambitious for the present.” In a Star article titled “Town Scales Down Bonac Creek Plan,” Supervisor Gilmar­tin was reported to say: “For the present, we think that a stabilized channel, with enough dredging inside the creek for a small anchorage, would be enough. . . . There are some doubts about the effect on shellfish of large-scale dredging and two inlets.”

    The town trustees, who had met with the town board to discuss the proposals, believed “the immediate need was for better water circulation inside the creek,” and this could be provided simply by deepening and stabilizing a channel, which would also facilitate boat traffic.

    Miller and Daub continued to work with the town on the project and were instrumental in convincing everyone that a new channel should be dredged somewhat north of the existing one, which should be left to fill in naturally with drifting sand.

    It was necessary to obtain permission to dredge not only from the town but also from the county, state, and federal governments, but somehow the town felt empowered to cut a preliminary shallow channel through the beach at the new site before the federal permit was obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers. The town began work on May 8, 1959, using a bulldozer and a crane equipped with a scoop. The new channel, which was to run 2,300 feet from the bay straight into the harbor, with a width of 100 feet and a depth at low tide of 12 feet, did finally receive the Army Corps permit on July 6, and a month later the long-awaited county dredge Shinnecock appeared on the scene to finish the job.

    The site of the new inlet had been selected in a belief that a centrally located channel, cut westward deep into the interior of the harbor, would improve tidal circulation in all areas, including the northern portion. However, the great dredge, which pumped bottom sand through pipes to places on nearby beach that the town wished to enlarge, ran into trouble. “Hardpan Forces Bonac Dredge Change,” The Star announced on Aug. 20, reporting that town and county officials had “decided to run the channel south . . . rather than continue straight west through the rock and gravel bed, which was forcing the dredge crew to tear down their pump as often as 30 times a day. . . . The dredge will also cut a channel to the north of the new entrance, to fill out their quota of work at Accabonac.”

    And so the new channel assumed a sort of drunken Y shape, which exists to this day.

    The work took about three weeks, the Shinnecock departed for a project in Lake Montauk, and the town board made application to the Army Engineers for permission to close the old inlet. Rather than wait for nature to take its course, it was decided to fill in the old channel so that roadway could be constructed over it in order to reach the beach next to the new inlet. This new tip of land is still called Louse Point, although the original point was over 1,200 feet to the south, now buried under sand fill.

    The point of land on the other side of the new channel, once 1,200 feet longer than it is now and called Cape Gardiner, somehow lost its original name and today the tip of the shortened peninsula is almost always referred to as Gerard Point, since it is at the end of Gerard Drive.

    This time the town waited for the Army Corps permit, and the old inlet was finally closed by East Hampton Town Highway Department bulldozers on Feb. 16, 1960. Two days later, on the night of Feb. 18, with high tide three feet above normal, winds 40 to 60 miles an hour beat against the new barrier. In Miller’s notes is an entry from that night: “The causeway across [old] Accabonac channel was severely put to a test. The sea washed across the causeway [which] was fortified with tree stumps, and it held.”

    Miller, who two weeks later was elected president of the Baymen’s Association, was a strong advocate of the Accabonac project. It was an engineering solution that would benefit everyone, and if it had cost taxpayers something to get it, he reasoned, it would be nearly maintenance-free in the future. Closing the old channel, he believed, would “help keep the new channel open” because now all tidal currents would go through the new inlet, and he figured that this “flow of the tides through the new entrance should keep it scoured.”

    The problem was that nature did not want the channel in its new location; she wanted it in its original site, shallow as that was. Prevailing tidal currents strive constantly to this day to plug up the new inlet. As a result, the town must fairly often go through the lengthy process of application to arrange for the county dredge to remove the shifting sands that continually fill in the channel. In between visits from the Shinnecock, the town sends the Highway Department to scoop out whatever sand can be reached from the shore by a crane with a swinging bucket, a nearly annual event.

    But Miller never knew this; he became ill and passed away in August 1962.

    Arnold Leo, recently elected secretary of the East Hampton Baymen's Association for the 34th year, lives in Springs and has worked as a book editor, bayman, and caretaker. He was the town's fisheries consultant from 2007 through 2010.

   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.

--

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

   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.

    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.

One New Year’s resolution I hope to keep is to get to the dump more frequently. I, for whatever reason, just did not take adequate advantage of my $100 East Hampton Town garbage permit in 2011.

    Around lunchtime on Tuesday, I took a big haul of empty boxes and holiday wrapping paper to the Springs-Fireplace Road transfer station. Also tucked in the back of my pickup truck that morning were two garbage bags full of our children’s broken toys, games, and puzzles now missing many pieces, and stuffed animals missing their stuffing. Gone now is Bad Dream Bunny, a plush rabbit that lost both of its ears early on and was blamed by our middle child for a string of nightmares.

    Back when dump permits were $50, and came with a plastic recycling tub with a cute raccoon on the side, the annual trash ante-up seemed a good value. At twice the cost now, and with the two town transfer stations closed on Wednesdays, I may be overpaying. Considering how much junk has accumulated in the house over the years, however, I should go more often and make the fee worthwhile.

    Garbage has been on my mind more than usual since Christmas Eve, when I was sorting presents in my office to get them ready for wrapping. Unpacking a box from Amazon, I was annoyed by the plastic air packs used to cushion the gifts in too-large cardboard boxes. Slashing them with an X-acto knife to make them small enough to cram in a trash bin, I noticed one of those triangular marks supposed to indicate an item’s recyclability, if you will. I discovered the air packs were made of type-2 plastic — one of two I thought were accepted by East Hampton Town for recycling.

    The recycling centers, however, take only plastic bottles that contained liquids, a rule I found buried deep in a PDF file on the town’s Web site. Plastic mayonnaise or yogurt containers, for example, even if they are type 1 or 2, the allowed varieties, must be tossed in with the nonrecyclable trash, as must be Amazon air packs, and the like.

    The reason, I read on a City of New York recycling Web page so I assume it is true here, is that commercial buyers of plastics are interested only in jugs and bottles. Municipalities, including New York, are trying to get the federal government to change the way packaging is labeled to make it easier for consumers to figure out what to recycle.

    This left me once again placing the air packs in the trash with Bad Dream Bunny and the rest. The obvious answer is to buy less stuff. But that is a lot easier said than done.    

    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.