Columnists

    If you had told me last month that I would be missing a 45-pound bundle of muscle and joy, a “hound mix,” according to ARF, I wouldn’t have believed you.

    With Halloween upon us, a ghost story would seem appropriate, and, as it happens, there is a tale of Congress Hall to be told.

    The house, which stands on Main Street overlooking the East Hampton Village Green, is ancient and storied. It was in the Mulford family from when it was built, sometime after 1680, until 1976.

    Congress Hall got its name somewhat cynically during the mid-19th century to note that it was where many of the men of the village would gather to talk, welcomed by their bachelor host, David Mulford.

    The letters to the editor in The East Hampton Star, to me, are the icing on the cake. I was about to say they are the spice in the stew, but stewing is not only a method of getting a batch of foods together and cooking them, but also means fretting or fussing . . . and maybe making a fuss isn’t quite what some letter writers need to be further encouraged to do.

    I’m in the eighth ditch of the eighth circle of Hell now, with the falsifiers. Today it would probably not be so populous a place, for relatively few of us moderns can claim to know the truth (thus how could we falsify it) enveloped as we are in cosmic molasses.

    Speaking of cosmic molasses, I was glad to see the Nobel Prize winner Dr. Peter W. Higgs, after whom the Higgs boson is named, does not use a cellphone or a computer — a laudable but perhaps inevitably doomed attempt by the so-called God particle’s discoverer to remain disconnected from the madding crowd.

    My first job after moving to Springs in 1985 was as a freelance copy editor, which made sense after years of writing. My second job, taken in 1986, was as prep cook at Bruce’s restaurant in Wainscott, which made sense only because I liked to cook. I had never worked in a restaurant or cooked professionally. Even in my home kitchen, performance anxiety was part of every undertaking. But my idea of prep work was what I did before cooking a meal at home — chopping vegetables, washing salad greens, peeling potatoes. How hard could it be?

    The restaurant economies of Bridgehampton, and to a lesser extent Water Mill, have benefited, albeit ever so slightly, from our eldest daughter’s taking to ballet and other forms of dance in a big way. The greenhouse effect, on the other hand, gives me room for pause.

    I’m just going to throw this out there — I’ve read parts one and three in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy. I skipped part two because how much sex can two people really have? It’s something I tell my husband every week. And considering I’m not a teenager or even young anymore, other people’s sex lives are something I can read about only so much.

    Today, you’d think, as in Keats’s ode, the warm days would never cease, and yet the autumnal sighing — a melancholy beauty — has begun.

    Here’s to the soft-dying day, and to gathering what buddies ye may, for Old Time’s a-flying.

    Enough: “Don’t stop,” Andy Neid­nig, the lifelong runner who was celebrated in a Sag Harbor race Saturday, told me on the occasion of his 90th birthday. “Nature takes care of that. Meanwhile, don’t think about it.”

    Okay, Andy, I won’t, I won’t.

ACT ONE: Boy Meets Candy

fade in: Popcorn, large

cut to: Milk Duds, box

slo-mo: misshapen spheres

cascade onto buttery maize

intimations of endless bounty

hand disappears into bag (MOS)

scoops up a lovely melange

dark balls and white fluff

sweet chocolate and salty corn

match made in casting kitchen

VO: “The journey has begun —

as American as Shinnecocks

as rich as Milton Hershey

as suspenseful as a Damon

and/or Affleck spy thriller.”

    One thing is clear about the East Hampton Town Trustees’ Largest Clam Contest: They are going to need a bigger boat if it gets any more popular. Well, at least a larger place to hold the thing.

    Ever since the 2004 presidential election, when I went to Florida to try to help legitimate voters avoid being turned away from the polls, it feels like every progressive organization in the country has had me on its radar. Perhaps one gave another its database; I certainly haven’t been signing up myself.

   “I’ve only gotten to the second circle of Hell,” I said to my daughter Johnna in an e-mail the other day, “but I like it.”

    My father, who used to teach humanities, said Dante had to be taught, though I’ve found an edition that has plenty of explanatory notes. Somebody ought to try a modern version of “The Inferno.” It would probably sell like hotcakes.

    The fence-sitters, by the way, weren’t even allowed into Hell, being neither sinners nor virtuous.

    There were maybe 30 of us at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor the other night, watching a PowerPoint presentation on how to spot an Internet “phishing” scam.

    Not a virus, not a bug, not a worm, not even the so-called “Nigerian 419” shakedown (419 is the number of the Nigerian Criminal Code section dealing with fraud — thank you, Wikipedia), where somebody in Lagos urgently desires to give you a big chunk of his rich uncle’s money in exchange for a little of yours to bribe it out of the country.

   There is a bit of irony in that the weekend I spent touching up our storm windows and getting them in place was followed by a week in which temperatures approached summer-like highs.

    Getting a call back from East Hampton Town Hall is a hit-or-miss proposition for the news media these days, which is why a flurry of responses to an editorial that appeared on this page last week was a surprise.

