If you were to sit in the back seat of my car or hitch a ride in my pocket, you would hear me composing rules like Gibbs does on “NCIS.” Naturally, because they are mine, they are less terse than his. Maybe they are suggestions and disgruntlements rather than rules, but I like “NCIS,” and if I can channel Gibbs, why not? Another favorite, Melissa Harris Perry on MSNBC, reads (on air) a letter to someone to whom she would like to make a point. She also inspires me. Herewith:
Dear people:
We were two weeks without a functioning washing machine, and not one of the local repair companies with which I had left messages had called me back about service. It seemed odd.
We had been going to the in-laws to use their washer. For us, a family of five, plus beach towels at this time of year, that made for a lot of trips, missing items, and an all-around headache. Something had to be done.
Usually, by this time of summer, I would have become bored with the hostas that always grew around the foundation of the house and around the barn. Seemingly eternal, they were full and old — many decades old — and mostly variegated, deep green streaked with white. By July, too, I would find myself complaining that the irrepressible orange tiger lilies were taking over the circular bed in the middle of my back yard. A few years ago, I even dug up a clump of tiger lilies and had them transplanted at my daughter’s place, thinking I really needed to thin them out.
Ah, Independence Day. The heady air of freedom!
Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from self-censorship, freedom from toeing the line, freedom from zeal, freedom from banality, freedom from filling out forms, freedom from conforming, freedom from filling out more forms, freedom from drudgery, freedom from helicopter noise.
Freedom from trembling, freedom from dissembling, freedom from idee fixes, freedom from margarita mixes, freedom from hand-wringing, freedom from barbershop singing, freedom from gas, freedom from race and class.
Now that our visitors have settled in a bit and fallen in love with our beautiful beaches, lakes, ponds, and woodland areas, I think it’s time to introduce them to some of Montauk’s more colorful characters, hopefully without scaring them away, although that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.
In every small town in every city in every state, people who frequent the same gin joints tend to get nicknamed. Sometimes they’re simple, like Smiley (been there), or insulting, like Thunder Thighs (done that, still there), or Scoop (over it).
The other day as I was explaining a cliché about boats to our oldest child, Adelia, I became acutely aware of the gap between us. The old saw, “A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into,” meant nothing to her, she made clear as I tried to put it several different ways.
When Anna Mirabai Lytton, a 14-year-old from Springs, was struck by a car and killed in East Hampton on June 15, it was as if the community-at-large were bereaved. As a parent and grandparent, I can think of nothing so horrible as the loss of a child.
At the dump the other day, I reached into the paper bin to retrieve a slim volume of what I thought might be racy medieval lyrics — in Latin, as it turned out — and a fat “History of the World” by Toynbee, though abridged.
The inscription referred to Santayana’s opinion that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, though the tome, while moldy (presumably the reason for it having been discarded, along with quite a few other books), didn’t look as if it had been read.
It’s quite common to see deer while driving around East Hampton. Every time I drive by the open field on Apaquogue Road there are at least 40 standing there, grazing like cattle. They have practically been domesticated, and thus we are immune to their presence.
We smirk as they munch on our neighbors’ flowers and vegetable gardens. But most of the time, we simply see them as part of the landscape and move on.
There is no way to say for certain, but it sure looked like a village traffic control officer was sleeping on the beach the other morning. Like I said, it was hard to know.
About a week ago, I was out for an early surf at the first Georgica jetty. The waves were small, but with only one other lone person to share them, it was a good way to start the day.
Having attended a batch of end-of-year school and dance programs in the last few weeks, I have become acutely aware of just how segregated the world is that my grandchildren inhabit. This is a topic that can make even the most open-minded citizens squirm; no one wants the world to be like this, but somehow we still shy away from talking about it. So let’s talk.
Call it de facto segregation, if you will: With only a few exceptions, my grandchildren live and play in near-isolation from those children who are so-called visible minorities.
The attention of metadata miners in a bunker somewhere in the godless West was drawn to the following intriguing telephonic transcript (for which a court order had been obtained, of course).
“Hi, Sarah, this rain has been of biblical proportions, hasn’t it? I’m treating myself to some apple pie a la mode.”
“A la . . . [crackling sound]? Ruth, I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up.”
“A la mode, I said.”
“Oh, a la [more crackling] is great!”
“Reading any interesting books these days?”
Given the tantalizing headline, I couldn’t wait until Thursday to read “Here Comes the Sun,” Carrie Ann Salvi’s “Relay” in the May 16 edition of The Star, so I snuck back to the production department on Tuesday afternoon. (Tuesday afternoon is never ending, as Paul McCartney sang in “Lady Madonna,” so I had time to spare.)
An unfamiliar number flashed on the screen of my cellphone shortly after 7 on Monday night. I was waiting at home for my wife to get back from a quick trip in and out of New York City and thinking about how to get the kids to go to bed.
I’m not alone, obviously, in being reluctant to submit to a party on my birthday. I haven’t had a real one since the year I turned 49 and threw one for myself, with a packed house and the kids helping prepare the food — a barbecued leg of lamb, if I remember correctly. That was the 1980s, when parties usually ended up with lots of noise and friends drinking to the music of early Frank Sinatra.
I played on grass on Sunday. On the surface, of course. And it was wonderful. Not only because it’s so easy on the feet, but also because we — me and Al — won!
