Columnists

It takes courage and tremendous power of persuasion to convince the electorate, and the powers-that-be, that the general consensus on a matter of public policy is wrong. Kevin McAllister and Mike Bottini showed that courage when they filed a lawsuit last week to try to stop the construction by the Army Corps of Engineers of a 3,100-foot-long and 50-foot-wide revetment along the ocean beach at Montauk. I’m not so sure about their powers of persuasion.

We were sitting on a narrow, pleasantly crowded fine-sand beach in Naples, Fla., the other day, reading our books under an umbrella as walkers paraded by, one of whom caught my eye, wearing as he was black shorts and his long black hair tied back.

What made him come up to us I forget, though it seemed apt. I told him I was reading a book on Zen Buddhism, and he said that that was good, and that — according to Mary’s recall — he liked to propound too much to be a Buddhist.

Her: Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

    Him: No you can’t.

    Her: Yes I can.

It was difficult last week for me not to go down into a historical rat hole while working on a story about how the East Hampton Library had recently completed the digitization and cataloging of a long-sought collection of papers from Montauk’s early days.

I encourage anyone interested in such things to take a look at the library’s website, under the Long Island History-Digital Long Island tab. From there, one can find a link to the Proprietors of Montauk Collection (Arthur W. Benson Papers) and on to thumbnail images of the remarkable holdings.

An osprey apparently forgot that he was supposed to be headed north in time for the first day of spring, or Fish Hawk Day, as old-timers here call it. Instead he hovered over Lake Arenal — a surprise greeting on our first afternoon in Costa Rica.

While I pay our bills every month, I tend not to follow through with the controversial kind, leaving those annoying back-and-forth agons to Mary, who the other day held my feet to the fire when a hefty one from Southampton Hospital came in.

Over all, I think it came to $34,000 or so — for a few hours in the emergency room and an overnight stay. The insurance company paid some of it, but that left about $6,000 as the insured’s responsibility.

When Terry Watson received a call at her winter vacation house on St. John telling her that the Montauk Friends of Erin had chosen her to lead the 52nd St. Patrick’s Day parade as its grand marshal, she thought it was a prank. Her husband, George, is one of the hamlet’s biggest pranksters, so it was a logical conclusion.

Stunned by the news, all she could say was “okay,” and then she hung up the phone and cried, she said on Monday. “I never imagined they would choose me, but it’s such an honor and I’m thrilled,” she said.

My wife and the kids got out of town the week before last and I took to the basement with a vengeance. It had been something I had intended to do for a long, long time.

After three kids and about 16 years since Lisa I got married and moved into my childhood house, things had, to put it mildly, accumulated. The basement, more of a glorified crawl space for anyone taller than a “Wizard of Oz” Munchkin, has been the receptacle of much of the excess. The weekend plus the few days I would have to myself seemed the perfect time to de-clutter in a big way.

Remember the grape boycotts of the 20th century? The dramatic slogan “It Won’t Wash” helped convince many of us to give up table grapes in support of California farm workers and their families, who were suffering serious health consequences, including birth defects and various cancers, from the pesticides being sprayed on fruit.

While “Birdman” was a wonderful picture, “Citizenfour,” which won the documentary Oscar for Laura Poitras (not to mention Glenn Greenwald’s Pulitzer Prize reporting), is even more of a must-see.

It certainly has a chilling effect — in keeping, I think you’ll agree, with the season.

Owing to the vagaries of weather here on the East End, few are the winters when we can reliably hope to haul the boats out of the barns and garages, sharpen our runners, and head for the ice. The winter of 2015 abruptly took a turn toward bitter with a Jan. 24 blizzard, and it has been cold enough to make for broad slabs of frozen water, but the snow accumulation made conditions on most ponds and lakes in the Northeast impossible for sailing.

Why is sunlight on a landscape of untrammeled snow more exhilarating than bright sun on the beach or through the woods? I wonder what scientists have to say about the ways visual experiences evoke emotions. 

“You’re one of the youngest old people I know,” my dentist said to me the other day as he excavated around a post in the hopes a filling would prevent the need for a crown. Before I could remonstrate with him — “One of the youngest? Please” — he was drilling away.

Still, that was music to my years, though lest I get cocky, he said, quoting from his grandmother, that I could not expect to get any respect in Florida, where we’re going this week, until I reached my 90s. Well, I thought, that would be something to strive for.

I’ve been in the presence of Phil Spector twice, so I can say with a measure of confidence that I am very lucky to be alive.

Forgive me if I have mentioned this before, but winter has been hard on Leo the Pig.

For those of you unfamiliar with Leo, he is our pet 75-pound, 2-year-old, neutered boar, which my wife and oldest child bought for a ridiculous sum from a Texas con artist they met over the Internet. “He’ll only be 10 pounds, grown up!” they were told, “or your money back!” Ask them how that worked out next time you see them.

