Guestwords

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.

You may have heard of the Sagaponack Village mayor, but let me tell you about the unofficial mayor of Sagg Main Beach.

The back row of the East Hampton movie theater is kinda like your own studio apartment with a wide-screen TV on gym candy. Not only can you feast undisturbed in stocking feet on contraband Cracker Jacks, Raisinets, Strawberry Twizzlers, and a large can of Arizona green iced tea with a foot-long veggie delight made fresh by Joe the deli manager at Stop & Shop, but if the movie’s boring, you can nod out, if the movie’s romantic, you can make out, and if the movie sucks, you can sneak out without someone behind barking “Down in front!”

She is there sitting on my shoulder. She is there every Passover, scrunched in the folds of a damp dish towel thrown over my shoulder. She is shrouded in the moist cloth between folds of fabric that hold my memories.

When my aunt bought land in Springs in 1962, she put her own aunt’s name on the deed, “just in case.” The house she had built was about as basic as could have then been made: single-pane glass windows, uninsulated attic, water heater rusting in a crawl space.

I didn’t always. For years, I didn’t quite get what the Facebook fascination was all about. An office mate of mine, Tim, an early adopter, as they say (or as I used to say, or mostly hear from clients when employed in the advertising biz before I got bounced out of it four years ago), was on Facebook a lot. Other raunchier sites, too, but he was careful and conscientious and he is another story.

Days before President Obama’s visit to Havana I saw a yellow Cuban taxi with an NBC sticker on its windshield. I knew things were changing in Cuba, and that logo was a sign of it. I was in Havana with Barbara and Dennis D’Andrea of Wainscott the week that included Obama’s visit. We had not planned to be there because of the president, it just happened that way.

I’m always a little embarrassed when procrastination pays off. I probably shouldn’t be, since I do it enough that the odds ought to provide a positive result once in a while. This time they did.

Friends, I thank you for starting another piece from me on this topic; please don’t move on yet. Yes, my efforts to defend Social Security from government and media lies have become familiar, though I fear fruitless, for more than a decade. Still, revelations in recent years of ever more skullduggery by both parties make my efforts even more relevant. Remember Bob Hope’s quip: “No one party can fool all the people all the time. That’s why we have two parties.”

I’m on the phone with my sister Tish, driving south through a blizzard in western Massachusetts to catch a plane to South Carolina. Mom, a New Yorker, moved there six years ago for the final chapter of her life. She’s stopped eating and drinking.

To be candid, I walked into the Southampton Antique Firehouse (yes, there is one, and it is fully functional) with a singleness of purpose: to sell them a comedy show.

“The Duke makes me puke” is what I said to Ben, my 90-year-old stepfather, about his idol, the film star John Wayne, a.k.a. The Duke. Words I can never take back but will take to my grave.

This political season the pundits failed to predict that the nonestablishment candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, would do so well. The pundits deluded themselves into thinking that voters would overwhelmingly stick with establishment candidates, timeworn ideologies, and business-as-usual initiatives. To date, the opposite is true.

Standing on top of rubble — cement blocks, slabs of wood, a pile of bricks, shingles, and mounds of dirt — I could hardly believe my eyes. What used to be my family’s home of 55 years, on the 10th hole of the Montauk Downs golf course, was now completely gone except for the two-car garage at one end and one small remaining wall of the bathroom at the other.

Your cat needs litter. It’s Saturday night and your usual outlet is closed until Monday, so you go to King Kullen. You better hurry. King Kullen closes at midnight on Saturdays, unlike the rest of the week when it’s open round the clock. You’d like to think that Bridgehampton is the only village in America that can support a Starbucks, a Gap, a T.J. Maxx, a Kmart, a 24-hour supermarket but can’t get mail delivered by the United States Postal Service.

How did we meet? I’ll tell you. I was working at the radio station WEHM as a D.J. with a Saturday afternoon show, “Kyle on the Dial.” Rusty listened all the time and fell in love with my voice. Curious as he was, he called the station.

It troubles me that the East Hampton Town Board has bowed to the Wainscott School Board’s demands and quashed the proposal to build affordable apartments off Stephen Hand’s Path for 48 of the town’s low-income working families.

If the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today and he had to endorse a candidate for president of the United States, who would that be? M.L.K. believed there were three evils that would destroy America: war, racism, and poverty. Let’s unpack poverty for a moment.

Once there was a woman who wanted to be a children’s writer, so she went to seek advice from the wisest counselor in the land.

I was late coming to Stephen Sondheim — 1979. I was 31 years old, and now I can’t remember why but I got two tickets to “Sweeney Todd.” This was after “Gypsy” and “Follies” and “Company.” It was 25 years or more after “West Side Story.” “Send In the Clowns” was also behind him, recordings by many voices, including the Voice himself.

A late Sondheim bloomer.

Christmas can be a time to evaluate our collective “goodness.” We mourn profusely the loss of 14 Americans in the San Bernardino shootings but do not feel connected with the hundreds of thousands of lives lost abroad.

Speaking at the recent climate talks in Paris, President Obama declaimed that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and back in March, Israel’s prime minister famously told Congress about Iran that “the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.” Punditry is alive and kicking.

A New York Times headline on Nov. 10, 1919, read: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens: Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. Einstein Theory Triumphs: Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.”

When I give tours to children and adults at the Parrish Art Museum, I always tell them, “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.” So when I visited the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green in Much Hadham, England, I was in for a surprise.

I don’t play tennis. I don’t golf. I burn easily. Even with a hat and an S.P.F. of 30 on my face and my surfeit of sunglasses, still I freckle and burn. And mosquitoes always make a beeline to my elbows and ankles.

I am sitting in my car waiting for the Quogue courthouse to open when I see this on my mobile phone: “Results of a study by AAA indicate that motorists using hands-free technologies in their cars could miss stop signs, pedestrians, and other vehicles while the mind is readjusting to the task of driving. Drivers can be distracted for 27 seconds after changing music or dialing a phone number.”