Columnists

To get an idea about what team spirit means, all you have to do is go to the greater Boston area at Super Bowl time. I was there last week because my husband was a patient at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, and everyone seemed to be wearing New England Patriots T-shirts emblazoned with the number 12 all weekend long. It was patriotism in two senses of the word.

I am to turn 79 on Monday, by which time I expect to be lying on a beach in Zihuatanejo reading a good book, or, given my tendency to interrupt, making Mary look up from hers. 

That, my tendency to interrupt, may be the sole sticking point in our otherwise blissful coupling. Why I do it, I don’t know, though it may have something to do with being an only child for most of my youth, untempered by siblings shouting, “Will you shut up, Jackie, will you just shut up for once?” And so, uninterrupted, I continued interrupting.

A high-tech washing machine gives out, and the whining about over-engineering starts.

Lots of books and other things arrive unannounced at The Star, as they do at newspapers and media outlets. Some are worthwhile. Some are not. Others lead into unexpected territory.

The dog belonging to me and my husband is a lazy, plump, foxlike creature with a red coat and a stubborn nature.

It was the day before I, perhaps the only “company man” left in America, was to be interviewed, and I was trying to think of clever things to say.

It always feels strange to walk around the old neighborhood again. Williamsburg is scarcely more recognizable to me than Montauk is, and sorry if that makes me a hipster or whatever.

A 160-yard-long black plastic pipe washed out of the ocean at Georgica last week. When I finally got around to looking for it on Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed that it had already been cut into shorter lengths and dragged away.

The teacher I found in New York was revered among some of the city’s up-and-coming young professionals in the opera world, so I was honored to be at her piano’s side

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen.

It doesn’t freeze up the way it used to. That was what a guy I went to high school with but whose name I cannot recall at the moment agreed on at the counter of Goldberg’s Bagels the other day.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass.

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column — midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

The fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, “government by the worst men.”

I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street, but I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

The day before New Year’s, I found myself wondering if there were resolutions I should make. Perhaps I could come up with something simple, promise myself not to go to bed with dishes in the kitchen sink or lights on in the living room. My husband makes sure the pots and pans are scrubbed before he calls it a day, and as a morning person, I am up and at it early the next day to put them away.

We saw a horror movie the other night as an antidote as it were for the reality that surrounds us. Can it get any worse? Yes, yes it can, but don’t tell, don’t want to give anyone ideas.

Empty but for the two of us on the top deck of the Cross Sound Ferry bound for New London on New Year’s Day, my middle child and I watched the waves. Evvy, named after my late father, takes after him in many ways, though they never met. It was her idea to explore the boat, and he, like us, would have been outside on the deck while the rest of the passengers sat quietly inside, away from the wind.

Robert DeLuca, the president of the Group for the East End, and State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. have declared war on the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, and, at least in my opinion, rightfully so.

It’s a few days before Christmas and I should wrap up my thoughts for Mary, with whom I share daily bread and whose company I always look forward to, as does O’en.

Winter’s sound is a scrape. There is ice to be removed from the truck’s windshield. The ground talks back as you walk. Tree limbs cross, swordsmen in a drawn-out dance. On the bay, frozen blocks will shift against each other as waves pass underneath and die.

Merry Christmas to you all. It’s not quite 60 years since I first began to celebrate Christmas with the Protestant family I married into. I was brought up in a secular Jewish family that didn’t do much more in December than light a special menorah for the eight nights of Hanukkah.

Can you believe, 10 percent of high school students, when questioned, think Judge Judy is a member of the Supreme Court, when, as everyone knows, she’s on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals? (Just kidding!)

Just the other night, with nothing better to do, and nothing to interest me at the office, I thought I would drive around a little and see the Christmas lights of the town. I took my leave from friends who I had been visiting on Gould Street, and headed off for a turn around the pond, where a brightly lit tree blazed in the center.

How do you tolerate the cold? I don’t seem capable of tolerating winter at all these days. When the temperature drops down below freezing, I find myself unwilling to do much of anything except go to bed and read a book. And, for some reason, a really cold and blustery winter day always makes me start thinking about delicious recipes and hearty meals.

You’d think that a country wanting to be great again would return to what made it great by welcoming those who, having seen the worst of things, are resolved to better their lives. What more worthy goal?

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The East Hampton Star staff has been making more frequent trips to the library next door ever since Starbucks installed a coffee machine on the front desk. This I know, not because we have a sophisticated indoor surveillance system, but because my second-floor window on the south side of the Star building looks onto the sidewalk that runs between our driveway and the library’s Main Street entryway.