Columnists

I’ve been asked what I would like our daughter to cook for me on the occasion of my fast-approaching birthday, and whether it’s cailles en sarcophage or mac and cheese, it will be wonderful, given the company we’ll keep.

I am of two minds about confessing my near-addiction to the give-away pile next door to the Star office at the East Hampton Library.

Visiting Quogue recently with friends who had summered there from childhood was eye-opening.

“I’m reading about the Puritans now,” I said to Mary, and a shadow passed across her face . . .

One of the pleasures of a home with older dogs, aside from surprising four-figure veterinary surgery bills, is when they get you up at the oddest hours of the night.

Because I’ve been putting my head down lately in a small house at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Green­port, the concept of “home” has been very much on my mind. If casual acquaintances were to ask, I would still say I live in East Hampton, despite the fact that it takes two ferries across Shelter Island and about an hour to get here from there.

I keep getting requests for money to help eliminate the Electoral College, which, of course, I would love to see happen, for, when you think about it, its reason for being had to do with the founders’ fear of a direct popular vote that a demagogue might manipulate to his advantage.

What a thrill it was to attend a performance of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess” last week at the Metropolitan Opera. The tickets had been purchased a long time ago as a present from my husband, Chris Cory, but he was under the weather and unable to attend. Instead, his sister, Eleanor Cory, a composer and dear friend, attended with me.

Usually around the time of his birthday, I quote Dr. Martin Luther King’s assertion that it’s abominable that poverty continues to exist in a country as rich as this, and there his words, lifted from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” written in 1967, lie, until I exhume them again a year hence.

It had been a while since it happened that I was mistaken for Breadzilla Brad.

We’re going soon to hear a soothsayer, and I hope what she says concerning the new year (being 2020, it should sharpen her foresight) will be as soothing as my mood is now, a fact that can be traced certainly in part to Dr. Langone’s orthotics, which seem to have angled me ever forward onto my toes, a good thing if you’re ready to rush the net in doubles.

Given that what has been called fourth-wave feminism has swept the country, as manifested by the #MeToo movement, it comes as a surprise, at least to me, that the only right guaranteed women as well as men in the Constitution is the right to vote. Can we still be second-class citizens? Yes, men, all of whom were white, wrote the Constitution.