Columnists

We were talking the other day about attaining a balance between the ways of the West and East, a discussion that sort of dovetailed with my reading lately, which began some months ago with William Blake and has wound its way through Lewis Thomas, who thinks everything’s connected, George McGovern, who thinks every child in the world should be fed and that we can afford it (what a radical thought), and which has now alit upon D.T. Suzuki, whose “Essays in Zen Buddhism” Northrop Frye had mentioned in a book of his, “The Great Code,” about biblical language.

“Ya never know.” 

That was Burnsie’s credo.

Johnny Burns was a bookmaker on the West Side of Manhattan. He looked like a frail, little old man. But I remember once tapping him on the back, feeling his body stiffen as he turned, relaxing when he saw it was me.

He went bar to bar, booking bets, collecting and paying out, until he got to Jimmy Day’s on West Fourth Street, the popular neighborhood saloon I worked in. He would go to the back bar, have a beer, and talk.

Winter is hard on Leo the pig.          

For those of you who may not know about Leo, he is a 70-pound pet pig of the white, perhaps English variety, that is, distinct from the Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that were all the rage a few years ago.

Two of my grandsons, one on the cusp of 5 and the other already there, have discovered each other and become fast friends. Although one has been growing up in a small town in Nova Scotia and the other right here, they are peas in a pod — even if they aren’t cut from the same cloth. (Sorry, I’m feeling cliché-ish.)

Well, you can’t go to heaven again, as I found out these past two weeks in Southern California. While, I’m glad to say, we did as good a job as we’ve ever done in escaping Christmas, we couldn’t escape the human condition.

I tried my damndest, but even I, who washed my hands almost continuously, and who cradled babies only under duress, could not duck the bullet.

To have been the only one to have done so would not have been commendable. I’m glad to say, then, that I too got sick, like everyone else.

An old religious statue goes missing from a Village of East Hampton bird sanctuary. A piece of a medieval suit of armor located in an East Hampton mansion walks off with an uninvited winter visitor. A 70-pound steel propeller vanishes from the corner of a village property.

These events all happened in East Hampton: One might guess the soil itself is the culprit, or maybe a salty sea wind from the south. A person might conjecture amusing mysteries are part and parcel of the place.

Religious Statue

If real estate outfits were likely to make new year’s resolutions, I would want them to try to hew more closely to the traditional, if fuzzy, lines of delineation among place names. It is a pipe dream, of course, but it would be nice.

We will have returned from Palm Springs by now. When last we were there, at this time two years ago, I described it as heavenly inasmuch as we’d been able “to take delight in each other and to remember why we were magnetized from the start.”

“. . . It’s been a week in which everything’s been more than all right. No appointments to keep, no need to strip the bed because the cleaning women are coming, no urgencies, no duties of any kind. Ah, I’m telling you, to do nothing is to progress wonderfully.”

Christa and I made a quick trip to New York recently. As we turned east on 34th Street after emerging from the Midtown Tunnel, we saw at least 50 Santas heading west toward Herald Square to take part in SantaCon. I noticed that every costume was the same, down to the cheap black plastic belt, the white faux-fur trim, and the ludicrous beard. And I recalled my own experiences, many years ago, as a St. Nick imposter.

East Hampton has seemed especially crowded for this time of year. With Christmas on a Thursday, many in the summer house and weekend crowd must have decided to head east and stay here through the New Year’s holiday.

Not that their being here is something to complain about, but there’s a difference. Drivers on Main Street, for example, have had that certain, uh, tentative quality since Dec. 24. Those of us here on weekdays during the depths of winter will know exactly what I am talking about.

The clamor among some Democrats, those who used to be known as liberal but now prefer to be called progressive, for Elizabeth Warren to run for president makes for fascinating politics. Like Barack Obama when he took on his first successful presidential campaign, she is a freshman senator. 

I’ve read that the greatest Christmas gift is the knowledge that one is blessed, and I know that that is not a frequent occurrence.

It happened to me the other day, though, a few weeks before Christmas, when I finally persuaded my wife to come see me play tennis — singles, not doubles, which I’ve played pretty much exclusively for the past eight years, having come to the conclusion at the age of 66 that singles had passed me by. And, besides, I, being a crazy lefty with a spin serve and quick hands at the net, have always been a better doubles player.

’Twas a week before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring not even the dog. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a vision of Jesus sketched into my morning peanut butter toast.

He wore not a red suit but a ragged white robe, and wore not a silly hat but a crown full of thorns. His belly was slim, not jiggling with jelly, and He didn’t look jolly but solemn and troubled.

He left me a message each day for a week and said he’s dismayed at the havoc we’ve wreaked.

So what has happened with that good old-fashioned word “it”? You would think that so useful a word would not go out of style or be forgotten. But, if listening to such well-regarded sources as National Public Radio news is any illustration, it has been almost fully supplanted by “they.”

The death of a friend is dreadful. A gathering of friends who come together to show how much they cared about the one who is gone and to support a family in their grief is, on the other hand, a lesson in living. 

So it was this week when a large crowd of people whose lives had been touched by Ed Hannibal visited the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton, and so it was at the funeral Mass the next day at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton, where the liturgy and a moving eulogy reminded all there of what a fine man he had been.

“Where’s the brief?” I asked Mary after we’d seen a somewhat long film about Stephen Hawking, who wrote “A Brief History of Time,” which I’ve taken the time to peruse again in an effort to constantly expand my consciousness, just like the universe.

Good grief, Christopher Walsh! Let go of the past, already!

You’ve gone far in a few short years. It wasn’t so long ago that, desperate for any merriment at all, you dragged a sad little Charlie Brown-caliber pine tree up the 75 steps and into your decrepit Brooklyn apartment, decorated it with a handful of dull ornaments and semi-functioning light sets, and . . . and then sat alone reading “The Catcher in the Rye” for perhaps the 15th time.

Of all the unlikely places, it was at a wake this week that I found myself talking about births and the fact that this newspaper publishes many fewer notices of them than it used to.

The wake was for Ed Hannibal, whom a crowd and then some was there to mourn and remember, and I ended up chatting in the back of the room with Eileen Myles, a poet I had long admired and who was Ed’s stepsister, something I had known at one time but nearly forgot.

According to a 2011 report from Chorus America, an organization that promotes and supports choral singing, 42.6 million people sing in more than 270,000 choruses across the nation.

They go for Christmas in a big way in Palm Springs, where we’ll be at the end of the month, with lights and ornaments all around. Yet even if I weren’t jaded when it comes to the mandatory bonhomie of the season, it seems all the more ludicrous to submit this year given the recent baffling refusals of grand juries in Missouri and New York to try police officers who killed unarmed citizens, one who had been told to get up on the sidewalk and another who was placed in an outlawed, and fatal, choke hold for selling single cigarettes.

Flash News: Incorporated Village of East Hampton, N.Y., U.S.A. — East Hampton Village leaders, in response to its citizens’ requests, recommendations, and common sense propositions, implement four new provisionary laws effective henceforth, quid pro . . . immediately.

First order effective immediately: Every day in East Hampton Village, year round, is now Senior Day. If you are over 80 years of age, you will be allowed to cut all lines to the front of the line, inclusive of CVS convenience store, Waldbaum’s supermarket, and all village wine retailers.

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.