Columnists

   Looking ahead to Presidents Day weekend, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is getting ready to tally North American birds in what it calls the Great Backyard Bird Count. Unlike the almost invitation-only Christmas counts for experienced birders, this one draws on the willingness of even the most casual observers, so it appeals to me with my middling identification skills.

   Maybe I decided to take part in a recent chain letter — by e-mail, of course — because it came from a cousin a couple of times removed, or maybe I’m just a recipe hound. I’ve got manila folders full of them that date back 30 years or more.

   Following a minor medical procedure recently, I had to be slapped awake from what was presumably a slightly overlong stay in Never-Never Land.

    Throughout the flurry of pummeling (during which my left hearing aid may have been broken, though its demise later that day or the next could have been a coincidence), I kept saying, “Blissful . . . blissful.”

   Cat lovers, maybe more so than dog lovers, enjoy having more than one cat at any given time. I am one of those cat lovers. One is just not enough.

    Sometimes the Other cat presents him or herself with no effort on your part at all.

    Years ago in New York, the first cat I had as an adult was delivered to me at my first apartment. My friend Carol thought a first apartment should have a cat, so she answered an ad for kittens in The Village Voice and “Archie” (gray tabby) arrived at my door. That was in 1968. I had Archie until 1982, when I was a new bride.

   Wednesday was Ellis’s second birthday and, like most mornings, the day started with his yelling “Da-deee” at about 5:20 as I was on my first cup of coffee. And, like most mornings, he settled back down. That was good; I had a column to write before the girls were supposed to get Ma  up for school.

   On the Jitney, headed to New York City, doctors appointments all in a row. Equipped with allegedly waterproof boots and an umbrella. Rain is inevitable.

    Two women across the aisle; it is clear that they are heading to the city for fun. They mention the Museum of Modern Art and talk about lunch, whether at the museum or at a restaurant suggested by a friend.

   And now a few words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated recently, and who, in 1967, had the following to say in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

   I just returned from my annual “girlfriends” vacation to Vero Beach, Fla., which began, true to tradition, with an open suitcase on the concrete at the curbside check-in at Long Island MacArthur Airport.

   Saturday’s snowfall was a pleasant surprise down on Cranberry Hole Road. After an extended dig through the basement, I found suitable snowsuits for Evvy and Ellis, and we went out. My wife and elder daughter preferred to stay inside.

    The younger kids and I first took turns sledding down the minor rise that passes for a hill on our property. That broke down to a snowball fight in short order.

   When Rick Santorum called President Obama an “elitist snob” for saying “every child in this country should go to college,” I found myself wondering how the Republican presidential candidates themselves stack up, education-wise. The former senator from Pennsylvania noted that he had seven children and, he said, “If one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him.”

    I happen to agree with that sentiment, but for one quibble: Who said being an auto mechanic was incompatible with having some sort of post-secondary education?

   I forgot when writing of my resolutions last week, resolutions for the irresolute, to say that there were two things I especially wanted to do in the new year, first to be able to print out what I’d written on the laptop computer Mary recently gave me, and second, to avail myself of the latitude this might confer, enabled as I would then be to write of nothing in particular from wherever I found myself, whether scaling El Capitan without a rope, sipping absinthe in Montmartre, or twisting the night away in Moscow.

   In recent months, life on the farm has included some activities that I never envisioned myself doing. The trash situation was slightly out of control, and since most of it was mine after a pointless juice fast, I used a wheelbarrow to load the soggy mess into the back of my pickup truck.

   For someone like me who has a home chicken flock, being caught at the Amagansett I.G.A. placing a dozen eggs on the checkout conveyor by a fellow poultry-keeper was highly embarrassing.

    The truth is that our hens, like many at this time of the year, take a break from producing. Egg-laying is somehow tied to the length of the day, and without artificial illumination of some sort or other, you either have to go to the store or go without for a few months.

   The price of The New Yorker magazine if you buy it on a newsstand is $5.99, so it came as a surprise when I received a notice at the end of December telling me that if I renewed the subscription I get in the mail, I could send a second — free — subscription to anyone I chose.

    Who knew that so many homicidal maniacs were running around loose in the Swedish countryside? Before Stieg Larsson’s revelations of murderous Nazi enclaves, before Henning Mankell’s dramatic decapitations, I had viewed Sweden as a liberal template for humanistic advancement. Now, though, it has to be acknowledged that Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is a touch unconventional, and that Mankell’s police inspector, Kurt Wallander, is serially depressed. Can this be chalked up to the effect of Swedish winters on the human psyche?

   It being the New Year, I suppose I should make some resolutions — resolutions for the irresolute. My first one is not to write, at least for the moment, about politics or the state of the economy, dreary subjects that have nothing much to do with the hope that should attend a new beginning.

    Instead, I will write about my imminent colonoscopy, and how everyone’s been ingesting flavorsome food here at the office as, drearily, I sip from a bottle of Gatorade whose contents look very much like Pres­tone.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattlelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

   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.