It seems to be a reasonable solution to the Springs School’s useable-space crunch that the district would borrow an East Hampton Town-owned building on school property to use for classrooms. However, a deal should not be struck without keeping in mind the needs of the larger Springs community.

    The Springs Youth Association has been holding programs in the small, shingled structure off Ed Hults Lane, and a town homework club has been run from there. The school’s problems have been well documented, and there is a sense that property owners there are nearing the end of their willingness or ability to pay for any more tax increases that might fund an expansion.

    With the hamlet showing tremendous population growth during the last decade, the school has struggled to accommodate all of its students. The youth association building would help relieve some of the pressure, but assurances must be made that it be accessible to the non-school public for meetings and events unrelated to the school.

    With the closing of Fort Pond House in Montauk by the town board and the town’s planned handoff of the Duck Creek Farm alongside Three Mile Harbor to an artists’ group, there are fewer publicly owned buildings available to one and all than there once were. Ashawagh Hall, also in Springs, is privately owned and generally booked, and it and the Presbyterian Church nearby should not be the only venues for gatherings in the hamlet.

    As the town board and Springs district continue to discuss the youth association’s building, its value as a potential meeting place for Springs residents remains a key point of negotiation.

    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.

I recently read that Tiger Woods is selling his yacht, Privacy, for $25 million. He bought it as a wedding present for his wife, Elin Nordegren, for a mere $20 million. He offered it to her in their divorce settlement, but she declined. Perhaps there were too many sequins and boa feathers and sticks of Orbit gum and bikini bottoms left on it from the lady friends he was entertaining while still married? He has downsized to a $3 million yacht named Solitude. From Privacy to Solitude. That’s so, like, Buddhist, which is what he said he is in one of his mid-scandal, well-scripted press conferences.

When he purchased the yacht, he never set foot on it during renovations. But his then-fiancée was very involved in the decorating, choosing white silk fabric for the walls and cherry wood handrails for the staircase. Christensen Shipyards builds about three Tri-Deck fiberglass motor yachts per year, leaving them 40 percent unfinished so their clients can tailor the interiors to their own taste. A project manager was happy to report how pleasant Elin Nordegren was: “She was a quick decision maker, no haggling!”

So I was thinking, hey, if I had $25 million to spend on a mega yacht, I could keep it moored in front of my little 250-square-foot camp at Lazy Point. I guess I’d have to ask the trustees’ permission, but how could they object to such a magnificent display, plopped down in the middle of the channel, affording me a splendid view of Hicks Island?

Tiger Woods has been quoted as saying he bought the yacht as a sanctuary from the media. Well, I could use it as a sanctuary from Route 27 traffic, fresh air, and outdoor life in general. 

Here is what my new fantasy motor yacht has: a 29.5-foot beam, a pair of 1,800 horsepower MTU/Detroit Diesel motors (oops, sorry, delicate shellfish population of Napeague Bay!), two 99-kilowatt Northern Lights generators, fluid capacities for 12,000 gallons of fuel (glug, glug!), 2,000 gallons of water, three Sea-Doos, two kayaks, and two Vespa scooters. No longer any need to dip my toes into that pesky saltwater! On the deck is a large bar, an eight-person jacuzzi, a station to fill scuba tanks, and an inflatable decompression chamber. One of the twin cabins has been converted into a workout room with a treadmill, exercise bike, and free weights. So rather than take a leisurely bike ride down Shore Road, greeting my neighbors, I can cycle in air-conditioned comfort on my slightly used mega yacht. Oh, and there’s an elevator.

