Columnists

    Ever since the 2004 presidential election, when I went to Florida to try to help legitimate voters avoid being turned away from the polls, it feels like every progressive organization in the country has had me on its radar. Perhaps one gave another its database; I certainly haven’t been signing up myself.

   “I’ve only gotten to the second circle of Hell,” I said to my daughter Johnna in an e-mail the other day, “but I like it.”

    My father, who used to teach humanities, said Dante had to be taught, though I’ve found an edition that has plenty of explanatory notes. Somebody ought to try a modern version of “The Inferno.” It would probably sell like hotcakes.

    The fence-sitters, by the way, weren’t even allowed into Hell, being neither sinners nor virtuous.

    There were maybe 30 of us at GeekHampton in Sag Harbor the other night, watching a PowerPoint presentation on how to spot an Internet “phishing” scam.

    Not a virus, not a bug, not a worm, not even the so-called “Nigerian 419” shakedown (419 is the number of the Nigerian Criminal Code section dealing with fraud — thank you, Wikipedia), where somebody in Lagos urgently desires to give you a big chunk of his rich uncle’s money in exchange for a little of yours to bribe it out of the country.

   There is a bit of irony in that the weekend I spent touching up our storm windows and getting them in place was followed by a week in which temperatures approached summer-like highs.

    Getting a call back from East Hampton Town Hall is a hit-or-miss proposition for the news media these days, which is why a flurry of responses to an editorial that appeared on this page last week was a surprise.

    This is my last issue as a staff reporter for The East Hampton Star and I will leave on amicable terms with those I admire and respect there. Before you ask what’s next, the answer is “I don’t know.” According to my perpetual spiritual calendar based on “A Course in Miracles,” that is how it should be. “When we go into a situation not knowing, there is something inside us that does,” it read on Sept. 18. “We step back in order that a higher power within us can step forward and lead the way.”

    Who: You and all of the various stakeholders in the health care delivery, consumer, and insurance fields are impacted by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All of us will continue to be affected by this law, whether through changes in the way you purchase health insurance or in the many new reports required of your employer by the Department of Labor.

    Things are quiet now, the racket is over, and silence, marvelous silence, is about to gather us in. I feel it in the air, I see it in the light that glistens on the honeysuckle leaf in the outdoor shower, and, as happens every fall, the feeling is delightful.

    Of course the world remains with us, and we with it, though to be spared the hyperactivity of summer — and each succeeding summer does seem to be more frenetic than the one past — is a blessing. We can think now, if we’d like, stand outside ourselves a bit, and breathe.

    We were gathered on a backyard deck. The light was failing and a chill was coming on. We had been asked to share something we had written, preferably poetry, with a small group of friends, a “read-in,” if you will. There were only a few poets among us, however. After listening to several short and sassy poems, we were treated to an unfinished memoir that the group agreed was a novel waiting to happen. Then, a United States District Court judge and law professor took out a manuscript and read what might be called a playlet. It went like this:

    Did Job ever get chiggers?     

    Let’s go to the book, Jerome. . . .

    Yes! In fact, it’s the first plague to have been visited upon him by the Lord.

    “. . . So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot [check] to the crown of his head [check — well, shoulder in my case]. Job took a potsherd [there being no cortisone cream in those days] with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.”

   After my daughter was born just over five years ago, when my two nights in the hospital were over and it was time for me to check out, I couldn’t believe that the nurses would trust me enough to let me leave with her. What did I know about taking care of a child? I hadn’t studied enough. Panic!

    As I sent my daughter off to kindergarten last week, I felt almost the opposite. She’s mine now, indoctrinated into our family’s particular way of doing things, a part of our culture, one of us. How can I trust her to someone else?

   One of the things they don’t tell you about being a parent of small children is that time, as you once may have known it, ceases to exist. This came to mind over the weekend when I was finally able to start some house chores that had been postponed by the birth of our youngest, Ellis, over three years ago.

   One of my granddaughters had some sushi in hand when she arrived at my house after school the other day. The other granddaughter checked out the freezer and asked me to make her chicken fingers another day.

   It took a lot of self-convincing to get me out to pick beach plums by myself last weekend. I had been hearing how plentiful they were at Maidstone Park for about two weeks, but I was reluctant to go out alone, I guess, because berry-picking has, for me, always been a communal activity. (Beach plums fit into the berrying category, right?)

