Columnists

   The North Carolina Legislature earned no small degree of derision recently in attempting to tell scientists there how to predict sea level rise. A bill pending in the Southern state would constrain how its coastal commission calculates the rate of increase, requiring that numbers be based on trends only since 1900. This would leave out exponential shifts that may follow unforeseen changes, such as accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.

   Like most of us, I get a lot of spam — from politicians I do approve of, from organizations I don’t approve of, and from merchandisers of everything from country-style window treatments to sketchy-sounding laser-hair treatments. They really were annoying this week, however, when I got back from three days out of town.

   If you believe that a multimillionaire who did well for a small group of wealthy investors by putting money creation ahead of job creation actually is a champion of the middle class, I’ve got a fridge I’d like to sell you — one whose vertical freezer section we can’t get into.

   The other day Apple iTunes, after years of meekly opening when clicked upon, inexplicably balked, demanding that I put in my password and username before it would let me give it 99 cents to hear Petula Clark singing “Downtown.”

    Aaargh. Am I the only fool alive who can hardly ever come up with the right combination of those two maddening computer evils?

   Monday night was the occasion of the annual East Hampton Star All-Star Awards in which we give recognition — and an dinner out with family or friends — to local high school juniors whose academic and extracurricular performance has been noted by their respective schools’ administrators. This year, as I drove to the dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant, I was thinking about what the world that these young men and women were inheriting would be like.

   When Whole Foods and the Red Horse Market both opened in time for Memorial Day, my theory that East Hampton has one too many of everything seemed borne out. I harrumphed when I noticed that Whole Foods, clearly not a farm stand, is calling itself one (I suppose because it does not intend to carry as many groceries as it does elsewhere). Still, I was impressed when word went out of a well-targeted marketing come-on: orchids for sale for $10 apiece.

   Our daughter, who while she wasn’t particularly athletic has one of her own who shows every sign of being so, recalled the other evening that her girls softball coach had been a marvelous encourager and that, thus, she had grown, through his encouragement and through practice, to rather love the game and to play it well.

   My British cousin, Jamie Gosney, recently decided to put together a compact disc — he calls it a family album — featuring the clan’s favorite songs as a tribute to his mum, my aunt Jen-Jen, who turns 80 in August.

    And he offered up a method with which everyone is familiar: “If you were, indeed, shipwrecked on a desert island, this would be the one piece of music you just couldn’t live without,” he wrote in an email.

   Nights for parents of young and getting-to-be-not-so-young children can be complicated, and by the standards of those without progeny at home, the things we celebrate must seem a little weird. Take, for example, the case of one editorial staff member here who was positively giddy on Tuesday morning because both her toddlers slept all the way through to 6:30 a.m.

   Almost all the grandparents I know contradict themselves when they talk about their grandchildren. They love them dearly, of course, and say they don’t see them enough. But, almost as reliably, they complain to anyone who will listen about how absolutely the kids wear them out.

    If truth be told, and I’ll not tell it slant, I am quite unorganized.

   Our photo files, which, I tell everyone, are a Black Hole, are a case in point. I dare you, for instance, to find 1982. It’s utterly disappeared. I never did like to file those contacts and negatives anyway, which is why it’s such a mess in The Star’s attic. And I’m no better at home, a failing that has become all the more glaring given the fact that Mary is now an archivist.

    If last weekend was any indication we’re going to have to set some ground rules here for the summer. The Montauk Music Festival brought a large crowd to the hamlet and it reminded me of summers past and the things that people do that I don’t like.

   East Hampton Main Street will be strangely silent Monday morning. For a brief hour the hissing rumble of a three-day weekend’s traffic will cease as a modest line of veterans assemble to parade north toward Hook Mill and the war memorial.

    The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  I bet that’s a truly ancient proverb: People have been coveting what their neighbors have since the dawn of time. But when the phrase pops into my own mind, it’s usually because I’m looking not at grass but at pictures of gardens.

   “Which one are you — the Tin Man, the Lion, or the Straw Man?” Mary asked as our granddaughter, Ella, sat transfixed in front of “The Wizard of Oz” at our house Sunday evening.

    “Well, I’ve got no heart,” I said, “so I’m not the Tin Man, I lack courage, and I haven’t a brain. . . . But,” I said, brightening, recalling my Kentucky Derby pick the day before, “I certainly am lucky.”

   When I was a kid, I hated writing thank-you notes.

    Christmases and birthdays would come along with presents in the mail (always welcome) from my Alabama grandmother, my poet aunt and composer uncle in Pittsburgh, and my two sets of godparents in New Haven and Woodstock, N.Y.

