Columnists

Remember the gas crisis of the mid-1970s and the long lines at filling stations? If you aren’t old enough to have been there, you aren’t likely to recall the nationwide energy-conservation effort that followed.

When I said I might write a column about the participation-com­petition debate as it concerns youth sports, Mary said I should stop beating a dead horse.

I know every word to just about every song written in the early 1960s. That's not to say I'm not familiar with what came after, but I have a special place in my heart for bubblegum pop. What that special place is is still unclear, as I find myself hardly able to stand some of the annoying, grating sounds.

Up before dawn, I heard a spade-foot toad calling from the small swamp just west of my house. Spring mornings can be loud down here alongside Gardiner’s Bay, but on Wednesday, after a thunderstorm that came through during the night, the toad and a few birds whose songs I did not recognize were the only voices I heard.

Our friend Mary, who spent the weekend visiting for the first time in more than a year, immediately felt something was amiss. “You don’t have a dog,” she said, looking around.

O’en’s become a boon companion, largely a creature of habit like me, and our evening walks, when it’s just us on the darkened streets of our neighborhood, has become one.

I did not get around to gathering a few surf clams to freeze for bait when thousands of them washed up along the ocean last week. Those who did could have put away enough to last the entire porgy season.

First off, I confess that I had no idea “Mad Men,” the popular cable-television series about the Madison Avenue advertising world of the 1960s, had arrived 10 years ago and continued for seven seasons. I was certainly slow on the uptake even though I had a vague interest in the show’s time and place.

I can’t wait to try out my new Signum Pro Tornado strings in a stroke-of-the-week clinic tomorrow. The website says you will “wreak havoc” with them.

The train was like the Hogwarts Express, but only for women. An insider’s knowledge was needed to locate its whereabouts. Even the stationmaster, who sat under a twirling fan in his office of cockeyed grandeur, could only waggle his head and say, “No idea,” when I asked what time the next Ladies Special train would leave Bandra — a neighborhood of Mumbai — for Borivali, at the northwestern end of the city.

March storms are hard on the ocean beach. The month was also hard on ships in the long age of sail, many of which ran aground on the shore here on their way to and from the Port of New York.

I know it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s not corned beef and cabbage I’ve been wanting. It’s a Reuben sandwich: corned beef, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese, on grilled rye. There is nothing wrong with a good, traditional corned beef and cabbage supper — with boiled potatoes, I can taste it right now! — and maybe this evening I might find myself tucking in at the St. Pat’s dinner being thrown by the Lions Club of Sag Harbor, at the Whalers Church. But, still, as far as I’m concerned, a Reuben is in a class by itself.

Now what shall I write about this week. . . ? Silly question. Of course it’s John 3:16!

What is it about staying in one place or, for that matter, moving around? I moved around a fair bit in younger days and still think of myself as that kind of footloose spirit, but the truth is I’ve been living in one place, here on the East End, for upwards of three decades, and in my little house on an old field lot in Springs for more than a quarter century.

It is a cliché for travelers to return from abroad marveling about rail transportation in another country. But, having just gotten back from Japan, where the trains, as they say, run on time, I must indulge.

A handful of parents, a batch of schoolchildren, and a pair of grandparents, including me, went to East Hampton High School on Sunday to see “In the Heights,” this year’s musical, and to say we were glad we had done so would be an understatement; we were blown away.

Recently, I moved some of the Durants’ volumes, about 20 pounds’ worth, from my office bookcase to make room for others equally as edifying.

Last week was the first birthday of the rest of my life.

People used to be surprised when I said that the beach along the southern reach of Gardiner’s Bay has eroded at about a foot a year since about the time I was born. When my parents had a small house moved to the property in the early 1960s, there were just over 400 feet between Cranberry Hole Road and the high tide line. One of these days, I’ll go look at a neighbor’s recent survey on file at East Hampton Town Hall to know for sure, but I’d say the distance is no more than 360 feet today.

At a time when Americans are lining up on opposite sides of what seems to be an increasingly wide divide, it was heartening that the film “Moonlight” won the best picture Oscar on Sunday night. The story of “Moonlight” follows the physical and emotional trials besetting a boy growing to manhood in one of Miami’s poorest black neighborhoods, Liberty City.

David Brooks lamented the other day that Americans are tending to stay put, while in the past they moved about quite a bit, were more adventurous. The short answer to that, I think, is health care’s exigencies.

Leo the pig does not do much in the winter. Actually, Leo, a house pet of unusual size, never does much at all. It’s just that on these early mornings, when I sit at the kitchen table thinking about what to write as he stands idly by, his easy ways are more obvious.

If digitization makes keeping track of everyone and everything easy, what do those of us with old, pre-computer address books do with them? I don’t remember how I managed to get all the information from my Rolodex transferred to my computer; perhaps I spent long nights keyboarding (or maybe I hired someone)?

Asked by a colleague, with whom I share a birthday, how I’d spent mine, I said, “On the tarmac, in Houston — they couldn’t get us to a gate for the better part of an hour and kept thanking us for our patience.”

The name Dita Von Teese meant nothing to me, so I thought of nothing as M. and I neared the marquee at the Gramercy Theatre, where the burlesque dancer would soon take the stage and command the gathered crowd.

Late on Sunday afternoon, only a few people were left on the trail down to Amsterdam Beach.

What do you do when you get up in the morning? Many people — provided they don’t, say, have proverbial buses to meet or children to stuff into snowsuits and send out the door to school — turn to the news of the outside world. My husband picks up his cellphone and checks out The New York Times right after waking, even though I remind him that the daily print edition is waiting just outside the door.

“So,” said Perry Silver, my dentist, looking at the chart. “You’re 76.”

On August 1981, Judge Shepard Frood married Christa and me under the big oak tree in front of East Hampton’s Town Hall. We moved to Los Angeles two months later to break into the movie business.

The Rev. Samuel Buell never made clear exactly what kind of sin he was talking about in his account of an outpouring of Christian faith he observed in East Hampton in the winter of 1764.