Columnists

   A few years ago on Gustavia’s main street, beside the yacht-laden harbor, outside the Cartier shop, a pedestal stood. On the pedestal was a stainless, bejeweled watch sitting on a smaller pedestal of its own. No glass, no cage, just sitting there out in the open. When you reached for it, your hand was spotted by some kind of electric eye and the watch disappeared through a trap door.

   Cramer, they called him around the documentary film company where I worked in the early 1990s, and although I doubt Richard Ben Cramer would have remembered me from those days, the news of his death on Monday of lung cancer at only 62 was a shock and a disappointment.

   Sitting in the living room last week, I enjoyed the warmth and dance of a fire in the fireplace as I began reading “Team of Rivals,” the book by Doris Kearns Goodwin on which the film “Lincoln” was based, a Christmas present. It, too, had something to say about fires.

   Since a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to the security of our free state — the National Guard and well-regulated police forces ought to be ample in that regard — why should not the right to bear arms be infringed?

    It would be wonderful to have in place of the Second Amendment one that reads, “A well-educated populace being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of students to be kept out of harm’s way shall not be infringed.”

   I grew up in Manhattan. I traveled to school on a school bus and when I was old enough I used my school bus pass to take the regular public buses. The uptown buses often let you out right onto subway grates. Not a problem, we wore school uniforms . . . with bloomers. No kidding.

   Whether or not the East Hampton Town Board decides to ban or strictly limit duck hunting in Fort Pond, Montauk, the growing debate points to a certain reality: Things are not quite the way they used to be here.

   It may seem funny, but I sometimes think the nicest part of my day, at least on those days when I have to work, is the walk between the house and the office. The few moments it takes to stroll the 250 feet to or from The Star, absorbing whatever the weather is and looking at the sky, keep me happy.

   I care not what others may say, I love steroids. Some were shot into me — my left shoulder — the other day, and the day after that I felt 20 years younger. And Henry, who got a contact high, had a spring in his step too.

   “Peeloff the partisan war paint,” said President Barack Obama a few days ago, and I couldn’t agree more. The last thing we need is division when it is quite obvious that the opposite is required for the good of all and quite possibly is the point of all of the disasters of late.

   A curse for someone who has to sit down in the morning and write a column is to be asked, “What are you going to write about?” It is doubly effective if the question comes right before the last one to be written in the year, when, I suppose, it is time to strike a note of some gravity or prediction or resolution.

   The Edwards tradition of cutting a white pine from their own Northwest wood lots for a Christmas tree goes back to the time Christmas trees first became popular among East Hampton’s old-fashioned Presbyterians.

   When I asked her to explain WiFi for me — and, for that matter, anything else that had to do with airy nothing that has found local habitations and names in the Internet, PCs, iPhones, et cetera — Mary was helpful, but not altogether enlightening.

    “It’s all a mystery to me,” I said. “Like the afterlife.”

    “How do you know there is an afterlife?” she said. “At least we know there is such a thing as WiFi.”

    “So you say,” I said, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say next.

   I got the best present ever for Christmas this year. It came a little early but I already love it.

    It’s a brand new titanium knee, given to me by Dr. Eugene Krauss of the Krauss Center for Joint Replacement in Riverhead. He was the fifth orthopedic surgeon that I saw and the first to find that I had tibial plateau necrosis, a dead bone.

   Gathering up children’s clothes and winter coats for East End Cares to distribute among those whose belongings were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, brought me up short. It is true that three current generations of our family have lived in my house, but, even so, the amount of clothes we have accumulated — and hold on to — is out of line.

    Children’s clothes are in a class of their own, of course, when it comes to hand-me-downs: Having cousins and older siblings’ wardrobes to  shop  from is a terrific thing, given how quickly kids grow.

   Sherrye Henry recently announced by way of e-mail that the $40,000 needed to underwrite the Artists-Writers Game exhibition at Guild Hall next summer had been raised, and from only three sources — Mort Zuckerman ($20,000), who reportedly bought U.S. News and World Report so he could have a column and pitch for the Writers, Barnes & Noble ($15,000), and the Shana Alexander Foundation ($5,000).

   I was more than confident, I was cocky.     

   It was the first week of October. I was sitting at the weekly East Hampton Star editorial meeting. I had already talked about what I anticipated the next few days would bring me on my beat, which is cops and robbers, plus the town’s zoning and planning boards. (Sometimes the last two are confused for the first two, but they are different, I swear.)

    I was finishing up, and, almost as an aside, I said, “I have jury duty on Tuesday.”

