Columnists

    On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of running water. Actually, I had noticed a soft flowing noise Saturday night, but decided I was imagining things. After all, a plumber had been to our house to fix the furnace and one of the toilets that very day, so surely nothing could be amiss with our pipes. By Sunday breakfast time, however, I realized I needed to investigate. Peering down the cellar steps, I saw a flood. I put on my cracked old boat boots, crept down, and found half the concrete cellar floor covered with water. It was five or six inches deep in one area.

    Of course when I said, on my return from San Pancho, Mexico, “Let the games begin,” I didn’t know a blizzard was imminent, which caused the cancellation of just about everything over this past week, except for the skating at Buckskill and the Gin Rummy games which Mary seems to invariably win, even as she says I am an astute card player.

    I was whiling away some time last weekend at the library, when I spied a copy of “Salinger,” the recently published oral biography of J.D. Salinger, the author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” staring back at me from the shelf.

    And even though I have a half dozen other books gathering dust on my bedside table, I brought it home and have been plowing through it and look forward to watching the documentary of the same name, which will be shown on PBS’s “American Masters” series on Tuesday night at 9.

    There was a near-sell-out crowd at the East Hampton movie theater on Saturday night for the 6:30 p.m. screening of “American Hustle,” and a buzz was in the air that had as much to do with the scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as any Academy Awards nominations.

    Borrowing from one of the books I’ve been reading lately (though not in the order presented), I would say that purgatory would best describe how it was getting to the small town of San Pancho, in Mexico; that being there was paradise, and that coming back was hell.

    Flying is such an ordeal these days that your destination damn well better be paradisiacal in order to justify the great annoyances you’ve got to undergo.

    Come back, Stephen Talkhouse, all is forgiven!

    This strange sequence of words was like a whisper in my ear as I trudged along the partially plowed sidewalk on Main Street ’round about midnight on Saturday, still blissfully unaware of the incoming polar vortex and its ruthlessly frigid Arctic air. A whisper, or perhaps the wind. Come back, Stephen Talkhouse.

    We were the only people in the Bird House at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday. This was not surprising, since it was a cold, cold day and only about a half-dozen vehicles were in the parking lot when we arrived.

    There were four others at the tiger display and just two besides us peering at the snow leopards. Between the five of us and another group, only nine visitors visited the giraffes when we were there. Nobody else was around as we watched some grizzly bears wrestling in the snow. No one ever stopped to see the bison.

    Air travel is a conundrum, at once wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful to travel so far so quickly, but terrible to have to leap over all the hurdles it throws in your way.

    (By the way, if our family friend Maria Matthiessen is reading this, I warn her that she should stop right here: I’m about to engage in a binge of what she calls “route talk.” And if you don’t get that reference, I refer you to a recent episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” about the five topics that without fail make conversations boring.)

    As it neared 8:30 p.m. on a recent Sunday night, Mary and I, as is our wont these days, talked of the time that remains to us, and she wondered, in that connection, what places I might really like to see and what things I might really want to do.

    “What do I really want to do now? Or in the future?” I said.

    “Both,” she said, “but let’s begin with now.”

    “As for now, rather than look at the big picture, I’d really like to watch the Steelers game!” I said.

    Midnight was the first. He was a big, tough tom, jet-black with just a couple of white hairs on his throat, a “witches cat.”

    We did not adopt him; he adopted us. I was 3 or 4. We were living in West Hempstead. My mother went into my parents’ bedroom. There was a black sweater on the bed that began moving. My mother screamed. Knowing Midnight, he probably didn’t even blink.

    My parents put him outside; he came back in. He quickly became a McMorrow.

    Sharp-eyed readers of a nautical sort may notice a small but significant change in this week’s newspaper. For what I think may be a first, the tide table, which usully appears in the sports section, no longer gives the times of the daily highs and lows at Promised Land. Instead, it lists the ups and downs for the Three Mile Harbor entrance.

    Our decision to do this reflects two things. The first is that government tide tables are easily available for Three Mile Harbor, and the second is that no one much knows where Promised Land is anymore.

    The conventional wisdom, as usual, is right: Being a grandparent really is wonderful.

    Almost nothing could have pleas­ed me more as the holidays came on than to see several of my grandchildren in performances. So far we have enjoyed two onstage, and two in make-believe shows at home. My husband and I have 12 grandchildren between us, but because they don’t all live nearby, we look forward to trips hither and yon for catching up.

    In Nelson Mandela and, closer to home, in Lee Hayes we have examples of moral authority, a persistent strength in the face of injustice, made all the more notable for their refusals to succumb to bitterness.

    There are very few humans who exhibit that charity, that superior strength, which can come out of suffering, but which, in many more instances, can result in resignation or a lust for vengeance.

    I was working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 when the film department there presented a one-week program of the films of Shirley Clarke. Clarke was a well-known independent filmmaker during the 1950s and 1960s, when few women worked in the field. Her first feature, an adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play “The Connection” (1961), won praise for its graphic depiction of drug use, but entangled Clarke in a two-year censorship battle, which she ultimately won.

