Columnists

   Did you know that all 400-some-odd members of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years? (Okay, the number is 435, not including the non-voting members who represent the United States territories and the District of Columbia.)

    I am willing to admit my own ignorance on this quite simple fact. Apparently I’m not alone: I’ve gotten consistent responses in the negative over the last few days, when I asked friends if they realized elections in the House aren’t staggered, as they are in the Senate.

   By the time I’d finished reading John Cheever’s short story “Goodbye, My Brother,” to Mary, we were both in tears, and, for a time at least, thrown back upon ourselves as beautiful writing will do to you.

    We’d been thinking of the day — a day free of care, a day of no obligations, a day largely free of traffic, which every summer becomes worse — when, all of a sudden, we were impelled to reflect upon life, not just on its joys, which, of course, we try to do as often as we can, but also on its sorrows, not to mention its horrors.

   I write in praise of the ugly golf shirt.     

   Oh, I’ve got a beauty. It’s not loud, no. It would be better if it were loud. It is, rather, a mottled mix of black and gray specks — inexplicably or inadvertently designed by someone in the employ of Bert Pulitzer to look like the ghostly nothingness of an old antenna television after the programming ends and the final bars of the national anthem fade.

   Among the subtle markers of the inevitable turn of the year is the arrival here of shorebirds from their northern breeding grounds. For a couple of weeks now, their numbers have grown along the Gardiner’s Bay beach as they fatten on the shoreline’s rich supply of food.

   “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.” If that musical ditty doesn’t immediately ring a bell, I’ll tell you it is, or perhaps more properly used to be, a familiar (and jocular) ending for songs, particularly in bluegrass. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but I couldn’t get it out of my head for a couple of days recently, after making an amusing bungle of an attempt to make a simple appointment to have my hair cut.

    Read a letter recently in The East Hampton Press the writer of which was outraged that a successful psychiatrist, who’d had “one glass of wine” at dinner, and who was driving his 86-year-old mother home, had been caught up in the police dragnet of a few weeks back.

    That fatal glass of wine had resulted in the “guilty-before-proven-innocent” psychiatrist spending the night in jail “along with 20-plus others.” The cops, she concluded, had acted out of spite, envious of the successful. Something “right out of Nazi Germany [had] occurred.”

   Summer is over. For me, anyway. I’ve been at The Star for June and July as an intern from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I don’t have to tell you that The Star is a terrific publication — you’ve probably been reading it for years.

    The stories are well researched by dedicated journalists who are serious about their craft. The newspaper that comes out each week is the beautiful result of a few dozen people and their pursuit of excellence. It’s been an honor to be a small part of that unit this summer.

   A fuss broke out in the world of journalism earlier this month, when several leading news organizations admitted they had agreed to allow the Obama and Romney campaign staffs to review quotations before publication. A New York Times reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, broke the story about this devil’s bargain, which included his own paper among others.

   From time to time, you get to meet extraordinary people, people whose lives have made others better. Such was the case last weekend when Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian women’s rights and peace activist, came to East Hampton to participate at Guild Hall in what is called the Hampton Institute, a two-day series of talks and panels on topics of national concern.

    Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, a rights activist and journalist. The prize was deserved.

    Invited out the other day onto the water, where I hardly ever go, preferring to take in the views rather than hang over the rail, I ran to CVS to buy some Sea Bands, thinking they might help.

    I shouldn’t have worried, for the cruise to and from Coecles Harbor on a restored wooden prewar cabin cruiser was marvelously placid, the adults convivial, and the children beguiling.

   The full impact of where I was standing during the Great Bonac Fireworks show on Saturday night did not really hit me until I saw a photo taken by someone on the tugboat floating right behind us, looking toward the barge loaded with fireworks where, with hard hat and goggles on, earplugs stuffed into my ears, I tipped my head back at virtually a right angle to see the shells exploding right overhead.

   In the end, the catbird won the battle of the blueberries.

   For whatever unknown-to-me confluence of meteorological circumstances, 2012 has shaped up to be a great year for the native high-bush blueberry bushes that grow at the edge of the swamps near our house. I noticed the pale-green young ber­ries late last month, and watched closely as they neared ripeness.

    So too did a catbird or two, which I could hear unseen in the brush issuing warning cries when I lingered near the patch. The calls seemed to say, “Be gone. These are mine.”

   Having spent seven days on a 41-foot ketch this summer after a long hiatus doesn’t qualify me to judge the way boats of this kind now use electronic devices, but I know what I like when it comes to sailing: the taut feel at a tiller or wheel when a boat is in perfect balance as you tack to windward on a beautiful day in a breeze that is almost stiff. It’s that simple.

   When I solicited Sinead FitzGibbon’s advice as to a lower abdominal strain that’s annoyed me for a while and has kept me off the tennis courts, she, a long-distance athlete for all seasons, said, “Take up golf.”

    Taken aback, I said, with as much finality as a diffident sportswriter could muster, “Never.” Which reminded her of her 82-year-old father, who had said when she made the same suggestion to him, ‘I’ll play golf when I get old.’ ”

   I am often complimented on my ability to find the good in situations, and have even been told that my positive thoughts can be borderline annoying.

