Columnists

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.

   The provocative story of what happened when an Associated Press reporter broke the news that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender, ending World War II, came across my desk this week — by random coincidence, at the same time controversy was breaking out over the recent revelation that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained records of 20 A.P. phone lines.

   Yes, spring may be here, but, besides the dazzling gold­finches and cardinals, there is the oaken semen dripping on one’s windshield, pollen-suffused air, allergies, tick bites, the wretched antibiotics required to treat them, and, sports-wise, it’s been a bit of a slog — the great majority of our high school’s teams not being playoff-bound.

    Still, lushness is to be preferred to slushiness.

    Presumably, there will be growth next spring, but then I wonder will I, a weekly sportswriter perhaps overly dependent on the winning drug, be here to enjoy it?

   “It feels like years since it’s been here,” sang George Harrison in the Beatles’ soul-soothing song “Here Comes the Sun.” Yes, “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter” but “smiles [are] returning to the faces.” The 60-degree weather and returning greenery and blossoms are visible in every direction I turn, and I caught myself smiling ear to ear when my iPhone camera turned its lens on me instead of the cherry blossom tree I was aiming to capture during a recent walk.

   As our children get older, Lisa and I have found ourselves shifting into the chauffeuring mode of parenthood. The after-school hours, and increasingly week­­ends, are spent driving the kids from one obligation to another. There are dance lessons, rehearsals of different kinds, and sporting events that have taken us as far as Pennsylvania.

   Two of my gal pals and I have been doing yoga together now for 10 years. Ani, our teacher, insists we’ve only just begun — that it takes years and years —  and years — to get good at it.

   Mary said on our return from the Dominican Republic that she didn’t much like my phone greeting, in which I say, “I’m either kicking the can down the road, pushing up daisies, or angling for a promotion,” especially the pushing-up-daisies part. And so, I’ve just changed it to “I’m either racing with the moon, running on empty, or jogging my memory . . . please leave a message.”

   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.