Guestwords

There’s no doubt formality has gone the way of the typewriter, and I have to tell you, I’m sorry to see it go. I write that with the humbleness of one who has flouted convention along with every other flower child and anarchist dating back to 1968. To say I’m not a prude is to put it mildly. I lust after sexy entertainment, have been known to shout out a vulgarity or two, and like to ride fast roller coasters.

Make no mistake, you are living through a U.S. version of the Bolshevik Revolution.

This year there have been a number of fish kills and harmful algal blooms in the Peconics and Shinnecock Bay. In my previous “Guestwords” column, I discussed how these events were caused by excessive nutrients (primarily nitrogen) coming mostly from fertilizers running off from farms and lawns, and from human waste, coming in primarily in groundwater from septic tanks.

The Hamptons are among the nation’s most gorgeous locales. The women living and vacationing here are equal to the landscape. Simply stunning. Enhanced bodies, refigured faces, doesn’t matter. Walk the Hamptons villages: short dresses barely there, hems touching slim upper thighs, feet with manicured toes peeping from pricey sandals with six-inch heels. Bodies to die for. And that’s just for starters.

Once upon a time there were three safecrackers named Cal, Earl, and Gus. For a long time they had schemed to rob the biggest house in town, which was said to have a safe containing huge quantities of diamonds.

At 8 in the morning, the day’s heat was already rising as I walked toward a funeral service I hoped to attend. It was the last Saturday in June in my adopted hometown of Charleston, S.C., and a long line of mourners had been forming for hours near a stadium in the middle of the city.

While it is arguably the best time to be on the East End, with the sun still shining brightly and the local farms bursting with their harvest, our attention begins to refocus away from the joys of a glorious summer.

Stella Goldschlag was a German Jew from the Berlin provinces who worked with the Gestapo during World War II, identifying Jews stuck in Berlin who were masquerading as Aryans. Those German Jews who performed this betrayal service for the Nazis were called “catchers.”

You’re not the only one with a summer rental, reads the sign in the window of the J. Crew on Main Street in East Hampton. The store is currently undergoing renovation and the sign is merely meant to direct customers to J. Crew’s “rental,” a pop-up shop just across the way, but when I came upon it the other night all brightly lit, it nearly stopped me dead in my flip-flops.

It is the early fall of 2016. The so-called Iranian nuclear nonproliferation pact is diplomatic history, although accusations of clandestine Iranian noncompliance are rampant.

I became a gay reader early, at age 9 or 10, when a well-meaning librarian introduced me to the Hardy Boys books. I was mesmerized by the scenes of the brothers, Frank and Joe, and their friends stripping down to swim across one body of water or another or to dry their rain-soaked clothing.

Donald Trump says he would be “God’s greatest jobs president.” So far, the candidate has focused on renegotiating trade agreements, would have stopped Ford from building its new $2.5 billion factory in Mexico, and would have retaliated against China’s recent currency devaluation.

When I first came to the Hamptons in the summer of 1981, Tina Fredericks, who died in May at age 93, was the pooh-bah of East End real estate agents. “Realtor to the Stars”: So she anointed herself in her business ads, and so she was. The impression, widely held and not discouraged by Tina, was that she was the Queen Bee, and the rest were drones. It was more or less true.

This June we were appalled to read about fish kills in the Peconic Estuary, turtle kills, and harmful algal blooms in the Peconics and Shinnecock Bay. This was especially shocking to me since for many years I used these waters as clean “reference” sites for studies on effects of pollution in fish, crabs, and shrimp living in the waters of northern New Jersey.

Generations of summer residents have expressed abhorrence about the changing demographics and mores of East Hampton. They revile the crowds of strangers in odd dress on Newtown Lane (this year’s crop seems to sport a return to formality, with women appearing in high heels and dresses in the middle of a summer afternoon), while forgetting that they themselves were once neophytes.

David Sedaris has gotten me through some pretty tough times. Whether it’s divorce, death, or disaster, I read “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and know that everything’s going to be okay.

Real estate agents serving the Hamptons number in the thousands. This occupation represents one of the largest sources of employment in the area. Based on 2014 figures, agents in the Hamptons achieved income totaling approximately $167 million.

“This is not who we are,” blinked the message from a white friend who lives in Charleston, put up a few days after the brutal murder of nine people in a church not far from his home.

Mallet Man (MM) can be found at Indian Wells Beach when the summer sun is ablaze and you probably shouldn’t even be out in it. “But Ma, you promised. There’s surf to ride, pails to fill, holes to dig.”

When I was younger East Hampton felt so alive. Local businesses made up the majority of Main Street and Newtown Lane, and for someone in their preteenage years, there was plenty to do in every season. As I got older, however, more and more of what made this place feel like home disappeared.

I didn’t understand what was happening until years later, but the realization will remain with me always. It was 1982 and all my husband and I thought about was how we were going to raise our two young children and pay our newly acquired home mortgage with its 17-percent interest rate.

Sunday night, Labor Day weekend, 2014: So here we find ourselves in the bedroom of Cabin #3 at Devon’s Fancy on the very, very last night, the end of an era. We fell in love here, so it’s with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our secret hideaway in the woods.

Some of you, I’m sure, will assume that by the Great Satan of Energy I must mean nuclear power, but I don’t. The Great Satan of energy is coal. Whether nuclear power is a lesser demon or a good angel is beyond the scope of this article.

Alive. So says the title of Stephen King’s 2011 short story. What with a personal trainer popping in twice a week, a yoga teacher swinging by another two days, and his banging out books, I’d say Herman Wouk is very much alive.

When my first daughter was born in Rome, my wife, a nonpracticing but (it became apparent) believing Catholic, arranged for her baptism. At a distance of 47 years, I can’t be certain of anything about the arrangements, not even the location.

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. A while back, I started making annual visits to Cape Town, not simply to avoid our Hamptons winter. I wanted to measure the changes taking place in what I still consider to be my “beloved country.”

We’d have cracked up laughing had we known of the “greatest generation” con that would define us 50 years later. The greatest generation was our parents who saw us through the Depression. Our children, we were sure, would be an even greater generation. We were clearing evil from the earth so that could be.

Remember game shows? “Concentration,” “The Big Payoff” (with a former Miss America, the late Bess Myerson, in a pre-feminist mink coat)? Remember “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret”? “Queen for a Day”? “You Bet Your Life”? I do.

Guestwords by Megan Collins Ganga

I flew on the first direct flight from J.F.K. to Havana, March 17, 2015. My six companions were members of several South Fork Presbyterian churches, traveling in mission partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba.