Guestwords

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.

Every few months I drive to Sagaponack from the Berkshires, where I live. I come to stay in my childhood home on Daniel’s Lane and visit with family. Each time I arrive, as I round the corner of Sagaponack Road and Main Street, I look over and see my 6-year-old self, pale and skinny with lank hair, sitting on one of the swings in the narrow patch of grass running along the side of the Little Red Schoolhouse (where a swing set still stands), getting an under-push from Sally Kinkade or Cookie Dombkowski.

The highlight of my summer on the East End last year was exploring Plum Island.

I could’ve driven the handful of miles to the auto dealer on Old Country Road in Riverhead to buy my new pearl white Honda CRV with the rearview camera and cool-looking dorsal fin-like antenna on its roof, but the thought of returning to a town I called home for 17 years and haven’t visited in six made me smile, so I jumped in my four-door gray Civic, threw on Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” pressed repeat, repeat, repeat, and danced by myself the 85-mile trip west to Levittown, never imagining my sojourn would hurl me back to 1964, when an innocent, very blond-haired boy known as Frankie daydre

I was once a member of a women’s Ping-Pong league. I played for about 10 years, say, from when I was 60 to 70. I’d been baby-sitting my 10-year-old grandson and took him to the local pool hall, where I knew they had a couple of Ping-Pong tables. We could bond as we knocked ourselves out.

Four women alongside us, playing like gangbusters, were taking a lesson. “Why the lesson when you play so well?” I asked.

“My league wouldn’t let me play if I didn’t improve,” came a response. “You can join. Here, Sundays, 2 to 5.”

The sign with upside-down letters hangs like an alien landmark on the corner of Shinnecock Road and Foster Avenue, and I know something’s up. When I reach the top of the Ponquogue Bridge I can see a helicopter on the right side of the parking lot and a tented area on the left. At the beach pavilion, people are clumped together on the deck.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re filming a New York State lottery commercial. See that sports car by the tent? Some guy’s gonna drive it across the bridge.”

“How cool.”

Late in the fall of 2008, Dorothy King told my wife, Carol, and me how to access East Hampton Star archive microfilm through interlibrary loan. This tip greatly aided our research on Jud Banister, a former East Hampton Village mayor and great-uncle of Carol’s. By early spring I had logged 100 hours or more on Amherst College’s microfilm reader when the analogy struck me.

Kris Talmage cleans my house and food-shops for me. Every Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, she is here, scanning my face for signs of deterioration and warning me to take care of myself or else, that she’s a tough Bonacker and I’d better not mess with her. I respond that I am a stubborn old Jew, a match for tough Bonackers. She snorts disbelief and then smiles hugely when I tell her I’d just been to Louse Point to see the winter sunrise.

“It was gold dust,” I tell her, “in a frame of deep black clouds.”

I’m single. There, I’ve said it, the dreaded S word. The D label fits, but it’s irrelevant.

Not many years ago, in the ’60s, marriage itself was on the brink of obsolescence for some people. Free love, sex, and rock ’n’ roll ruled the day for the young and restless like me. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, threesomes and groups cohabitated, guiltless and smug.

Even if her life depended on it, my wife cannot tell a joke. In all other ways, she’s brilliant. (Beautiful too.) In fact, the way she ruins a joke is in and of itself amusing and (if I may say so) adorable.

She starts off with the premise of the joke (what professional comics call the setup), then she starts to crack up. You can see by the quirky look on her face that she’s thinking of the punch line (what comics call the payoff). Anticipation clouds her story line. Then she starts laughing, giggling, and breaking up . . . until she can continue telling the joke no longer.

We knew, Alice and I, a bit about Ninevah Beach — that it was founded as a community for well-to-do African-American vacationers, especially families escaping New York City for the summer.

It is special, more upscale by reputation than similar black enclaves such as Val Verde Park, Calif., in the Los Angeles area, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Idlewild, Mich., Highland Beach, Md., and Atlantic Beach, S.C.

It’s that time of year, folks, the holidays are over. We spent too much, ate too much, and drank too much. The season of toomuchness has gutted us and is gone. Time now to buckle down and stop having so much fun. Resolutions, anyone?

I was scribbling “Goya painted with a spoon”

when I heard Jane died (Saturn gnawed

his children without a place setting),

I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.

I never got over

the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage,

when she screamed, “I bargained too much” —

for her murdered son’s life.

The actress wore a wooden spoon as a broach.

So tongue tied, I kept “spoon.”

It is not a kind of decoration.

Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon —

potato fields, Water Mill, pink mallow,

Living together is an art, not a mere scientific or mechanical adjustment. All the mechanizations of all the social engineers will not help a heterogeneous people to live together in brotherly, peaceable, happy relationship unless the individuals of society begin early, practice diligently, and learn to delight in the art of living with other peoples and different races.

My wife never saw an owl. She would mention this at odd times, fairly regularly. Not just when she was looking at trees in the woods or trees on the street or trees through the car window. And not just when she was refurbishing birdhouses or rehydrating hummingbird feeders or referencing a book of North American birds. She would mention it when putting on her blue snow boots or scrambling eggs, when waiting in line to send a package to our son or get handed a bag of popcorn without butter.

When my summer tenants in Southampton asked if they could stay two weeks past Labor Day because their kitchen renovation wasn’t finished yet, I said, “Sure.”

“What would you would charge?” the wife asked on the phone. I knew her husband worked for a wine distributor, so I said, “How about a case of wine? White, red, whatever, maybe a bottle of riesling for my husband.” That seemed fair to me.

Long Island from the beginning has had a close relationship with England. On Dec. 24 the United States and Britain celebrated 200 years of unbroken peace.

The peace treaty, the Treaty of Ghent, came after a long period of hostilities. We were on the same side during the French and Indian War, when the wise Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder chased the French out of North America. But as soon as Prime Minister Lord North and George III tried to make the colonies pay for their own protection, the American Revolution was on.

A story published in The East Hampton Star on Nov. 27, “Lawyer’s Death Reveals System Failures,” about emergency medical services in the town following the death of Tom Twomey, illustrates the tip of the iceberg. Such stories have played out in the past and will continue to in the future until we implement better solutions.

Because of the big storm the other day, the howling winds driving sheets of rain, the ocean beach has written a new chapter for itself. The straggly brown ribbons of seaweed mixed with debris have been swept away, the deeply grooved ruts of crisscrossing truck tracks have been smoothed over, and most footprints are gone.

I’m marveling at clearly visible miles of low-tide, hard-packed glistening sand, brand new and shiny as the sun begins to hover over the day’s freshly painted scene before me. But I can see something is wrong up ahead on the shore.

I’m not a gambler, never have been, except for the 2 bucks I lost on the Jets game in ’68 when they lost to the Bills 37-35 and where #12, my idol Joe Namath, threw five interceptions. After that crushing defeat, and after peeling off two worn George Washingtons, I swore I’d never gamble again, ever, and for 40 years that mandate held true.

But recently I discovered the most unlikely of places to alter my anti-gambling vow from “Never again” to “I’m all in,” and it sits in a church on Buell Lane.

For the first two decades of my life, Thanksgiving was our only whole-family gathering of the year. The cousins loved the reunion, laughing and hugging and playing an annual game of hide-and-seek. Grandpa cupped his hands, yelled his familiar if not creative “Come and get it,” and the first wafts of Grandma’s wonderful cooking greeted us as we stumbled up the front steps.