   Bedtime comes early this time of the year, or at least we try. I’m up an hour before the kids have to be out of bed to get a couple of ounces of coffee down before trying to cajole them into their clothes, to brush their teeth, to eat breakfast. If they make the bus, the older two are gone by 7:30. Then it’s time to stuff the youngest one into his car seat for his ride to school.

   That the South Fork is part of the greater metropolitan area rather than the rural place we used to think it was has become almost impossible to deny. You get the message from conspicuous consumption, both in the size and shape of many new houses and in the boutiques that have turned East Hampton’s Main Street into Madison Avenue East. But you also get the message by simply taking note of all the millions of special events you can participate in on any given jam-packed weekend.

    Take Saturday, for example.

   BookHampton has a daily quiz now, and so I thought why oughtn’t I to have one too.

    Which Shakespearean characters said:

    1. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

    2. “For in a minute there are many days.”

    3. “It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”

    4. “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t is I know how to curse.”

    5. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

   “Tashi delek.”

   The words, mumbled while fishing for coins in my pocket, surprise me, though it was I that had uttered them.

    New London, Thanksgiving Day, 11:30 a.m. I’ve allowed so much time to drive to Orient Point that I catch an earlier ferry and arrive an hour sooner than anticipated. I’m famished and everything is closed. Finally, not far from the Amtrak station, a small grocery, open.

    A middle-aged couple sits inside. Finally, I’ve chosen a few items, and stand at the counter. On the wall, pictures of the Dalai Lama.

   Sharp criticism greeted the New York Post editors’ decision this week to put a photograph of a man about to be struck and killed by a subway train on the cover of the Tuesday edition. The image presented the Post with a dilemma its editors are likely to face a lot more than we do at The Star: when to run or not run photographs that could cross a moral or ethical line. I’m not saying the Post made the right choice, but the question is more nuanced than the critics make out.

   More than 43 million Americans are said to have traveled at least 50 miles to celebrate Thanksgiving, and among them were four members of our family, including two grandchildren, who live in Nova Scotia. Two other grandkids were in Tennessee visiting other relatives for the long weekend, but it was a grandmother’s dream come true, nevertheless, having so many gathered here at one time. The feast at our house, with 14 adults and seven kids — from 2 to 11 — was all that it’s supposed to be (at least according to Norman Rockwell).

   Mary had been after me to change my voice mail message, which, she said, aside from being boring, was way too long.

    Allen, our neighbor, said, in a message he left, that it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. And so, opinion being deeply divided, I tried to be more succinct. Now when you call, you’ll hear me say, “I’m either jumping to conclusions, hurdling obstacles, or running a fever. Please leave a message.”

    We were stopped in traffic on the way to Sag Harbor a few weeks ago when a car pulled up alongside.

    “Hey,” the driver shouted. “Do you want to sell that car?”

    “I might,” I said, startled. Actually I’d been thinking on and off for a year or so of selling my much-loved little Recreational Action Vehicle (longspeak for the Toyota RAV4).

    “What year is it?” he wanted to know.

    “It’s a ’97. Listen, we’re late for a movie, and I really can’t . . .” He broke in. “What’s your phone number?”

   Life on the beach is a temporary proposition. This I learned from my father, who was old enough in 1938 to remember the hurricane that ripped across Long Island and became the one by which all others here are measured.

   My gal pal and I spent almost the whole hour it takes us to walk from the Star office to Main Beach and back on Monday talking about — what else — food.  Not food in general, of course, but specific to our Thanksgiving tables.  

   When our lights went out the second time, during the northeaster, Mary said if Obama hadn’t won she really would have been depressed.    

   The story goes that when I was a little girl of about 4 or 5 I went next door to a neighbor’s house and asked if she would sell me two pieces of bread for a nickel. The woman of the house was worried that we had no food and my mother was mortified. I think I was just practicing my future yard sale skills. Although I would never insult anyone by asking them if they would take a nickel for Grandma’s old serving dish.

   Among the rewards of small-town newspapering are the little tidbits you learn about things that are not really news but are fascinating or amusing or heartbreaking nonetheless.

    On the serious side of the ledger, there are the ambulance calls we hear on the office emergency-frequency radio. Sometimes the call is from the home of someone we know; other times, they are strangers. On Monday, I listened with increasing anxiety as a request for transportation to the hospital for a badly dehydrated elderly woman in Springs initially went unanswered.

   How can any of us go about our daily lives as if nothing had happened? We learn to look away from, if not entirely ignore, human suffering in other parts of the world, but it ought not to be possible to act inured to disaster closer to home.