Columnists

At the end of a scary article about freelance genetic engineering, raising the possibility that someone might one day not all that far in the future release a killer virus that would wipe out a lot of us, Lawrence O. Gostin, an adviser on pandemic influenza preparedness for the World Health Organization, said, “There are really only two things that could wipe 30 million people off of the planet: a nuclear weapon, or a biological one.”

My plan was to watch the royal wedding from an ironic distance. I got out of bed at 4 a.m., I left my cowlick-afflicted hair uncombed to create the illusion that I had donned a sort of cut-rate fascinator, I adjusted my Twitter feed to receive the snark aimed at the event, and then I turned on the television.

First, Second, and Third House in Montauk were so named, one would think, to commemorate the order in which they were built. This is not so. Nor is Gin Beach called that in connection with Prohibition, as is often assumed. In fact, their origins go back to the early 18th century and have everything to do with cattle and sheep, and nothing to do with construction sequences or illicit liquor.

For as long as email has been an everyday occupation, I have been in the habit of trying to rid myself of unwanted electronic communications by labeling incoming junk as “junk,” and vaguely sort of expecting and hoping that my laptop email program would eventually catch my drift and start recognizing and blocking the senders.

‘If I ever get arrested,” I said to Tom McMorrow, who was about to leave us for The Independent, “please say, ‘A 78-year-old man from Springs. . . .’ ”

In 1867, something called the Department of Education was formed in the United States, establishing the notion that providing children with an education is a universally good idea. But in the century and a half since then, it seems we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most fun, carefree, inquisitive, and experimental and turn them into a period filled with stress and a neurotic sense of failure.

Suddenly, this became dandelion spring. Their pale yellow heads rose one day in numbers like I had never noticed before.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a psychological need to set the household to rights before doing much of anything else in the morning. First I potter around the bedroom, putting a book left willy-nilly on the bedside table back in its place or picking up socks I tossed about at bedtime.

This would be the time of year I’d rub neat’s-foot oil into my mitt, inhale the heady smell, and put in a ball and fasten it with a stiff rubber band.

Now that I’m back traveling the South Fork daily, I’ve come to one very simple realization: The cellphone service out here is really not so great.

After a persistently cold winter, the shadbush has at last bloomed. Cloudlike sprays of white flowers are rising briefly here and there on Napeague like fireworks and fading away as quickly, as their gentle petals drop and green leaves unfurl where the sparks had just been.

For the better part of the school year, when I was in seventh grade, I went to my Great Aunt Elizabeth’s house for lunch. Uncle Chiel, a formidable presence, had lunch at the same time, and I would watch with shock and awe as he devoured an assortment of strange meats and offals like calves brains. I always was served scrambled eggs and white-bread toast with grape jelly.

Spring began for me over the weekend of April 21 and 22. The weather was the best it’s been in six months, it seemed, and athletic things, all of a sudden, abounded — the Katy’s Courage 5K in Sag Harbor, baseball, youth lacrosse, and youth soccer games at East Hampton High School, and, at the Pantigo fields, Little League’s opening ceremonies — all in one day.

As the season changes from the calm quiet of winter to the raucous bustle of spring, the nature preserve where I live is teeming with new life.

Surfing out at Montauk Point last week, I was startled when a seal, make that a really, really big seal, popped its bulbous head out of the water just a few feet from where I sat straddling my board. It was a chilly, windy day, with few birds around and even fewer other surfers. I felt alone, and, had the seal been amorous or angry, there was little around other than me for it to take out its urges upon.

Two small daffodils forced themselves out in the greensward between the sidewalk and a picket fence in front of an old East Hampton house on Main Street about a week ago, and I admire them as I pass by.

“I dreamt I’d won a Peace prize. . . .” “No, no, that was my Peace prize,” corrected Mary, who recently had spent hours straightening out one of my bill-paying gaffes with State Farm, had painstakingly laid the groundwork for a tax grievance, and had raked leaves and edged until she was a physical wreck.

On the way to school on Tuesday morning, one of the kids announced that she and a classmate had a plan if a shooter ever turned up.

What would you do if you unexpectedly found yourself with two hours to kill on a Sunday morning in Manhattan? It didn’t seem civilized to call a friend, before 9 on a Sunday, with my old “flip phone” to ask if I could drop in. Art galleries were not likely to be open yet, and it was too early to go to a movie.

I felt a bit self-righteous — well, a lot self-righteous — the other night when I heard a woman say on the “NewsHour” that Facebook was nothing more than “a surveillance machine.”

Tuesday morning awoke with a snarl. Two raccoons had gotten into the chicken run and were squabbling over something or other, making an indescribable clamor, kind of a blend of exercised chatter, hisses, and a predator’s growl. That roused the dogs, which roused me, and together we ran out to see what was going on.

For four days last week I was immersed in beautiful music with the Choral Society of the Hamptons. At concerts held at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church and the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Manhattan, we were privileged to take part in a rare and rousing work — Rossini’s “Petite Messe Solennelle” — alongside virtuoso soloists, a visiting choral director, and gifted musicians at the piano and organ. It was an extraordinary experience.

Walk-off home runs, leadoff grand slams, great pitching, Elroy Face throwing out the first forkball of the season. . . . Is there to be no respite from excellence?

It had not been hard to gather up the thin strips that remained of the receipt, despite the fact that the garbage from the two bags had been strewn by sea gulls across the beach access.

If it’s spring — and we know it doesn’t feel like spring, but it is — it must be time for spring cleaning. In my house that means, at lazy minimum, an examination of closets and drawers.

What struck me most at the March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C., was how eloquent all the speakers, who ranged in age from 11 to 18, were.

Pedestrians in Mumbai have no zebra crossings, no rights, and, by the law of averages, not a long life expectancy. There are barely any traffic lights to give a moment’s grace to those who have to get to the other side. Unencumbered by rules, training, or insurance, Indians drive with an ethereal airbag of reincarnation. They follow no laws of the road, only some eternal and unwritten commandments of existence. Stopping for pedestrians isn’t one of them.

Town Pond was not always a pond, and I have long been fascinated by this bit of historical trivia.

Does a person really revert to childhood in old age? Clearly, that can be true in extremes, as when dementia sets in. But what about ordinary aging, the kind that I and many of my friends now testify to? Our bodies give evidence of our having grown older, sure, but have our minds inevitably followed suit? No way.

The vernal equinox has come and gone, the Northern Hemisphere is tilting toward the sun, and we local sportswriters are not yet saved. Snow on the sodden fields, snow on the tennis courts, snow on the track. . . .