    Leo the pig has hit what appears to be his adolescence — constantly leaving a mess on the floor and trying to carve out a little space of his own just to be left alone.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the story of our pet house-pig, let me explain that he joined our family over my most strident objections. My wife, Lisa, and elder daughter, Adelia, had fallen for what appeared to be an online con, a Texas breeder who claimed that it would weigh no more than 10 pounds as an adult. Don’t ask how much he cost us or to ship by air.

    If federal sharpshooters show up here and pick off some deer, they won’t be acting on my behalf even though a resident deer family devoured the Christmas cactuses that were outside for the summer. The cactuses had gone out and in for years, flowering for Christmas, so I’m particularly aware of their loss this week. If I had known how hungry the deer were going to be, I might have been more watchful. Four small cactuses of the variety that blooms nearer Thanksgiving have taken their place, but they’re scanty substitutes.

    If all went well, we’re in San Pancho, Mexico, now, having escaped Christmas, for the first time ever.

    She remonstrated a bit when I told her a few days before we left that I’d gotten her a present (a gold hummingbird pin). I had seen it advertised in The New Yorker after we’d seen a jaw-dropping documentary on these extraordinary birds.

    Dear Santa,

    Please say it isn’t true. Assure us that you and your reindeer-driven sleigh will not be replaced by octocoptor drones dropping packages down our chimneys. We’d miss your rosy red cheeks, long white beard, and belly that shakes when you laugh like a bowl full of jelly. Will we soon have to leave batteries out for you instead of cookies on Christmas Eve?

    Little did I know all these months that the school lunch that I was making for one of my daughters was actually feeding someone else’s kid. Not every day, mind you. This has only occurred on those mornings when I felt inspired at the crack of dawn to boil up a pot of penne, toss it with pesto, and spoon it carefully into a Thermos. And, I only learned about it when my daughter  mentioned in passing that her friend had asked why she had stopped bringing in her favorite pasta.

    “You don’t eat your lunch?” I asked.

    “No, well, Liv likes it,” she said.

    On Monday this week I awoke — I won’t say like Ebenezer Scrooge — to the awareness that the year was rushing to an end. Two and a half weeks till a new year. . . . And so I hurriedly began getting ready for it.

    I would have been standing on line for an eternity in Chelsea today to experience 45 seconds of it in Yayoi Kusama’s “Mirrored Room,” but forgot, in my anticipated bliss, to get someone to look after our aging Lab, Henry.

    Every professional writer who makes his or her career gathering other people’s stories should be on the opposite end of that equation at some point. Sure, we write about ourselves and our experiences from time to time, but it is very different when someone else decides to take on your story, whatever it may be.

    Most local after-school activities were canceled Tuesday as a light snowfall drifted through the air over the South Fork. Traffic on Main Street quieted down; the usual rumble of work trucks was thinner. The snow wasn’t sticking. The temperature was slightly too warm, but that did not stop the preparations.

    From my window, looking out toward the Town Pond green, I could see the occasional snowplow roll past, all geared up with nothing to do.

      Our family doesn’t like to throw anything away. This is a problem, given that I and one of my sons have inherited houses that were full of things to begin with, and given that my daughter used to haunt yard sales and the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s Bargain Box looking for interesting household implements and china and doodads.

“At a certain point you’re going to plan that gathering which you won’t be able to attend. You’re going to make your final arrangements.”  — from the blog The Screaming Pope

       Q. Dear Pope, as you know, I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and recently settled on Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, which I’ve been hoping to show you one day soon. Should I select a plot on higher land, so that drainage is good?

       We tried, but, as usual, failed to escape Thanksgiving.

       “Let’s go to Sam’s,” I said to Mary when the subject came up, “and have a large pizza with cranberry topping.”

       It’s not that we are antisocial — we do care for our relatives, but when they’re foregathered all at once it can be overwhelming, especially if you are — as Mary often is — the designated cook. (I, being the designated joyful one, have an equally arduous task.)

     There are Hamptoners who only use their houses here one week a year. I know this because two years ago I worked as a sous chef for such a family. Headed by one of the biggest Wall Street whales, they only inhabit their Water Mill House during Thanksgiving week, the rest of the year being spent in the city, Florida, England, France, and probably more places to which I’m not privy.

       When I was younger, my standing joke at this time of the year was that all I wanted for Christmas was socks. It was true then, and it is true now; socks are just fine, at least for me. For our three kids, however, gift-receiving is another matter altogether.

       And children’s presents are made complicated these days by the ubiquity of smartphones. While the younger ones may want those shiny and bright geegaws seen in the Sunday paper circulars, the truth is they will cast them down quickly to lose themselves in a tiny screen if given the chance.

    Thank goodness President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Congress to set Thanksgiving permanently on the fourth Thursday in November so that we can follow an annual routine. If Thanksgiving were allowed to fall pell-mell on any random day of the week — like Christmas does — I am not sure how we would get ourselves organized.

    I get so wrapped up in the winter holidays that everything else goes by the boards. Television, newspapers, Facebook? I have no idea what’s going on in the world, beyond the rounds of the Thanksgiving marathon.

    There are some days when you feel that you’re up to anything, at the top of your game.