Columnists

Recently, I was asked to retrieve from The Star’s attic contacts and negatives of Troy Bowe, the former Killer Bees’ point guard, in action. The request set my head to spinning like a leptoquark, for, as I told Carl Johnson, who had made the request, “It’s a black hole up there, a bottomless pit from which it has been said nothing escapes.”

At the risk of offending my friends from Sag Harbor, what is up with those people? Most of the time that I run into someone I know in that village, the first thing they say is, “What are you doing over here?” with the emphasis on “you.”

“I wanted to go to Persan’s for a clam knife,” I protest. They tilt their head ever so slightly, suspicious

I’m never happier than when the power goes out, and all the humming machines, low-buzzing appliances, furnaces, and neighborhood pool heaters shut down, and the house goes quiet. Partly I feel this relief because, like Greta Garbo, I just want to be left alone . . .

Soon, I’m told, we’ll be able to grow six marijuana plants (or is it 12 per couple filing jointly?), which, as I said to Mary, may impel me to get back to gardening again.

I once was avid in that regard, my steering wheel turning of its own accord when I’d be driving by Hren’s (now Groundworks). But the deer feasted on just about everything I grew, and if it wasn’t the deer, it was the voles.

I can remember quite clearly the conversation with a friend who knew a thing or two about town politics. At least a dozen years ago, he and I got into it about if anyone really wanted to close the East Hampton Airport. I said no; he said I was wrong. Cut to, as they say, today, and it is clear that my friend was onto something.

The dull warehouse has come in for reconsideration in light of Amazon’s exponential growth and the drive for unionization.

The commentary of Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith — the last vestiges of a watchable N.B.A.

My mother, who wrote a column called “Connections” in this space for more than 40 years, has only made one remark on “The Shipwreck Rose” since I began my own column last July: “I see you are styling the dog’s name as one word, Sweetpea,” she says, with the sideways gaze and slightly arched eyebrows of a disdainful veteran copy editor, “rather than two.”

The Town Board ruled today that, once the coronavirus pandemic has run its course, all of our schools, aside from those for toddlers, be turned into affordable housing units, thus going far to solve that problem, and, further, that henceforth a new without-walls system of education be created wherein students, through visits to mentors living here, whether engaged in the trades, the professions, or arts, will participate in hands-on learning.

Regular readers of The Star’s editorial pages might have noticed that our official position with regard to the ecological importance of Hook Pond and its tributaries, notably the present mud bog known as Town Pond, is that it would be nice to restore them, but there are far higher priorities.

In my salad days in Manhattan, my friends and I would play a barroom game in which we judged people by their footwear: a sort of reverse fortune telling in which you observed the sartorial selection and made a Gypsy-like pronouncement about who the wearer was. This was the 1990s. An adult male sporting unscuffed Top-Siders with no socks was judged to be a recent grad of Cornell or Duke — possibly Dartmouth — lately arrived on Wall Street, who still kept a poster of Pamela Anderson from “Baywatch” on his wall.

I had to say I wasn’t breastfeeding in order for my CVS questionnaire to be accepted, but, what the hell, I’ll say anything to get a shot.

The one I’m to have Sunday, at Mattituck’s CVS, will be my second, and then, two weeks hence, I presume I’ll be home free. Mary is to have hers at the same place the day after mine. Why they couldn’t do us both at the same time I don’t know, but we consider ourselves lucky to get them.

We’ll continue to wear masks and to wash our hands more often than we would have in the past, of course, wanting, as ever, to be good citizens.