Columnists

    Not long ago, without our telling anyone, my spouse and I appeared on a tabloid news show. Judging from a near dearth of phone calls and e-mails, absolutely no one we know saw the segment. Not only was this lack of exposure fine with us, it was a huge relief.

My horoscopes have been encouraging lately, though while I’m not a believer, reading them helps me with...

Do you remember your first time? I do. It was a late spring evening and a slight fog blanketed...

Not all that long ago really, East Hampton Village saw its first driveway gate. Now every other...

Quiet rain, heavy rain, thunderstorms, we’ve had them all this week, and the forecast isn’t for sun until...

Before Osama bin Laden built his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, he spent a few harried years looking for the perfect property while looking over his...

“We’re grieving again,” I said recently to our appraiser, adding, “I guess it’s something like...

Nikki Goodbird is our 3-year-old Quaker parrot. We named him Nikki as an acceptable androgynous option before we knew...

What to do with bluefish is one of the warm seasons’ eternal questions, at least in Bonac, where they are caught in great number once the water is...

A beautiful afternoon in New York is a holiday for me regardless of why I’m there. It brings back the years when I was single and living and...

The six of us were the only Americans flying to Havana from Miami on a chartered flight in March. The others were Cuban, many with packages of goods purchased to...

I have in front of me the rule that resulted in the suspension for the rest of the season of our highly successful softball coach, Lou Reale, and wonder, given the apparent...

Local elections are around the corner, with political parties making their candidate slates for this November’s contests public. Around here, we practice democracy mostly at...

Driving home from the office on Tuesday evening, I was surprise to notice that I was in what amounted to a traffic jam...

My mother adored me. I was her midlife baby, and even though I had two teenage sisters, I grew up pretty much as an only child. They were both out of the house by the...

Looking out of our bedroom window one recent morning onto the lawn that becomes greener every day, I remarked on the stone rabbit that sits on a...

I had never really thought about traveling to South Africa. Cape Town wasn’t on my bucket list. But . . .

One morning while driving the kids to school, we talked about how there were things, one thing in particular, that you shouldn’t say...

My New York City grandchildren spent their spring vacation from school in East Hampton with us, a long week in which I got to know them better. We saw each other from morning till night, and there were continual surprises. I discovered how much they had grown up, and it felt like seeing them anew.

Our dory would launch just before dawn, when the truck towing it would back quickly and violently into the ocean and come to a sudden stop, letting momentum pull the boat free. While the truck pulled out of the water as fast as possible, sometimes with the help of a tow line already set in...

Prudence and persistence seem to be traits associated with long life. I will lay claim to persistence, when so inclined, though Mary is the more prudent of the two of us. I suppose there does come a day when it is no longer prudent to persist...

Before I opened the envelope with the school’s insignia emblazoned on it the summer before I was to enter third grade, I knew that she was the teacher I wanted. I had no good reason for wanting Mrs. Davis-Parks except that my sister had had her two years earlier.

Earlier this year if you had asked about the upcoming local political season in East Hampton, the response would have been little more than a shrug. Not anymore.

One of the pleasures of hanging around the East Hampton Star office is the chance to explore its archives, a veritable Wunderkammer of interesting historical tidbits. I sometimes wish I had nothing else to do but go through the crammed old-photo files in the back room, which always yield surprises.

As we read with horror about the meltdown of the nuclear plants in Japan, most of us wonder, How could this have happened? How could this tragedy have occurred in one of the most technologically sophisticated countries in the world? What went wrong?

I don’t understand why there has been all this brouhaha having to do with deficit reduction. Simply make the people who have benefited from the fiscal handouts in the past 30 or so years pay their fair share. That’s not Communism ...

Sing along: In my Easter bonnet with all the dog hairs on it I will be the hairiest in the Easter parade.

Since the crash that killed two Sag Harbor men on April 9, I have driven past the accident site on Brick Kiln Road several times. It has had relevance for me, if at a remove, because my older daughter was in another vehicle that happened to...

For a while as winter waned, I thought the deer family of Edwards Lane, East Hampton, where I live, had gone on vacation. It had been quite a while since I called a grandchild’s attention to one on the front lawn...

Mary and I met an ornithologist while perched at the Hyatt Regency bar in Bethesda a night not long ago, and our conversation immediately took flight.