Columnists

Two things have greatly improved the way we eat at the Rattray house this spring. First, warmer weather brought the garden to life and helped encourage me to get out on the water to fish and clam. The other is that after talking for years about signing up for weekly produce with one of the community-supported agriculture ventures that have popped up here, we joined Amber Waves.

Have you heard the news about the 10-fold increase, since 2011, in the number of children coming illegally and by themselves into the United States? The Obama administration has called it a humanitarian crisis. Almost unbelievably, it is estimated that 60,000 children will be apprehended this year trying to get into the U.S. across our Southwestern borders. Many of these children — from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — are placed in the care of a federal agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Others, from Mexico, are routinely sent back home.

I had a column about my Scrabble complaints ready to go, but thought better of it inasmuch as it seemed, in reading it over, as opaque as a mud flat after a heavy rain.

In brief, it didn’t breathe. But I did think what I said about the mouse-eaten Webster’s New International Dictionary sagging forlornly at the edge of Irene’s desk was Chekovian, she and I being the only ones left in this office to do it reverence.

You wouldn’t think there was anything about the peaceful, shaded streets of Springs that calls to mind the architecture of Paris’s grand boulevards and bourgeois dwellings. And at first glance, there isn’t.

In Paris, the buildings (aside from those in Montmartre and the Marais, districts that survived the urban planning of the 1850s) for the most part all look the same. The walls are cream-colored stone and the roofs are slate blue; the balconies, always on the second and fifth floors, have black iron railings, and windows are in top floor dormers.

The annual onslaught of ticks is in full swing around here now, which has prompted talk of drastic measures. Each of the members of our human family on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett has pulled at least one of the horrifying little pests from his or her person recently, and our animals have been playing unwitting hosts as well.

A career-guidance test we took in high school that supposedly scientifically assessed students’ personal characteristics had me ranking high on what was called persuasiveness. The suggestion was that I would make a good lawyer.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, I think it’s a good thing I didn’t follow through on that career advice: What sort lawyer is too impatient to wade through fine print, as I’ve always been?

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

Spring agrees with Leo the pig. Regular readers of this column may recall that about two years ago, over my desperate protests, two of the women of our household insisted that we get a pet of the cloven-hoof variety.

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

We have Danny Walsh, the golfing partner of my brother-in-law, to thank for what I’ve called “the Taj Mahal of outdoor showers.”

I say “we,” but historically I’ve been the only one to use it, logging with Jeffersonian attention each year’s first and last days. The women generally have been wary inasmuch as the one I built some years ago, using remnants of the house’s original deck and a pair of purloined swinging saloon-style doors, wasn’t sufficiently high enough — a genuine concern, I’ll admit, when the tall house next door housed innumerable tenants.

You really have to see the Taj Mahal in person to appreciate it. I don’t know if that’s a cliché — it probably is, but then, I’m not much of a world traveler. Still, a few years back I did catch a morning train from Jaipur to visit Shah Jahan’s “ultimate monument to love,” the mausoleum and funerary garden honoring his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

    Complaining to a colleague, as I am wont to do, about my difficulties hitting upon a subject for this column every week, she asked when I first began to write it. It turns out — and I had to pull out a folder from a crammed old filing cabinet to be sure — that the first “Connections” appeared in The East Hampton Star on April 28, 1977, which means it passed the 37-year mark a few weeks ago. (Even I, a hater of unnecessary exclamation points, want to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.)

    A gentle breezed wafted — that’s what breezes, or rather, gentle breezes, do, don’t they — over the athletic fields at East Hampton High School last Thursday afternoon.

    Over the green expanses of the fields and the orange infields. No one was on them, however, all, however beautiful, was silent. I, for one, was ready for things to begin — the weather had finally come around. Yet the season was over.

    Jimmy Fallon of “The Tonight Show” got up on the stage at the Montauket on Saturday night to sing “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors with the Blue Collar Band. It was a great start to the season. And if it’s any indication of how the summer’s going to be, we’re going to have, according to Jimmy, a good time!

    Thanks to a spring that has seemed somewhat cooler than usual, the grass, weeds, and fallen twigs that are our lawn have been slow to get going. This meant that I was able to put off taking the rusty old lawn mower out of storage until Sunday.

