Columnists

   The one thing my children know is not to buy me perfume for Mother’s Day on Sunday. And even though the perfume makers purport to use all types of natural ingredients, such as sandalwood, rose, patchouli, white lilies, and ambergris, they also use chemicals that are not listed on the label that include benzoin resin, deer musk, acetoin, bisabolol, and perillaldehyde, whatever that is. No wonder I’m allergic to it.

   One of the more frequent questions I get these days when talking to someone whom I have not been in touch with for some time is how the beach in front of our house survived the winter. Hurricane Sandy set the table, as it were, for the ordinary winter storms that followed, so it is reasonable for friends to wonder whether we, too, suffered badly.

    The answer is mixed, as it is along the whole South Fork shoreline. Sandy was not the end of the world, but it sure came close. 

   A story in The Star last week about recycling left me, and perhaps many readers, with an uncomfortable awareness that the state law requiring that all refuse be separated at its source is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

   Well, it’s official: Spring has arrived. For Sebastian Gorgone, it was heralded by the arrival at Gerard Drive of squid-chasing bluefish; for me it announced itself in the form of a deer tick latched onto my upper left shoulder.

    A day later, Peter Siefken finished the job that I’d somewhat botched, though I did remember to take two antibiotic pills, as he had recommended, soon after making the discovery. The potent pills made me feel wretched, though anything’s better than having Lyme disease, which messes with your brain.

   I recently completed a two-day course to become a C.P.O., a certified pool operator, a person who’s responsible for keeping swimming pools and spas free of disease, injury, and worse. The class was held upstairs at the Montauk Firehouse.

    Most of the dozen or so who attended were renewing their certification. I was a first-timer and knew that chlorine had to be kept at a certain level to keep pathogens at bay. What could be simpler? 

   Our family was in Fairfield County, Conn., over the weekend, not all that far from Newtown, where 26 students and school employees were shot and killed in December. My impression was how ordinary it all seemed around New Canaan and Norwalk, where we were for one of our children’s synchronized swimming meets.

   The family photos are scattered in clusters and packs all around the bedroom: They sit on the radiator, the desk, the three dressers — littered across any available flat surface. I got into this habit back in the days when I used to move between two houses every year (renting out what was my winter one to summer people), and needed to be able to scoop up all my pictures quickly, and pack them. Trouble is, they are getting quite out-of-date, and I haven’t figured out how to get prints of newer ones, particularly of the grandchildren.

   So, it’s spring — a bloody spring, a promising spring. Not long ago, when the Olympic committee was proposing to ban wrestling from the Olympics — wrestling, which, besides running, is the Olympic sport — I said to Mary I’d never met a wrestler whose character I didn’t admire. And now, given the abomination in Boston, that generalization is swept away — with the dead, with the maimed.

   The tenant in Brooklyn returned to Japan, so I took the opportunity to paint the living room and remove a bunch more belongings, not that I have space for them here.

    In the odd spare minute, I’ll go through shoeboxes filled with old photographs, mostly 31/2-by-31/2-inch Kodacolor prints, a blurred or fading date stamp on the back. Those that catch my eye get scanned and placed on a little stack on the desk, where they lay bare the magnitude of change.

   Perhaps one of the more depressing, if relatively inconsequential, predictions of the results of the continued filling of the atmosphere with man-made carbon dioxide is that poison ivy will become more widespread and even more noxious.

   Sometimes nothing goes right. We were to be 12 at dinner, 7 adults and 5 children. Turkey breast, which had been marinated in an Asian-style sauce, was in the oven, to be served with rice, broccoli rabe, and zucchini, an apparently perfect meal for all. Chris had made a big bowl of cut-up fruit for dessert, and it was at the ready, along with cake pops. (If you haven’t seen cake pops, they’re round balls of cake that has been iced and put on a lollipop stick. A favorite with the kids these days.)

   As a cold rain slants down (and as the grass and mosses green before my eyes), it is pleasant to think of Cayo Levantado, an islet off the Dominican Republic to which we repaired recently to divest ourselves, however temporarily, of any untoward thoughts, or of any thoughts whatsoever, frankly.

    Things did not begin well: Our room, which was to have had “a garden view,” according to the Web site, gave out onto a macadamed back lot, which, although we were at a palatial resort hotel, seemed no different from what you might gaze upon were you at Motel 6.

   Now, I like Brian Williams. I usually watch his nightly news report at 6:30 p.m. But I have to take strong exception to the way he reported the emergence of millions of 17-year locusts expected in the next few weeks along the East Coast.

    Preaching to the choir, he was, full of anxious anticipation, brow furrowed with the threat of the looming plague. What’s next, he asked. First we are forced to endure mega storms, and droughts, and on and on. Oh the racket! Oh the horror we will now have to endure!

Eighty years ago last month, a boy was born in Eisenach, Germany, in a country already being torn apart as the Nazi Party rose to power. That boy was Karl Egon Heilbrunn, my father-in-law, and the story of his coming into the world, his defiant father, and what happened next is one of the millions of small tales of that terrible time that should not be forgotten.

   When Hillary Clinton, in an intense primary battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, said she was ready to lead the country from day one, she started an avalanche of everyday people using day one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says the use of these words to indicate the start or the beginning of something dates back to 1971, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t really common in the popular vernacular until an estimated 2.5 million people watched the candidates debate in 2008.

   The viewing choice the other night was between “Berkeley Square” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

    “I guess it’s ‘Berkeley Square,’ ” I said to Mary, “because you don’t like sushi.”

