Columnists

It may be too soon to crow, but the $13 home electric bill I received this week could be the start of a happy relationship between me and the new solar panel array on my Amagansett roof.

The summer of peace and love was also a summer of war and incendiary strife, from which East Hampton, a “backwater” then, in which every now and then ripples of the great national issues of the day were felt, was at one remove.

The names of mobile devices — not to mention the lingo used to describe the things they do — are Greek to me. Obviously, I know “app” is short for “application,” but will you think I am a nincompoop if I admit I still don’t know why we stopped calling them programs? Aren’t apps just software programs? I’m sure this marks me as a curmudgeon akin to those who refused to stop calling the fridge a “Frigidaire” or a suitcase a “valise” back in the last century, but I feel all right about feeling old-fashioned. I’m not dying to use WhatsApp or TikTok or whatever else my grandchildren are addicted to today.

I watched Monday’s sunset from the starboard deck of the ferry from New London to Orient. The Thames River shoreline was in silhouette, the sky mostly orange to the west.

Indeed it was a relief to drive in leisurely fashion around and around the roundabout on Tumbleweed Tuesday, reveling in the fact that “they” were gone, at least for a few days. I was run in on a charge of ADIEU, Aimless Driving in Euphoria Unparalleled, a violation, but was let off with time served after my employer testified in asking for leniency that I’d been here all summer.

How awful it is to have to hold a collective breath this week as our children, and grandchildren, begin a new school year. How unnerving that gun violence has caused us to doubt the lyrics that our “country ’tis of thee” is still a “sweet land of liberty.”

There was scarcely anyone else around when I fell asleep on the ocean beach late Labor Day afternoon. I had left my pickup truck in the parking lot and walked to the west to look for whales and meditate a bit. The town lifeguards, with no one to keep and eye on, lazed around under a plastic shelter and took turns in the stand, looking out at nothing much at all. Two people and a dog were in the distance.

Just when I thought I had seen every last obscenity the 2019 Hamptons summer scene had to offer, things took a turn for the strange. On an afternoon walk down Job’s Lane in Southampton on a recent afternoon, I was greeted by a number of “keep out” and “no trespassing” signs as I approached my favorite people-watching spot.

I should probably have my head examined, for I still like to watch football — perhaps all the more so because, aside from wearing pads in the seventh grade (though I don’t think we played any games) and aside from some touch football (I always wanted to be an end, not a blocker), I never played it.

My mother’s baby brother, Herman Spivack, who lived in Los Angeles and thereabouts for many years, died on Aug. 21 at the age of 102. He was one of six siblings (a seventh died as a toddler) and 15 years younger than my mother, who died in December of 1995 and would be 117 were she alive today.

Liam, age 9, stalked toward the meal lying completely still on the ground before him. His ears pointed straight to the sky while his head stayed low and his legs advanced with a deliberative rhythm. Step. Step. He reached his prey, but, taking mercy upon it, simply nudged it with his nose.

The frequency was very high as we walked out onto the street one sultry night recently with O’en, owing to the tree crickets, whose numbers in our otherwise comatose neighborhood seemed to be legion.