Columnists

Digging opened Saturday for the East Hampton Town Trustees 2018 Largest Clam Contest. I should say officially opened, since it is my well-nursed suspicion that somecompetitors prospect for potential prizewinners all summer long, reserving the heftiest quahogs in deep hidey-holes for a shot at September glory.

It was 6:30 on Tuesday morning, the time I usually get up, but I wasn’t ready. Although the cold snap was ending, I grabbed the thick New Zealand blanket, a long-ago present, and made myself quite comfortable on a living room couch. The next thing I knew it was after 8 — to be exact, 8:03 by my watch. For me, that counts as a lazy morning.

“My head is swimming,” I said during some recent long-distance swims in Sag Harbor, referring not just to that early morning’s hyperactivity, but to the summer here in general, which found me either up and out at dawn or during the cocktail hour at a baseball, soccer, or slow-pitch game.

So you think your operation was bizarre? Let me tell you about mine.

Ellis came home with ticks the other day. He had been on a nature walk with his thirdgrade science class when someone bolted from the path into the leaf litter to inspect something interesting. Accounts vary about who led the charge, but several reliable sources pointed to my son.

For reasons that I think require explanation, I have never registered as a member of a political party. To put it simply, I was the editor of this paper for more than 20 years and thought it quite enough to have an opportunity to express opinions large and small in print, including who should be elected or re-elected to local or national office.

I know I’m repeating myself, but it was a while ago — in the mid-’70s, I think — when I last rhapsodized about keeping your eye on the ball.

I lived in Montauk as a child, and spent several summers there as a young adult, but it wasn’t until years later that I finally visited the Montauket.

Among the pleasures of a late summer day here is being at the beach and watching small shorebirds race to pick food from the wet sand as each wave recedes. As the next wave advances, they dance up the beach, returning in a seeming instant to probe again with their beaks.

Labor Day weekend is going to hit me like a ton of bricks. I can’t help feeling I let summer go by without taking enough advantage of its possibilities. Did I get to the ocean when it was calm enough for the likes of me? Did I meet up with the best of friends who are rarely here in fall or winter? Did I attend some humdinger social or political offerings?

Our cat taught us how to die, leaping into the vastness, the slugs, taking their own good time, taught us how to love, and Henry Haney may have taught us how to live when he said life was what you made of it — in other words, that we could be the agents of our salvation.

On Tuesday morning, I took a shower with a clam rake; it made sense at the time. I had just come up from the bay after a swim and needed to rinse off the salt. So, too, did the rake.

The Equal Rights Amendment is only 24 words long: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Its point couldn’t be simpler: to provide women with all the rights now guaranteed by the Constitution to men. The only existing guarantee for women in the Constitution, which dates to 1787, is the right to vote, which became an amendment in 1920.

“Only two more weeks,” I said to the young woman at the liquor store, who, I thought, did not entirely comprehend.

If only, if only I had really gotten to know Aretha Franklin’s catalog.

Say the word “roundabout” round about here and people go nuts. This is true even though these road configurations, also known as traffic circles, tend to work well at what they are supposed to do — route vehicles at complex intersections efficiently without causing backups.

The job of editing letters to the editor landed in my lap a few years ago and has remained there ever since. I don’t know whether I was given this difficult task because the editor or managing editor decided it would be a suitable slot for an old hand like me or because they thought it would keep me out of harm’s way (or prevent me from doing harm as I “age in place,” as the saying goes).

Hats off to Sylvia Overby, who told me at the Little League ceremony at Maidstone Park the other day that Adderol was used to treat ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as I was later to learn) and thus helped me finish a crossword puzzle that had been causing me to fidget.

Trudging up the dune path leading to the beach on Tuesday evening, Sisyphus came to mind. I was midway through finally building a swim raft to moor out front in the bay and, in several trips, had carried my tools, number-two cedar deck boards, and dock foam from the house along the rising serpentine path, then down the steps, which I had built to the beach.

“The woods‚” hereabouts, used to mean quiet expanses where one could wander alone among stands of white pines, find a path to a hidden pond, and hunt for trailing arbutus, an evergreen groundcover with small pink blooms in early spring.

Helen Rattray, our publisher, confessed as she went to open The Star’s side door the other day that she had forgotten whether she’d driven down here from her house up Edwards Lane, or whether she’d left her car at home.

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh I worked one college summer as a waitress at an enormous restaurant on the New Jersey shore called Zaberer’s, which was run by a seriously tanned man who grandly called himself “The Host of the Coast.” The main attractions there were lobster — steamed lobster, stuffed lobster, lobsters everywhere — and “Zaber-ized” cocktails served in glasses the size of bathroom sinks.

Each year, the shorebirds that have just finished nesting far to the north arrive around the end of July. If they were successful as parents, their young of the year will be on the flights too, landing along the shore of Gardiner’s Bay to feed and fatten and, soon, to rise and fly south toward their wintering grounds.

The landscape at Promised Land, where I settled after marrying an East Hamptoner in 1960 (a time that now seems 100 years ago), was for me akin to another planet.

One can be exceedingly buoyed by the aura of good will that exists here, but, for the most part, in order to revel in it you’ve got to arise at first light, which I have been doing for a number of weeks now.

While I was neglecting to properly maintain my yard this summer, a colony of wasps built a nest on one of the outer walls of the outdoor shower.

“Don’t eff it to death.” That was what the late Sandy Bainbridge said to me one day long ago while we were getting a new bookcase into former Treasury Secretary Pete Peterson’s oceanfront house in Southampton.

I may have been the winner of a spelling bee when I was in second grade, but now that I am above a certain age my spelling prowess is diminishing. It’s hard to stomach the fact that I sometimes have to consult a dictionary these days before committing a word to prose. (I was about to say “to paper,” but thought better of it.)

Well at least the president didn’t claim the enemy of the people misquoted him — he had, in fact, misquoted himself, he said, when it came to Russia’s meddling on his electoral behalf.

Chill out, give thanks, I wrote, from Brooklyn, in a typically mawkish letter to The Star eight years ago.