I worry a little bit about seeming ostentatious out there at Lazy Point where most of the houses are small, the boats used for fishing, and the neighborhood low-key. So I should probably toodle over to Sag Harbor where my yacht can mingle with the Combses and Joels and Mottolas. Better yet, maybe I could get some fellow mega yacht owners to join me, perhaps Andrey Melnichenko and his Philippe Starck-designed 390-foot yacht, A. Maybe Roman Abromovich and his 500-foot Eclipse (which burns 691 gallons of fuel per hour at cruising speed) would like to break bread at the Beacon while on his summer vacation. It’s too bad Mikhail Khodorkovsky can’t join us. He’s in jail and his yacht is just bobbing around in St. Bart’s. We’ll just have to raise a glass to him, as our yachts are tied together, watching the sunset through our bullet-proof, U.V.-deflecting, tinted windows in the air-conditioned comfort of our floating, moneyed, luxury wombs.

So I’m saving up my pennies for this purchase. I usually cash in my spare change at the CoinStar machine at King Kullen and just use it for groceries. But now I’m thinking big. I’m dreaming mega . . . I just want my Privacy.

—

Laura Donnelly is a food writer at The Star.

“Moving to California is a lot like living in the future,” my friend Peter said to me, as I was fresh from the trauma of moving from Sag Harbor to Marin County one year ago. 

Though Los Angeles runs through both sides of my family for generations, our relocation to Northern California couldn’t have come as more of a shock. The early days of moving felt a bit like trying on a foreign country for size — learning new ways of dressing (Patagonia and Birkenstocks) and socializing (make plans but don’t commit too forcefully). Also, fragrance is forbidden, and recreational cannabis has replaced the evening cocktail.

Since graduating from college, I’ve moved about a dozen times now. In my next lifetime, I vow to come back as a minimalist. Mostly, I’m tired of hanging and then rehanging all my artwork. 

I’m as attached to the watercolor paintings by my grandmother that adorn my walls as I am to the hundreds and hundreds of books that have followed me from coast to coast, their spines newly arranged in a different order each time. I never feel quite settled — like I am home — until those things have been put away, breathing familiar life into unfamiliar spaces. 

We last called Sag Harbor home, and our return trips to the East End last summer and fall filled me with a deep and wonderful feeling of nostalgia. The shifting, magnificent light, the seasons, the warm ocean you can swim in, our friends and their growing children. 

I feel as at home in Sag Harbor as anyplace I’ve ever lived.

Some say that after a cross-country move it takes a solid year to fully settle into new surroundings. Or maybe it’s a decade. Regardless, it’s the traditions we take with us, wherever our destination. 

I come from a small, insular family, and it never feels like Christmastime until my father and mother and I are again sleeping in the same house. Last December, our first Christmas in Northern California, was a year of beginning again. My mother’s holiday cookies and flaky pie crust held up just fine. Yet the magic of Christmas morning felt like we had suddenly swapped hemispheres. The balmy, foggy air. The fragrant eucalyptus trees that would never change color and lose their leaves. 

Looking back now, it didn’t feel like we had fully arrived in California until we decorated our first Christmas tree. 

I’m a latecomer to Christmas. For years, when it was just my husband and me living on the Upper West Side, he would dutifully purchase a tree from a nearby lot on Central Park West, hauling it into our 14th-floor apartment and stringing up a few sets of drugstore lights as I sat idly by, thinking only of the hassle of soon dismantling it. 

But slowly I’m coming around. 

Last Christmas, our two children, Theo and Violet, settled on a whimsical, six-foot-tall evergreen. Once home, going into the garage and dusting off our box of decorations moved me, unexpectedly, to tears. Unwrapping the intricate ornaments that my grandmother had hung on her tree in Hollywood those many decades ago, interspersed with others from my own Southern California childhood, next to the ones that our children had made in Sag Harbor, their glitter and sequins still attached. 

Finally, an outbreath. A feeling of coming home. The twinkling white lights. The angel holding court above the dozens of ornaments that together tell the story of our family. The same ones our children will eventually inherit. 

A wise former therapist used to talk in terms of how many summers he had left. He promised to relish each and every one. In our many conversations over the years, he has gently nudged me to do the same. We’re here and then we’re not. Best to dive into the ocean whenever the opportunity presents itself.

