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. 

   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. 

   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.

   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.

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.    

    My friend “L,” a New Yorker through and through, has always been a model second-home owner. We’ve been friends for about 40 years.

    I married into a family that had been here since colonial times, a family that cherished its roots and wrote about them. In a sense, L followed suit. At first, I thought New Yorkers who summered here were like her: smart, educated, and fun. Even though I wasn’t long out of the city myself, I didn’t consider myself one of them; I thought of myself as having become local, even if locals thought of me as “from away.”    

    My friend and her husband bought a little old house near a pasture and, although they eventually built a big open adjoining room where family and friends could stay in summer, they did not alter the house’s traditional aspect.

    My immersion in life and lore here was inevitable. L, however, engaged herself in the community purposefully; she found out what the folks were like who had lived here forever, and she admired those among them who were extraordinary. Stuart Vorpahl, for example, a fisherman, local historian, and stalwart advocate of the rights bestowed upon the East Hampton and Southampton Town Trustees. She got to know what the South Fork has to offer almost as well as she knows the cultural life of New York.

    Over the years, L was often up and away. She spent lots of time in France, walked in India and Japan, and went on pilgrimages to this country’s national parks. Last week, she introduced me to a natural wonder right here that had eluded me all these years.

    The mountain laurel, she said, was in full bloom, as it was supposed to be during the second week of June. She and another friend had taken a walk in the woods the day before and she teased me by offering to go back again so I could see it.

    Mountain laurel is a true native species. According to Andrea Wulf’s book “Founding Gardeners,” our founding fathers introduced it to England. I had lived for almost six months at the edge of Northwest Woods when I first came to East Hampton, and, over the years, had come to know where to look for such miraculous flora as trailing arbutus and princess pine. (I’ll have to take L to those places next spring.) I had seen mountain laurel in bloom here and there along the roadsides, but never in profusion.

    L took me and another friend to a loop trail near the Noyac Golf Club that connects with the east-west Paumanok Path. Someone, apparently members of the Southampton Trails Preservation  Society, had traced the trail with sand to keep wanderers on track. Straying would have been easy because, as we walked along, the mountain laurel bushes appeared not only in front of us but on rises to either side in greater and greater numbers. We walked through bowers and under canopies.

    I remembered mountain laurel’s petals as  pinkish, which apparently is characteristic when they first unfold. Now, in the Noyac woods, the flowers were an almost sheer ivory white. The woodland nymphs could not have found more magnificent places to dance, or sing, or marry, if they were so inclined. Thank you, L.

    In the introduction to his book “The South Fork: The Land and the People of Eastern Long Island,” Everett Rattray wrote about new residents: “The South Fork is native now to a relative handful; it could be native to thousands more if they would undertake the necessary naturalization exercises, which include some long looks beneath the surface of things.”

    My husband, Mick, is a jam-making machine. It’s as if he stepped into a telephone booth wearing his summer uniform of khaki shorts and a beaten-up polo shirt and changed into a superman of jam.

    Since last summer, he has made cherry, apricot, mango, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, peach, plum, blackberry, and beach plum.

    He boils the jars bought from the hardware store and leftover Bonne Maman jam jars with the red-and-white-checkered lids. He calls his new enterprise Bon Papa. He works with factory-like precision. He chops and dices and strains fruit and measures sugar and boils it up according to the recipes on the Certo package. Then he melts wax to seal each filled jar. He carefully wipes off any excess jam and admires his results.

    I leave him alone and return to find beautiful pots of fruit nectar with light coming through the transparent color. His nine jars in three rows are lined up on the kitchen counter like British redcoats off to war. He cleans up after himself and leaves the stove spotless with only a few jam drips here and there.

    The sensuous pleasure I used to experience making jam has now been passed on to my jam king of a husband. One day as I was making raspberry jam he said, “Why don’t you make plum?”

    I answered, “Why don’t you make plum?” And he did.

    I never bought any fruit and used only berries we grew ourselves. I would never have attempted cherry jam; I couldn’t be bothered to take out the pits.

    Mick writes on oval labels with a red Sharpie pen. This gives each jar a professional appearance. He has had offers from a local farm stand to sell his jam but he prefers to keep it for friends and family. When our kids and grandchildren visit they get to pick their favorite to take home.

    We sample a different jam every morning. We spoon jam over plain yogurt for lunch and over vanilla ice cream for dessert. Mick’s favorite is gooseberry and mine is apricot. The blackberry jam that he strained all the pips from reminds me of my Aunt Helen, who removed the seeds from the watermelon that she cut up for my cousin and me when we were children.

    We give a jar wrapped in a colorful new dish towel as a hostess present when invited to dinner. Friends give us the empty jars back, hoping they will get a refill the next year. The dish towels hanging in their kitchens are a reminder of the delicious jam gift.

    I wasn’t surprised by his jam making since Mick was a natural nurturer as we raised our children. He would take the kids to the pediatrician if I had to work. He thought his purpose in life was to smooth out the bumps in my life as well as our children’s. Nothing was too much trouble or too difficult. There was a solution to every problem. “Ask Dad,” was a frequent refrain.