    “Penny [Wright, her boss at Rogers Memorial Library] says you don’t have to like sushi to like it,” she said.

    “The sushi one then.”

    I’m glad I chose “Jiro” because it’s about a man who does one thing well, so well in fact (he’s considered by many to be the best sushi chef in the world) that at 85 he’s still working every day and still trying to improve.

   One of my assignments last month was to take pictures at an East Hampton Village Board meeting on the issue of solidifying a more modern approach to the vastly important international issue of Dogs on the Beach.

    One man spoke at length concerning forming a 2,000-strong organization directed toward “education” and “behavior” of both dogs and dog owners on the beach. He seemed to view it as a social activity, socializing with other dog owners at the beach, like in Central Park, but the beaches of this far-flung village are not Central Park.

   Just this week we received a message via Facebook from a reader in California who expressed what sounded like disbelief that The East Hampton Star had begun to ask frequent visitors to its Web site to buy an online subscription.

    This occasional reader said he lived on the West Coast and picked up a copy of the paper when he visited here in the summer. “I like to keep up with the local news,” he wrote. “Is it really true that you now want me to pay for an on-line subscription?”

    It is a good question. Here is an answer.

   My 5-year-old granddaughter, Nettie, is good at wishful thinking. I doubt that an adult gave her the idea that if you told the Easter Bunny, like Santa, what you wanted, you probably would get it. I am sure the bunny left her and her 3-year-old brother, Teddy, baskets with appropriate goodies on Easter morning, but leaving the bunny a note about what she wanted for (ahem) Easter must have been her own idea. And it was a two-sided note at that.

   I was surprised when, on arising this morning, I was cheery. There was no reason to be, but perhaps I am programmed to be so, particularly when things aren’t going well.

    There is spring, of course. Where it is I don’t know, but everyone’s saying they can sense it; there seems to be general agreement as to its inevitability. And then, of course, summer, which I inveighed against recently, perhaps unfairly, but it had it coming. “Ou sont les etes d’autant?”

   It’s really been a long time since I observed Easter in any meaningful way — or in any way at all. Tradition lived on this year, with an afternoon drive to Brooklyn and a late dinner, alone in my near-empty apartment, of Indian takeout and a couple Heinekens.

   In the early East Hampton Town records accounts are frequent about the initial apportionment of land by the trustees, who were the only governing body. Though it is not stated in an obvious fashion, it appears that the grants of acreage were conditional in that recipients were obligated to abide by certain obligations, some spelled out, others apparently assumed.

   “Childrens’ Garden — No Ball Games, Cycling, Dogs” reads a sign published with a recent story in The Guardian, an English daily newspaper, informing readers that “the sometimes vexing question of where and when to add an apostrophe appears to have been solved in one corner of Devon: The local authority is planning to do away with them altogether.”

   Whatever happened to the laughter boat? Which was to visit countries around the world and laugh, the idea being presumably that laughter would be catching.

    Sometimes I think our only hope lies, rather than in buggering priests or in cardinals with shadowy pasts, with the world’s comedians, those who have keen intellects and can hold a mirror up to the horrors and hatreds that individuals and groups somehow rationalize.

   I don’t buy Easter outfits anymore. I don’t wear them. It’s not because Montauk doesn’t have an Easter parade — even though we don’t, that’s what church services are for — it’s just that I’ve outgrown the whole new outfit thing. And forget the bonnet. I’ve always hated hats; I don’t have the head for them.

   “Have you seen a white skateboard?” the woman asked me, a hint of desperation in her voice.

    I had noticed her a short time earlier at the Abraham’s Path kids park run by the town in Amagansett. We were on the basketball court, and she and a young girl were taking shots, talking in Spanish and English interchangeably, while my son, Ellis, and I passed a ball back and forth.

     Across the park, two boys, the woman’s sons, I assumed, took turns on a skateboard on the ramps, while several other girls who were under her charge rode bikes.

   “It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” This Sir Walter Scott quotation provided Peter Matthiessen with the title of his book “Men’s Lives, “on the history and decline of the South Fork’s inshore fishery — and about the men whose lives depended on it. The quote has an ominous ring, and I wasn’t surprised that it kept coming to me when I was in Nova Scotia last week.

   Our spirits have been rising lately with the promise of spring, though spring, as anyone who’s lived in Bonac a while knows, can be a will-o’-the-wisp, heralding the year’s truly most depressing season — summer.

    It’s not “A-a-pril come she will,” it’s “Memorial Day, get ou — out of my way.”

   “I want your life,” said my Aunt Pat from California upon seeing me at my nephew’s wedding on Friday night. “I joined Facebook just to look at your pictures,” she said.

    “No, you don’t,” I assured her. I don’t post an update when I struggle to make the rent, I explained. I don’t share a picture of that. But yes, I live on an amazing island and I am blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful commute to East Hampton, by land and sea, and I enjoy capturing it when I can and sharing.

   Yesterday at 7:02 a.m. spring began in the Northern Hemisphere. With any luck the change of season will bring an end to the seemingly relentless string of coastal storms that began on Oct. 29, when Hurricane Sandy steamrolled the region.

    Sandy was just the biggest and single-most destructive of the 2012-13 assaults. A northeaster followed just over a week later. Then, after a number of ordinary blows, came the February blizzard and a couple more storms, including one on March 6 that echoed the great northeaster of that date in 1962.