Columnists

   The very first attempt I made at  journalistic writing was a fictional obituary as an academic exercise in an evening course at the Columbia School of Journalism. It never occurred to me at the time that I would go on to write and edit hundreds (and hundreds) of them.

    Not long afterward, I married into the Star family and began writing obituaries for real. Ev Rattray, whom I met at the journalism school and who had come home to edit the paper, set the standard: Obituaries were not to be written by rote, and they were to celebrate the life of those who died.

   While the nation wonders what should be done about the deficit, East Hamptoners are wondering what’s to be done about the surfeit of surf shit.

    Some even say it’s a metaphor for our times, emblematic of what they see as the country’s irreversible descent into deep doo-doo. And they’ve begun carrying flags that say, “Don’t Sh— On Me.”

    In rebuttal to the fecaphobes, some dog owners, I hear, are rallying around a Super Bowel Movement, a “shit-in” planned for Memorial Day at Main Beach.

   The mark is gone now where they laid Yoco Unkenchie. The year was 1653, and a group of Manhansett men were carrying their dead sachem on his final trip from his Shelter Island home to Montauk, where he was to be buried.

    Yoco was the chief of Shelter Island’s native people, and it was said that upon his death they disbanded, some to live among the Montauketts, others to join the Shinnecocks.

   Let’s hear it for the Springs School’s fourth-grade opera, “Cat Tales” — or  “Ton of Fun 61 Opera” —  which was performed four times at Guild Hall this month. Imagine, 61 kids divided into small groups, writing a libretto, composing music, building sets and doing lighting, working on makeup, sewing costumes, and handling promotion. I’ve been to lots of kids’  productions over the years, including some directed by theater professionals, and you can take it from me: This was extraordinary.

   In my mother-in-law’s house are two large black-and-white photos prominently displayed, of Secretariat with Ron Turcotte aboard, leaving their four 1973 Belmont Stakes competitors in the dust, 31 lengths behind, and of Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford in the opening game of the 1955 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers.

   “Not that way!” Jasper said, after I cut his scrambled eggs into fork-size pieces. His small feet began to stamp a protest beat on his chair. A rant of frustration simmered just below the surface. “You moved it!”

    “Which way?” I asked, unclear of the infraction.

    “Turn it around,” he demanded, a whimper now set to the rhythm of his feet.

    I stirred the eggs in the bowl. Not it. I rotated the bowl clockwise. No. Then counterclockwise. No.

   About a week ago, a small parcel, postmarked San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrived at the office. Inside, cushioned against breaking, was an old glass bottle of the sort that might have once contained a soft drink.

    The legend, “J. D’Amico Quality Bottler,” in raised letters, appeared on one side, and “Amagansett, N.Y.” on the other. Vertical ribs made it reflect light in a colorful way. In the hand, its tapered midsection was vaguely reminiscent of the classic Mae West Coca-Cola bottle. The raised letters at bottom said it once contained seven fluid ounces.

   When Aaron Swartz, a technological genius, was found dead last week at the age of 26, an apparent suicide, he joined a phalanx of idealists who died for a cause. Explained simply, he believed that scholarly and scientific information should be shared on the Internet freely, and he did what he could to make that a reality.

   I’m a little tired of this — propping up the economy every year when it comes to Christmastime. I read in the papers where we must keep spending to keep ourselves out of yet another recession, and I’m doing my part, but it’s becoming burdensome. I can’t do it all alone.

   Lisa Ekdahl, where have you been all my life?

    I remember the excitement, there on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, when I’d walk down the steps into Nuggets, a secondhand record store near Kenmore Square. With the only three or four dollars I owned, I’d scan every bin, seeking the one record that would maximize those thin resources.

    A scratchy copy of “Sticky Fingers,” a Beatles bootleg, or take a chance on something previously unheard? The process was laborious, progress was slow, but over time a collection grew and a musical education bestowed.

   It was family day at East Hampton Bowl, though I didn’t know it at first on Sunday as I took our 8-year-old daughter there mid-afternoon just to get out of the house.

    Evvy and I had tried and failed to go bowling a week earlier, but had arrived after what apparently was a surprisingly early closing time; maybe it was just dark inside, but the lack of vehicles in the parking lot made it seem uninviting.

   There’s no doubt that the story was highly exaggerated, but when I was a child I heard it said my grandmother was so strong that she had once carried a claw-foot bathtub in her arms. I tend to believe that statement was metaphorical, perhaps derived from an old Yiddish folk tale or saying, but as a child I believed it as fact.