    Mick drove the kids to school for 19 years, sharing the driving with a Japanese family. He loved to drive them because the kids would talk to each other as if he were invisible and he got to hear what was really going on.

    Our two children were born on the same day, six years apart. One birthday morning, Mark and Sophie thought he was driving them to school as usual, but after they passed their turnoff, they said, “Where are we going?”

    He told them he was taking them to an amusement park for the day. “Are we playing hooky?” they asked. “Yup,” he said. “Yeah!” they shouted, loving the idea of parent-sanctioned rule breaking.

    While coaching our daughter’s varsity softball team he rewarded the players with stuffed animals when they made a good play, admonishing them “Softball players don’t cry!” when they missed an outfield catch.

    As Sophie was writing her essay for early admission to Princeton, the glowing green numbers on the digital clock clicked past the midnight postmark deadline for the application. The next morning my husband drove the application to Princeton from New York City. He told Sophie she’d better be accepted because he wasn’t going to drive her college applications all over the Northeast.

    He took our son with him on location for photo shoots for the Army, Tropicana Orange Juice, and other commercial accounts. They went to Zion National Park in Utah and Homer, Alaska, and Aspen, Colo. Mick wanted our son to experience the real world of advertising, to see the process behind the perfection.

    He taught Sophie how to develop film in the darkroom and how to do museum-quality prints. He drove his ’69 Mustang to Florida so our son could use it for his wedding. Mick had kilts in his family’s tartan made in Scotland for the male family members of the wedding party. Mick is a Sean Connery look-alike.

    When I see him with our grandchildren, hugging and kissing them and making up games and drawing roads in the sand to follow, I fall in love with him all over again. Nurturing is sexy. He laughs and giggles like a little boy himself as he plays with blocks, organizes toy car rallies, and reads kids’ books. At the beach my husband builds forts, collects shells, and runs like a sandpiper in and out of the waves.

    Don’t get the idea that my husband is perfect. We have our differences and usual disagreements, over the kids and money. But we try not to go to bed angry. He does have one annoying habit: He never closes jars — mustard, mayonnaise, or relish tops — so when I pick them up, they slip through my fingers, breaking and making a mess. However, he always manages to securely fasten and tighten the lids of his homemade jam.

    But it’s a small price to pay for my Jam Man. As long as he produces jam and smoothes out life’s bumps, I can’t imagine my life without him.

Joanne Pateman is a former advertising art director who lives in Southampton. She has an M.F.A. from Southampton College, and her writing has appeared in The Star and The Southampton Review.

    “Joe Pilates would be proud of you,” my instructor said following yet another midweek class at the Y in which, were I to be frank — which I can’t because I’m Jack — I flailed about trying to work in sync with a group of women whose cores are iron and who bend like reeds in the wind at Carolyn Giacalone’s cues as I strain in the general direction of my toes wherever they may be.

    They’ve come a long way, baby. And, in part because they have, I have too.

    I wasn’t always so humble: When Zach Grossman, our champion young golfer, said before the high school’s athletic awards ceremony that he had earlier that day lost a tennis match to a female classmate, I told him that “eons ago,” when it became apparent I was about to lose to Joan Foedisch at the Edgeworth Club in Sewickley, Pa., I had walked off the court rather than be beaten by a girl. But that was then. Nowadays, when any of our club’s hotshot women — and they are legion — deign to have me as a doubles partner I hum this ditty (substituting myself for the old maid who sings it):

    “Come a landsman, a kinsman, a soldier, or a sailor / doctor, a lawyer, a tinker, or a tailor / a rich man, a poor man, a fool, or a witty / Don’t let me die an old fud, but take me out of pity. . . .”

    I told Zach that the equanimity of his generation — his equanimity at least, for he has already learned to treat victory and defeat as the imposters they are — when contrasted with the chauvinism of mine “must mean there is such a thing as evolution.”

    It is a happy thought then, that at three score and 10 I can participate in a coed effort at self-improvement, rid to some extent of the self-consciousness that might keep a man from trying something new. (Lest I get too big a head, I suppose, a woman in my class told me I wasn’t the only one, that she knew of a number of other men who were doing Pilates elsewhere.)    Of course, if I were really free I wouldn’t be writing this column about how acutely aware I am of women’s superiority. Though fairly flexible for a man, I’ll never bend like them, elbows on the floor, heads on their knees, nor do I yet have — maybe never will have — the stomach for what they do.

    It is pleasing, though, to sense that I’m participating in the dance of life, however ungainfully. That’s my core value, I would say.

    Before throat cancer took his voice and eventually his life, Damon Runyon, most famous for the stories immortalized in “Guys and Dolls,” was asked what kind of a remembrance he wanted. “You can keep your things of bronze and stone,” he said, “and give me one man to remember me just once a year.”

    My dad, like Runyon, died before his time at 65. He had beaten the big “C” before, but in early 2001, he got sucker-punched.

    A lot of people are described as larger than life. Dad was larger than life, and he lived that life large. He only ate the freshest produce and the juiciest meats. He wore the softest shirts. He smoked only the finest cigars, rolled upon the tanned and nubile thighs of laughing Dominican virgins, or so he said.

