Columnists

    Feb. 2, 2014, Ditch Plain, Montauk: The voice rings out, “Lads, paddle, a set is coming.” Four men on surfboards ranging from 9 to 10 feet paddle 30 yards farther seaward to wait, positioning themselves for the four-foot winter set.

    Three of the men had been talking, light Irish brogues distinct, pleasant enough topics, not much at all, prior to the sighting of the three-wave set, clearly visible 250 yards offshore. The fourth surfer had mentioned to one of the three Irish guys, “You need a hood.”

    An aside in an editorial that appeared on this page last week threw down a challenge of sorts. In explaining why The Star persists in leaving the “s” off Ditch Plain, we said that it was in deference to old maps. Well, a reader saw this as an incoming softball and swung.

    “While you are at it,” David Buda wrote in an email, “why doesn’t The East Hampton Star use the historically correct hamlet name of The Springs, instead of plain old Springs?” Oh boy, here we go.

    A friend sent an eBlast this week that offered a balm to the winter-weary soul. Using a service called Paperless Post, his email bore the subject line winter 2014, but its contents, the poem "in time of daffodils" by E.E. Cummings, heralded spring.

In time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

In time of lilacs who proclaim

The aim of waking is to dream. . . .

    “‘I gave up masonry in November,’ ” Ken Raf­ferty told me in May of 1978. “ ‘I could stay down here and paint 14 hours a day. I get my hot cocoa and dash around back through the snow. People must think I’m crazy. One abstract I did I called, ‘It’s Snowing on My Cocoa.’ ”

    Everything I said last summer that I would get done in winter has not yet gotten done. When the roses were still in bloom, I had plans to strip down and then paint a corner cupboard for my dining room, clean out the big closet in the living room, and organize my shoe closet. There are just been too many distractions, one of which is watching reality television at night.

    The surgeon general’s first report on how bad smoking is for the human body came out on Jan. 11, 1964. Fifty years later — perhaps in connection with the report’s anniversary? — CVS Caremark, the huge drugstore chain that has a branch in East Hampton, announced on Feb. 6 that it would no longer sell tobacco products. When I read the news I let out an audible hooray.

    The workers have just left, leaving us with a pristine room at the end of the hall, a room that had long been overstuffed with all manner of things — a log bed, a dark, ponderous chest of drawers, a ratty light-green rug, and a closet so bursting at the seams that the unanchored sliding closet doors angled several inches outward when shut.

    I was wrong, and the nuns were right. It turns out Hell does exist.

    I was not going to argue. I knew I deserved this. Still, I didn’t know what had happened, only that when I awoke, I was in a parking lot a short walk from the gates of Hell.

    I got out of my car and walked through the strangely frigid air to the ticket machine. There were signs posted everywhere about putting a ticket on your dashboard — as though you were ever coming back, once through those gates.

    There has been good ice here, and I mean really good ice, for the first time in quite a few years. This means that those of us with iceboats tucked away in garages and barns have been busy digging them out and heading for Mecox Bay.

    Because we had set aside Saturday to celebrate our 4-year-old son’s birthday, I did not get to my boat until Sunday morning. The bag containing several key bolts and my foot spikes was in the basement, and the rest, more or less, in the barn in East Hampton behind my mother’s house.

    Did you hear that 111.5 million people watched the Super Bowl on TV Sunday? This number may not be an eye-opener for sport fans — apparently, this was the fourth time in five years that the Super Bowl has set a record as the most-watched television event in United States history — but it was a stunner for me.

    I saw a film the other night, “Riding the Rails,” and, on re-reading some of my old interviews this weekend, I came serendipitously upon one with Alex F. Dzieman, whom many of you, I hope, may remember as “The Lone Defender” on our letters pages years ago, whose letters were signed “From the Mountaintop.”

    I can’t imagine anybody working at a newspaper suffering from the condition known as writer’s block. At a newspaper, you live by a simple creed: Write or die.

    Writing has always seemed natural to me. Whether I was writing copy for advertising or writing a poem or a play, it has always been about hearing the words, then writing them down. Hearing the words, and voicing them.

    Everyone has a voice.

    Main Street in East Hampton will never be the same for many of us now that Cam Jewett is gone. Mrs. Jewett was 102 when she died of pneumonia on Jan. 27 at Southampton Hospital — and what a fine, long life she had.

    I first got to know Cam, as she was known by just about everyone, when I was just a child. My grandmother would take me over to Cam and Edward Jewett’s house to play backgammon. The house, where she lived right to the end, is just to the south of the Maidstone Inn, overlooking Town Pond.

    It was 17 degrees that morning, so maybe the reason the conversation turned to warm water sailing was to put our minds over matter. I had been coiling a heavy orange extension cord, which was no longer needed near my desk, and announced rather smugly to a co-worker who happened to be standing nearby that I knew how to coil lines correctly because I had spent a lot of time on boats.

    “You got all but two turns right,” he said rather seriously as he took the cord to put it away. That my score was only fair was embarrassing.

    “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a book, “Where Do We Go From Here — Chaos or Community?” that was written in 1967, and into which I dip every year around this time.

    He said that almost 50 years ago, when there were three social classes in this country. Now, it’s pretty much fair to say there are two, the gap between them continuing relentlessly to widen.

    I want to thank Mr. Ira Rennert. Really. 

    Years ago when he began work on his compound in Sagaponack many were outraged. How could he take that lovely unbroken vista, Fairfield, and build something on it?

    Rumors swirled as more and more work was done in this huge ex-farm field overlooking the ocean. People tried to get a look at it. They flew over it and crept up from the beach to try see what was going on.

    In fewer than the allotted 140 characters, someone  took to Twitter to make note of an obituary that appeared in The Star last week, but it was a first. Social media has become ubiquitous, but somehow, to my knowledge, no one had tweeted before on what we had written about a loved one who had gone.

    For those of us in local news there is the knowledge that we have far more readers now than we ever had before, thanks to the Internet. What we write now has a long reach and an extraordinary degree of persistence.

    About 20 years ago, when my husband and I were courting, we came across one of Dr. Dean Ornish’s  books, “Eat More, Weigh Less.” The word  “wellness” was not in the air at the time, but we were ready, and old enough, to give serious consideration to alternative ways of improving our health.

    I had thought I’d been sleeping unduly long — 9 to 11 hours at times if I can get away with it — until I read a report in the weekly science section of The New York Times on the so-called glymphatic system, which takes out the trash, as it were, from the brain while one is in Never-Never Land.

    “So what is removed from our brains as we sleep?” I asked Mary, who is as much of an insomniac as I am a narcoleptic, this morning.

    “I don’t know,” she said. “Read the article. I’ve saved it. It’s in the computer room.”

    On Sunday nights, our entire street goes dark. We used to be among the weekend families, the ones who packed up their lives and returned to the city midday Sunday afternoon.

    Having children changes everything.

    It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and Ellis, who will soon turn 4, and I busied ourselves preparing one of the old kitchen chairs for some regluing. It was the pig’s fault.

    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.