   I stand naked before you, computerless. Humidity may have been at fault, or ants. I don’t know, but there I was on deadline with no “h,” no “j,” no “g.” It was very disconcerting, especially given the fact that I know my failings when it comes to dust and mold and mustiness in general, i.e., it probably had been because of my neglect that the computer didn’t work.

    So I got a ticket. Not a speeding ticket, a parking ticket. At Trout Pond. Wrong place, wrong time. Guilty.

    But. . . . What went through my mind was this:

    This doesn’t apply to me, because I was working.

    I didn’t see the sign.

    I didn’t look for a sign.

    I wouldn’t have read the sign if I had been looking for it or if I had seen it because:

    I was working.

    It was a weekday.

    It’s just a parking lot near a pond.

    I just wanted to see if there were any good pictures to take.

   School is back in session, which means that once again my wife and I are on the road, going back and forth to Bridgehampton, where two of our three children are enrolled. Lisa took on the first day’s trips Monday; I was able to avoid making a run until midafternoon on Tuesday.

    Last year our middle child was able to get a bus back to East Hampton after school, which was helpful since Lisa and I work there. This year, the bus route has changed, so until we can work up a carpool or another arrangement, one of us has to make the trek.

   When The New York Times reported last week, on the front page, that a major lobbying effort was being made to reinstate a proposed cut in payments to dialysis centers, and that 205 members of Congress had asked that the cut be eliminated, my attention was riveted. Ev Rattray, the editor and publisher of this newspaper and my husband, who died more than 32 years ago, was a dialysis patient in the last years of his life, after cancer claimed both his kidneys. That was a long time ago.

   Not long ago, I mentioned some ways in which the freedom of which we often prate is constrained; it’s not only limited by the certainties of death and taxes, but by myths we adore, hatreds that seethe, failures of the heart, and such.

   Earlier this summer I was sitting with a couple of friends at the bar at the Topping Rose House and began to talk to the woman next to me. Why else go to a bar except to meet people you otherwise wouldn’t? In this case, both she and the conversation turned out to be well worth the next day’s hangover.

   If I remember correctly, I had told Eileen Roaman that she was crazy when she told me she had been asked to take a position on the East Hampton Town Planning Board and was thinking of saying yes.

    She did not listen to me as far as I could tell. Few of those who confide in me do, though later, after they have had a taste of the process, they will invariably tell me that I had been right.

   The difference between my husband and me, at least since he retired, may be boiled down (ahem) to the way we share kitchen duties. We both like to cook, but for themost part I load the dishwasher and do all the picking up and putting away. He provides the elbow grease, washing the pots — and, okay, the wine glasses.

   I have undergone a month of guests, and though they’re closely related, and thus conjure good feelings, I’ll be happy to have Mary all to myself again.

    It is enough to be able to talk to her, about any old thing, though inevitably, because she’s more generous of herself than anyone I know, we’ve rarely had the time to “hang out,” as they say, in the past few weeks.

   I’m sure those of you who read my columns are expecting a rant about our summer visitors on this Labor Day weekend. And I do hate to disappoint, but social media has taken the fun out of that. This summer I learned to seethe internally and had not one fight with an annoying individual.

    I also learned how to avoid them. I stayed close to home on weekends and tended my garden, read a few summer novels, and went only to our secret beaches. Yes, we still have some. I also slept with a bird, which sounds weird and a bit kinky if you’re into birds, but let me explain.

   A story that popped up in the last week, about an old anchor hauled up by some members of the Lester clan while they were fishing in the ocean off Amagansett, reminded me of a similar find my family made quite some years ago.

    It probably was in the mid-1970s. My father had restored an old menhaden fishery striker boat, putting a long-shaft Seagull outboard on the back so we could putt around Gardiner’s Bay.

   My youngest grandchild, who is 31/2, has discovered that grandma has, perhaps, not the most adorable feet.

    I was sitting around barefoot the other day when Ellis pointed at a rather gnarled and red bump on one of the toes (recently operated on) on my right foot. “Grandma?” he asked. “What’s that?” I answered him cheerfully, but without thinking too carefully about what I was saying: “Well, dear, that bump is a corn.”

   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.