Columnists

Was it so long ago that I wrote about the articulate students, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, who had come to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., to speak eloquently of their suffering?

After 20 or more years of faithful service, our overstuffed dryer gave a sad little grunt and wheezed to a stop, leaving many too many wet beach towels behind.

The men would walk from the trains after getting to the end of the line, pay for their beer, and walk back to get ready for the ride back to New York.

Like many of you, I have been glued to television-news debates about mass shootings and what can, or should be, done to stop them. Gun control is a frequent topic as the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination face the cameras. But my attention is drawn to my desk, where the focus is narrow and a book called “Semicolon” by Cecelia Watson sits alongside one I have mentioned before, Mary Morris’s amusing and astute “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

It’s my late stepfather’s birthday today, and while we were at the antipodes, I think, when it came to societal questions, we were on the same page when it came to sports, to baseball, squash, and tennis in particular.

Over the years I had received those familiar email requests from people asking me to be the conduit for money to be deposited in my account and sent elsewhere, and those obvious scams were always deleted. Why not this one?

Over dinner on Sunday, the subject turned to sharks. Since it was the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week blitz, this was not surprising.

Using the word “resource” to describe the East Hampton Library doesn’t do it justice.

The presidential game is not over, many Americans being frightfully capable of being fooled twice. That the economy is rolling along is nice, though you do wonder how much people are making and how many jobs they are working.

Worn out, the worse for wear, working for The Star and longshoring on the side in the sweet summertime, it has really, finally become apparent: I’m not a young man.

The woman’s wedding ring was out there, somewhere in the sand. Her husband thought he had a pretty good idea where, but it was not to be.

The East Hampton Town Democratic Party faced a significant primary in June, proving that intraparty differences of opinion were alive and well even though Democrats fill nearly all the town’s elected positions. It also marked a turning point for me.

There used to be a bumper sticker you’d see around here that urged everyone to “strive for excellence,” not a bad admonition, though I’d prefer “strive for beauty.”

A Star editor tries out a surprisingly injury-free exercise regimen: no warm-up, no cooldown, no stretching, no preparation whatsoever.

There would have been agave-hibiscus margaritas at the beach party, but someone lost the bag of ingredients in the sand.

The distance between East Hampton and Southold is about 21 miles, and I am happy to say that despite the proximity, the latter has not been Hamptonized. Of course, even if you are traveling by ferry, it can take more than an hour to reach one town from the other.

‘We all have issues . . .” a fellow player said as he surveyed us, the three of us being well along in life, following a recent tennis doubles match. Heads nodded.

At the risk of self-aggrandizing, let me tell you what I did early Monday morning.

It’s a cliché around here to say, “I’ve never seen so many people in town!” but everyone agrees there really never were so many people in East Hampton than on the July Fourth weekend just past, and the days leading up to it.

I had just written about a “rite of summer,” namely the first day of the 2019 junior lifeguarding season, and was inspired, therefore, to take part in another, namely the opening for the season of our outdoor shower.

Sometime after 10 p.m. on the Fourth of July, the brake lights from stopped cars on Montauk Highway curved west from where we stood on the sidewalk outside Pizza Village. Like thousands of other spectators, we had come to Montauk for the fireworks, and now everyone it seemed wanted to go home.

Brown-headed cowbirds and guinea hens were pecking at the ground this morning where seeds had fallen from the bird feeder. I am splitting my time these days between Greenport and East Hampton and have noticed with interest that, aside from the shore birds you see along the beach on the ocean side, avian visitors on the North Fork are much the same as those on the South Fork. (Although the guinea hens, of course, are not native or migratory; they have been imported to feast on ticks.)

On a day that I thought I should stay in bed — dragged down temporarily by a cough that came hand in hand with the fecund delights of spring — I went instead with Mary on a bus trip to the New York Botanical Garden, returning, if not cured, enlivened by what I’d seen.

This has been a fine week to be a bird. Judging from the noise outside the window before dawn, they are fat and happy — especially those that eat insects. This has also been a fine week, or year actually, to be a mosquito.

Getting up early is always a good idea, but it was especially enjoyable this week after I spent a night in the family house in the village with my daughter and her kids and Sweet Pea, our little, red-haired ARFan dog. 

Gino says the new racket won’t make any difference, that no matter how well-engineered the tool, the flaws of its wielder remain, unchanged.

Having been out of town all last week, I felt as if I needed some updates getting back to the East Coast. Joanie McDonell, who lives just up the beach from me, has been a faithful correspondent since I wrote in mid-spring about how it had been ages since I saw any toads or snakes around.

Twenty-six letters to the editor were published in last week’s Star, on June 13, and as of this writing we were still counting those that will be in this week’s edition; I think it will be 31. 

‘It gets worse,” Mary said as I lay stunned in my recliner after having winced and writhed in sympathetic pain throughout yet another episode of “Outlander.”

‘Driscoll’s.” That was Ad­elia’s one-word answer in a blind taste test of strawberries bought locally on Sunday. By then, I had already had three quarts of them boiling in the preserving kettle. The cliché about commerce is you get what you pay for. This weekend, I learned that lesson yet again.