Columnists

I had just written about a “rite of summer,” namely the first day of the 2019 junior lifeguarding season, and was inspired, therefore, to take part in another, namely the opening for the season of our outdoor shower.

Sometime after 10 p.m. on the Fourth of July, the brake lights from stopped cars on Montauk Highway curved west from where we stood on the sidewalk outside Pizza Village. Like thousands of other spectators, we had come to Montauk for the fireworks, and now everyone it seemed wanted to go home.

On a day that I thought I should stay in bed — dragged down temporarily by a cough that came hand in hand with the fecund delights of spring — I went instead with Mary on a bus trip to the New York Botanical Garden, returning, if not cured, enlivened by what I’d seen.

This has been a fine week to be a bird. Judging from the noise outside the window before dawn, they are fat and happy — especially those that eat insects. This has also been a fine week, or year actually, to be a mosquito.

Brown-headed cowbirds and guinea hens were pecking at the ground this morning where seeds had fallen from the bird feeder. I am splitting my time these days between Greenport and East Hampton and have noticed with interest that, aside from the shore birds you see along the beach on the ocean side, avian visitors on the North Fork are much the same as those on the South Fork. (Although the guinea hens, of course, are not native or migratory; they have been imported to feast on ticks.)

Gino says the new racket won’t make any difference, that no matter how well-engineered the tool, the flaws of its wielder remain, unchanged.

Having been out of town all last week, I felt as if I needed some updates getting back to the East Coast. Joanie McDonell, who lives just up the beach from me, has been a faithful correspondent since I wrote in mid-spring about how it had been ages since I saw any toads or snakes around.

Getting up early is always a good idea, but it was especially enjoyable this week after I spent a night in the family house in the village with my daughter and her kids and Sweet Pea, our little, red-haired ARFan dog. 

‘It gets worse,” Mary said as I lay stunned in my recliner after having winced and writhed in sympathetic pain throughout yet another episode of “Outlander.”

‘Driscoll’s.” That was Ad­elia’s one-word answer in a blind taste test of strawberries bought locally on Sunday. By then, I had already had three quarts of them boiling in the preserving kettle. The cliché about commerce is you get what you pay for. This weekend, I learned that lesson yet again. 

Twenty-six letters to the editor were published in last week’s Star, on June 13, and as of this writing we were still counting those that will be in this week’s edition; I think it will be 31. 

Time travel. It’s one of the great, impossible things we sci-fi nerds dream about doing. And I recently figured out how to do it.