Columnists

The only thing that breaks the predictability of Thanksgiving is watching the yearly metamorphosis of your offspring, from minor to major.

Fall turned, twisted, and curled on the stem and lingered in the air much longer than usual.

The first time I visited the house I live in now, the shelf at the bay window in the dining room was filled with great, big flowering Christmas cactuses on a painted, dark-green copper tray. They brought color into an otherwise dark wintertime room and, taken as an entirely natural holiday decoration, they were perfectly suited to my taste. Their brilliant red flowers and deep green foliage were enough to perk up any cold afternoon.

But what to say? Ah, it’s Thanksgiving, time to give thanks for Kitty’s torte, which I swear will be the death of me. The ingredients are not arcane, store-bought devil’s food cake mix, a box of Nilla wafers, two bags of walnuts, light brown sugar, butter, plenty of that, and whipped cream, yielding a crunchiness, creami­ness, sweetness, and softness that taken all together are nonpareil.

Approaching Indian Wells, I stopped my truck on the beach to look at a flock of small sparrow-like birds. It was about a week ago. I figured I would take a few last casts of the season into the ocean. Big bluefish and a few striped bass remained around, or so I had heard.

In my mind’s eye, Thanksgiving Day looks — as it probably does for many Americans of a certain age — like a famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom From Want,” that appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post during World War II.

It would be about now that the football season would be winding up, assuming we had a football team.

Sunday was one of those days, you know, the kind that get people saying that’s why we live here.

The time has come for us to get a dog. I’ve had many over the years, and a rescue dog is now in order. The problem is the difference between our perceptions of what would be a perfect pet and the perceptions of the highly meticulous staff at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons as they size us up.

Recently, I listened for eight of 11 waking hours, sitting in on a Killer Bee reunion on a Friday night and, the following morning, attending an equally long Hall of Fame induction ceremony at East Hampton High School.

I only realized later what had happened. On my way to drop Ellis off at second grade, I decided to stop quickly to vote. Election District 12, where I was registered, never has all that much of a line, so I figured we would be in and out of the Amagansett Firehouse quickly.

Anyone who reads this column will have an idea of where I stand politically, but they haven’t heard much, if anything, from me about religion. My first husband and I used to say we had the same religion, by which we meant none. Our notion was that my Jewishness and his Protestantism were entirely secular. (It will remain for our children to say whether they missed a religious upbringing.)

I just know that this so-called tax reform plan, if what’s been intimated comes to be, will gore my ox, and probably will gore the oxen of numerous other members of the middle class here, this being a high-tax state where middle classers itemize.

Paul Manafort has a nice pool. I should know, I swam in it once at a children’s birthday party. The water was fine.

Thirty-eight members of the Cory family, if you count spouses who may or may not use that surname, arrived at a Pennsylvania resort at different times from different places in the country for a reunion last weekend — and what an event it was.

Fifty-one years ago this column began to be written. No, no need to genuflect. No, no, please. . . .

There were no deer fences in sight on the farmland in Northern Delaware, where I was visiting one of the kids at school last weekend. I noticed this as I drove along back roads near Middletown and miles of corn and soybeans. There were no ticks, either, according to several people I talked with.

The admonition that before you judge a man you should “walk a mile in his shoes” was, clearly, quite sorely lacking in Donald J. Trump’s upbringing. Does our president have even a shred of real empathy?

So (cough, cough) we are encouraging more burning of coal, while China, they say, is about to take the lead in the manufacture of electric cars.

There was no reason to doubt the caller, even though he would give only his first name. I had heard a story second-hand on Tuesday that a whale had become tangled in a gill net off the Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett and hoped to get someone on the record who had seen what happened.

You may have been pleasantly surprised, as I was, on Friday when the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Doing so in effect recognized its 468 member organizations in 101 countries around the world.

They say that half of life (maybe more than half) is showing up. Well, I have been showing up, but the teams I’ve expected to cover have not.

As of two months ago, I live on an island on an island off an island. Deep in the Mashomack Preserve, our house is separated from the rest of Shelter Island by a two-and-a-half-mile driveway, making it one of the most remote spots you could live in these parts. The quiet is quieter than anything I’m used to, the nights darker, the sunrises and sunsets more remarkable.

I popped Facebook open this morning and was surprised to see a video advertisement featuring Jeff Bragman, who is running for a place on the East Hampton Town Board.

Forty-eight curious people went to Block Island on Monday to learn about Deep­water Wind’s turbine installation there. Hearing about this expedition, and learning that the group also had gotten to tour the island and stand on the bluffs high above the site where the electricity comes ashore in a cable, I was, I admit, rather jealous. And it made me wax nostalgic.

I read that Francis Bellamy, the Baptist minister, and socialist, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which first was recited in 1892, had wanted it to read “. . . one nation, indivisible, with equality and fraternity for all” before thinking better of it, given the weight of anti-woman and anti-black sentiment at the time.

At the end of the season in 1909, Frank B. Wiborg had a $261 balance due to Strong Bros. Livery Stable. This I learned from a tattered, cloth-covered ledger that was in the office attic.

A longtime reader of The Star has given me a copy of pages from an 1839 diary kept by a Long Island woman named Maria Willets, which describes a seven-and-a-half-day tour she and her husband, Stephen Willets, took in August that year, more than 175 years ago, from Westbury to Montauk and back.

“Don’t play it again, ’Nam,” I said to Mary as we agreed we weren’t up to watching what I’m sure is a very well done, years in the making Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

A group of us were on the beach Sunday night watching the sunset over the hills across the bay as a sound like thunder rolled across the water. Because it was not quite dark, our assumption was that it could not be fireworks, and no distant sparks could be seen on the horizon, and some among our group of picnickers assumed the end was nigh.