Columnists

Sometimes the do-it-yourself bug strikes because of a great interest in a particular craft; other times, it’s just the money. I am susceptible to both urges, as in a newfound passion for making crackers.

I was a wide-eyed greenhorn assigned to a night squad of world-weary veterans when I first joined the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association about five years ago.

Notes from a Jeremy Strong fan club member.

The potential for explosive, cathartic moments is what leads us to play sports and to watch them, and it seems that with a number of them the possibility of serious injury, or even death, is ever present.

Rooftop solar on the early-1960s house I live in provides me with a reason to gloat: electric bills that run a steady $14 a month.

Things keep breaking. In 2023, the infant year, I’ve accidentally dropped and smashed plenty.

Adventures at the Whitney, on the High Line, and in a lost New York.

I had no Covid symptoms, but that apparently, according to what I read, wasn’t necessarily a cause for celebration.

I am now on my second plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, at a combined gas and electric of 100 or more miles per gallon the way I drive it.

The Ukrainian president cuts through the nonsense.

I read in a recent New York Press Association publication an article suggesting that journalists be more broad-minded when writing about the elderly. Six “tips” were proffered. Here are mine.

My brother, Dan, used to say that one could survive perfectly well eating nothing other than brown rice and clams.

On Boxing Day . . .

Best concert ever: Bob (“Schoolhouse Rock”) Dorough on keys and Richard Sudhalter on cornet at a North Fork vineyard, spring 2002.

There is little question that soccer here, the games that have been played by adults since the early 1970s and since 2009 by our high schoolers, has been East Hampton’s pre-eminent sport.

Buying socks was a problem here — until I noticed a bin in the menswear section at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Bargain Box.

As with so many things in life as the years tick-tick-tick by, it takes rather more priming of the pump than it used to to achieve the right holiday atmosphere.

A simple question for the sellers on those social media marketplaces hereabouts . . .

Yes, Virginia, even 82-year-olds can freak out.

Laid up with a stomach bug for the past several days, I have had a lot of time to watch what is going on outside.

The only person I know who says they don’t gossip and holds true to that word is a friend who is autistic.

Pot? Hey, kids, maybe not before your brain has fully developed.

“I don’t want to let him go,” our eldest daughter said of her elder son, who in the not-too-distant future is to go to college, a normal progression you’ll agree, but she can’t bear the thought of him leaving.

Early December would usually be when we got the iceboats ready. A letter writer this week recalled a time, not really all that long ago, when Mecox Bay froze solid enough to race on. Not anymore.

One of the most stirring moments of my youth was the April evening in 1985 when, as part of a marching mass of college-student protesters, I danced up Amsterdam Avenue to the joyful rhythm of the song “Free Nelson Mandela” by the Specials.

A daughter’s streaming of Netflix’s “Wednesday” calls to mind the 1960s reruns of a columnist’s youth.

Subconsciously, as has long been the case with Christmas, I may want Thanksgiving to just go away.

Like many men, Ron, a pack-a-day smoker, had gone years without visiting a doctor.

A failed home repair has a columnist fondly recalling life without running water.

Evidently, there is “a more brotherly mood” abroad in the nation than I had thought.