Columnists

   You can’t even really call it a January thaw, since December was mild, and, save for a 15-degree night a week ago yesterday, 2012 has had above-average temperatures. This has been a very good thing where the Amagansett Rattrays’ gardening, outdoor chores, and playtime are concerned, as we (read: your humble correspondent) let things slide this fall.

My parents died at 94 and 96, so I never expected my brother, Martin Men­del Seldon, to go at a younger age. He was 83 when he died on Dec. 28, after an unexpected, massive heart attack.

    I was in Nova Scotia on a wonderful Christmas holiday with my daughter and her family when the news came. Assuming that his funeral service would be held very quickly, I skipped coming home, as we’d planned, and headed out the next day to Sunnyvale, Calif., where he had lived for years.

On July 5 The New York Times had two articles datelined Clear Lake, Iowa, noting that Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich had marched in the Fourth of July parade. I was there and saw both of them. Ms. Bachmann wore heels. How impractical, I thought, for walking in a parade.

Perhaps it has always been so, but it struck me last week that so many of the sports stories I wrote in the past year had to do with people who had surprised themselves. In brief, they had not known it — whatever that might be, a faster time, a stronger performance, a more chiseled body — was in them.

    Ed Petrie, the East Hampton High School boys basketball coach who recently retired after a Hall of Fame career, was said to have gotten the best from each of his players, presumably not only surprising themselves but others — perhaps even him!

There was a morning low tide on the last day of 2011. After tending to my household chores, feeding the dogs and chickens, and before the rest of the family was awake, I slipped out in the truck to go clamming. With little traffic on the roads before 8 a.m., I rolled easily up to East Hampton Village to buy $40 worth of gasoline and grab a clam rake from the barn.

    Tonight is the third night of Hanukkah, a holiday —  in the month of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar — which lasts for eight days and often coincides with Christmas, but not always.

    Every year I ask my husband to get the Christmas decorations. He usually rubs his chin, sighs, and asks, “Now?” After an entire year of moving things in and out of the garage, the Christmas boxes have been shuffled and stacked and are usually in the farthest, most difficult areas to reach.

    Having inherited from my wife a laptop, the first I’ve ever owned, I realized in thumbing through some old columns that had not yet made their way to my archivist in Carlsbad, that for me the computer age began 23 years ago, in the summer of 1988. . . .

I wrote the letter, sealed it with red wax and a kiss and sent it off to the North Pole. It goes like this:

Dear Santa,

    All I want for Christmas is a new knee. I’ve seen three specialists, my general practitioner, and have gotten five diagnoses: arthritis, a possible fracture, bursitis, edema, and a bruised tibia. Not one of them has offered me a fix, and I’ve been broken for over a year.

At some point at the end of this week, I’ll start my Christmas shopping. Being used to operating on a deadline, I am familiar with this sort of pressure. Moreover, buying gifts late reduces the chance that our children are going to discover them before they are wrapped.

    When an expert restorer of pianos and harpsichords said there was no point in saving the baby grand that had more or less decorated the living room in the family house in Amagansett for 30, maybe 40, years, the last thing I imagined was that in a week’s time I would buy another piano.

    When you’re watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” this Christmas season I hope you’ll note how much this masterpiece by Frank Capra has to tell us about the way we live now — and the way we used to live then, in a more rational and humane time.

    Did you know that to beg a question is not to beg it, at least in our sense of the word? I learned that the other day from a 2010 “Common Errors in English Usage” calendar that has lain open to the May 15 entry on Baylis Greene’s desk for 19 months now, begging to be perused.

    My father passed away last month at the age of 98. He was quite a guy, and I miss him. He lived in Amityville, and after he died I began cleaning out the house.

    There was a box in the attic that I’d seen there for years but never investigated. On the outside of the box was written “Letters 1943-1944.” They were letters my father had written to my late mother during that time. She was teaching in Poughkeepsie, and he was in the Marine Corps stationed on a small atoll in the Marshall Islands during some of the worst fighting in the Pacific theater.

    Saturday, as I was on my way to run some errands, I saw a couple of estate-sale signs at an old place on Main Street in East Hampton Village. As it was before  the permitted 10 a.m. start time for such things, and the signs definitely did not meet code, I figured this was a renegade operation and that the police were going to show up soon.

    The bathroom scale started sending unusual messages as soon as the unusually pleasant and warm fall weather began to turn. I have a pretty small frame, and I’ve kept fairly slim in recent years due to a regular yoga practice, so when my weight varied by a whole 10  pounds on the digital screen one day a few weeks ago, I was more befuddled than alarmed.