Playing on a grass tennis court is my idea of heaven, so it was appropriate, I suppose, that it was Sunday.
“Some keep the Sabbath — going
to church —
I — keep it — staying at Home —
With a Bobolink — for a
Chorister —
And an Orchard for a Dome. . . .”
Nostalgia, Platonic love, and a church-like experience would hardly be on the average man’s mind when contemplating a routine excursion to the East Hampton Town dump. Now the dump is referred to as the East Hampton Town recycling center. But Sunday arrived, time presented itself, the dump beckoned.
Cardboard boxes, a damaged plastic storage container, a toy lightsaber, a carved wooden handle, a child’s club with a note of the aboriginal: These artifacts would make their final departure to the unknown.
Our regular readers are likely to have noticed a couple of new features in the last few weeks, two columnists who add perspectives not always reflected in The East Hampton Star and a notable departure.
The pace is supposed to slow after Memorial Day, but I don’t see it happening. Could it be a portent of the busiest summer ever?
June has usually been a respite between the weekend that traditionally marks the beginning of the season and the madness of July and August. Although second-home owners have long since stretched “the season” into fall and spring (and for some the winter holidays, too), it seems that this year June is being swept into the maelstrom.
I was not myself this past weekend, nor was Mary herself. You may well ask, who were we then?
“It’s not you,” she said at one point.
“Of course not,” I said, “because I’m not myself.”
Still, I felt like atoning for having freighted one night in the city with such a fervent hope we’d be able to get beyond ourselves that we came close to self-destructing.
It was too much “relax and hurry up,” and for that I was sorry.
The perils of being a fair-skinned beachgoer are legion, particularly at the beginning of the summer when no manner of sunscreen seems to protect one from the inevitable beach nap burn.
It takes place every year on the first day at the beach when sunscreen is seemingly carefully applied to face and body and an umbrella adds extra protection. This time of year, unless you have a wetsuit, swimming is not the object of visiting the beach. The ocean’s calming sound and pretty majesty are the primary sources of its appeal now.
Leo the pig ate my sunflower seedlings on Monday. It was my own fault, having left the flat, in which they had germinated and begun to reach for the air, at swine’s-eye level on the patio. Ellis, our 3-year-old junior farmer, and I had planted them about a week earlier and been watering them daily, waiting for the little green heads to peek out of the soil.
Let us now praise all things good about Memorial Day weekend. It goes without saying that those who live here year round usually stagger away from the first onslaught of the season complaining: “Oh my God,” or, “Help us! It’s begun,” or, yes, “It’s never, ever been worse!”
So what good things, you ask?
It was rather exhilarating to see some 600 fifth through eighth graders dash across Main Street one morning last week on their irrepressible way toward the Main Beach pavilion some three miles away.
“It must be the funnest day of the year for them,” I thought, as the kids, from Montauk, Springs, Amagansett, and East Hampton, cavorted at the edge of the cool ocean, remembering how I had always looked forward to the Collegiate School’s field day in the spring. (It just occurred to me that I’m wearing Collegiate’s colors today, orange and blue.)
Dear significant-others of the comb over guys,
I know you are suffering, and I am here to help. Trim this part off and leave the rest of this article around the house for the gents to see in the sanctity of the room where they do the comb-over.
The Comb-Over
Do the gentlemen with seven hairs 11 inches long that stretch from left ear to right ear really think that that looks like a healthy head of hair? Really?
Sunday afternoon, after having kept the kids cooped up in the house for the preceding 24 hours or more, it was time to get them out for some air. Lisa took our eldest off in one direction, and I loaded the other two into my truck for the drive from our house in Amagansett to Montauk.
Our destination was the Montauk School playground, which is probably the best one around. A thick layer of ground-up tires covers the ground and provides an appropriate cushion for Ellis, our 3-year-old, who knows little in the way of physical fear.
“Whose Garden Was This,” an evocative song by Tom Paxton, who lived in East Hampton for many years, came into my head this week after I drove through the railroad underpass on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton and was suddenly startled, not by an approaching vehicle (although that is a real concern), but by a stand of some two dozen wild lupines. I had forgotten how stunning their blue-purple flag-like flowers are.
“Happiness is the only sanction of life,” Santayana says at one point in his discussion of reason and how it comes to be, adding that “where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
I’ll drink to that, to happiness . . . however you want to define it. For me, mainly, it’s having the freedom to be your own person, or the freedom to be able to create yourself.
“When should I stop?” an elderly man asked Sharon McCobb at the Y the other day as he was working out with weights.
“Never!” she said.
Ah, Memorial Day, how did you come upon us so quickly? I don’t know about my fellow locals, but I’m just not ready for you.
I’m already missing winter’s empty stores, quiet checkout lines, and roads that were not yet filled with pedestrians and bike riders who don’t seem to get that there are vehicles in their midst, people rushing to their jobs, people in a hurry. The bumper sticker that says, “We’re not all on vacation,” says it all.
With apologies to Sarah Palin, our family’s pet pig, Leo, went rogue last weekend. In fact, he did it twice.
With 50 fast approaching, apparently my mind is not what it used to be as on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, I left the gate to the path down to Gardiner’s Bay open. Leo, whom I will describe a little more shortly, took advantage of this, sauntering out that way, and as best as I can figure, slipping off into the woods for parts unknown.