And now another December is here. I’m still not used to warm Christmas days spent in only a T-shirt. I’m also unsure on which coast we will permanently reside. But in the middle of finding our way, I vow to make the most of this holiday season — recreating traditions that ground us in our past while also embracing our new community of friends.

Come January, in the spirit of starting over (and with the freezing cold, shark-infested Pacific Ocean in such close proximity), I will keep my East End brethren in mind when I take my first Polar Bear Plunge on New Year’s Day, swapping East Hampton’s Main Beach for Stinson Beach, outside Bolinas.

Amanda M. Fairbanks is a former reporter at The Star.

   Monday is Memorial Day, a time when East Hampton’s Main Street stops for a brief half-hour as veterans and others march to show their support and appreciation for those who have died in the nation’s armed conflicts. Flags come out, old uniforms are unfolded, speeches are delivered at the war monument at the side of Hook Mill.

    While our country is not at peace, this year marks a gradual turn. Troops are coming home from Iraq, and there is optimism that the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan will occur as scheduled.

    In the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, increasing calls have been heard from the left and the right, however, to accelerate the removal of our troops from Afghanistan. Richard Lugar, a Republican senator from Indiana, said earlier this month that the fighting there was sacrificing too many lives and costing too much. President Obama had set a July deadline for wrapping up combat operations, but support for such a hard withdrawal date appears to be wavering.

    The Afghan war has been the longest in U.S. history. On this Memorial Day, as we think of long-ago losses and those of a new generation, Americans might reflect on whether the time has come to finally bring the troops home.

    In the end, it was a routine affair — a real estate closing last week that from outward appearances was like any other. The property that changed hands was a large portion of the now closed Boys and Girls Harbor summer camp on Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. The buyers were the Town of East Hampton and Suffolk County. The tortured route the land deal took before coming to pass had finally come to an end.   

    Money was never the issue. The town was able to tap its community preservation fund, and the county had an account dedicated to land buys like this. Officials agreed to a 50-50 split in 2007. However, a lawsuit from neighbors stalled the proceedings until a mutually agreeable management plan was drafted last year. This document says the tranquillity of nearby residential streets is to be given equal consideration to the site’s natural features and value as a recreational site.   

    The parcel is part of the much stressed Three Mile Harbor watershed. Development of it as house lots would have had a long-term negative effect. It is also thought to contain untouched Native American home sites of archaeological significance.   

    The camp operated from 1954 to 2006, when Tony Duke, who founded it on his own land, and the board of directors decided to concentrate its activities closer to the urban areas from which it had drawn children.   

    Mr. Duke did not have to sell 26 acres to the town and county, nor did he have to agree to the very reasonable $7.3 million price. However, he wanted the property to be used by the public and saw the joint purchase as a way both to ensure that it would and to save it from development in perpetuity. With the deal done, his vision is complete. All involved are to be congratulated for seeing it through.

    I recently returned from Pakistan, a sentimental journey to Lahore, the place I was born and which I hadn’t seen for 40 years. Providentially timed, it coincided with the brief lull after the assassinations of the politicians Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti and the furor over Raymond Davis’s espionage activities but before last month’s killing of Osama bin Laden. I’ve come home to hear Pakistan castigated as an untrustworthy and ambivalent partner undeserving of the billions of dollars of American aid it has received since 2002.

    “What do you think about Lahore? Can you believe how much it’s changed?” I was asked over and over again there, as my friends listed the traffic, the crowds, the new subdivisions, the restaurants, the box stores. Yes, of course (I’ve changed too in 40 years), but really their question was rhetorical. They were telling me how their Lahore has changed, how it has been transformed from the green and pleasant place of my youth, a place of order and predictability, still basking in the afterglow of the British Raj, where we worried about contracting dysentery from improperly washed fruit or about being jostled by hideously mutilated beggars in the bazaar.

