Columnists

    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.

    About 20 years ago, when my husband and I were courting, we came across one of Dr. Dean Ornish’s  books, “Eat More, Weigh Less.” The word  “wellness” was not in the air at the time, but we were ready, and old enough, to give serious consideration to alternative ways of improving our health.

    I had thought I’d been sleeping unduly long — 9 to 11 hours at times if I can get away with it — until I read a report in the weekly science section of The New York Times on the so-called glymphatic system, which takes out the trash, as it were, from the brain while one is in Never-Never Land.

    “So what is removed from our brains as we sleep?” I asked Mary, who is as much of an insomniac as I am a narcoleptic, this morning.

    “I don’t know,” she said. “Read the article. I’ve saved it. It’s in the computer room.”

    On Sunday nights, our entire street goes dark. We used to be among the weekend families, the ones who packed up their lives and returned to the city midday Sunday afternoon.

    Having children changes everything.

    It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and Ellis, who will soon turn 4, and I busied ourselves preparing one of the old kitchen chairs for some regluing. It was the pig’s fault.

    On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of running water. Actually, I had noticed a soft flowing noise Saturday night, but decided I was imagining things. After all, a plumber had been to our house to fix the furnace and one of the toilets that very day, so surely nothing could be amiss with our pipes. By Sunday breakfast time, however, I realized I needed to investigate. Peering down the cellar steps, I saw a flood. I put on my cracked old boat boots, crept down, and found half the concrete cellar floor covered with water. It was five or six inches deep in one area.

    Of course when I said, on my return from San Pancho, Mexico, “Let the games begin,” I didn’t know a blizzard was imminent, which caused the cancellation of just about everything over this past week, except for the skating at Buckskill and the Gin Rummy games which Mary seems to invariably win, even as she says I am an astute card player.

    I was whiling away some time last weekend at the library, when I spied a copy of “Salinger,” the recently published oral biography of J.D. Salinger, the author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” staring back at me from the shelf.

    And even though I have a half dozen other books gathering dust on my bedside table, I brought it home and have been plowing through it and look forward to watching the documentary of the same name, which will be shown on PBS’s “American Masters” series on Tuesday night at 9.

    There was a near-sell-out crowd at the East Hampton movie theater on Saturday night for the 6:30 p.m. screening of “American Hustle,” and a buzz was in the air that had as much to do with the scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as any Academy Awards nominations.

    Borrowing from one of the books I’ve been reading lately (though not in the order presented), I would say that purgatory would best describe how it was getting to the small town of San Pancho, in Mexico; that being there was paradise, and that coming back was hell.

    Flying is such an ordeal these days that your destination damn well better be paradisiacal in order to justify the great annoyances you’ve got to undergo.

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, all is forgiven!

    This strange sequence of words was like a whisper in my ear as I trudged along the partially plowed sidewalk on Main Street ’round about midnight on Saturday, still blissfully unaware of the incoming polar vortex and its ruthlessly frigid Arctic air. A whisper, or perhaps the wind. Come back, Stephen Talkhouse.

    We were the only people in the Bird House at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday. This was not surprising, since it was a cold, cold day and only about a half-dozen vehicles were in the parking lot when we arrived.

    There were four others at the tiger display and just two besides us peering at the snow leopards. Between the five of us and another group, only nine visitors visited the giraffes when we were there. Nobody else was around as we watched some grizzly bears wrestling in the snow. No one ever stopped to see the bison.

    Air travel is a conundrum, at once wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful to travel so far so quickly, but terrible to have to leap over all the hurdles it throws in your way.

    (By the way, if our family friend Maria Matthiessen is reading this, I warn her that she should stop right here: I’m about to engage in a binge of what she calls “route talk.” And if you don’t get that reference, I refer you to a recent episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” about the five topics that without fail make conversations boring.)

    As it neared 8:30 p.m. on a recent Sunday night, Mary and I, as is our wont these days, talked of the time that remains to us, and she wondered, in that connection, what places I might really like to see and what things I might really want to do.

    “What do I really want to do now? Or in the future?” I said.

    “Both,” she said, “but let’s begin with now.”

    “As for now, rather than look at the big picture, I’d really like to watch the Steelers game!” I said.

    Midnight was the first. He was a big, tough tom, jet-black with just a couple of white hairs on his throat, a “witches cat.”

    We did not adopt him; he adopted us. I was 3 or 4. We were living in West Hempstead. My mother went into my parents’ bedroom. There was a black sweater on the bed that began moving. My mother screamed. Knowing Midnight, he probably didn’t even blink.

    My parents put him outside; he came back in. He quickly became a McMorrow.

    Sharp-eyed readers of a nautical sort may notice a small but significant change in this week’s newspaper. For what I think may be a first, the tide table, which usully appears in the sports section, no longer gives the times of the daily highs and lows at Promised Land. Instead, it lists the ups and downs for the Three Mile Harbor entrance.

    Our decision to do this reflects two things. The first is that government tide tables are easily available for Three Mile Harbor, and the second is that no one much knows where Promised Land is anymore.

    The conventional wisdom, as usual, is right: Being a grandparent really is wonderful.

    Almost nothing could have pleas­ed me more as the holidays came on than to see several of my grandchildren in performances. So far we have enjoyed two onstage, and two in make-believe shows at home. My husband and I have 12 grandchildren between us, but because they don’t all live nearby, we look forward to trips hither and yon for catching up.

    In Nelson Mandela and, closer to home, in Lee Hayes we have examples of moral authority, a persistent strength in the face of injustice, made all the more notable for their refusals to succumb to bitterness.

    There are very few humans who exhibit that charity, that superior strength, which can come out of suffering, but which, in many more instances, can result in resignation or a lust for vengeance.

    I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 when the film department there presented a one-week program of the films of Shirley Clarke. Clarke was a well-known independent filmmaker during the 1950s and 1960s, when few women worked in the field. Her first feature, an adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play “The Connection” (1961), won praise for its graphic depiction of drug use, but entangled Clarke in a two-year censorship battle, which she ultimately won.

    Leo the pig has hit what appears to be his adolescence — constantly leaving a mess on the floor and trying to carve out a little space of his own just to be left alone.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the story of our pet house-pig, let me explain that he joined our family over my most strident objections. My wife, Lisa, and elder daughter, Adelia, had fallen for what appeared to be an online con, a Texas breeder who claimed that it would weigh no more than 10 pounds as an adult. Don’t ask how much he cost us or to ship by air.

    If federal sharpshooters show up here and pick off some deer, they won’t be acting on my behalf even though a resident deer family devoured the Christmas cactuses that were outside for the summer. The cactuses had gone out and in for years, flowering for Christmas, so I’m particularly aware of their loss this week. If I had known how hungry the deer were going to be, I might have been more watchful. Four small cactuses of the variety that blooms nearer Thanksgiving have taken their place, but they’re scanty substitutes.

    If all went well, we’re in San Pancho, Mexico, now, having escaped Christmas, for the first time ever.

    She remonstrated a bit when I told her a few days before we left that I’d gotten her a present (a gold hummingbird pin). I had seen it advertised in The New Yorker after we’d seen a jaw-dropping documentary on these extraordinary birds.

    Dear Santa,

    Please say it isn’t true. Assure us that you and your reindeer-driven sleigh will not be replaced by octocoptor drones dropping packages down our chimneys. We’d miss your rosy red cheeks, long white beard, and belly that shakes when you laugh like a bowl full of jelly. Will we soon have to leave batteries out for you instead of cookies on Christmas Eve?