Columnists

    When I go, I’d like to go, as Montaigne said, “planting my cabbages,” which is to say either swept away by the one I love or, that failing, by the sure knowledge that I have swept away the opposition in a last rally at East Hampton Indoor.

    I’ve become the absentminded reporter these days. And with St. Patty’s Day being celebrated in Montauk this weekend — the unofficial harbinger of the season out here — I’m not counting on Mother Nature to allow me to get my bearings.

    So by now we all know about the soccer mom. Allow me to introduce the ballet dad.

    Ballet dads, of which I am one, are hardly a demographic that politicians are going to be chasing in the next national election, and of course there are as many ballet moms as fathers. Allow me to tell you what it’s like.

    Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who wrote “One of Ours,” the longest-standing personal column ever to run in The Star, used to say “the world comes to our door.” That was eons and eons ago (or at least it feels like it to me). Would she still say that — that the world comes to our door? I think she might not. These days, the world is already here . . . if perhaps only on weekends.

    No more whistling in the dark, the winter’s over. I’ve decreed it. Nothing but blue skies from now on.

    There will be a medal-conferring ceremony at Hook Mill for all those who stayed, the date and time to be announced.

    Saturday morning I went about singing, “I feel worthy, oh so worthy / I feel worthy and nervy and wry / And I pity / Anybody who hasn’t suffered as have I.”

    I played lacrosse when sticks were made of wood, gut, and rawhide. During the three years I played for Colgate we scrimmaged with Syracuse University several times during the season. We did well against them, although they were in a more challenging league.

    No one really ever liked the kitchen tiles. My wife, Lisa, and I learned this a couple of days ago when my mother stopped by the house and we began talking about our on-again, off-again effort to fix up the house.

    We had painters taking care of a few rooms earlier in the year, but work stopped when we got tired of having to follow them around pointing out places they had missed. Then, too, trying to figure out what color to paint the kitchen cabinets was nearly impossible — the rectangular early 1960s red quarry tile with white grout made everything look wrong.

    Because I have been a writer, editor, and eventually publisher for The Star over the course of more than 50 years, hundreds and hundreds of obituaries have crossed my desk. Sometimes, naturally, they have been obituaries of relatives or friends.

    It’s too bad Southampton turned down our athletic director’s proposal that it and East Hampton combine forces in football. It would have been fun to root for the Marinackers, perhaps under their lights on some Friday or Saturday nights.

    It is said that the Mariners demurred because they didn’t want to lose their identity, nor did they want to move up from Division IV to the more atavistic Division III. East Hampton, faced with fielding a tiny squad of 20, was less narcissistic, more willing to mix with its ancient foes.

    The summer of 1966, after my sophomore year in college, I went to Europe for 10 weeks. I had read “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Moveable Feast.” My brother, who was seven years my senior, had hitchhiked across the U.S. when he was 19, spent a year in Greece when he was 21, and was working as a journalist in Tokyo in 1966. He was a more proximate role model than Hemingway, but both inspired me to go abroad for the first time.

    Here at The Star, we have a rule about using foul language or problematic material in print: It is okay as long as there is solid justification. This means that profanity is justified if, for example, an elected official drops an f-bomb or other offensive term on someone or something in a public meeting. If it were a gratuitous aside that neither advanced the story nor exposed the official’s antagonistic personality, there would be no reason to use it.

    Almost by chance, but aware that it was Black History Month, my husband and I went to Shelter Island on Friday night for a program on the history of slavery sponsored by the Shelter Island Library and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. We had been primed by Mac Griswold’s penetrating book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.”

    Today . . .     Mostly sunny, though clouded conditions resulting from a high-pleasure system that moved through the region late may take a while to clear. By noon, however, one ought to be able to face the day, even though temperatures will continue to be unseasonably cold. By midafternoon undifferentiated thoughts of escape can be expected to arrive from the south-southwest, though the disturbance may be of short duration given that everything’s booked anywhere warm.

    Feb. 2, 2014, Ditch Plain, Montauk: The voice rings out, “Lads, paddle, a set is coming.” Four men on surfboards ranging from 9 to 10 feet paddle 30 yards farther seaward to wait, positioning themselves for the four-foot winter set.

    Three of the men had been talking, light Irish brogues distinct, pleasant enough topics, not much at all, prior to the sighting of the three-wave set, clearly visible 250 yards offshore. The fourth surfer had mentioned to one of the three Irish guys, “You need a hood.”

    An aside in an editorial that appeared on this page last week threw down a challenge of sorts. In explaining why The Star persists in leaving the “s” off Ditch Plain, we said that it was in deference to old maps. Well, a reader saw this as an incoming softball and swung.

    “While you are at it,” David Buda wrote in an email, “why doesn’t The East Hampton Star use the historically correct hamlet name of The Springs, instead of plain old Springs?” Oh boy, here we go.

    A friend sent an eBlast this week that offered a balm to the winter-weary soul. Using a service called Paperless Post, his email bore the subject line winter 2014, but its contents, the poem "in time of daffodils" by E.E. Cummings, heralded spring.

