Columnists

Perhaps the dumbest thing I heard back when I was covering the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals came to mind this week as I watched a heavy northeast storm roll in. I cannot recall now what the application was for or where the property was or even who the lawyer was, but I remember blanching when a representative of the owner said the sand on the beach comes and goes and that the sea wall he was advocating would be soon covered and out of sight.

All those pumpkins and squashes at farm stands — and in so many artsy photographs last month — got to us. We’ve been trying to eat healthy, and as Thanksgiving approached the pantry and refrigerator were jammed with big, beautiful vegetables and squashes about which we had the best of intentions. 

One of our problems is that we both, my husband and I, go grocery-shopping, and more often than not neither of us has a clue what the other has been buying.

“Did you hear?” I said the other day to Mary, who was working at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

“Yes. Obama finally bit the bullet on immigration.”

“Well, there’s that, but they’ve found that 90 percent of social drinkers are not alcoholics! I had been hoping, though, to stand up at an A.A. meeting and say, ‘My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks.’ ”

Well, I have the cold.

Everyone has or has had this cold. It’s what is going around. If you deal with crowds, if you go to the movies or the gym, if you go to the store and stand in line to get turkey gravy, you are surrounded by people. Some of them will have a cold and not know it. Some will have a cold and will do their stealth sneezing and coughing into their elbow, but it is out there and I got it.

But I didn’t know it.

One of the things I’ve noticed this fall, a season without any even glancing blows from tropical storms or, perish the thought, hurricanes, is that the volume of leaves fallen from the trees by now has been prodigious. Down near the bay where we live in Amagansett, November’s nearly unbroken northerly winds most years push what oak leaves manage to reach the ground swiftly into the underbrush.

Bargain-hunting is a hallowed American pastime. Despite the recession and widespread joblessness, most Americans are generally well-enough off to be able to plunge into the fray to buy whatever it is they’re coveting, especially when there’s a hefty discount.

Middletown High School, where the state boys soccer Final Four games were played recently, is the Taj Mahal of high schools, the size, I thought, of at least two airports.

An eight-lane track wraps around a large turf field overlooked by a Jumbotron — yes, a Jumbotron — and at the other end is a large grandstand over which a commodious press box stretches. I tend to stay away from press boxes, though, preferring a ground-level view, as close to the action as possible.

I am thankful that Facebook wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I can’t even imagine the trouble I’d have gotten into if it was. As it is, I’m a grown woman and get in trouble from my children for some of my posts, which I think are quite harmless and often humorous. They don’t agree, so obviously they didn’t get their sense of humor from their mother.

Everybody else, it seemed, had the same idea. On Sunday, with an afternoon low tide and the temperature forecast to be in the mid-50s, it was time to scallop. The harbor a friend and I checked after lunch was dotted with figures wading around waist-deep. Pickup trucks backed close to the water were lined up side-by-side. At the road access where the sand trail meets the pavement, a couple of people were transferring their haul from plastic bushel baskets into regulation, red-mesh shellfish bags.

Driving, as I often do, toward the Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, crossing the place where Lumber Lane and the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike conjoin and a driveway for a large parking lot to the west butts in, I can’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction when I see the imposing 19th-century buildings that mark two corners of the intersection. Not too long ago they were in need of various degrees of rehabilitation and faced uncertain futures.

After interviewing Cory Lillie and Kyle Solomon about the soon-to-be East End Sharks, a nascent high school ice hockey team that ought to be fun to write about this winter and in winters to come, I went onto the last court open to play that remained, the hard court, to practice my serve, which had been tweaked the day before at an adult clinic at the East Hampton Indoor Club.

The weekend had been beautiful, Saturday morning typically lazy. Slow to arise, the leisurely making of fresh juice before stepping into the light and crisp November air and into the village, where steaming coffee would be poured at Mary’s and carried to the Square, where a park bench and laughter and fond reminiscence awaited.

Everything was different on Sunday — or it wasn’t, until it was. Suspicion, accusation and recrimination, the dull ache in the gut as another glass of wine was drained.

Just after sunrise on Sunday, with a first cup of coffee down the hatch and another getting ready on the stove, I went down to the beach for a walk with the dogs. It was a cold morning; a strong northwest wind had blown itself out overnight, but the chill lingered. The sand underfoot was hard, as if getting ready for the freeze to come.

What sort of person willingly goes into harm’s way to help others? What makes a doctor or nurse fly to West Africa to do what they can in the Ebola crisis? What drives a journalist like the late James Foley, who was beheaded, into the heart of darkness to unveil things the world should know? How does a female reporter in the Middle East find the courage of her convictions? What balance of ideals and personal interest makes some folks willing to tempt fate for what they would call the greater good?

Election night for us was the night of the living dread, and on the morrow (even our night sweats have achieved a certain simultaneity) we awoke to baleful reality in a bed next to which a George McGovern poster hangs.