   Nancy Pelosi was on the South Fork last weekend, although hardly anyone noticed amid all the excitement about Mitt Romney’s fund-raisers hereabouts. Ms. Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, was here to promote the re-election of Tim Bishop, who is running for a fifth term as the representative from New York’s First Congressional District.

   “Hoy es El Dia de la Independencia en Los Estados Uni­dos,” I said to a woman, who, while an engineer in her native country, does what she can here. “Y yo lo celebré con una ducha afuera!”

    She laughed on hearing I had celebrated Independence Day by showering outdoors.

    There was no need, other than the fact that I like to try, for me to speak Spanish; her English is as good as mine, but she, whom I have enlisted as a sometime teacher (thus she will be building bridges of a different kind) is willing to humor me.

   It’s comforting to me how we scoot along each year marking the calendar by holidays. January is cold and dark, and after the enthusiasm of the New Year wears off, I feel a bit of a letdown. February gets more exciting with my birthday and Valentine’s Day — seeing hearts everywhere makes me smile.

    I’m a big fan of St. Patrick’s Day, even though my family has been in this country for five generations. As spring arrives, everything is a bit brighter and the dreariness of winter is forgotten as we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. 

   Downtown East Hampton Village looked nice enough Tuesday afternoon when I walked through to get some salad and something to drink. The shop windows were full of expensive men’s and women’s clothes: colorful prints for her, blue-and-white checks for him.

   Concerts by the Choral Society of the Hamptons are sources of pleasure for our audiences, and they receive wonderful reviews. But for me, the Choral Society is more than that: It is a personal delight — and a good cause. I sometimes call myself a defrocked soprano, because I once had all those top notes, but now am an alto. No matter. I can head into a rehearsal feeling tired or out of sorts, and it falls away as I concentrate on the score in my hands and the collective sound of music-making. “Zen and the Art of Singing?”

   I ran into a close relative, my double in some respects, in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” this week.

    I picked up a copy of the play, which comes with “The Golden Age” and “What I Did Last Summer,” at BookHampton after seeing a beguiling Hampton Theatre Company production of his “Black Tie” at the Quogue Community House.

   There are no happy stories in this place, at least not for me.

    Sure, there are weddings. Weddings are happy. Brides are pretty, grooms dashing. I don’t cover weddings. Weddings don’t make the front page and they don’t sell newspapers, unless they’re marrying two super-size flavors of the month, or unless it involves local royalty.

    Me, I get the aftermath, the wives beaten, orders of protection violated. Wife stabs husband in self defense? That will sell newspapers.

   Monday, late for dinner, in my opinion, two houseguests and I walked into South Edison, one of the relatively new Montauk restaurants, hoping to get something to eat. A few minutes before 10 p.m., and the place was ringing with conversation. Nearly every table was full, and, after the flustered hostess said something about a big order and how they probably could not seat us, we headed to the Hideaway over on the lake for some Mexican food.

   During the 20 or so years when we rented our winter house in town every summer and moved to one five miles away, on Gardiner’s Bay, we had the drill down pat. Even when the kids were young — when we had a dog and a cat or two, plus assorted pets like Ginger, the goat, and Peeper, the aggressive goose — the process worked. Patterns developed about what had to be done. I knew which china to store away and which to leave for the tenants. Never mind that when we got to our summer house it was chaos; the tenants, at least, weren’t left with a mess.

   I’m full of beans this week, having made enchiladas — the third meal I’ve cooked, I think, in the past 27 years.

    My mother-in-law still remembers fondly the flounder in orange sauce I did in ’85 or so, and then there was “the green meal” for one of Mary’s birthdays — artichokes, asparagus with hollandaise, pistachio ice cream, brandy Alexanders. . . . After which I, a self-described “wokaholic” as a bachelor, dropped the ball big time cuisine-wise as Mary began to hit the ball repeatedly out of the gastronomic park.

   While everyone in America is celebrating the Fourth of July on Wednesday, I will take a moment to celebrate my dog, Brodie, an incredible golden doodle who looks like a platinum blond, purebred golden retriever. Sounds silly, I know, but read on nonetheless and you too might celebrate him. He is my hero.

   Havens Beach in Sag Harbor was closed by order of the Suffolk County Health Department yesterday and the day before that after heavy rains raised the possibility of bacterial contamination. But you wouldn’t have known this had you stopped by for a swim.

    Once word comes from the county that the beach is to be closed — as happens from time to time — the village has the lifeguard hang up a generic “no swimming” sign, and they leave it at that.

   East Hampton had a major development boom in the 1980s. At least in developers’ dreams: A 400-unit subdivision was planned for Montauk’s Hither Woods, 64 oceanfront house lots were to be carved from Shadmoor in Montauk, the 845-acre Grace Estate in Northwest was to become a community modeled on Hilton Head, S.C., with clustered and single-family houses and a nine-hole golf course, and Barcelona Neck, between Northwest Woods and Sag Harbor, was on the block.

   When one of my tennis partners the other morning asked what I did, I told him I wrote sports for The Star, and had worked at the paper for such a long time, going on 45 years now, that I was probably fit to be embalmed.

    “But first,” I said, “I’m to be enshrined!”

   It’s been a long time since I’ve been single and in the market, but having a contractor do some work around the house this year kind of took me back to the thrills and insecurities of my dating days.