Ten years ago this June, my eldest granddaughter fell in love with a kitten at the Animal Rescue Fund’s shelter. I can’t imagine what my daughter-in-law, Lisa, was thinking when she took her there on a lark as a fourth birthday treat: Lisa is allergic, and their household has always been something of a dog menagerie to begin with, without much spare room for extra sets of paws.

This can’t continue much longer, it sucks: I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve struck a co-worker’s truck, and I’ve just told a cold-caller to “take a flying ——.”

You get the idea — one’s nerves begin to fray when beset by the cold, not to mention cold-callers.

I was beginning to think that all the reserves of joy that are to be found in mutual suffering had been spent when a wonderful couple bearing tea came to our aid, but more about them later. 

I’m sure many of you have heard the newest catchphrase, “No worries,” which is said by many people these days in what I believe is a totally inappropriate use of the phrase. I’ve had a lot of people say it to me lately, and I think they’re just bragging, because I have plenty of worries, especially now in winter, when it’s so cold out our daily lives are limited by snow and ice and our finances are at an all-time low.

This winter has been hell on man and beast alike, and it has been hard on houses as well, with frozen pipes, ice dams leaking under soffets, and over-taxed furnaces. Our house has taken a blow or two, including a never-before freeze-up on a kitchen drain, and, one morning this week, a door that came apart in my hands.

Guess what song has been going through my head for more than two weeks since two feet of snow fell and the temperature started to go down. Sorry, but I can’t help setting things to music. What I keep hearing, a la Louis Armstrong, is:

“Oh, the weather outside is frightful/ But the fire is so delightful/ And since we’ve no place to go/ Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

I’ve got to get beyond the birth-and-death thing, as my Zen book advises, though the good news is that my birthday is tomorrow and Mary is going to take me out to dinner.

When recently the subject of first loves came up, I told her that mine had tossed me over in the end because I had “no ambition.”

“That was what Mom and I always admired about you, that you had no ambition,” she said, “that you chose to go your own way.”

Madge did not disappoint. No one thought she would show up for an impromptu photo-op on one of the picturesque lanes in the Village of East Hampton last summer.

The rumor circulated among a few of the camera-toting East Hampton inhabitants. Something fun: Hawaiian beach wrap by the seaside — Madge sporting a modest swimsuit. How about a discreet Wiborg Beach visit? Or her posing with the Georgica Beach lifeguards?

Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed something a little out of the ordinary on one of The Star’s recent obituary pages. Down in the lower right corner was a correction — nothing strange about that, of course. But what was unusual was that the notice concerned Phoebe Scott, an East Hampton woman who died in 1938.

Did you read about the gigantic opossum that got stuck in a wooden gate in Sag Harbor last week? The story of its rescue was told on easthamptonstar.com almost as soon as it was freed, and the ’possum pictures, which The Star didn’t have room to publish in print, were ridiculously adorable. This week, like all weeks nowadays, plenty of feature and sports photos that weren’t used in the paper itself appeared on the web.

I’ve been reading about Zen Buddhism lately, and was reminded of the Yogi Berra koans I’d seen at the Artists-Writers Game last August.

    Here are some:

    “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

    “It gets late early out here.”

    “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

    “Baseball is 90 percent mental — the other half is physical.”

    “A nickel isn’t worth a dime anymore.”

    “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

    “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

This has been a rough winter for my husband and me, even though we’re 1,100 miles south of the snow, and it’s been made no easier by reports from Amagansett of big changes in store for the quiet street we’ve lived on for — whoa — one year short of 50. (Like Jack Graves, I may soon be reading my own words in the “Years Ago” column.)

In the few weeks since the terrorist shootings in Paris, a number of people have asked about my take on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and whether The Star would have published them.

Whether to reprint these images was a serious question, one that many news organizations around the world asked themselves in the days after 11 people were killed at the office of the satirical magazine. In the United States a great number of editors decided to run them either for their news value or out of a sense of solidarity with those killed, or even for reasons of defiance. Others did not.

Did you know that Starbucks sells souvenir mugs featuring images of different cities, countries, and states around the world — from Arizona to Ireland to Tokyo? Shush. Don’t tell my husband. He’s got a mug bug.

It was an exhibit of Dominy furniture at Clinton Academy that set off his addiction: He must have bought a half-dozen of the attractive commemorative Dominy mugs, keeping some and giving others away. I agreed that they made nice gifts, but I had no idea they would open a floodgate.

I’ve been in recovery — clean — for almost a full month now, 29 days as a matter of fact, and while of course one always should be wary of a relapse, I think I’ve kicked the Facebook habit.

I haven’t formally resigned — I doubt frankly that they let you — but I swear I have not clicked on it since we returned from a vacation at the end of December.

We have all been under a sort of snow arrest for the last week — lots of time sitting in cars going really slowly to avoid black ice and hours waiting for “the guys” to come to plow us out, or driving around and around the parking lots looking for a spot that isn’t in a drift.

That is not to say that I am not paying close attention, but my mind does wander to the ponder.