Columnists

Cerberus and I had the crossing to Old Saybrook to ourselves. I could stand a year of Octobers, I thought.

My friend and I are stuck in something of a creative bind at midcareer, looking around and wondering where the community went.

If you’re questioning the sanity of spending time in front of a television watching professional football, read on.

Gubbins is back and I have a pair of bright, shiny new Asics sneakers on to celebrate the sports store’s return.

When was the last time you saw the tail of a white-tailed deer? They no longer seem to care about the human presence at all.

We are either cynical or naive by nature. I believe this to be true.

When a campus visit becomes an urban tasting tour that smacks the complacency out of your mouth.

It says “Forever” on our stamps, and we say we live in the UNITED States, but I wonder. East Hamptoners, though, give me hope.

The Star last week called it Sammy’s Beach, on Three Mile Harbor, when, in fact, the correct name is Sammis, as in the local family that lived there.

There has been all too much clinging going on in this family.

Netflix’s documentary series “Wrestlers” gets at the real America — you know, the oddball, likable one.

Watching people running at each other like careening trucks while safe in the comfort of one’s own home is probably something to atone for, and yet football is “as American as apple pie.”

It was toward the end of the 2014 Hamptons International Film Festival, and I had been asked to be a juror in the documentary film competition.

Such is the lot of the personal essayist: Sometimes you have to lead with “I.”

Directed onto a heat-oppressed dog, a box fan does double duty as Proustian madeleine.

I am about to begin my 57th year at The Star. Yet I should not be borne wistfully into the past.

What is the Huntting Inn, anyway?

Having spent a lifetime looking at fabrics and trying to imagine what it felt like to live in the material world while wearing a dress of dimity or cambric or society silk, I have gotten pretty good at recognizing what era a print or pattern is from.

When Cormac McCarthy died this summer, I didn’t go to one of his late novels, I went to “Blood Meridian.”

I was taken to task recently for not giving as much space to the Travis Field memorial softball tournament as I did to the Artists and Writers Game, but both events were noteworthy.

September at summer’s end feels as if the world is in a kind of abeyance.

I am a superfan of the — terrible, awful, no-good — television franchise “The Bachelor.”

When a good-natured and for-a-good-cause 5K becomes an obsession and a mission.

Confined to one sports page these days, whereas, formerly, I was granted three or four, I’m inclined to yearn for the old days.

On Sept. 21, 1938, the morning of the Great New England Hurricane, as it came to be named by news writers, indicated a perfect end-of-summer day. There was little warning for tropical storms in those days.

How lucky we were to be born into Cadillac America in the century of progress, optimism, 20-cent milkshakes, and rock-and-roll. Everybody in the 20th century had something to say about Cadillacs.

Long-running college football rivalry games are down the drain.

There’s still something to be said for the value of a liberal arts education, with courses in history, literature, and languages, whose ultimate gift is to enrich our lives, to make us more knowledgeable citizens of the world.

Our language roots go back to the early British colonists, not the Dutch, whose influence can be heard UpIsland, that is, west of the Wainscott Post Office.

The best thing about reality bathing is that, in addition to intensifying the quotidian pleasures of simply being alive in the mundane, it slows time.