    Today, home, sweet home requires high walls and iron gates, reinforced by fierce dogs and quasi-uniformed men. Today, my Lahore and theirs has grown to a city of over 10 million, still the cherished cultural heart of Pakistan but now also menacing home to the daarhiwallahs, the bearded fundamentalists in traditional shalwar kameez who easily outnumber the clean-shaven men dressed in the Western style of my day. Lahore is also home to the “khaki,” the unpopular and feared military.

    In the military-religious complex that defines Pakistan’s ruling elite, generals, and mullahs are joined in an unholy political alliance that protects them for and against each other but fails to provide large swaths of the citizenry with a decent life.

    Punjabi women have traditionally covered their heads and upper bodies in public with a light, colorful dupatta, but this time I noticed far fewer women wearing the iconic white or blue shuttlecock-shaped burkas. “Being covered” has become a fashion as well as a religious choice, and varieties of black hijab or chador, sometimes elaborately decorated in silver, populate the streets and shop windows. These fashion choices are more than they appear.

    Despite the growing income inequality, especially among the rural poor, Pakistan is also enjoying a new prosperity and class mobility, forces that are shaping the urban working class and creating a burgeoning middle class. The catalyst for this social change is an influx of international money from foreign development aid organizations, multinational corporations, and growth in the telecommunications and media industries, as well as Saudi money, some of it trickling up in remittances sent by workers who have been flocking to the gulf states since the 1980s to earn wages that are inconceivable in Pakistan.

    Saudi money has also been trickling down since the late ’70s, when the dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq (who was responsible for the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the father of Benazir) imported religion, specifically Wahhabism, an intolerant form of Islam, from Saudi Arabia into the Pakistani Army. Wahhabism is deepening its hold on Pakistani society by spreading the word through mullahs into the mosques, through women into the home, and through madrassas, the Islamic schools, into the minds of younger generations.

    Pakistan is being torn apart by violent disagreements between fundamentalism and modernity and, within the religion, about which branch of Islam represents the voice of God. Because of its extreme intolerance, Wahhabism is responsible for many of the bloody attacks against Islamic minorities such as the Sufi, Ahmadiya, and Shia branches of Islam and also against Christians. Wahhabism has penetrated political parties and religious groups as well as the army, which consumes as much as 25 percent of the budget and controls much of the foreign policy. No wonder that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has lost interest in its people!

    But not in its elites. The new prosperity is reflected not only in women’s fashions but also in the unapologetically named Defense area, a large, affluent, aspirational Lahore suburb replete with golf courses and clubs for the newly ich, including military officers, politicians, celebrities, and returning Pakistanis enjoying the freedom of dual E.U., U.S.A., or U.K. citizenship. It is not unusual to see Arabic Koranic verse sculpted onto the residences, signaling that a Wahhabi adherent lives within.

    Flights in and out of the Lahore airport are packed with the elite jetting to Dubai to shop or continuing on to destinations in Europe, England, or the United States, their language a fast-paced mixture of Urdu and English, their children American wannabes. For the not yet newly rich, it is now possible, as it hardly was when I grew up in Lahore, for the daughters of illiterate parents to become teachers and doctors and for the sons of house servants to become technicians and engineers.

    Rich people depend on servants to run their huge houses, manage their extravagant social lives, and chauffeur their children to school. Poor people depend on rich people for their food and shelter and, with luck, some support for their children’s education. The system has functioned well for centuries but socio-political change is creating a servant class less willing to work for or remain loyal to the rich; dark stories are told of servants turning out to be gang members who rob or kill their employers.

    In conversations with Pakistanis, I sensed a deep despair about the devolution of their country into a failed state or arguably one that is failing. It’s scant comfort to those who live there that the rest of the world, especially the United States, considers Pakistan too big to be allowed to fail (176 million people, nuclear weapons). It’s one thing to pontificate about failed states and quite another to be a resident of Lahore and to experience the reality of life in a failing state, to be hostage to a government that reminds its people on a daily basis of this failure.