    The East End, or at least the South Fork half of it, is like a sponge filling up with more and more people and events every year. Sometime in the almost forgotten long ago, the sponge would begin expanding on Memorial Day and shrink again come Labor Day. Nowadays, the sponge gets heavier and heavier earlier and earlier in the season and, while it does begin to slim down in September, it doesn’t really resume its normal shape until after Thanksgiving.

    They say children are overscheduled in this day and age, but what about us?

    I’m sure our high school baseball team would rather be 13-1 now rather than 1-13, but I wonder, in light of this past week’s wonderful 3-2 win here over Mount Sinai by virtue of a flurry of hits in the bottom of the seventh, if it won’t become all the more memorable for those who played, and treasured all the more because of its singularity.

    It seems that everyone that Tony Duke met, or whose lives he touched, was personally touched, and with lasting effect. Because that’s what kind of man Tony was. The founder of the Boys Harbor camp on Three Mile Harbor, who died on April 30 at 95, was warm and genuine and courtly, sincerely interested in others, and a gentleman who exuded an infectious joie de vivre. You walked away from an encounter with him feeling just so much better about life, yourself, and the world. He was handsome and caring, and dedicated himself to doing good.

    A friend in the real estate business told me the other day that the secret to showing a house on a north-facing beach here was to do it in the summer. “Try to show it when the wind is blowing, and you’re stuck. Do it when it’s summer, and they’ll think it’s the most beautiful place on earth,” he said. In a way, he was summing up the whole winter-summer, hard-soft thing on the East End.

    A so-called big birthday is looming and, as it approaches, I can’t help but notice augurs of change. I’m not superstitious, honestly, but some days it feels like the gods are dropping hints about aging — or, at least, like there is a clock ticking rather too loudly over my head.

    I see there’s a casting call for “Hamlet.” I wonder if any septuagenarians have ever played the title role. It offers a chance for re­­demp­tion, though my main chance, I suppose, is Polonius.

    I still remember parts of the soliloquies that I mostly forgot in what was nevertheless a tediously long four-hour production at the Hill School on prom weekend in 1958.

    Captain Mike did not laugh when we saw a silver fox clear as day on the Napeague stretch, 6 a.m., early May 1982. He said there were two left out here: “Animal looks like a big wolf, easy to see.” His 1956 Willys Jeep barely had a front windshield, window wipers never worked. Must have been a clear morning.

    On Saturday morning, I accompanied our son, Ellis, to a soccer get-together at a house not all that far from ours in Amagansett. While he and the other 4-year-olds kicked the ball around, the parents relaxed on a screened porch, eating muffins, drinking espresso, and feeling for the world as if we were in a stadium skybox writ small.

    The hosts were a couple I had not met before, and, as things go around here, talk turned quickly to houses, architects, and how long it takes to get things done.

    Even though it has been a long time since I saw the Japanese film “Rashomon,” I can remember the profound impression it made. “Rashomon” introduced Japanese cinema to this country, and its director, Akira Kurosawa, went on to become one of the most influential in American filmmaking.

    So, they say Edward Snowden is a traitor and yet they give those who reported on his public service work the Pulitzer Prize.

    The Obama administration admits that it has overstepped when it comes to its spying on all of us, and yet if Snowden returns to this country, they will leap upon him and prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

    After I buried Pooh in Central Park, I wanted nothing more to do with felines, at least not for a while. I was in mourning for my little friend, and mourning takes time. My wife, however, had other ideas and a team of accomplices pitted against me.

    We lived on West 19th Street in Chelsea at the time, and a Dominican couple with four daughters had moved from the South Bronx into the building next door a few weeks earlier.

    As it happened the other day, I was in that recently relocated Amagansett store that sells little more than vinyl records, talking to my friend Carlos Lama, who works there, when a woman walked in with a surprised look on her face.

    “People still listen to these?” she asked with a wide grin.

    “Yes, they sure do,” the ever-polite Carlos replied. Then under his breath, and to me alone, he whispered, “They all say that.”

    Why is it so hard for me to give things away? My friend Myrna says it’s because, like her, I was a Depression baby. Our parents held on to worn-out, broken, or tattered things, believing they could never be replaced. Balls of string in her parents’  case, Myrna said; old screws and nails in mine. Who really needs a drawerful of cheesecloth and canning-jar wax that predates the Vietnam War?