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.
Bunky was a real writer’s cat. When I would sit down at my laptop, he would jump onto the desk and circle around my workspace. He was of the belief that the keyboard was the perfect resting place. I would gently dissuade him from lying on the keys. He would eventually give in, moving to the side or the back of my laptop, and lie down. Sometimes he would watch me, and sometimes he would sleep.
He was scrappy. Having spent his kitten months in a small apartment full of aggressive children, he was wary of being handled. In particular, you could never touch his tail.
With the film festival in town last week and into this, an unusual number of people walked back and forth in front of our office. I counted myself among them, as a late addition to the festival’s documentary jury, which meant, among other things, that I spent quite a considerable bit of time on foot between the office and town, as we call it, and then hustling back south to Guild Hall, and back again.
The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household.
Were victory and defeat becoming the imposters they are, I wondered the other morning as I told Mary how I’d perhaps arrived at long last at the threshold of wisdom, to wit, that being calm was the key to winning tennis, if not to life itself.
“That’s why meditation’s so big, why yoga’s so big — everyone wants to be calm — mental toughness is simply to be calm,” I said, recalling that I had been cast out of the only meditation session I’d ever attended because I couldn’t sit still.
Fall weather is perfect for a yard sale. People aren’t hot or cranky and really seem to enjoy the smell of leaves dying and the crunch they make under one’s feet. I’m joining a few other women this weekend to have a yard sale in Montauk and am not sure if I should be looking forward to it or dreading it. Obviously, I have done this before.
One might wonder what I could possibly be thinking, as those who have held yard sales know that the insults to your personal stuff fly freely. I just hope to wake in a good mood on Saturday morning.
Our kids are sick of hearing about my car already. And what kid wouldn’t be? Parents are, almost by definition, annoying when you are between, say, 10 and 17 years old, especially if they ramble on and on. But, hey, I just got my first electric vehicle after thinking about it for years, and I’m not ready to shut up yet.
Clichés are usually based on matters of common knowledge, so there has got to be at least some truth in the often heard idea that people revert to childhood as they age. Right? I’m sure this doesn’t pertain to me — at least not yet — but I’m keeping watch.
I celebrated one of those birthdays this week that people consider a milestone, and I am afraid there’s no hiding my age anymore. Besides, I’ve decided, if people don’t know my age, how can they tell me I don’t look it?
“Let it rain!” I said to the guys who were putting up new seamless gutters whose downspouts and discharge pipes were arranged under our deck in such a way as to inspire hope that the annoyance of periodic basement floods would once and for all be ended.
Haz llover! Let it rain! Open the floodgates of heaven. Well, perhaps not quite so wide, but I do want to see if the new system works, if we’re on our way to, if not bone-dryness, less dankness. Yes, less dankness, fewer spiders, less mold, a little less of the entropy against which we are struggling.
It has become a tradition, six years running, for my family to meet up with a crew of other families from nearby and spend a September weekend camping at Hither Hills in Montauk. When the weather cooperates, and even when it doesn’t, these are my favorite days of the year.
There are simply too many animals in our house, and, to be honest, there were too many a month ago before we brought a new pug puppy home. But a surprising, if unlikely, relationship between two of them gives me hope.
By the numbers, Luna the pug did not really skew things all that much. We had promised Evvy, our 10-year-old middle child, that she would be next in line for a dog of her own when our ancient pug, Yum, died. So, when Yum Yom’s time was up, the ticker started toward Evvy’s big day.
It was the early 1980s and everyone at The Star was fed up with the pigeons that perched and nested and chattered on the ledge that runs above the plate-glass windows at the front of the building. The pigeons made a lot of noise and left droppings all over the sidewalk (and, sometimes, all over the heads of customers). They were such a nuisance that we wanted to rid ourselves of them about as much as some people, these days, want to be rid of deer.
Our lineup is being depleted, as Steve Marley’s death this past week reminded me.
Much was made this summer about the crowds, “the biggest ever,” our way of life lost, “trouble right here in River City.” It got crowded, yes, and Labor Day weekend topped it all, but why the surprise?
They really have the cleanup thing down pat in Port Jefferson, where I was for two days last week for a newspaper conference. Early Saturday, when I was out looking for a cup of coffee and something to eat instead of the hotel buffet, I noticed that the main route through the business district was littered with castoffs from the previous night. Plastic cups, waxed-paper remnants of late-night pizzas, cigarette butts, empty soda bottles, napkins, and other garbage spread over a two-block stretch.
Suppose you’re a kid in one of the East Hampton School District’s three schools on a particular day this fall. Suppose you don’t usually get breakfast at home, and you’re hungry when you get on line for lunch. Friends on line are opting for whatever the main offering is, maybe spaghetti or pizza, and some also ask for and get a cookie or other snack.
What with the Jewish High Holy Days coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about God. But the Days of Awe, that 10-day period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the time for introspection and repentance, have given me pause. Prayers will be offered, pleas and propositions will go up to the heavens. To God. The Almighty, the Munificent, all-knowing yet unknowable God.
It’s hard to imagine that participating in sectarian slaughters fraught with possibilities that we’ll be played for suckers perhaps by all the combatants will lead to any good, and yet it seems we have no choice given the likelihood of a greater evil emerging insofar as Americans are concerned from a jihadist triumph.
I am still angry, from 3,000 miles away, at an old man whom I do not know and will never meet, but who unnerved my daughter Julia to the point where she went on Facebook to tell the story to her friends and ask for their take. This happened in Portland, Ore., but it could have been anywhere.
Here is what she wrote, along with some of the many comments. I know the comments helped her get over it, and I’m betting that rehashing it in this way will do the same for me.
Elly, by the way, is 5 years old. Jeff is my son-in-law.
The next couple of days will spell the end of the remarkable beach plum crop of 2014. A mild, relatively dry summer made for good growing conditions, and the dunes from one end of town to the other were full of the tart purple fruit. A prodigious turnout of wild grapes in the understory was related to favorable weather as well.
A passel of college kids conjured the back-to-school spirit last weekend when they came to Bridgehampton to sing. Shere Khan, an a cappella ensemble of 12 Princeton students, performed for a group of friends at a private party, while the 45-member Howard University Gospel Choir, accompanied by electric bass, keyboard, and drums, raised the rafters of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.
As I walked to The Star’s kitchen the other day with Henry’s empty dish, not needing it anymore, I saw a piece of plywood barring the editor’s door, about baby gate-high, and looked in, and there was a puppy nibbling at his shoelaces. I wasn’t overly sad, for that’s the way it is: Life goes on.