    This is my last issue as a staff reporter for The East Hampton Star and I will leave on amicable terms with those I admire and respect there. Before you ask what’s next, the answer is “I don’t know.” According to my perpetual spiritual calendar based on “A Course in Miracles,” that is how it should be. “When we go into a situation not knowing, there is something inside us that does,” it read on Sept. 18. “We step back in order that a higher power within us can step forward and lead the way.”

    Who: You and all of the various stakeholders in the health care delivery, consumer, and insurance fields are impacted by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All of us will continue to be affected by this law, whether through changes in the way you purchase health insurance or in the many new reports required of your employer by the Department of Labor.

    Things are quiet now, the racket is over, and silence, marvelous silence, is about to gather us in. I feel it in the air, I see it in the light that glistens on the honeysuckle leaf in the outdoor shower, and, as happens every fall, the feeling is delightful.

    Of course the world remains with us, and we with it, though to be spared the hyperactivity of summer — and each succeeding summer does seem to be more frenetic than the one past — is a blessing. We can think now, if we’d like, stand outside ourselves a bit, and breathe.

    We were gathered on a backyard deck. The light was failing and a chill was coming on. We had been asked to share something we had written, preferably poetry, with a small group of friends, a “read-in,” if you will. There were only a few poets among us, however. After listening to several short and sassy poems, we were treated to an unfinished memoir that the group agreed was a novel waiting to happen. Then, a United States District Court judge and law professor took out a manuscript and read what might be called a playlet. It went like this:

    Did Job ever get chiggers?     

    Let’s go to the book, Jerome. . . .

    Yes! In fact, it’s the first plague to have been visited upon him by the Lord.

    “. . . So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot [check] to the crown of his head [check — well, shoulder in my case]. Job took a potsherd [there being no cortisone cream in those days] with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.”

   After my daughter was born just over five years ago, when my two nights in the hospital were over and it was time for me to check out, I couldn’t believe that the nurses would trust me enough to let me leave with her. What did I know about taking care of a child? I hadn’t studied enough. Panic!

    As I sent my daughter off to kindergarten last week, I felt almost the opposite. She’s mine now, indoctrinated into our family’s particular way of doing things, a part of our culture, one of us. How can I trust her to someone else?

   One of the things they don’t tell you about being a parent of small children is that time, as you once may have known it, ceases to exist. This came to mind over the weekend when I was finally able to start some house chores that had been postponed by the birth of our youngest, Ellis, over three years ago.

   One of my granddaughters had some sushi in hand when she arrived at my house after school the other day. The other granddaughter checked out the freezer and asked me to make her chicken fingers another day.

   It took a lot of self-convincing to get me out to pick beach plums by myself last weekend. I had been hearing how plentiful they were at Maidstone Park for about two weeks, but I was reluctant to go out alone, I guess, because berry-picking has, for me, always been a communal activity. (Beach plums fit into the berrying category, right?)

   I stand naked before you, computerless. Humidity may have been at fault, or ants. I don’t know, but there I was on deadline with no “h,” no “j,” no “g.” It was very disconcerting, especially given the fact that I know my failings when it comes to dust and mold and mustiness in general, i.e., it probably had been because of my neglect that the computer didn’t work.

    So I got a ticket. Not a speeding ticket, a parking ticket. At Trout Pond. Wrong place, wrong time. Guilty.

    But. . . . What went through my mind was this:

    This doesn’t apply to me, because I was working.

    I didn’t see the sign.

    I didn’t look for a sign.

    I wouldn’t have read the sign if I had been looking for it or if I had seen it because:

    I was working.

    It was a weekday.

    It’s just a parking lot near a pond.

    I just wanted to see if there were any good pictures to take.

   School is back in session, which means that once again my wife and I are on the road, going back and forth to Bridgehampton, where two of our three children are enrolled. Lisa took on the first day’s trips Monday; I was able to avoid making a run until midafternoon on Tuesday.

    Last year our middle child was able to get a bus back to East Hampton after school, which was helpful since Lisa and I work there. This year, the bus route has changed, so until we can work up a carpool or another arrangement, one of us has to make the trek.

   When The New York Times reported last week, on the front page, that a major lobbying effort was being made to reinstate a proposed cut in payments to dialysis centers, and that 205 members of Congress had asked that the cut be eliminated, my attention was riveted. Ev Rattray, the editor and publisher of this newspaper and my husband, who died more than 32 years ago, was a dialysis patient in the last years of his life, after cancer claimed both his kidneys. That was a long time ago.

   Not long ago, I mentioned some ways in which the freedom of which we often prate is constrained; it’s not only limited by the certainties of death and taxes, but by myths we adore, hatreds that seethe, failures of the heart, and such.

   Earlier this summer I was sitting with a couple of friends at the bar at the Topping Rose House and began to talk to the woman next to me. Why else go to a bar except to meet people you otherwise wouldn’t? In this case, both she and the conversation turned out to be well worth the next day’s hangover.