Columnists

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.

The Ladies Village Improvement Society fair is Saturday, an annual event that I have enjoyed since I was small and my grandmother took me to the Mulford Farm grounds to play pint-size games of chance and get my face painted. But it was not the fair that had me thinking about the L.V.I.S. early this week; rather, I had no swim trunks in my truck, and I badly wanted to break up the day with a dip in the ocean.

Call it an addiction, but I’ve been bereft this week without The New York Times. I have had a copy delivered to my door pretty much every day of my adult life, but suddenly it has ceased to appear.

This time of day, when the sun can be seen in stripes on the dark grass and on the ferns and there’s a breeze and some of the birds can be heard, is my favorite. Maybe O’en’s too.

High tide came late on Friday, late enough that no one was awake or on the beach when my old, red kayak floated away. It was my fault, really.

I’ve been thinking about a topic very much in the news these days, which has not gained as much attention as it should — understandable, considering all the emergencies, especially emergencies involving children in recent weeks — and that is the Supreme Court decision on June 27 that public employees do not have to pay the costs of collective bargaining by unions that represent them if they have not chosen to be members.

Every year it seems to get worse. Last night, O’en and I were almost clipped by a wide-turning tank dropping people off at the house across the street. With O’en on the leash, I unleashed obscenities. I had been waving my flashlight energetically to ward them off, but to little avail it seemed.

It was a missed opportunity. On Sunday night my friends and I spent our time waiting for a table at Salivar’s in Montauk and watching a crowd at an outdoor reggae show. Would that I had had the sense to take a photo with my phone. It might have made the front cover.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent voter, it’s easy to simply assume that Representative Lee Zeldin, our congressman here in the First District, is a reliable, reasonable, traditional member of the mainstream Republican Party. However, given his decision to invite Sebastian Gorka to headline a re-election fund-raiser in Smithtown on June 28, that easy assessment needs to be tossed out the window. Our congressman has become extraordinarily buddy-buddy with radicals and extremists of the ultra-right, bigoted wing of his party.

It was asked last week of some people in the street how they were going to celebrate Independence Day. Most said they’d see the fireworks, which is evocative, but I’m wondering if we shouldn’t before night falls (this was written before night fell) take 10 minutes, at the most, to reread the Declaration of Independence, one of whose “self-evident truths” is, surprise, that “all men are created equal,” an assertion that seems to have been more honored in the breach than in the observance over the years, especially these days.