Columnists

A report by Facebook from the George Floyd war zone.

All about us there’s suffering, and yet this neighborhood in which we live in Springs is beautiful, in full bloom and serene. It doesn’t get any better than this — here, that is.

The obvious enthusiasm of some American police officers for violence amid peaceful protests may be among the most indelible images to come out of the nationwide demonstrations that have followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Before the coronavirus became a round-the-clock night­mare, mine were confined to night­time.

Who would have thought when a pandemic hit the United States that instead of stocking up on guns, Americans went grocery shopping?

Memorial Day seems an appropriate time to bid farewell to a longtime pursuit — in this case, this: my weekly column, “Connections,” which has appeared in The East Hampton Star, come rain or come shine, come hell or come high water, since 1977.

I’m playing tennis in the morning,
Ding, dong, the balls all will be signed,
Pull out the hopper, let’s do it
proper,
But get me to the courts on time.

Learn something new. Of all the thoughts I have heard or read on enduring the pandemic lockdown, this has been the best advice.

I am proud of The Star's literary standards when it comes to language, proud of our effort to represent the lives and interests of not just the wealthy and the grand but of the working people who make up the fabric of our community.

We talked with a potential financial adviser by phone one recent morning, he in Charlotte and we here, and were told that the resultant plan was positing a life span of 100, which I thought was a little on the rosy side given what’s been going on.

It hit me yesterday, when one of the kids pointed out that she was going to be done with school in two weeks, what the heck are we doing to do with them this summer with camps not opening and movement still restricted?

It’s not just fear of Covid-19, but how the pandemic has affected the grocery-store supply chain that commands my attention these days.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.     

For me, boredom has always exerted a siren pull — to the extent that once, inspired by a spate of entropic films coming out of Europe in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I dreamed of heading up my own film studio dedicated to producing the kind of profoundly listless screenplays that I couldn’t get enough of.

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

Passover week found me leafing through a big file folder of my mother’s old recipes, along with a few cook-booklets from days gone by. My goodness, what a time capsule she had squirreled away.

During our walk with O’en (I used to complain that our neighborhood was comatose, now I’m grateful that it is), Mary said she might reconsider the popovers she’d planned to make. “Ah, flattening the curve?” I said.

The Tibetan horoscope foretold “sudden change or obstacle,” and here it is. The present planetary alignment is said to “force a more spiritual outlook by causing material loss.”

We call and write our friends more now that there is a glimpse of mortality on the horizon and the time to think about it. But the paradox to this newfound closeness is that we cannot express our connection in the physical world.

Whether you qualify it as “social” or “physical,” dis­tancing is not how any of us anticipated spending the spring of 2020. This week, the actual and psychological distances we have to travel to get through this thing just seemed to keep growing.