In time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

In time of lilacs who proclaim

The aim of waking is to dream. . . .

    “‘I gave up masonry in November,’ ” Ken Raf­ferty told me in May of 1978. “ ‘I could stay down here and paint 14 hours a day. I get my hot cocoa and dash around back through the snow. People must think I’m crazy. One abstract I did I called, ‘It’s Snowing on My Cocoa.’ ”

    Everything I said last summer that I would get done in winter has not yet gotten done. When the roses were still in bloom, I had plans to strip down and then paint a corner cupboard for my dining room, clean out the big closet in the living room, and organize my shoe closet. There are just been too many distractions, one of which is watching reality television at night.

    The surgeon general’s first report on how bad smoking is for the human body came out on Jan. 11, 1964. Fifty years later — perhaps in connection with the report’s anniversary? — CVS Caremark, the huge drugstore chain that has a branch in East Hampton, announced on Feb. 6 that it would no longer sell tobacco products. When I read the news I let out an audible hooray.

    The workers have just left, leaving us with a pristine room at the end of the hall, a room that had long been overstuffed with all manner of things — a log bed, a dark, ponderous chest of drawers, a ratty light-green rug, and a closet so bursting at the seams that the unanchored sliding closet doors angled several inches outward when shut.

    I was wrong, and the nuns were right. It turns out Hell does exist.

    I was not going to argue. I knew I deserved this. Still, I didn’t know what had happened, only that when I awoke, I was in a parking lot a short walk from the gates of Hell.

    I got out of my car and walked through the strangely frigid air to the ticket machine. There were signs posted everywhere about putting a ticket on your dashboard — as though you were ever coming back, once through those gates.

    There has been good ice here, and I mean really good ice, for the first time in quite a few years. This means that those of us with iceboats tucked away in garages and barns have been busy digging them out and heading for Mecox Bay.

    Because we had set aside Saturday to celebrate our 4-year-old son’s birthday, I did not get to my boat until Sunday morning. The bag containing several key bolts and my foot spikes was in the basement, and the rest, more or less, in the barn in East Hampton behind my mother’s house.

    Did you hear that 111.5 million people watched the Super Bowl on TV Sunday? This number may not be an eye-opener for sport fans — apparently, this was the fourth time in five years that the Super Bowl has set a record as the most-watched television event in United States history — but it was a stunner for me.

    I saw a film the other night, “Riding the Rails,” and, on re-reading some of my old interviews this weekend, I came serendipitously upon one with Alex F. Dzieman, whom many of you, I hope, may remember as “The Lone Defender” on our letters pages years ago, whose letters were signed “From the Mountaintop.”

    I can’t imagine anybody working at a newspaper suffering from the condition known as writer’s block. At a newspaper, you live by a simple creed: Write or die.

    Writing has always seemed natural to me. Whether I was writing copy for advertising or writing a poem or a play, it has always been about hearing the words, then writing them down. Hearing the words, and voicing them.

    Everyone has a voice.

    Main Street in East Hampton will never be the same for many of us now that Cam Jewett is gone. Mrs. Jewett was 102 when she died of pneumonia on Jan. 27 at Southampton Hospital — and what a fine, long life she had.

    I first got to know Cam, as she was known by just about everyone, when I was just a child. My grandmother would take me over to Cam and Edward Jewett’s house to play backgammon. The house, where she lived right to the end, is just to the south of the Maidstone Inn, overlooking Town Pond.

    It was 17 degrees that morning, so maybe the reason the conversation turned to warm water sailing was to put our minds over matter. I had been coiling a heavy orange extension cord, which was no longer needed near my desk, and announced rather smugly to a co-worker who happened to be standing nearby that I knew how to coil lines correctly because I had spent a lot of time on boats.

    “You got all but two turns right,” he said rather seriously as he took the cord to put it away. That my score was only fair was embarrassing.

    “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a book, “Where Do We Go From Here — Chaos or Community?” that was written in 1967, and into which I dip every year around this time.

    He said that almost 50 years ago, when there were three social classes in this country. Now, it’s pretty much fair to say there are two, the gap between them continuing relentlessly to widen.

    I want to thank Mr. Ira Rennert. Really. 

    Years ago when he began work on his compound in Sagaponack many were outraged. How could he take that lovely unbroken vista, Fairfield, and build something on it?

    Rumors swirled as more and more work was done in this huge ex-farm field overlooking the ocean. People tried to get a look at it. They flew over it and crept up from the beach to try see what was going on.

    In fewer than the allotted 140 characters, someone  took to Twitter to make note of an obituary that appeared in The Star last week, but it was a first. Social media has become ubiquitous, but somehow, to my knowledge, no one had tweeted before on what we had written about a loved one who had gone.

    For those of us in local news there is the knowledge that we have far more readers now than we ever had before, thanks to the Internet. What we write now has a long reach and an extraordinary degree of persistence.