With no preliminaries or even a “How do you do,” a man walked up to me as I was looking at the surf on Sunday afternoon and asked, “Can anyone be here?”
I knew what he was trying to say, but being in somewhat of an ill temper at the time, I played dumb. “What do you mean?” I said.
This summer will go down, in my opinion, as the one in which the affluent finally burst the South Fork’s seams — and maybe the North Fork’s, too.
By the end of 1940, in America or New York or Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan neighborhood running approximately east to west from the Harlem River to the Hudson River and north to south from 190th street to 160th Street — someone decided the children of Washington Heights needed a Brotherhood Week celebration.
A crew from Town and Country magazine was here a couple of weeks ago, and, at the end of the day, the young reporter appeared at my door.
My sweet little Volvo is so lucky. It has an odometer that measures how far it has gone since it was made, like all cars. And then it has two “trip” odometers. If I press the odometer button twice, I can get two other readings: for example, how many miles we have driven since God knows when, and how many miles it is to Riverhead.
But the great thing is, if I hold the button down on the trip odometers, the car will reset them to zero.
With the calendar flipping from July to August, changes come to the beach. Even before sunrise I can hear the difference in the wind, now coming from the north. It is a light wind, though, only a hint of what is to come as summer gives way to fall and then to winter.
In the house, our oldest child was packed off to sleep-away camp for the very first time this week, another sign of time’s passing. Skittering hordes of sandpipers and plovers have been back for several weeks now, their numbers increasing each day as they arrive from breeding places in the far north.
Having grown up in the metropolitan area and spent childhood vacations in the Catskill Mountains, it comes as a surprise to me that I have enjoyed being on the water sailing more than other summertime pleasures here.
Now that New York has given the legal go-ahead to same-sex marriages, I should be busy this fall. As a Universal Life Church minister and authorized marriage officiant in the state, I’ll be officiating at weddings of gay and lesbian friends eager to tie the knot.
I bought two books at the recent Amagansett Library book fair — a nice clean copy of Bartlett’s for my office, which I will proceed to mark up, and “Rapid Italian for Students and Tourists,” which better provide pretty rapid results indeed, for my wife and I are talking about going to Italy in September, even though the dollar’s worth about 70 cents over there.
“Maybe Little Italy would be better,” I said the other night, “or Sam’s.”
Sometimes I feel like a short-order cook in my own house. According to my wife, Lisa, it’s my own fault, and she is probably right. We are in one of those stereotypical situations with a household of young and fussy eaters, each of whom has strong likes and dislikes.
Ellis, who is 11/2, is by a mile the easiest to feed, if the messiest. Half of anything he’s given will end up in his mouth eventually, though sometimes via a trip to the floor or a hand-art session followed by his snuffling it off his tray like a pig onto truffles.
Because one of my friends wants to lose a lot of weight and recently asked whether I had any recommendations about how he should go about it, I’ve been thinking about diets. We had discussed counting calories and the Weight Watchers system of food points, but I had seen a new documentary called “Page One: Inside The New York Times” and knew that Brian Stelter, a reporter, had lost 90 pounds in a relatively short time. The question was, how had he done it? The answer was easy to find.
It really was a steam laundry. Of course you already knew that if you were a Laundry restaurant patron during its 25-year run on Race Lane dating from 1980. The large industrial washing machine on the patio was a good clue.
On entering the office one recent deadline morning, I was told that the electricity had gone out and would be out for the next six hours.
Since I had one more story to write, not of much moment, but nevertheless a story that needed to be done to fill out the page, I thought, for the first time in a very long time, of manual typewriters and how they would — for me at any rate, because I don’t have a laptop — save the day.
The transition from urban dwelling to small-town living has been anything but easy.
A good friend called during work hours early this week and said he had something important to discuss. Immediately, I thought that he was calling to say he was engaged now that New York is about to allow same-sex marriages.
As it turned out, he was calling about an idea he had for something entirely unrelated and of a less thrilling nature. I love a good wedding, and my friend, if and when he decides to marry his long-term partner, would probably throw one hell of a party.
Somewhere in the archives here at The Star are stories about how the Atlantic sturgeon was caught here and made into caviar.
After the divorce, I had to rent my house each summer in order to keep up with expenses and somehow get myself through college
Back to school catalogs have begun to arrive, and summer, the season that when you’re young you think will never end, has barely begun..
Not even the Kona, that magical coffee bean, could rouse the sleeper, and by the time he did wake up, the external shell of me was ready for bed.
Trouble on the beach of one sort or another is inevitable once the days get hot and the water reaches a swimmable temperature.
Before I left Long Island with an educational delegation to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona in May, I thought I knew everything about the problems that immigrants face in the United States. But I could not have been more wrong.
We’ve heard so much about the border — the fence, the violence, drugs — but we’ve managed to forget the real story.
Hold on to your hats! Extra, extra, hear all about it! The U.S. Open is coming back to Shinnecock in 2018.
I greeted the news (remember, you read it here last) with utter dread, and wondered if I would be retired and/or dead by then.
“They’re more scared of you than you are of them” was simply not true when it came to me versus stinging, swarming, flying creatures. As a Woody Allen-esque city kid dragged to the Hamptons on weekends or for vacations, those insects — bees, wasps, hornets — were lumped into one scary interchangeable species.
If I heard the dreaded, low-pitched buzzing noise, I would proceed into a series of swatting, hopping motions that came to be known by friends and family as Bridget’s “Izzitonmee” dance.
Family life in the digital age has added a dimension of complexity to battles over how much television and other distractions parents allow their children. In our household, we do without regular TV in favor of using online alternatives to give us a measure of control over what the kids watch and to avoid the intrusive commercials.
When the Emirates plane landed at J.F.K. on Saturday after a 23-hour trip (with 18 of them in flight), my daughter and I were filled with both joy and relief. Her second child and my seventh grandchild was now a citizen with the promise of a good life. Besides, we had fallen in love with him.
Summer again. Salt on my tongue, sand in my suit, sun on my shoulders. It takes me back to Napeaque, to a new A-frame on a vast expanse of bare shore, dunes covered with storm fencing. A pristine playground for a lucky few in the early ’60s.
Hold on to your hats! Extra, extra, hear all about it! The U.S. Open is coming back to Shinnecock in 2018.
I greeted the news (remember, you read it here last) with utter dread, and wondered if I would be retired and/or dead by then.
Out in these parts almost everyone has a fish tale. I have just one, but it’s a whopper. And to this day I hold the record for catching the biggest flounder ever on the Lazy Bones fishing boat in Montauk. It’s a feat I’m not quite sure I’m proud of.
Tuesday started off well enough, I suppose, until I was reaching into the refrigerator at my mother’s house behind the Star office and the lights went out.
I walked down to the office, concerned about a blackout. It was just after 9 a.m. on the most hectic Tuesday of the year so far, and we were out of business.
The difference between good and evil seemed straightforward when I was a child. Call it what you...