So there I was in One-Stop’s parking lot, depowered because of a dead starter motor, and, oddly, it was pretty much a replay of what had happened in November during the time of Hurricane Sandy, I told Bill Hall, who had come out with the screwdriver that a helpful coast guardsman had asked for, thinking there remained some hope that the car could be revived.
“I think it was in this same parking spot that it happened the last time,” I said to Bill. “Your son Ben gave me a ride.”
Driving back from Queens after delivering 890 copies of The Star, I get to Southampton and the storage room at midnight and 20 minutes later am rolling east toward 114, where I’ve been sleeping for the last four or five nights. Five or six trips up a flight of stairs and now my room is like a studio apartment someone has just moved into, minus the pizza or Chinese takeout.
Maybe asleep by 1:30 but after five hours the iPhone’s alarm is singing its mournful tune and I am pulling on jeans and out the door and onto 114 and from there 27 east toward Montauk.
These end-of-August weeks can be both relaxing and frenetic, at least around the newspaper office and on the home front. On the one hand, the constant barrage of publicity pleas and self-promotional requests has died down. Yet on the other, with the kids out of camp and parents working, there is a sudden imperative of finding them things to do.
The East Hampton Library, it seemed, broke into the highest echelons of good causes — up there with the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, motherhood, and apple pie — on Saturday, when a reported 2,000 people jammed into a tent on the Gardiner-Flynn grounds off James Lane in the village for the ninth Authors Night extravaganza. The crowd was estimated as 25 percent larger than ever before.
I think I’ve finally made my fortune: I’ve come up with an anti-raging pill that preliminary tests have shown lasts a full 48 hours.
There are, of course, some side effects, none really serious like death, though if you remain inordinately compassionate for more than the prescribed length of time you might consider calling a doctor.
“I want to write about that,” I said, as I often do upon hearing about something I think sounds interesting, fun, and that the world would benefit from. The response from my new friend Bradley Francis, who I met a few weeks ago at a Wailers concert in Amagansett and again at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island, was “Okay, we’ll get you on a flight with us tomorrow.” Minutes later, his friend asked me a few questions and I was confirmed from LGA to ATL the next afternoon.
Up early Saturday and Sunday looking for waves worth surfing, I made an informal survey of beach conditions following what had obviously been two wild nights on the sand. Almost everywhere in town, the beach garbage cans had filled to overflowing, and people had left their trash in the general vicinity.
At an age when many of my peers have retired or, if they are not quite of retirement age, busy with new interests, I’m still pounding the keys at The Star and continually confused about which of the zillion enticing summer events I should pursue in my hours off. A trusted colleague hit the nail on the head: “It’s a job just trying to figure out what to do,” she said.
Gordon Grant, one of our neighbors, says now that our driveway’s fixed his kids will no longer have to wear waders when they come over on Halloween.
Could it have been that that great system of lakes, seemingly scoured out by the retreat of the last glacier, was off-putting? I had never meant to give offense.
“See,” I said to Mary the last time she complained of it, “one of the puddles is shaped in the form of a heart! Have you no concern for the environment?”
Though normally I try not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice, there are just a few things I have to get off my chest. Because here it is August and this summer, before it was even July, I couldn’t take any more. My eyes hurt from rolling, and my new seasonal utterance, “Puh-leeze,” was already overused.
Maybe it’s because I’m subject to the seasonal barrage of entreaties from P.R. lackeys desperately trying to get attention for their clients, touting the next great Hamptons this or that.
Waiting in the San Francisco Airport departure lounge late Sunday into Monday morning for a delayed flight home, I noticed that of the couple hundred people hanging around only a handful were reading a good, old-fashioned book. Oh, folks were reading, of course, or looking at something or other, but the majority were using some kind of handheld device or computer. I saw no one reading an actual, hard-copy, dead-tree magazine or newspaper at all.
As any habitual reader of this column already knows, my neighborhood — or, anyway, the property surrounding my house — was, last fall and winter, home to a resident family of deer. Five would appear at once, and two were fawns. For the most part, they ambled, rather than ran, across the lawn or down the lane; they seem to enjoy visits to the adjacent East Hampton Library grounds, too. I never could figure out where they bedded down. But while other members of our household railed against them, I took a benevolent, maternal attitude.
Elizabeth Kotz recently put me on to Electro Mix, little packets of minerals — heavy metals, her husband, Steve, told me — that I have found to be quite effective when playing tennis in humid heat.
Last month a friend gave me, unsolicited, a copy of a book called “Wheat Belly.” What was she trying to tell me?
It hadn’t escaped me that, having reached a certain age, my middle had begun to expand. I eat very healthfully, and exercise regularly, but still the old spare tire clung to me like an embedded tick.
No one in our household, nor at Russell and Fiona Bennett’s place up the way, heard the sirens Saturday night.
It was a little after 10 p.m. when, according to a police report, a drunken driver flipped his BMW convertible, injuring himself and two passengers. We did not know about it until much later, when my sister sent us an e-mail saying she had heard of it on Facebook.
Perhaps it can be said that I have a handicap where computers are concerned. After all, I started using them in what might, depending on the actuarial tables, be considered the second half of life. No matter. I keep trying to catch up, to learn more and get better at it. But I am not sure I am getting a passing grade.
