Columnists

Tis the season, as the water cools rapidly, that many minds, around here anyway, turn to scallops. New York State will allow the start of harvesting from its waters on Nov. 4; town waters will open on Nov. 10, a Sunday. How good the take will be remains to be seen. I have my doubts.

The Hamptons International Film Festival got me thinking about the starring role the Rattray family’s Amagansett house played in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen’s 1977 movie starring Diane Keaton. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” in a long time, but much of it has stayed with me.

Somewhere in the Midwest, where if you’re anti-Trump you must speak in lowered tones, I had my hair cut — well, so to speak, inasmuch as there isn’t much left — and was at one point during my monologue — for I can’t hear without my hearing aids, and thus feel I must hold forth when in the chair — asked if I read.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah,” the barber said, “my polling’s holding up! You didn’t vote for Trump, then?”

“For public enemy number-one. . ??”

I have a friend who knows the names of the stars. A few of them, anyway, she says. I do not know what the stars are called; a few constellations, maybe, yes, but individual stars, no.

The Yiddish-German words “shoen vergessen” are the punch line of the only joke I’ve ever been able to remember, and remember it I did when I read Rabbi Josh Franklin’s essay “Rethinking God” in The Star on Sept. 26.

After reading the wonderful editorial on impeachment in The Times the other day, I was prompted to seek out the Federalist Papers, but our library didn’t have a copy, nor did BookHampton, so I reached for Tocqueville. And here’s what he has to say on the subject, comparing European and American constitutions.

My surname is not common, but it is notorious. One of the real-life mobsters portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “The Irishman,” is named Russell Bufalino.

Left on a vast plain, we humans instinctively look, at a minimum, for the horizon to place ourselves relative to the sun’s path. The slab sides of mountains are immaterial as our eyes trace the ridges, which are but lines where the ground and the sky meet.

As far as I’m concerned, the trouble with our congressman, Lee Zeldin, is that he doesn’t come up for re-election again until 2020.

My father found grace in Sister Marie Joseph’s smile, a smile that told him everything was all right, that he was loved, no matter what, that he did not have to atone, and thus a heavy burden was removed.

Once upon a time I dreamt of a career singing and dancing in Broadway shows. Journalism was not center stage for me — yet. I trained as a triple-threat for a while and even joined a cabaret company, but never really got anywhere beyond the New Jersey dinner theater scene.

Four pints of Roma tomatoes and Laura Donnelly shamed me into getting the preserving kettle out early Monday morning. I had picked up the smallish, hard tomatoes a week or more earlier with the intention of canning them sooner, but instead they had just been shunted and shifted from one place to another around the kitchen as the clock of ripeness ticked. One day they were on the windowsill, the next the mantelpiece, then the next on a different, now north-facing windowsill.

Ketchup was a kitchen staple when I was growing up in the 1940s, as it still is in most American households. You know the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? I think we might better be able to chart the zeitgeist of the United States by keeping an eye not on auto production but on our national condiment.

I’m getting near the end of the Old Testament now, and it surely has been a test.

North Main Street was blocked this week as a crew hired by the Long Island Rail Road worked on raising two trestles about three feet above their current grade. The project had been a long time coming. For years, trucks too tall to make it through the underpass there and at Accabonac Road have done damage to the trestle. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the L.I.R.R., had had enough.

Months ago, when a friend and I realized we were the same age and our birthdays were only a day or two apart, we agreed to celebrate together this year. Now, however, with our natal days upon us, I say “fuhgeddaboudit.”

The summer of peace and love was also a summer of war and incendiary strife, from which East Hampton, a “backwater” then, in which every now and then ripples of the great national issues of the day were felt, was at one remove.

It may be too soon to crow, but the $13 home electric bill I received this week could be the start of a happy relationship between me and the new solar panel array on my Amagansett roof.

The names of mobile devices — not to mention the lingo used to describe the things they do — are Greek to me. Obviously, I know “app” is short for “application,” but will you think I am a nincompoop if I admit I still don’t know why we stopped calling them programs? Aren’t apps just software programs? I’m sure this marks me as a curmudgeon akin to those who refused to stop calling the fridge a “Frigidaire” or a suitcase a “valise” back in the last century, but I feel all right about feeling old-fashioned. I’m not dying to use WhatsApp or TikTok or whatever else my grandchildren are addicted to today.

Indeed it was a relief to drive in leisurely fashion around and around the roundabout on Tumbleweed Tuesday, reveling in the fact that “they” were gone, at least for a few days. I was run in on a charge of ADIEU, Aimless Driving in Euphoria Unparalleled, a violation, but was let off with time served after my employer testified in asking for leniency that I’d been here all summer.

I watched Monday’s sunset from the starboard deck of the ferry from New London to Orient. The Thames River shoreline was in silhouette, the sky mostly orange to the west.

How awful it is to have to hold a collective breath this week as our children, and grandchildren, begin a new school year. How unnerving that gun violence has caused us to doubt the lyrics that our “country ’tis of thee” is still a “sweet land of liberty.”

I should probably have my head examined, for I still like to watch football — perhaps all the more so because, aside from wearing pads in the seventh grade (though I don’t think we played any games) and aside from some touch football (I always wanted to be an end, not a blocker), I never played it.

Just when I thought I had seen every last obscenity the 2019 Hamptons summer scene had to offer, things took a turn for the strange. On an afternoon walk down Job’s Lane in Southampton on a recent afternoon, I was greeted by a number of “keep out” and “no trespassing” signs as I approached my favorite people-watching spot.

There was scarcely anyone else around when I fell asleep on the ocean beach late Labor Day afternoon. I had left my pickup truck in the parking lot and walked to the west to look for whales and meditate a bit. The town lifeguards, with no one to keep and eye on, lazed around under a plastic shelter and took turns in the stand, looking out at nothing much at all. Two people and a dog were in the distance.

My mother’s baby brother, Herman Spivack, who lived in Los Angeles and thereabouts for many years, died on Aug. 21 at the age of 102. He was one of six siblings (a seventh died as a toddler) and 15 years younger than my mother, who died in December of 1995 and would be 117 were she alive today.

The frequency was very high as we walked out onto the street one sultry night recently with O’en, owing to the tree crickets, whose numbers in our otherwise comatose neighborhood seemed to be legion.

Liam, age 9, stalked toward the meal lying completely still on the ground before him. His ears pointed straight to the sky while his head stayed low and his legs advanced with a deliberative rhythm. Step. Step. He reached his prey, but, taking mercy upon it, simply nudged it with his nose.

Tuna or chicken? Salad, that is. I’ve got a mania for tuna salad and have been known to even eat it for breakfast — deli-style, with lettuce and mayo on a hard roll — when I am rushing to work and have no time to cook (which is usually all the time). Chicken salad makes a fine sandwich, too, especially when on good bread, pumpernickel perhaps, and at this time of year with a slice of fresh tomato. But I wouldn’t dream of chicken salad for breakfast. That would be bananas!

I should write about this while the effect still lasts. To be put on steroids was, I told the doctor, a wonderful thing for a golden-ager, though I know, at least have been told, that they’re not great for you in the long run.