Columnists

I would like to say a word about my former landlady, Barbara Johnson, without whom I would not have been able to stay in East Hampton.

Given my insistence that time has come to sign off on “Connections” — at least as a weekly obligation — various family members have started sending suggestions for special, quirky, or interesting columns.

The isolation is balanced. Phone calls seem a little longer. Even routine conversations with someone in the outside world leave time for a few empathetic words.

Despite the fact that I had been a resident of East Hampton for nearly two decades at that point, my first column definitely reads today like the words of a young woman “from away.”

Love means never letting her wonder if you’ve left a margarita for her in the pitcher you’ve put in the refrigerator, even if she doesn’t want one.

Watching a live stream of the East Hampton Town Board’s Tuesday meeting, I began to think about the tattletale impulse.     

It is therefore with quite a bit of poignant nostalgia, but perhaps just as much anticipatory relief, that I have made the decision to write my final weekly “Connections” next month, for the big Memorial Day issue.     

For me, boredom has always exerted a siren pull — to the extent that once, inspired by a spate of entropic films coming out of Europe in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I dreamed of heading up my own film studio dedicated to producing the kind of profoundly listless screenplays that I couldn’t get enough of.

We call and write our friends more now that there is a glimpse of mortality on the horizon and the time to think about it. But the paradox to this newfound closeness is that we cannot express our connection in the physical world.

During our walk with O’en (I used to complain that our neighborhood was comatose, now I’m grateful that it is), Mary said she might reconsider the popovers she’d planned to make. “Ah, flattening the curve?” I said.

Passover week found me leafing through a big file folder of my mother’s old recipes, along with a few cook-booklets from days gone by. My goodness, what a time capsule she had squirreled away.

The Tibetan horoscope foretold “sudden change or obstacle,” and here it is. The present planetary alignment is said to “force a more spiritual outlook by causing material loss.”