    Was the scale broken? Or had I really been, unconsciously, fattening up for a cold winter like a prize goose?

    I counted the number of players who had their shirts off following American Samoa’s first-ever World Cup soccer win the other day, a singular victory reported on in The New York Times, and there were six. All happy fellows in good shape. Nothing to offend as far as I could tell, though if partial disrobing becomes the norm one shudders to think what will happen should it extend to boccie, bowling, shuffleboard, and bridge.

    In one sense, my basement flood couldn’t have happened at a better time. With Christmas approaching, the drive to accumulate (or should I say, more generously, “to give”) more worldly possessions grows ever stronger. The wanting is magnified. Consumerism calls. The pent-up demand begs for release.

    Something fell from the ceiling in the Star building’s front office Tuesday morning, nearly striking Russell Bennett in the head.

    Things coming from above in the Star office take on more than a metaphorical significance when you consider that the first-floor lobby, if you will, has a ceiling made of glass panels held in place with a criss-crossing lattice of wooden slats. The ceiling presumably dates to when the building was put up by Everett J. Edwards, who was my great-grandfather. E.J., as he was known, opened the East Hampton Pharmacy here in 1901.

    Because I don’t pay much attention to fashion, I didn’t know who Tomas Maier was until the other day when, thumbing through an August edition of Vogue magazine, I learned he had designed a velvet-on-python satchel (read great big handbag) for Bottega Veneta.    

    Maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine curling up with a Kindle on a cold winter’s night. Its slick, hard surface has no cuddle factor and just doesn’t appeal to me, not like a much-loved, well-thumbed book, and it never will. I’m a bookworm, a lover of books — printed, bound and glued, paper-covered books.

    Well, I’ve gone and done it — joined Facebook — though I have an eerie feeling it won’t end well.

    Talking with Kenny Mann, whose film “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” about her ancestral past, will be shown at Bay Street on Sunday, got me thinking about identity and, of course, how it relates to me.

    But after I suffered from a weekend of tryptophan-induced writer’s block, my husband, the beautiful Eric Johnson, suggested that I get in touch with Who I Am by describing the stickers on my car. And you know what? As his suggestions go, which usually include all sorts of naughty stuff not fit for print, it’s not half bad.

    Traffic between East Hampton and Bridgehampton just after 4 one afternoon this week was heavy west of the Stephen Hand’s Path intersection with Montauk Highway. At this time of year, when it gets dark so early, the roads fill up at dusk, the day over for those who work outdoors, while others are rushing home or to the market.

    My late dear friend Joanne, who was always with us for Thanksgiving, wouldn’t let anyone else supervise the mashed potatoes, back in the days when we had as many as 30 people, big and small, sitting for dinner. You weren’t allowed to cut the potatoes into small pieces to hurry the boiling along, because they would get watery, you had to cook them to her exacting standard of doneness, and you had to use old-fashioned mashers. I can still see her, hard at work, in the corner of our kitchen between the stove and sink.

    Thanksgiving time is a powerful season — so powerful that it inspires in me a Will to Grow Up, which in turn has the superpower to vanquish my usual non-cook stance. My non-cook stance is a no-confidence, can’t-style configuration that includes a lot of cooking avoidance and a lot of apologizing for the food when I do have to cook. But every Thanksgiving, I give it up.

    I’m sorry, of course, that Steve Jobs died, though, perhaps unlike many, I can’t say he’s improved my life. Well, maybe some, for I do like going onto Google when in need of a trenchant quote or some such. And Wikipedia can be fun, whether the articles are peer-reviewed or not.

We are a nation of gullible fools. We swallow everything advertisers tell us to. Not only are they telling us to shop tomorrow on “Black Friday,” but they also want us to participate in “Cyber Monday” by shopping online. I say we ignore the mind-control tactics they use and spend the day eating leftovers instead of shopping. We could call it “Fat Friday” instead.

    At about midday on Monday, I took a walk into the East Hampton Village business district just to get a little air before changing gears at the office. There was the beginning of an east wind, a bit of chill in the air. The elms lining Main Street were almost entirely denuded of their leaves.

    Downstreet, as the old-timers call the downtown area, was bare in spots as well. As everyone knows, many shops are closed and the ones that remain open, with only a handful of exceptions, seem to be selling things of no particular interest or usefulness to ordinary people.