Columnists

We are in a funny place right now, having moved back home to East Hampton after a medical sojourn in Massachusetts, but not quite able to properly settle into our old ways, because while we were away much of the house was painted, and things are still at sixes and sevens, boxes piled on the sunroom table, furniture askew.

They say that if you’re not worrying about the outcome, things go better in sports, thus enabling you to remain in the moment, and I suppose you could say the same about life, whose outcome, while still a dark glass in my view, is nonetheless definitive.

My tennis partners and I sometimes banter about the Great Chair Umpire in the sky. “ ‘When I don’t see candles and don’t smell flowers, I know it’s time to get up and greet the day,’ Red Skelton used to say,” said Gino during a recent break in our doubles game.  

Happy 3rd birthday, Evelyn Osborn. You may forget this particular birthday, but I shan’t forget it or you, your dad, Elisha Osborn, or Jason Petty and Aubrey Peterson.

There are to-do lists, and then there are want-to-do lists. For many people on Long Island, mid-March means keeping an eye and ear out for the arrival of certain birds.

Suffolk County, as part of its Adopt-a-Highway program, marred the vista on the west side of East Hampton Town Pond last year by sticking up an eye-scorching sky-blue-and-fuchsia sign, exactly at the most-photographed postcard view in the village.

We were watching the red carpet effusions preceding the Oscars when “Roma,” which we liked very much, came up, Susan wondering what the fuss was about inasmuch as she had found the movie to be “boring.”

The shirt was a “deceitful product,” according to one Amazon reviewer, who complained that it “looks blah and cheap.”

“No way. Tell them to call you when the price drops below $1 million.”

The panel at Sunday’s fifth annual Black History Month program at Bay Street Theater on the history of slavery on the East End was illuminating.

At sea in the Mexico City airport the other day, following a nine-day idyll in Zihuatanejo, I was reminded of the Bonacker, who, in Penn Station, said that he certainly knew New York City was big but he hadn’t known it had a roof over it.

The feel-good movie “Green Book” winning the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday night drew immediate protest. Most notable, perhaps, was the filmmaker Spike Lee’s comments and fast walk out of the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. But more measured, if no less passionate, responses came from all corners. 

I’ve been living without kitchen appliances — really, without a kitchen at all — while our walls and shelves undergo their first thorough sanding and painting in, well, decades.

Presidents Day was celebrated earlier this week, and, of course, we at The Star were working rather than reflecting on how far the country has come, or regressed, since George Washington and Abraham Lincoln led it.

Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

Leaving the hospital for rehabilitation was anything but simple. We do not have a plethora of “acute rehab” options here on eastern Long Island, so it was evident quite soon after we began our search that Chris would be extending his stay in the greater Boston area, and that I would be clocking a lot of time on the Cross Sound Ferry.

“Have you noticed we’ve been watching a lot of movies about old people?” Mary said as we were viewing “The Last Laugh” with Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss on TV. She paused a moment. “How did they get so old?!”

We all know it’s been cold, and we all know how to procrastinate. What do I avoid doing? Paying bills, sorting through the junk drawer(s), going through old papers and magazines. You know the drill.

The wind has been out of character this winter here by the beach. Normally, by now we would have had a couple of classic northeasters; instead, there have been just a few easterly blows followed by hard wind from the west or northwest.

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.