Guestwords

Hate hurts most when you’re not ready for it, when your thoughts after a brutal political season are of the comfort of home. That’s how hate sliced through me recently on the Long Island Rail Road — suddenly.

I was certain that a second home would actually be horrible for me: more bills and aggravation. Why not just travel the world and stay in luxury hotels?

I have a suggestion for the students, faculty, and alumni at Yale, where the naming of a residential college in 1931 to honor John C. Calhoun, an 1804 graduate from South Carolina, is being reconsidered — Clay College, to honor Cassius Marcellus Clay.

Seeing my three daughters so happy is what motivates me to keep struggling in this country that isn’t my native country.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been high-profile presences in the Hamptons over the past few decades, but who would've guessed that they would end up competing for the highest position in the nation?

On the night of Oct. 25, 1986, we left Huntington for Shea Stadium for what Mets fans refer to only as Game 6, no further explanation needed.

If I were a local business owner summoned to court for violating our state or local disabilities laws, I might simply ask the judge, “Why should I comply when your court doesn’t?”

It’s been three years since I sold my house in Amagansett, but in 2015 my head was totally turned around by another summer resort town: Provincetown.

I was a short, skinny teenager, and my father was concerned that bigger boys might pick on me, but he knew Lou Stillman, the owner of Stillman’s Gym, and signed me up for 10 lessons.

Since the first thing a teacher experiences at the start of the school year is a faculty meeting, some pointers.

I suspect the Montauk sandbag seawall provided some protection to properties before it was damaged during Hermine, but as a long-term fix for beaches, seawalls of any type are problematic.

What first comes to mind about that absolutely gorgeous late-summer day is the disconcerting quiet inside and even outside the courthouse after the attack was known.

As another social season in the Hamptons comes to an end, one is reminded of the importance of friends. If you don’t have ’em you’re dead in the waters of Shinnecock Bay.

I sat confused, distraught, and angry, staring at TV channels that rarely advertise a restaurant, hotel, nightclub, store, or activity east of Riverhead.

We returned to the tangle of place called home in 1994 — me, my husband, and our young daughters. I was afraid of it, terrified of myself in it, loved it the way you love food you think you’re not supposed to eat and fear will make you sick.

I am nauseatingly self-deprecating by nature. It is a crutch if not a character flaw, but let me take a moment to be serious and brag a little: Despite big setbacks, all three of my self-published books have made money, and continue to.

For nearly two years, starting with the breakup of my marriage, I regularly ventured during the fishing season to a secluded beach along an eastern Long Island bay known for holding good-size striped bass in its shallows.

Just a reminder, since the popular news is dominated by terrorism, murders, and the politics of bathroom rights, that global warming continues apace.

Writing is a grueling job that is never done. I wake up to it and go to sleep with it. One character or another pokes me in the ribs and causes me to toss and turn. The antagonist, with thesaurus in hand, whispers in my ear during REM, “Psst! Wake up! You’ve got to change the wording in chapter seven, third line down.”

Or not really worry, but maybe to think about if you can’t get to sleep some night. That’s how the question came up in the first place. My friend, who apparently often can’t get to sleep, asked me on the beach if I ever considered what would happen if the earth stopped spinning even for just a second. He thought everybody would fly off into space.

It’s been only a month since I returned from Dallas, where I, like thousands of other tourists, had visited many of its well-known attractions, including the Fairmont Dallas Hotel with its famous Venetian Room, centered in the largest arts district in the country, the 560-foot Reunion Tower, and the Sixth Floor Museum.

In the mid-1980s, East Hampton’s summer and year-round weekend population was growing rapidly. The demand for water views in particular was enormous, and the seemingly endless construction of new homes along the shoreline caused wastewater and other pollutants to run off into the bays. The contaminants made their way into clam and scallop beds; at least two lucrative fishing areas were damaged.

In the beginning the happy couple are busy. Furnishing the house, bringing up the kids, working to pay the bills. So busy are they with the everyday stuff of life they barely see the anniversaries piling up . . . paper, diamond, silver. Gold even. With all this life going on, many couples have never had time to really know each other and, boom, it’s retirement time.

It was spring along the East End beaches of Long Island. The striped bass moved along the rolling surf, driven to follow all the baitfish before them as they had when no humans were around to remember. They were followed by the gannets and the ospreys diving from above, feasting on the baitfish pushed to the roiling surface by the bass and bluefish.

I live in a house surrounded by nature. It is for all the world like a tree cottage on the ground. Every view from inside is a window to the life of trees. There are oaks, of course, since we live in a place out here full of oaks, with Oak Lane and Wooded Oak a nod to the canopies that shade us on hot summer days. There are also cedars and pines and two huge cryptomeria we planted 28 years ago framing our driveway.

On May 16, 1946, 70 years ago to the day I write this, I was in a Quonset hut in Camp Beale, Calif., sitting beside the desk of a graying sergeant who’d lost both his legs above the knees fighting the Japanese on one of those way-out-there Pacific islands. Typewriter keys whacked a form in the roller. He was processing my Army discharge.

I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”

It used to be that if you called someone and he didn’t answer (and there was no answering machine), you could almost see the silence yawning at you. You placed yourself in that imaginary office or kitchen or bedroom and conjured either a void or something going on that was mysteriously alluring and that you were somehow being excluded from. Your wife, friend, or lover might be betraying you in that silence, but there was always an anchor, a place to which the ringing belonged.

On April 12, President Obama expanded the national park system to include the historic Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C. In designating the site as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, the president honored the trailblazers who fought for women’s rights. President Obama described the site’s significance as “a hotbed of activism, a centerpiece for the struggle for equality, a monument to a fight not just for women’s equality but, ultimately, for equality for everybody.”

I woke up from a nightmare with the television on. An evangelist was hustling cash. This man had been defrocked by his own church. He had cried on his television show asking for forgiveness for consorting with a prostitute. Then another prostitute appeared. His redemption slow­ed. But he sees himself redeemed by his Lord. And needs cash now.