I know it’s after the fact and thus irrelevant to the recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an African-American teen whom Mr. Zimmerman, an armed neighborhood watch volunteer, had pursued while the youth was returning to the condo his father’s fiancée rented in a gated Florida community, but one wonders why on earth a neighborhood watch volunteer was carrying a gun in the first place.
Thinking on that reminded me that armed “auxiliaries” were once proposed here.
When workers get off the job, one might think that they would kick back and relax after a hard day’s labor. That they would at least go home, take a shower, and maybe collapse into bed. But on weekend evenings, as soon as work is out at around 5 or 6, Latin American men of various nationalities head to the barren fields and dense woods of the community center at Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton.
We have met the enemy and it is us. That is the conclusion I reached this week as summer 2013 began to reach full fever pitch.
Here’s my epiphany: Those of us who consider ourselves local like to think it is folks from away who need a little attitude adjustment. Perhaps they do, what with their expressions of entitlement, boorishness, and piled-on demands, but frankly, it is those of us who should know better by dint of living here year round who really have no excuse.
Protesters holding signs reading “Trayvon Martin Lynched” marched down University Place in New York, where I happened to be, on Monday. From across the street, the marchers seemed outnumbered by police. A long line of officers walked in tandem with them, another line of police on motorcycles edged the street, and other officers, apparently of higher rank, stood nearby, along with several vans. I had no idea what to expect and wondered if the police were sent out in high numbers only to keep order or because violence was feared.
Sartre was right: Hell is other people, I think,s as I try to navigate as calmly as possible through the throbbing, siren-wailing traffic here.
Well, perhaps not other people, but other drivers, for sure. In the aggregate, they and I could pass for a pretty fair approximation of hell, which if by hell you mean torment.
Yes, it’s pretty safe to say that we who drive here in the summertime are tormented — a fact music, however serene, or talk radio, however demented, will not allay.
My iPhone 4 fell out of my back pocket and into the toilet.
Three things raced through my mind when I heard the splash: Get it out! Dry it off! I can’t believe this is happening!
I grabbed a towel and rubbed, and then I did what you are never, ever supposed to do when your cellphone gets wet: turned it on.
A flicker of life! The little Apple silhouette — glowing, otherwordly — appeared . . . and vanished.
Unfortunately perhaps, East Hampton Bowl was just the kind of place you did not think about much — or miss until it was gone. This dawned on me as I was driving west on an errand early Sunday. One word on the classic road sign said it all: Closed.
East Hampton Bowl had been shuttered at the end of June after 54 years. My first thought was of my son, Ellis, who is 3. He had been there a few times but would in all likelihood never be there again. It was a melancholy moment.
I am not a believer in astrology, but could someone please tell me if Mercury is in retrograde? What a mixed-up jumble of a week I have been having.
My brother-in-law said as I mumbled something about having to go to the U.S. Women’s Open this past week that there was, after all, nothing else to write about.
“What nonsense,” I said. “There’s Little League!” And, indeed, our 9 and 10-year-olds were not to disappoint on the evening of July 1 as they took the wind out of Westhampton’s sails, by a score of 10-0, a merciless rout that was ended mercifully after four innings instead of the customary six.
If you were to sit in the back seat of my car or hitch a ride in my pocket, you would hear me composing rules like Gibbs does on “NCIS.” Naturally, because they are mine, they are less terse than his. Maybe they are suggestions and disgruntlements rather than rules, but I like “NCIS,” and if I can channel Gibbs, why not? Another favorite, Melissa Harris Perry on MSNBC, reads (on air) a letter to someone to whom she would like to make a point. She also inspires me. Herewith:
Dear people:
We were two weeks without a functioning washing machine, and not one of the local repair companies with which I had left messages had called me back about service. It seemed odd.
We had been going to the in-laws to use their washer. For us, a family of five, plus beach towels at this time of year, that made for a lot of trips, missing items, and an all-around headache. Something had to be done.
Usually, by this time of summer, I would have become bored with the hostas that always grew around the foundation of the house and around the barn. Seemingly eternal, they were full and old — many decades old — and mostly variegated, deep green streaked with white. By July, too, I would find myself complaining that the irrepressible orange tiger lilies were taking over the circular bed in the middle of my back yard. A few years ago, I even dug up a clump of tiger lilies and had them transplanted at my daughter’s place, thinking I really needed to thin them out.
Ah, Independence Day. The heady air of freedom!
Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from self-censorship, freedom from toeing the line, freedom from zeal, freedom from banality, freedom from filling out forms, freedom from conforming, freedom from filling out more forms, freedom from drudgery, freedom from helicopter noise.
Freedom from trembling, freedom from dissembling, freedom from idee fixes, freedom from margarita mixes, freedom from hand-wringing, freedom from barbershop singing, freedom from gas, freedom from race and class.
Now that our visitors have settled in a bit and fallen in love with our beautiful beaches, lakes, ponds, and woodland areas, I think it’s time to introduce them to some of Montauk’s more colorful characters, hopefully without scaring them away, although that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.
In every small town in every city in every state, people who frequent the same gin joints tend to get nicknamed. Sometimes they’re simple, like Smiley (been there), or insulting, like Thunder Thighs (done that, still there), or Scoop (over it).