   This is the season in which the parents of grade-school children put entirely too many miles on their vehicles. There are year-end dance recitals, music and theater performances, sports league playoffs, and the like to ferry the younger set to and from. Lisa and I have been spending what seems like hours every afternoon tooling between Amagansett and points west with one or more children in the back seat.

   Perhaps more disturbing than the hazing death itself — on Nov. 19, of a 26-year-old Florida A&M University student who was a drum major in its marching band — is the knowledge that brutality is ingrained in the culture of certain collegiate activities and Greek letter societies . . . and accepted by adults who should know better. It turns out, according to press reports, that a gauntlet of punches and kicks, called Crossing Bus C, was routine among band members, and that they felt it proved their strength and instilled pride.  

   Michael Heller, who walk­ed away with pretty much every photography prize at the recent state press association contest, said in walking up to me at Herrick Park the other day that he’d seen only one other rugby game and therefore knew practically nothing about the sport.

   I often wonder when people pass away if they can still hover a few days and get a closer look at what’s happening down below on earth. Like our creator, can they see all? My mom passed away in April, and if she can see that I’m not wearing lipstick, allowing my animals on the furniture, and not always styling my hair, then I’m in big troubles, as one of my children used to say.

   Readers of this column may remember that a few weeks back I wrote about our family’s ongoing scuffle over whether or not to buy an expensive pet pig. The battle lines had this columnist on the “no” side, Mom and one daughter on the “yes” side, our 7-year-old daughter on the “sounds okay to me” side, and the 2-year-old oblivious and looking for his finger paints.

   So many things were so comically awful at the restaurant we chose for Saturday night dinner in Pittsburgh last weekend that the consensus among our foursome was to give it the award for the worst restaurant we had ever been in — and the most pretentious.

   Having snapped when I should have buttoned my lip, I thought the next day of ways I could make amends, how I could patch things up, as it were.

    I would begin by fixing the liquor cabinet door that’s remained awkwardly ajar lately. Step one in working my way back into her good graces.

    “It’s not perfect,” I began in alluding to my good intentions a half-hour later, “but it’s better than it was.”

   I couldn’t sing, but that didn’t stop me from being a lead singer.  

    It was the early 1980s, and New York City was the coolest place in the world.

    There was danger and sex and excitement, crime and punishment, one-night stands with someone you just had to sleep with, and anarchy everywhere.

    And if you didn’t have a band, you were nothing.

    I lived at CBGB’s. It was the only place to live. I was working at the club as a bouncer. The pay was $15 a night and all the Screwdrivers you could drink.

   I had meant to close off the kitchen exhaust vent so the wrens could not get inside.

    About a month ago, while sitting in the living room at home, I was startled by a metallic thumping from somewhere within the walls. The racket, it turned out, came from a pair of what I think are Carolina wrens. They had begun stacking sticks inside an open vent louver on the exterior of the kitchen.

    The Clearwater Beach Property Owners Association is a formidable organization. Unlike many homeowners groups, which tend to evaporate after their first few years, the Clearwater association spread its wings, taking under them what was originally known as Lion Head and the neighborhood farther east.

    There are 870 homeowners who are eligible to be members, and 550 have paid their dues! When they do, they have first dibs on a 119-slip marina at Hog Creek and access to a gated and protected bayfront beach and a barbecue and picnic area.

        When I was young, I loved to travel. Not the flying part of it, no, not that at all, just the idea of going to a new place. And, well, whatever it took to get there. Which is, generally, flying.

    When Georgie wrote on her twin sister’s wedding poster last weekend that “a life without love is a life half-lived,” I asked who had said that, figuring the reply would be Ovid, or Dante, or Calvin Coolidge, but her smiling answer was that the quote had come from the movie “Strictly Ballroom.”

    That put me on the spot, for when it came to us Mary had demurred, assuming that I, being “a writer,” would know just the right words that ought to be inscribed to the young couple on our behalf — wise, pithy, unforgettable.

    Earlier this month I was invited to travel from New London to New Orleans aboard the Coast Guard’s training ship Eagle. A story appears elsewhere in this issue about Eagle under sail.

    I first joined the ship in 1994 as a journalist, crossed the Atlantic, wrote a story for Smithsonian magazine, and joined her again in Hamburg, Germany, in 1996 on the anniversary of her 1936 launch from the Blohm & Voss shipyard. She was christened Horst Wessel in the presence of none other than Adolf Hitler.

    One of the benefits of the very, very mild winter just past is that outdoor chores that would be still hanging over my head are more or less done.

    A couple of weekends ago, in fact, I pruned the grapes and brambles around the edge of the property and cut back branches along the driveway. This was well before the ticks were again afoot and the poison ivy had begun to grow.