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When my parents made me, I got the shape of my father’s face. I got his dark hair and unfortunate eyebrows. I got both his sweet tooth and his love of vegetables. I got his talent for eight-ball, too.

The other morning, looking out toward Gardiner’s Bay, I saw two white-tail bucks browsing among the beach plum scrub. They were spectacular from a distance, sleek buff coats and high antlers still in velvet. But I cursed their existence.

I should write about this while the effect still lasts. To be put on steroids was, I told the doctor, a wonderful thing for a golden-ager, though I know, at least have been told, that they’re not great for you in the long run.

Tuna or chicken? Salad, that is. I’ve got a mania for tuna salad and have been known to even eat it for breakfast — deli-style, with lettuce and mayo on a hard roll — when I am rushing to work and have no time to cook (which is usually all the time). Chicken salad makes a fine sandwich, too, especially when on good bread, pumpernickel perhaps, and at this time of year with a slice of fresh tomato. But I wouldn’t dream of chicken salad for breakfast. That would be bananas!

The men would walk from the trains after getting to the end of the line, pay for their beer, and walk back to get ready for the ride back to New York.

Was it so long ago that I wrote about the articulate students, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, who had come to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., to speak eloquently of their suffering?

Thirty-seven emails arrived over­night on Monday, but I wasn’t able to access them because I had mislaid my computer. Left it at work, actually.

After 20 or more years of faithful service, our overstuffed dryer gave a sad little grunt and wheezed to a stop, leaving many too many wet beach towels behind.

It’s my late stepfather’s birthday today, and while we were at the antipodes, I think, when it came to societal questions, we were on the same page when it came to sports, to baseball, squash, and tennis in particular.

Like many of you, I have been glued to television-news debates about mass shootings and what can, or should be, done to stop them. Gun control is a frequent topic as the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination face the cameras. But my attention is drawn to my desk, where the focus is narrow and a book called “Semicolon” by Cecelia Watson sits alongside one I have mentioned before, Mary Morris’s amusing and astute “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

Over the years I had received those familiar email requests from people asking me to be the conduit for money to be deposited in my account and sent elsewhere, and those obvious scams were always deleted. Why not this one?

Over dinner on Sunday, the subject turned to sharks. Since it was the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week blitz, this was not surprising.