   “Where do wars and internecine strife go?” the New Year asked on arriving at the dump.

    “Here, in nonreconcilables,” came the answer.

    “Thanks, it’s a heavy load.”

    “Wait, I’ll help you,” said the supervisor, sweeping some ancient antipathies into the pit as he made his way to the overstuffed van with the YR-2013 plate.

    “Here I am tossing them out and they’re not even paid for!”

   A few years ago on Gustavia’s main street, beside the yacht-laden harbor, outside the Cartier shop, a pedestal stood. On the pedestal was a stainless, bejeweled watch sitting on a smaller pedestal of its own. No glass, no cage, just sitting there out in the open. When you reached for it, your hand was spotted by some kind of electric eye and the watch disappeared through a trap door.

   Cramer, they called him around the documentary film company where I worked in the early 1990s, and although I doubt Richard Ben Cramer would have remembered me from those days, the news of his death on Monday of lung cancer at only 62 was a shock and a disappointment.

   Sitting in the living room last week, I enjoyed the warmth and dance of a fire in the fireplace as I began reading “Team of Rivals,” the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on which the film “Lincoln” was based, a Christmas present. It, too, had something to say about fires.

   Since a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to the security of our free state — the National Guard and well-regulated police forces ought to be ample in that regard — why should not the right to bear arms be infringed?

    It would be wonderful to have in place of the Second Amendment one that reads, “A well-educated populace being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of students to be kept out of harm’s way shall not be infringed.”

   I grew up in Manhattan. I traveled to school on a school bus and when I was old enough I used my school bus pass to take the regular public buses. The uptown buses often let you out right onto subway grates. Not a problem, we wore school uniforms . . . with bloomers. No kidding.

   Whether or not the East Hampton Town Board decides to ban or strictly limit duck hunting in Fort Pond, Montauk, the growing debate points to a certain reality: Things are not quite the way they used to be here.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

   I care not what others may say, I love steroids. Some were shot into me — my left shoulder — the other day, and the day after that I felt 20 years younger. And Henry, who got a contact high, had a spring in his step too.

   “Peeloff the partisan war paint,” said President Barack Obama a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. The last thing we need is division when it is quite obvious that the opposite is required for the good of all and quite possibly is the point of all of the disasters of late.

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

   The Edwards tradition of cutting a white pine from their own Northwest wood lots for a Christmas tree goes back to the time Christmas trees first became popular among East Hampton’s old-fashioned Presbyterians.

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

   I got the best present ever for Christmas this year. It came a little early but I already love it.

    It’s a brand new titanium knee, given to me by Dr. Eugene Krauss of the Krauss Center for Joint Replacement in Riverhead. He was the fifth orthopedic surgeon that I saw and the first to find that I had tibial plateau necrosis, a dead bone.

   Gathering up children’s clothes and winter coats for East End Cares to distribute among those whose belongings were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, brought me up short. It is true that three current generations of our family have lived in my house, but, even so, the amount of clothes we have accumulated — and hold on to — is out of line.

    Children’s clothes are in a class of their own, of course, when it comes to hand-me-downs: Having cousins and older siblings’ wardrobes to  shop  from is a terrific thing, given how quickly kids grow.

   Sherrye Henry recently announced by way of e-mail that the $40,000 needed to underwrite the Artists-Writers Game exhibition at Guild Hall next summer had been raised, and from only three sources — Mort Zuckerman ($20,000), who reportedly bought U.S. News and World Report so he could have a column and pitch for the Writers, Barnes & Noble ($15,000), and the Shana Alexander Foundation ($5,000).

   I was more than confident, I was cocky.     

   It was the first week of October. I was sitting at the weekly East Hampton Star editorial meeting. I had already talked about what I anticipated the next few days would bring me on my beat, which is cops and robbers, plus the town’s zoning and planning boards. (Sometimes the last two are confused for the first two, but they are different, I swear.)

    I was finishing up, and, almost as an aside, I said, “I have jury duty on Tuesday.”

   Bedtime comes early this time of the year, or at least we try. I’m up an hour before the kids have to be out of bed to get a couple of ounces of coffee down before trying to cajole them into their clothes, to brush their teeth, to eat breakfast. If they make the bus, the older two are gone by 7:30. Then it’s time to stuff the youngest one into his car seat for his ride to school.