Columnists

   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.

   Even though the “Mast-Head” this week is about the editor’s household and backyard pets (see below), I can’t help but get in a few words about how I wound up with a 23-pound cat named White Boots.

    About seven years ago, my oldest granddaughter, the pig-wanting girl in the “Mast-Head,” happened to be taken to the Animal Rescue Fund’s kennels for a special afternoon adventure on the occasion of her fourth birthday. That she might fall in love there with a kitten had not really been considered by her mother, who happens to be allergic to cats.

   The other night Mary realized she was missing the news.  “That’s good news,” I said, knowing that for her but to think is to be full of sorrow.

    (Keats said that by the way, not me, but I like it.)

    We are, as this is written, about to be transplanted temporarily in the ersatz environs of Palm Springs, where one of our daughters is to be wed. The weather ought to be good. Of course, it’s good here too, as it’s been all winter, inclining one to stay put, but at the end of the day filial ties win.

   I’ve always been fascinated with all things medieval so I’m just as surprised as anyone that I had never even heard of a Renaissance fair until I was at least 35 and never attended one until I was past 40. Growing up in New York City exposed me to all kinds of people from all walks of life, but I don’t remember a lot of them walking around in armor or wimples. But maybe I just wasn’t very observant.

   Out of the blue, our older daughter announced last week that she wanted a pig — sorely. This was not an ordinary pig, mind you, but some sort of supposed mini-breed she learned about on the Internet, which could be hers for $850, shipping from Indiana, or wherever, extra. I said no, of course, which set off a fit of wailing unprecedented for its length, if not for volume.

   Who knew we would need a chemist last weekend, when I tried to make matzoh balls for our Passover seder? True, it was the first time I had hosted a seder in a very long time, but I had managed to find my mother’s recipe for matzoh balls, and there is nothing particularly daunting about making them.

    Unfortunately, things got a bit complicated.

   I was trying to persuade Mary to look at the big picture during a recent late-afternoon ritual at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central, but she, whose compassion can be worrisome, demurred.

    “Of course it’s not so hard for me,” I said, “because I don’t care as much as you do.”

    “I wish I could be like that,” she said.

    “Don’t be fooled by my equanimity, though — it’s simply self-absorption. That and the fact that I’m a bear of little brain.”

   My ex-husband came to Shelter Island to deliver the remainder of boxes I had stored in his basement, my former residence on the North Fork. “You have a lot of love letters in there,” he said. “Really?” I asked, surprised both by the information and the fact that he had apparently read the letters, which were not from him. I had been wondering what might be contained in the delivery that might be interesting, useful, or exciting, but did not consider love letters. Life is rarely anything similar to what I expect these days.

   Shellfish fans in the Town of East Hampton got a reminder this week of just how lucky we are — for now. The State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered a huge swath of Shinnecock Bay closed on Tuesday until further notice after the detection of a powerful biotoxin there.

    What’s called a captain’s chair has been in the kitchen of the Rattray house in Amagansett since the 1960s. I’m not sure of the exact date it arrived, but I have never forgotten how it got there. My first husband and I had sailed over to Gardiner’s Island one summer’s day and gone ashore for a wander without being detected. The chair was in a small, tumbled-down building, exposed to the elements. I guess I must admit we pilfered it, yes, but at the time it seemed only right to save it from ruin.