Columnists

Perhaps you were among those who saw the feature about The Star in The New York Times on Memorial Day. Such positive publicity, and the subsequent rally of support from readers and the advertisers upon whom we depend, is no small thing. It’s not every day that reporters and publishers get a pat on the back and, for this, we are truly grateful.

I read a review of two sports books in The New Yorker recently and there was not once the mention of joy, though, admittedly, it was the business of sport — the money in it — that was the subject, not the headiness of play per se.

I should apologize at the outset to the man my kids and I call Wrong-Way Guy, but we’re kind of obsessed.

Trying to determine if the East End is medically underserved isn’t very hard to do, but it might have been foolish to try to answer the question the day after a crowded holiday weekend.

It’s Friday and it’s almost as if a show’s begun: There were 12 instead of the usual five or six servers behind the counter at Starbucks this morning. Main Street traffic was very, very slow. Noses were pressed up against the doors at BookHampton, which was to reopen the next afternoon.

Rain is fitting on Memorial Day, the solemnity of the occasion not totally forgotten amid sunny beach outings and start-of-summer barbecues.

Nine American war veterans lie buried in a modest farm cemetery off Jericho Road in East Hampton. I had driven by their resting place from time to time on my way to Georgica Beach from the highway, but had never given it much thought until John Phillips, who lives next door, filled me in.

East Hamptoners revere the heritage of this place and are proud that so many ancient objects have been preserved. The house that has remained in continuous use as a residence the longest dates to 1680 (and The Star is pleased to provide a look at it in today’s Habitat section). That certainly sounds like a very long time . . . but as historically significant as our treasures may seem, an exhibition now at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church puts them in perspective.

We took delivery of a Ping-Pong table the other evening, and it is sitting handsomely in the newly painted, well-lit basement.

We were having dinner at the home of friends when the conversation segued from the relatively safe subject of politics to the unfailingly dangerous one of cats.

Memorial Day weekend is when the seals abandon the South Fork beaches, turning them over to the summer crowd. But, well-fed and happy, they remain in the area, just slinking off to remote places to relax. Kind of like the locals.

Mine was called the Silent Generation. We probably didn’t have the collective energy of today’s millennials, but take a look at some of those, like me, born in the generation between the early 1920s and 1944: Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis Presley, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, Robert F. Kennedy, Ray Charles, Che Guevara, the Beatles, and, get this, Bernie Sanders. Maybe we weren’t so quiet after all.

Knowing that my brother-in-law was going to the Kentucky Derby this year, thus forgoing his annual party where he persuades attendees to part with significant sums of money as he, as auctioneer, hypes the virtues of seeming — and, in the end, certifiable — also-rans, I said to Mary, “The good news is we’ll save $300 this week.”

I’m only, so far — ahem — a certain middle age, but sometimes it seems like many of the things I’ve done and places I’ve been are part of a long-ago dream, a narrative of memory threaded with story, and I can’t always pick apart which is which.

It’s fishing season once again, but for one reason or another I have yet to give it a try. Such is the state of things in the spring; pre-high season work demands a lot of attention, and with a house renovation under way, weekends seem to be taken up with arguing about tile choices and the like.

“Summertime and the living is easy.” Not. At least it’s not if you live here and find it a pain to have to adjust your daily life to the influx. Pretty soon it’s going to be time to limit our forays to the market, or anywhere else that requires driving, to midweek.

Min Hefner asked if I’d read the article in The Times’s Sunday Review section about the man who came late in life to tennis and advocated it as an ideal aid in extending one’s life.

The other day, like many recent days, I was in a funk about America. The presidential race — angry, degrading, dumb, bafflingly regressive — was eating at me. Then along came an old friend to make America great again — or, at least a little better.

Leaves are starting to emerge on the trees outside my office window on the second floor of the Star. I get melancholy about this each year because they both cut off my view of the proceedings that go on in front of the East Hampton Library and because they signal that the off-season is coming to an end.

Things lost and found have been on my mind ever since April 17, when my purse disappeared at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater. I told the story of that mystery on this page two weeks ago — and had no intention of revisiting it, until, on Sunday night at 11, we were surprised to hear the phone ring.

Just when I thought I knew it all, I was blessed — yes, blessed — the other night to discover that I have a glaring weakness: I cannot hit, when receiving in the deuce court, a serve curved from the far corner.

Every election season there are one or two celebrities who threaten to move to Canada if their favorite candidate doesn’t get elected. It’s an idle threat because none of them follow through with it. I think they think us real folk will care that they plan to leave the country. But at this point there are far too many celebrities in the world, so to quote my father-in-law, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Looking at three sparrows the other day at the water’s edge of Northwest Creek, I got to wondering about why exactly it was that anyone spends any time at all watching birds.

Last week, when County Executive Steve Bellone proposed a surcharge on the use of public water to fund projects to remove nitrogen from groundwater — and subsequently the waterways — I was immediately reminded that Suffolk was the first municipality in the nation to ban the sale of household detergents.

A recent visitor to this office remarked on my books. “There’s everything you should read,” he said as I preened.

“You’ve met everyone!” Durell Godfrey exclaimed last Thursday, just after the editorial meeting and moments before the bombshell tossed by TMZ, the celebrity-gossip website, landed in the office: Prince was dead.

The dead whale that fetched up in the bay near our house at some point during the past weekend has drawn considerable attention, as dead whales do.

If you happen to come across a key chain with a medallion from East Hampton’s sesquarcentennial — that is, 350th — anniversary hanging alongside an ordinary brass door key and a Honda Civic ignition key, give me a call. For some reason, among all the items in my little old Coach shoulder bag when it went missing, the key chain’s loss is the most regrettable. It was a symbol of belonging, I guess. (And it’s not like you celebrate sesquarcentennials every day.)

All of a sudden, in synchrony with the weather, the sports scene here has brightened, just when I thought it would be yet another silent spring.

Through no real fault of my own, I recently found myself needing to find a new place to live on the South Fork. It only took me about five weeks to find a rental, which might as well have been the equivalent of five minutes in Hamptons housing time. It was pretty terrifying out there, but I made it.