Columnists

The admonition from health and government officials that everyone stay in place in order to curb the spread of Covid-19 suits my husband and me just fine.

So, there I was, on Wednesday last, with a stuffy head, and a very, very occasional cough, rheumy eyes — as usual — but wondering.

Among the positive impacts of our coronavirus isolation has been what you might call found time: hours and hours each day for the books I intended to read, television programs I wanted to watch, and operas I didn’t want to miss.

The E.M.S. and fire community has indeed come together to support Randy Hoffman, a critical care tech from East Hampton who in December underwent a routine spinal procedure and came out paralyzed due to unexpected complications.

My grandmother on my father’s side told me to always wash my hands — and I have tried to as often as possible ever since.

The Indian Wells tennis tournament was canceled the other day, then came the Coachella music festival, and then came us. Postponing a trip to Palm Desert, Calif., where one of our daughters lives, seemed the rational thing to do, and JetBlue, wonderful to tell, came through.

The possibility of housebound quarantine to avoid Covid-19, the coronavirus, took me back to my childhood in Bayonne, N.J., where my family belonged to an orthodox synagogue. Each autumn at Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish observance, the observant fast between breakfast and dinner. My family did do that when I was very young; and then, after World War II, did not.

You might almost feel bad for Mike Pence. You could almost see the color drain from his cheeks when he was tapped by the boss to lead the United States coronavirus response.

I’m beginning to get it — “it” being how Puritanism, with its disdain for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, equality, et cetera, led to the Declaration of Independence — but my essential question as to how we got from Cotton Mather to Thomas Paine remains.

As choruses go, the Choral Society of the Hamptons, which forwent a spring concert this year in order to allow enough rehearsal time for its concert of the Bach B Minor Mass on June 27, has gotten better and better. Now, under the heartfelt leadership of its longtime music director, Mark Mangini, and with its ranks expanded by the members of his New York City Greenwich Village Chamber Singers, it’s ready for Bach.

Is Michael Bloomberg is taking cues from the Trumpian style of public speaking? Departing from prepared remarks last Thursday, he briefly riffed on his negative view of the Shinnecock Reservation, which is near his Southampton vacation house, calling it a disaster and a bunch of other things better not repeated.

‘What was the book where the bookcase fell over and killed the guy?” I asked Mary one day recently after having banged nails somewhat haphazardly into the shelves of our living room one that had become bowed out, thus rendering precarious one of our stores of knowledge, much of it having to do with cookery.