    The realities of life in a failing state are harsh. The electricity supply falls so short of demand in Pakistan that “load shedding” outages occur many times every day, at unscheduled intervals for apparently random duration, snatching people’s control over light, heat, and cooling and, since most water comes from tube wells, leaving them unable to manage their daily lives. The cost in human frustration and interrupted economic activity is enormous, as is the anger toward indifferent and corrupt government officials.

    A failing state fails to protect people from one another. Religious extremists have easy entry into the lives of those they consider infidels; rampant theft of cars, laptops, and cellphones and a moribund judicial system in which impunity rules and thieves and assassins go unpunished have all but uprooted civil order.

    A failed state is one that does not protect its people from widening economic disparities, deepening inflation, and escalating food shortages. A failed state is one that taxes its citizens without providing services in return. The government provides free education but in ghost schools, empty of furniture, books, and teachers. The pupils don’t come because the teachers won’t be there, even though they collect their monthly sal­aries. A failed state is one that has abdicated accountability to its citizens.

    To rebuild itself, Pakistan’s first step must be radical reform of the army and Inter-Services Intelligence. Its weakened civilian government unable to provide the necessary oversight, Pakistan will be unable to reform itself without outside help.

    Raza Kazim, a leading lawyer and thinker, told me: “The time is here and now [to] remove the jihadis, their incompetence, and the ideological humbug we’ve been living with for half a century. [We need] positive support from a global coalition, not American imperialism. The time for imperialism is behind us. A new contemporary army, not one in which the state and religion are combined, with corruption pulled out by its roots. We need to change the whole culture; we need agents of change. We are not self-sustaining; we have not earned our keep.”

    Hazel Kahan, the host of the “Tidings” program on WPKN radio, is writing a memoir about growing up Jewish in Pakistan. She lives in Mattituck.

    The East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals heard a potentially precedent-setting request Tuesday from an Amagansett property owners association that would like to rebuild a portion of the steel dock at the former Bell Estate on Gardiner’s Bay. The Broadview subdivision, named after a mansion that burned there in 1991, contains a number of properties overlooking the water. The seaward end of its dock has largely rusted away into ruin.

    The association’s board has asked for permission to replace a 107-foot-long section of the pier and line part of it with rock “armor.” The problem for the association is that this kind of work has been prohibited since the East Hampton Town Board adopted the Local Waterfront Revitalization Program in 1999, which was approved by state regulators in 2007 and gained federal approval the following year.

    Under the rules, reconstruction of coastal structures, such as the Broadview dock, is not allowed. An exception can be made if the structure can be shown to have a public or environmental benefit. The tumbledown pier under the Broadview bluffs will have neither; it appears to have mainly an aesthetic value to some of the association’s members who would like to see it tidied up.

    Worrisome, too, is the question of what use the association would want to put such a large pier to in the future. Is the Broadview board privately considering plans to someday seek permission to dredge the section of bay bottom immediately adjacent to the dock, to allow access by deep-draft vessels — like the 70-foot yacht Dennistoun Bell once kept there?

    And why does all this matter? Because the town’s waterfront revitalization plan, at its core, is there to preserve both the environment and the free passage of visitors and residents along the public shore. Some have argued that the Broadview dock, by blocking the movement of sand, is already narrowing the public beach at Albert’s Landing to the south. (And, as a footnote, the dock was an impediment to police and county medical investigators trying to reach the body of a man found on the beach nearby on May 22.)

    There may be times and places in which our hard-won rules on coastal structures must be bent. This is not one of them.

    The other day, staring out the window at a gray sky (there hasn’t been much else sky-wise to stare at recently), I began to fill out a questionnaire having to do with my 50th college reunion.

    As for hobbies, I listed my wife as number one, following up with tennis, Spanish, and rereading my columns. Kafka, after all, sometimes laughed when reading his stories to friends, so why can’t I, even though I know I’m no Kafka, whose stories presaged a torturous century.

    In contrast, I’m not prescient, having no idea what’s going to happen next. Though, antlike, I trust in Pollyanna fashion that things will continue to go swimmingly in Bonac.