Frankly, and naively, I had thought ideas were pivotal when it came to electoral politics, but, as we’ve seen, it mainly comes down to money and the sound bites money — no matter the party — buys.

“What is God?” my daughter asked me a few months ago. Not, “Does God exist?” Not, “Do you believe in God?” More like, “What is this God that people speak of?” Since then, the questions have tumbled in like waves breaking on the shore.

As the driver of an electric car, it was exciting to learn this week that the Town of East Hampton had installed its first charging station. An open house of sorts is planned for tomorrow morning at 9 to introduce it to the public. Buzz Chew Chevrolet and Tesla Motors are expected to send vehicles over and representatives ready to answer questions.

The New York Times had an eyesore of a typo in a front-page headline recently, and — while it’s not very nice to take pleasure in someone else’s mistakes — I couldn’t help but feel a certain secret satisfaction. If the old reliable Times, with its large and talented staff, can put out an edition with such a glaring mistake (“Panic Were Ebola Risk Is Tiny,” it read, “Stoicism Where It’s Real”), then we at the humble East Hampton Star can ease up a bit. 

Mary has a most marvelous moth-eaten gray sweater that she loves. I’ve felt it and I know why, the tatters be damned.

The paint stains speak to me of the universe, the tear, resembling a hara-kiri cut, of the vagaries of life — in short of wonder, joy, and woe.

I told her recently as she sat reading on the deck that I envied her that sweater. Mine by contrast are not nearly as fine. I have one that is in the running, a dark blue cashmere one with a collar that is worn through at the elbows. It’s my favorite.

If you’ve ever wondered who sits in the big bay window on the second floor of The Star’s office building, that would be me. It is a great perch to witness the life of the village throughout the seasons. Up in the treetops there are leaves budding, blooming, changing, and falling, sparrows peeping in, and the occasional cardinal.

On Tuesday morning while we were on our way to school, Adelia announced that she would have picked Lee Zeldin for Congress had she been old enough to vote. Adelia is in the eighth grade and not yet 14. “Mmm-hmm,” I said, “Why’s that?”

“Tim Bishop is being investigated,” she replied.

“Oh. Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“YouTube,” she said. “And Hulu.”

Two houses, huge ones, are going up just south of the Ross Lower School on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton, but even pondering the fact that they are on what was supposed to be protected farmland did not dispel my happy mood as I drove away from the school’s field house after a yoga class. 

Sunday morning was bright and beautiful, with the temperature heading into the 60s. The roads were empty, the wind hadn’t kicked up yet, and I was propelled back to simpler times. 

Returning from an ever so brief visit to D.C., where we — Mary, I should say — baby-sat two grandchildren, and I tended largely to the basic needs of a pug who had a heavily bandaged foot (the result of a torn, bleeding toenail), we listened with fascination to NPR’s “TED Radio Hour” as scientists traced (ever so briefly) what’s been going on for the past 13.8 billion years.

Over the years on Halloween I’ve been the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz,” a princess, of course, and a giant face, a mask that covered everything except my shoes. But I’ve never been a ghost, because I’m afraid of ghosts. As luck would have it, I’m pretty sure one has moved in with my husband and me.

The Devil House was not haunted. At least my friends and I did not think it was. Still, that did not keep us from being so terrified of it that we teenagers were scared to walk past it on a dark night, and even going by it during the day might bring a shiver down the spine.

Thinking of having a yard sale? Don’t. At least that’s what my friend Maggie said. What she didn’t forecast was that it would take three, four, and five days out of my life, even with incredible help by members of the family, a pair of friends who are yard-sale aficionados, and three muscle men.

I thought briefly of saying, “On my backhand” when asked the other day during our weekly editorial conference what I was working on, but demurred.

It is true though — I am working on my backhand, and, moreover, I think I’ve experienced a breakthrough. You know how it takes a while sometimes — about 66 years, in my case — for the right mnemonic word or words to sink in. (Wait, there’s an ant on my desk, zigzagging along agitatedly, lifting his tiny antennae up at the edge of my calculator as if he were calculating. As if to say, “So much to learn, so little time.”)

The dark comes so early now. I shudder to think of the end of daylight saving time, barely a week away. But Tuesday was so mild and biking up Further Lane after work has become something of a mild exercise habit as I try to hold onto these great outdoors until the frost comes. So it was already getting dark as I pedaled east, then south, then west.

A friend from an inland state, a very inland state, is due to leave for the Gulf of Mexico in the next couple of weeks for a course in boat handling, sailing, and navigation. He is taking a leave of absence from his job working for the State of New Mexico in anticipation of buying a boat and seeing the world.

The holidays aren’t here yet, not by a long shot, but my mailbox is already stuffed with letters seeking big and small gifts. Many of the requests come from institutions I am familiar with and wish I could do more to support, but I also seem to have gotten on the mailing lists of tons of organizations that I know little or nothing about. I guess donor lists are shared and shared again, until your address has been reproduced exponentially.