Columnists

One of my great pleasures is perusing old cookbooks to see how people ate and entertained in other eras.

They say it’s “the beautiful game,” and yet some teams that play soccer in a less beautiful, even ugly fashion, can win as often as not — as Half Hollow Hills West did here on Halloween — through untrammeled will.

Out of seemingly nowhere, on Monday my 12-year-old told me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to vote for anyone who was not “a minority.”

On Sunday at dinner time, the evening before All Hallows Eve, my son, who just turned 13, decided he wanted to wear a costume for the first time since he was small.

There is, as you may know, homelessness in East Hampton Town.

A friend called a single flower that emerged from a thin cosmos plant on my office window this week the “miracle on Main Street.”

This would be a good Hallowe’en to be visited by ghouls and ghosts because the Mohs surgery I’ve had lately has prompted Mary to sing “My Funny Frankenstein” from time to time.

Any trip I make west, at some point past the cultural demarcation of the Shirley-Mastic area, I head back to the future with 90.7 FM, WFUV out of Fordham.

“You’re wondering why no honking, where are the a-holes? Why is it so peaceful?”

My father leased the Sail Inn for about a decade in the last century, and in doing so drove himself to an early death for ignoring Rule #1 of bar ownership: You can’t be the best customer in your own saloon.

On Main Street in East Hampton Village, it never stops.

My grandparents had a passion for steamships that, as these family inclinations do, has somehow trickled down to me.