    Along this line, I apologized to Alfredo Corchado, a courageous journalist who covers the U.S.-Mexican border, before he began his talk at the Rogers Memorial Library the other night. “We’re living in La-La Land,” I said. “And I,” I confessed further, “write sports.”

    He was forgiving, as if to say, It’s all right, Jack. I can understand why you would want to live in such a beautiful place.

    He himself, I was interested to hear, had at one time thought of sportswriting. Instead, he chose to continue bearing witness to the grisly truth of the frontera, which, despite his removal from Durango, Mexico, to this country’s central California ranches at the age of 6, and despite his U.S. citizenship, he still considers his home.

    He continues on this dangerous beat because he has reason to hope that things will turn around, that Mexico will regain its democratic soul, and that the rule of law will one day return to his home.

    I applaud him, from the sidelines, averting my eyes and seeking solace from the world’s agonies in the sports pages.

    And when asked by the aforementioned questionnaire to list achievements and to enclose a personal essay, I tell them that in July 1965 I won the United States Army Ryukyu Islands tennis singles championship (the stronger competitors presumably having been diverted elsewhere), was the East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club men’s doubles league’s runner-up this winter, and received the Old Montauk Athletic Club’s community service award for 2010.

    There also was an honorable mention once from the New York Press Association for another column concerning a reunion, a high school one, in which I replied, when asked if I had a vacation home, “Yes, a 1969 Ford Falcon.”

    When it came to the personal essay, which was, I gathered, to strike a valedictory tone, I stared out the window at the gray sky, wondering how best to sum it all up, and then wrote, “Ugh, it’s raining.”

    The Music to Know festival coming to the East End this August, featuring some of the bigger names in indie rock out there as well as less-easily-pigeonholed acts like the alternative country-folk singer and songwriter M. Ward, would seem to promise to place the patch of land a hundred miles east of New York City on the hipster map, so to speak, if only for a few days.

    The occasion marks, among other things, the first time the headliner, New York City-based Vampire Weekend, plays together in several months, the group having reportedly been on hiatus since concluding a tour in support of its most recent album, “Contra.”

    That ours might become a relevant scene, however briefly, for the alternative-indie set more accustomed to seeing many of these bands play for $15 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, than shelling out nearly $200 for a two-day affair in rural, not-a-stop-on-the-L-train East Hampton would be quite the accomplishment for the show’s promoters.

    Indeed, notwithstanding the logistical nightmare the concert — expected to bring some 9,500 people to a closed-off runway of the East Hampton Airport — might prove itself to be, bringing acts that choose their appearances carefully to a place not exactly known for its indie rock fan base is noteworthy. Vampire Weekend has reportedly turned down offers to play at two massive, well-established music festivals this year: Lollapalooza in Chicago and Glastonbury in London, where they surely would have been met by legions of devoted fans.

    Perhaps it is not intuitive that the Hamptons — which possess a rich artistic and literary community, thanks to their proximity to New York, and are replete, in the summer anyway, with more than a few bigs of the film and fashion worlds — would be desperate for an injection of contemporary pop culture. But they most certainly are.

    Most of the reporting on this issue has addressed local concerns about crowds, noise, and cleanup. Missing is a recognition of the important moment this is for the youth that come of age in a place many outsiders barely realize has year-round residents, youth who sometimes feel themselves to be off the grid when it comes to developing alternative culture.

    In fact, growing up on the East End, it is sometimes tough not to view oneself as if stuck in a musical morass, with few of the voices of one’s own generation within reach. We cannot say that a few festivals or concerts will change this perception; winters in East Hampton will be trying for adolescents hungry for fresh ideas and desperate to see more of the world, for the foreseeable future. This festival’s promoters, though, deserve credit for aggressively seeking out some of the brightest new sounds in contemporary culture for what promises to be a unique experience.

    This all to say that if we have never lacked physical beauty here, and we are proud of the writers and artists who have long called the East End home, perhaps this summer we are somewhat more hip, as well.

—

    Matthew Taylor is a reporter at The Star.