Columnists

This week’s snow notwithstanding, this winter has been a letdown, at least as far as ice goes. For skating the only option has been to pay for time on one of the local rinks. Likewise, the chance that there will be iceboating this year declines every day that we get closer to March.

On a cold and slippery afternoon this week, I found myself immersed in conversation about an idyllic summer house. And this time I could understand — or, I should say, almost understand — why some people who have tons of money would pay unbelievable sums for a summer rental. It really was gorgeous, with a long history, miles of lawn, and miles of white oceanfront sand.

Well, it is true. I am a liberal and I sleep in. But so did my father, who was a Vermont Republican. As in politics, so in dress. I still have his black linen tie, which he often wore with a white shirt and a dark jacket, to such an extent that a woman once said he “shrieked of conservatism.”

Time was that people here bent small oaks to mark property lines. They were called lop fences, and more than a few remain visible on roadsides if you know where to look. Or not look; what seems to be a lop fence can be found at the edge my house lot in Amagansett on a plot of land that has been in the family since the 19th century.

Jay I. Meltzer, a revered nephrologist and retired professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, used to warn his patients, and I dare say still does warn anyone who will listen, about the urgency of having an ongoing relationship with a doctor. You need to know your doctor well, he always says, and your doctor needs to know you, especially when you become ill.

The media had it all wrong. Don’t tell me the Steelers didn’t win that A.F.C. championship game with the Patriots. It just goes to show you to what lengths the lackeys of the press will go to distort the truth.

Sprinting down the asphalt path at Lowenstein Court in Montauk late Monday afternoon to get a look at the ocean before the light faded, I had a passing thought about how excited many of us who live on the East End get about a good northeaster.

By the time Bernie Sanders swept the New Hampshire Democratic primary and urged voters to go to Bernie Sanders.com to make online contributions to his campaign, Barack Obama had long since revolutionized presidential fund-raising by using the internet in the 2008 race to seek donations and to gather information and organize the ranks. (Time and Twitter moved on.)

Mary was reading the other day about “inemuri,” the Japanese tradition of napping on the job.

I have a love-hate relationship with winter. Every so often I mull about moving to an always-temperate place, someplace where momentum doesn’t get lost for half a year, where my outward self, the one that flings open the door and steps outside barely awake, stays active all year and the half-outside life I adopt during the season — and the swimming — never ends.

A new house is going up across the street from mine. It is large, with separate two-story sections joined by a steel-framed atrium or what might be a barn-like social space or indoor swimming pool. It’s hard to say.

For all that I love my old house, and show it off when I can, it’s a burden that sometimes feels like it is getting away from me.

Mary’s great-grandmother, a star of stage and the early screen, reportedly said — or so the family story has it — on passing by the open casket of a woman who had in life borne the burden of her severe lameness with good humor, “She never suffered as I have.”

Waiting for the traffic signal to change to green at Wainscott Northwest Road on Monday, a dark bird soaring far above drew my eye against the gray and empty sky. From its size and broad and fingered wings, it seemed a bald eagle, likely a first-year juvenile, according to illustrations in the Sibley guide I looked at later on.

Given the plethora of exotic foodstuffs available these days from the five corners of the world — as well as the continual reports about what foods are good for you (or not) — it is understandable that people are changing what they eat.

Finally, that year is over. But will it ever fade to black and be gone? Or will it prove a harbinger, someday to be known as Year One of the Bad Times?

The summer’s drought ended the last of whatever miracle had been holding up the old beech tree outside my office window. Two weeks before Christmas, Kevin Savastano and his crew arrived early on a cold Friday morning, as promised, to take it away.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama seem to agree that joy springs through suffering, and so, I suppose, it’s appropriate that I’m reading “The Book of Joy” at the moment, while in the throes of a wretched cold.

The grandchildren were visiting one day last week when one of the boys noticed a large box with a bull’s-eye logo on it, and came running. “Target,” he shouted, “Is it for me?” Yes, I know this is a visual age, but I was still surprised. Thinking he was just too smart for his own good, I grabbed the box and slid it under a bed, out of sight.

The late boys basketball coach Roger Golden, when I asked what it was he loved about basketball, said, “The gyms are warm.”

My first home of my own after college was an apartment on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, just south of the Sag Harbor Cinema. I lived there for six years in my 20s, watching the village’s daily life unfold through the front windows.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Leo the pig. Regular readers know all about Leo, a supposed teacup pig that now, at age 4, has grown to what I estimate to be 130 pounds.

In putting The Star together we agree that it benefits not just from a variety of feature and news stories each week but diversity among the opinion pieces. “How about the holidays or a funny anecdote?” I’ve been asked when trying to come up with a topic of late. In recent weeks, though, it has not always been easy to supply the requisite entertainment or light humor.

My sister, who has agreed that she was “a basket case” not so long ago, has made a complete turnaround, thanks to an Egyptian-born psychiatrist who utterly revamped her medications with what I would call miraculous results, “and, ultimately, God.”

Mobutu Sese Seko was by the time I arrived in Africa as a college student in 1985 renowned as one of the globe’s most corrupt leaders. Zaire, as the Congo was then called, had withered under his rule. The story was that you could have driven a Cadillac from the Rift Valley in the east all the way to the Atlantic without hitting a single pothole when he assumed power in 1965. Twenty years later, only traces of the road remained, most of it sucked up into the jungle.

We’ve heard a lot these days about fake news and know that cyberspace is crowded with misinformation — and disinformation — which often make it hard for anyone to know who and what to believe. But I never expected to find a film on a kids’ TV channel infested with advertising masquerading as a happy holiday production for the whole family.

It was Tuesday night when it occurred to me that I hadn’t — because I was flying back from having spent the weekend in Pittsburgh — seen the first half of the Steelers’ delightful 24-14 win that Sunday over the Giants.

Having spent most of the past two weeks in bed with what appeared to be the flu, Twitter and I have gotten to know each other well. Not that I tweet, or post, much; instead I have spent hours upon hours following various threads on which the authors express outrage about the election. Twitter is as good a place as any to drive you to despair. But it is also a place where one can get a deeper understanding of what is going on.

If, when you get behind the wheel of a car, your thoughts turn toward auto accidents, or if, when you board a plane, you worry that it will crash, you are apt to face your digital life with trepidation, too.

David Brooks wrote recently about the lack of trust in our society, and how corrosive walling oneself off can be when it comes to the intermingling a thriving democracy requires.