    When I was a small, shy child in grade school on the Upper East Side, occasionally the door to my classroom would open and a half-dozen tuxedoed waiters would burst forth, carrying silver-covered platters of hot dogs and hamburgers still hot from the ovens at Maxwell’s Plum for me and my astonished classmates.

    His avoirdupois only solidified his standing as the largest person in the room. When he appeared at some highbrow event in a gold lamé suit, he was described in a Manhattan gossip column as a “shiny butterball.”

    Dad lived up to his Hollywood glam roots. The son of Mervyn LeRoy, who produced “The Wizard of Oz,” and the grandson of Harry Warner, the mogul who started Warner Brothers, he was pretty much doomed to be over the top from the very beginning.

    He was born to astound.

    But what I miss most is when the gilded paint would chip a little, and the real Dad would shine through.

    “We’re nothing but ants on this planet,” he would tell me. “You just have to be the best ant you can.” Or, “Have a dream. Make it come true. Then move on to the next dream.” Those are the jewels I remember best. Those, and the feel of his shirt on my cheek.

    I was in Hawaii when I had my last conversation with Dad. He was in the hospital, heavily medicated, and somewhat manic.

    “How are you, Dad?” I asked.

    “Busy,” he replied, sounding distracted. “Busy, busy, busy.”

    “Doing what?”

    “Oh, you know . . . hospital shit,” he answered, annoyed, making it sound as if he had taken over the entire oncology department and had dozens of patients to see before the end of the day.

    “What’s going on?”

    “Oh, I’m having a big party in my room tonight. Big,” he emphasized. “You should come. Bacce is coming, and Rita is coming, Buddy and Greer, Judy Garland . . .” He continued to rattle off the names of people who had been dead for years. His stepfather, Charles Vidor, the director, he called Bacce. Rita was Rita Hayworth.

    “It’s going to be fabulous. Fabulous!” he said. “I’ve just ordered 12 chickens from Eli’s, and a bunch of other stuff. I found the reddest peonies in New York City. No kidding. The reddest! You really should be here.”

    “I’m in Hawaii,” I said lamely.

    “Oh,” he said. “Well, a big kiss for you and for Eric and for Georgia and for Joelie and for Bing and a big kiss for you!”

    “You already gave me one at the beginning,” I told him.

    “Well, you get two ’cause I love you so much,” he said with a laugh, and then said the words I had heard thousands of times. “I’m really busy, Bridgie. I gotta get going. I love you.”

    “Okay, Dad. I love you too. Have fun tonight.”

    Three days later he was dead.

    I’m so glad he went out with a big party, lots of friends, and lots of food.

    Since I’ve moved back to the East End, at least once a week someone asks, “Are you related to Warner LeRoy?”

    “Yeah,” I say, never knowing what to expect. “He was my dad.”

    Then they smile to themselves and all say the same thing: “There will never be another Warner.”

    Tom Twomey, the attorney, grabbed my hand at a library meeting last week and looked into my eyes.

    “Your dad was one of my heroes,” he said with all sincerity, and I know he meant it.

    “Me too,” I answered, choking up a little, amazed that I still do.

    If Runyon’s quote means anything, Warner will be around as long as there’s someone out there who will remember him, with fondness, just once a year.

    Which just goes to show Dad’s even larger than “larger than life.”

    He’s larger than death.

    Happy Father’s Day to all.

—

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

    That State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who represents the very gay-friendly South Fork, as well as the rest of eastern Long Island, has refused to vote yes on a same-sex marriage bill so far this week has, unfortunately, not been a surprise, even if it is deeply disappointing. With the Senate locked in a 31-to-31 stalemate over the issue, Mr. LaValle could have played the hero with a reversal to vote in favor of the measure. That, however, did not appear to be likely as the battle raged on in Albany.

    Mr. LaValle is in his fourth decade as a state senator and has rarely faced any real competition. He has not suffered any apparent political harm from the right for his position in favor of civil unions, kind of a marriage half-step that does not guarantee equal protections under the law.

    Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Sag Harbor resident with an office in Bridgehampton, has been a consistent supporter of same-sex marriage bills and has not had much criticism over his position and is about as popular as ever. Mr. Thiele voted again last week in favor of a measure that is a companion to the one in the State Senate, and angry constituents did not flood his office with complaints.

    Mr. LaValle’s opposition to gay marriage comes from his own apparent principle. But his express support of civil unions for gay couples could be interpreted as a contradiction, or perhaps a glimmer of hope, for same-sex marriage advocates. He is usually a compassionate legislator, with particular interest in matters of importance to disabled people and the First District’s older residents. The limits of his empathy are apparent in this matter.

    We would have hoped Mr. LaValle would have followed the lead of another Republican state senator, James Alesi, who changed his stance earlier this year, saying, “I believe that if you live in America and you expect equality and freedom for yourself, you should extend it to other people.”

    Whether based on his personal belief or not, Mr. LaValle is on the wrong side of this historic debate. We would have hoped that he would reflect the moderate and tolerant views of the majority of people in his district rather than hew to the regrettable line of an era that is rapidly ending.