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My surname is not common, but it is notorious. One of the real-life mobsters portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “The Irishman,” is named Russell Bufalino.

After reading the wonderful editorial on impeachment in The Times the other day, I was prompted to seek out the Federalist Papers, but our library didn’t have a copy, nor did BookHampton, so I reached for Tocqueville. And here’s what he has to say on the subject, comparing European and American constitutions.

Left on a vast plain, we humans instinctively look, at a minimum, for the horizon to place ourselves relative to the sun’s path. The slab sides of mountains are immaterial as our eyes trace the ridges, which are but lines where the ground and the sky meet.

The Yiddish-German words “shoen vergessen” are the punch line of the only joke I’ve ever been able to remember, and remember it I did when I read Rabbi Josh Franklin’s essay “Rethinking God” in The Star on Sept. 26.

My father found grace in Sister Marie Joseph’s smile, a smile that told him everything was all right, that he was loved, no matter what, that he did not have to atone, and thus a heavy burden was removed.

Four pints of Roma tomatoes and Laura Donnelly shamed me into getting the preserving kettle out early Monday morning. I had picked up the smallish, hard tomatoes a week or more earlier with the intention of canning them sooner, but instead they had just been shunted and shifted from one place to another around the kitchen as the clock of ripeness ticked. One day they were on the windowsill, the next the mantelpiece, then the next on a different, now north-facing windowsill.

Once upon a time I dreamt of a career singing and dancing in Broadway shows. Journalism was not center stage for me — yet. I trained as a triple-threat for a while and even joined a cabaret company, but never really got anywhere beyond the New Jersey dinner theater scene.

As far as I’m concerned, the trouble with our congressman, Lee Zeldin, is that he doesn’t come up for re-election again until 2020.

North Main Street was blocked this week as a crew hired by the Long Island Rail Road worked on raising two trestles about three feet above their current grade. The project had been a long time coming. For years, trucks too tall to make it through the underpass there and at Accabonac Road have done damage to the trestle. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the L.I.R.R., had had enough.

Ketchup was a kitchen staple when I was growing up in the 1940s, as it still is in most American households. You know the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? I think we might better be able to chart the zeitgeist of the United States by keeping an eye not on auto production but on our national condiment.

I’m getting near the end of the Old Testament now, and it surely has been a test.

It may be too soon to crow, but the $13 home electric bill I received this week could be the start of a happy relationship between me and the new solar panel array on my Amagansett roof.