Columnists

It’s not often that The Star reviews student productions, but having seen — and having highly praised — East Hampton High School’s recent staging of “In the Heights,” I decided to follow suit with “Thoroughly Modern Millie” at the Ross Upper School last weekend.

“It’s so green, O’en, so green!” I said as we walked down Main Street recently. “See the dark green, the yellow green, the gnarly roots. . . .”

Those returning to East Hampton after a time away will be sure to notice that the green near the flagpole does not look quite the same. Where until this year it was unbroken grass, a winding ribbon of plants and low shrubs now extends to the little bridge on Mill Lane. This, we are told, is a bioswale, which is, as I told a group of Ladies Village Improvement Society members in a recent talk, a fancy word for swamp. This brought a laugh, as one of the next speaker’s topics was to be the Village Green and how it recently came to look different.

In June it will be 50 years since Israel and its Arab neighbors, Syria, Egypt, and Jordon, fought what is known as the Six Day War, a conflict in which Israel secured a military victory, though, to put it mildly, hardly a lasting one.

My son-in-law and I were treated to a squash lesson by the young Egyptian pro, Mohamed Nabil, at the Southampton Recreation Center recently. He was kind, kept feeding the ball back to us so that we could smash it crosscourt or down the rail, and it was a lot of fun, especially for one whom the game has long passed by.

So I was down at Town Hall the other day, picking up my dump, ahem, recycling permit, and a clam, uh, shellfish license. As I waited for the next available assistant clerk, I noticed a Latino man taking care of some complicated business at the next assistant clerk’s station. A moment later, a tall man with a long beard wearing a white crocheted cap came in, seeking town taxi paperwork.

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is his taste — not just in gold-plated toilet-paper holders, but in food. He may be plunging the world into dangerous waters, with aggressive talk aimed at North Korea and threats to take the United States out of the Paris accords on climate change, but he also is setting a terrible example for bad health, particularly among low-income Americans, by what he eats.

I had been asked to make O’en’s dinner and had not — at least by the appointed time — and heard about it, concluding that it had not just been the dog’s dinner, but the last 32 years.

One of the things that sets East Hampton apart from so many other American communities is respect for its own history. Up here around our office, Main Street looks much the same as it did 100 years ago. Some of the houses here date much further back still, as much as a century before the Declaration of Independence.

We visited Winterthur, the Henry Francis du Pont estate in Delaware, last weekend at the invitation of Charles F. Hummel, the curator and scholar whose 1968 book, “With Hammer in Hand” (reprinted in 1973), describes three generations of Dominy craftsmen in East Hampton and the objects they made — clocks, chairs, case pieces, looking glasses, tables — as well as the conservative rural culture here from the early 18th century to the mid-19th.

“We can get sick now!” I said to Mary, as she enthused over the pain-free coverage we’ll receive as a result of enrolling in our AARP supplemental plans.

After Matthew Lester died this January, his mother, Dana Miller Lester, posted something online about dandelions.

Maybe it’s because Memorial Day is almost here, the time of year when (at least in the decades before year-round weekending) second-home owners used to arrive in force, saying they were going to “the country.” Whatever the reason, I cannot stop anticipating the deluge that comes with the season — not of people, but of luxury vehicles.

We were positively giddy the other night, thinking that, at long last, we’d finally made it in tandem to Medicare.

I think it was the poet Marvin Bell who advised my freshman English class as to overcoming writer’s block. “Lower your standards,” he said.

Over drinks with a couple of friends at the American Hotel the other night, Maziar Behrooz posed the question of what this place would look like in 100 years.

Can it be true that this column has appeared in The Star more than 2,000 times?

Our Medicare broker suggested that I might try a supplemental plan that would cost me nothing.

When I was a kid I played with dolls. I was an only child and (maybe consequently) I had a lot of dolls. These were not mushy baby dolls; they were “fashion dolls.” This was the 1950s, folks, pre-Barbie.

In the weeks since a dead tree outside my office window was taken down I have become aware of how many near-misses there are on Main Street on any given day.

An inveterate but rank amateur birder, I nevertheless enjoy seeing birds at the feeder or suet cake through the sun porch windows so much that it is often a high point of my day.

Though the weather’s wretched today, I know better days are coming — sportswise too, if the close scores this week are indicative.

A few weeks back, I stopped at the Village Cheese Shop after a doctor’s appointment in Southampton. As I walked in, I noticed an older woman with silver hair and a flattering red suit sitting at a table with a group of other women her age, maybe a little younger. She was the kind of woman you knew instantly had style and great taste. She must have been quite stunning in her youth. I decided she was in her 80s now. She was still quite beautiful.

What passes as a positive sign on the national front is when the headlines in the morning and the terrible thing that led the news when you went to bed are the same. Risk and scandal have seemed to come quickly in the last few months, with a fresh outrage presenting itself at almost every turn of the clock.

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.