Columnists

When the coronavirus refugees began arriving about the middle of March, I wondered what the ospreys would think.

Don’t we want this to be a happy place? A friendly place? And isn’t how we feel often self-created? Friendliness is intentional, driven partly by the idea that our own friendliness might brighten the community around us.

Golfers can golf, and have been able to for most of the past two agonizing months, but tennis players, unless they have private courts, have been waiting around wondering if they’ll ever be able to play again.

Given my insistence that time has come to sign off on “Connections” — at least as a weekly obligation — various family members have started sending suggestions for special, quirky, or interesting columns.

Leafing through old issues of The Star from the time of the so-called Spanish influenza, its effects here could be told from the number of dead and ill.

Talk of a return of baseball this summer, sans fans, sends our faithful correspondent tripping down memory lane and stumbling into the N.F.L. draft, quarantine-style.

I would like to say a word about my former landlady, Barbara Johnson, without whom I would not have been able to stay in East Hampton.

Despite the fact that I had been a resident of East Hampton for nearly two decades at that point, my first column definitely reads today like the words of a young woman “from away.”

The isolation is balanced. Phone calls seem a little longer. Even routine conversations with someone in the outside world leave time for a few empathetic words.

Love means never letting her wonder if you’ve left a margarita for her in the pitcher you’ve put in the refrigerator, even if she doesn’t want one.

It is therefore with quite a bit of poignant nostalgia, but perhaps just as much anticipatory relief, that I have made the decision to write my final weekly “Connections” next month, for the big Memorial Day issue.     

Watching a live stream of the East Hampton Town Board’s Tuesday meeting, I began to think about the tattletale impulse.