Columnists

The best part of Christmas is the run-up.

Thoughts on a 13-year-old mouth liberated from braces.

When the Cuban missile crisis had everyone on tenterhooks, I, a collegian then, was pretty much oblivious.

Cerberus’s sailing season came to a formal end this week when the crew at Three Mile Harbor Marina lifted the sloop from the water and placed it on the boat-mover’s trailer for the short trip into town.

The older I get, the less happy I am about the dark afternoons. Sunset brings us down. We have to fight, fight against the dying of the light.

Funny that it took my daughter heading up and over to college in western New York for me to at last appreciate the state I grew up in.

There were 18 here the other night, and now, as is the case most of the year, just the two of us and O’en.

Eighty years ago this month, the mayor of the Village of East Hampton issued an urgent plea: An important piece of early American history was in danger of being lost.

Every morning is a double espresso kind of morning around this ranch — the Double-Bar-E Crazy Ranch on Edwards Lane.

Other than everyone in masks on the plane, there was nothing much out of the ordinary about Alaska Air Flight 458. It seemed strange to travel again, being the first time that I had been aboard an aircraft since 2019. For the most part, passengers followed the rules, but there were a few people in the section around seat 18D who needed repeated reminders from the flight attendants to “Cover your nose.”

Hard-hitting college football action — a cure for the late-night-Wednesday-in-November blues.

The desert is hardly deserted, at least the one that is rimmed by the San Jacinto mountains in Southern California, where two of our grandchildren, unbridledly joyous 4 and 6-year-old girls, live. Untrammeled joy, however, was not our lot last week inasmuch as an 11-year-old grandson who lives in northwestern Ohio underwent at the same time a severe Covid-caused trial ultimately overcome only by astute medical intervention and his characteristic bravery.

I’m not supposed to say this — visualize me right now muttering “Knock on wood” as I rap smartly on the top of my head — but I am the lucky dame who always wins the raffle: I win things much more frequently than chance says I ought to. If there is a door prize or basket of cheer, I expect to soon be carrying the basket home, strapped with a seatbelt into the front passenger seat beside me, softly chuckling to myself like a thief.

Adventures in a deserted Kmart.

My granddaughter stroked the ball well in a middle school tennis match at Sportime the other day, but it was her composure that struck me.

My teen years here in the 1970s, in retrospect, seems a halcyon time.

When I was a teenager, the doomed trajectory of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life story caught my attention.

There’s more going on than you’d think at Sunken Meadow come state qualifier time.

I quit Facebook years ago, convinced that, despite the happy patina, it was by and large a medium for meanness, for back-stabbing, name-calling, ganging-up, and worse.

Doing the storms, the worst rot I found was on windows less than 20 years old made of junk wood and not intended to last.

In the mid-1970s, Promised Land was like the wilderness of the Bible.

All legislation held hostage? There’s gotta be another way.

“What difference does it make, really, when we’re floating around in space in a hostile universe?”

We in the news business have to be sure to walk the information over to where readers are, and not expect all of them to come to us.

I myself don’t believe in specters, but this is a true story.

“Us,” the PBS mini-series that ran on “Masterpiece” — every married couple should see it.

Yesterday, in the throes of a flushed feeling of unease, “a full-body tingling” that seems to occur monthly whose cause has yet to be determined by the cardiologists — that it doesn’t happen every night when the NewsHour’s on can be counted a blessing — I answered “not very well” when asked, casually, how I was feeling.

For many of us, the windstorm that lingered from Tuesday into Wednesday brought to mind 2012 and Superstorm Sandy, which paralyzed the Northeast. Oct. 28 of that year had been still and warm enough that two of the Rattray children had gone swimming at the copper-gold end of the day.

Many times over the last 13 years, since my daughter arrived home at the age of 1, I’ve wanted to astonish everyone with my own list of all the tasks and errands I accomplish daily. I can hardly believe, myself, that I wake up by 6:30, and not infrequently by 5:45 a.m., in order to begin the varied and often esoteric chores of momming, from goldfish-feeding to trumpet-renting.

Best diner ever.