Guestwords

   In the late 1950s, I attended catechism classes at a Catholic school called Our Lady of Czestochowa. This particular incarnation of the Madonna had a long history among Polish Catholics because the story goes that her gold-framed portrait hung in Jasna Gora monastery in Poland. One day in the 1400s, a fire erupted and the flames darkened the flesh-tone pigments. The church was miraculously saved and the icon became known as the Black Madonna.

    Lillian grabbed my forearm and locked her eyes on me. “Your life is gonna change now,” she said, staring into me as her grip tightened for a few long seconds. “You know that, right?”

    Her husband stood with hands clasped at the French doors that closed around the hallways of Glueckert Funeral Home. She loosed her grip and walked away toward him.

    “Bye, honey.” She waved. “I loved your mom.”

    Her words hovered in the air.

This newspaper imagined a large number of very desirable building lots becoming available, with the prospect that the street, to be known as Maidstone Lane, would equal the popularity of Huntting Lane, opened 20 years earlier.

    It’s a bold risk to dismiss the 360-seat capacity of Guild Hall’s John Drew, ignore over $10 million in renovations, and turn the 80-year-old gem into a black- box theater, but Stephen Hamilton’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” pays off. In an intimate and powerful theater experience, the audience (55 seats total) is placed right onstage, only inches from the action. 

    My mother has been gone 44 years now. I was 21 when she succumbed to colon cancer at age 55. Although I can hardly remember what she looked like, her sayings and morals spring to life in my head, and often pop out of my mouth, almost on a daily basis.

    For instance, when there’s a reason to procrastinate about some necessary task, like an early morning workout, the internal conflict set into play is “never put off for tomorrow what you can do today,” as opposed to “the early bird catches the worm.”

    It was a nice morning on the Rhine — warm, hazy, a breeze. I remember it that way and have checked the weather records to make sure I’m not idealizing it after 67 years.

    I was sweeping horse manure from a Bailey bridge that my outfit, the 1251st Combat Engineer Battalion, had built from Neuss to Dusseldorf. A major driving by in a jeep pulled up, leaned toward me across the passenger seat, and said before I could free my hand to salute him, “It’s over, son.”

    I went numb. I’d been expecting it, but couldn’t believe it.

   As we think about planting our gardens this spring, let us not forget to make a special effort to grow some flowering plants, especially for honeybees. These insects pollinate about 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and seed crops in America. You can thank the honeybee for a third of the food you eat every day.

   I’ve always been fascinated by credit card fees. When your bank is already charging you any interest rate they like, why antagonize their customers further with hefty nuisance fees? It doesn’t seem to make marketing sense. (Just bump up that “default” rate to something even more usurious than it was before; most of your customers won’t notice.)

    “I’m sorry, but you have cancer.” There are probably no more frightening words than those. And everyone feels like a potential victim. After all, if one doesn’t die of heart disease or Alzheimer’s or in an accident, then chances are it will be one of the many forms of cancer.

    My East Hampton is a small town. It is not “the beach,” “the Hamptons,” or some docu­drama. I raised a son here. I talk politics on Main Street. I wait the winter out with fireside reading. The most important thing to me is living here, not how fast I can get in and out for the season. I like having a small airport. It is an amenity. But ultra-luxury travel is not part of my life.

    The first Saturday night of each month, I go contra dancing in Water Mill. The word “contra” always arouses curiosity. Typically, it goes like this:

    “You do what?”

    “I go to contra dances.”

    “Is that some sort of Central American activity?”

    “No, it’s North American country dancing.”

    “Oh, then why contra?”

    “The first New Englanders called it contra, maybe their slang for country.”

    Imagine Paul Revere galloping through town on an average evening, lantern in hand, shouting, “Contra dance tonight!”

   The heralded Obama-Berwick plan to reduce health care infections and errors by 40 percent by 2014 is much too cautious. It falls short of goals already achieved by infection-control advocates in hundreds of hospitals throughout the country and would still leave us with an annual toll of more than 120,000 preventable health care deaths, more than a million preventable illnesses and injuries, and an annual taxpayer cost of $21 billion.

   I love live theater. Musicals, mostly. Sondheim — what’s not to love? I see as much of it as I can.

    I recently read a lot of stuff about a performance by the New York Philharmonic that was held hostage by a ringing cellphone. It stopped the orchestra, stopped the show — the conductor was mortified and embarrassed the guy whose phone disrupted it all. (Surprised he doesn’t have a reality show yet. Suggested title: “The Cell Bells Are Ringing.”)

    Aren’t you sick of the lame, violent, and techno-heavy dreck Hollywood’s been dishing out for the past couple of years? I am. With movie attendance at an all-time low, it’s time for drastic measures. Hollywood needs a hit. What Hollywood really needs is a sequel to “Pretty Woman.”

    Let’s demand a meeting, A.S.A.P., with the powers that be: the director, Garry Marshall, the screenwriter, J.F. Lawton, and the silver screen’s most lovable couple, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. If they’re not available, what about Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst?

   Metaphors don’t come easily to me. Having a limited imagination doesn’t help. But even I couldn’t miss this one.

    Last summer was kind of a bummer for me. Living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with two young children, I didn’t get to the South Fork much, the place where I spent the majority of my youth as a year-rounder. And when I did make it through the constant knots of traffic to the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere of Memorial Day to Labor Day to stay at my mother’s in East Hampton, it became a harried journey to avoid the clots of people and whole swaths of overrun villages.

   Howard Miller, from an old family in Springs, was elected the first president of the East Hampton Baymen’s Association in March 1960. His involvement in community life did not begin with this election, however.

   How do we measure the value of a life? For some of us it’s by the wealth and fame amassed, for others it’s by the good works done.

   My parents’ house was almost empty. The movers placed some things in storage. The rest, items my parents could live without, were being sold today piece by piece. They needed extra cash to help pay for the move. It was a tag sale inside my family’s home, strangers shuffling through rooms, eyeballing furniture and bric-a-brac. Then, by the end of the day, just one more suburban tract house owned by the bank. My mother couldn’t bear it so I came to pick her up for the weekend while my father oversaw the sale before shutting the door behind him for good.

   The Star welcomes submissions of essays for its “Guestwords” column, of between 700 and 1,200 words, and of short fiction, between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

   Authors can either e-mail their pieces (in text or Word format) to [email protected], with “Fiction” or “Guestwords” in the subject line, or mail them, preferably on disk and saved in a text format, to The Star, Box 5002, East Hampton 11937. A very short biographical note should also be included.

    We live on an island. A long one, if you take into account the entire landmass from the Brooklyn Promenade all the way east past Money Pond in Montauk. The North and South Forks, surrounded nearly entirely by water, can be thought of as islands of a sort, too, connected as they are to the mainland west of Riverhead by the narrowest of threads. East Hampton has always had an exceptionalist, island mentality.

    Never having spent Christmas anywhere but at home, I wasn’t sure what Christmas in Nova Scotia with my daughter, Bess, and her family would be like. They live in a small town on the southwest shore called Shelburne. There are two inns in Shelburne, but they are both closed at holiday time. The few sightseers who make the drive down from Halifax are long gone at this time of year, and most of the handful of second-home owners are elsewhere, too. Maybe in part because of this isolation, the sense of community is strong.

    As the New Year fast approaches — and on the heels of what could perhaps best be called an upbraiding by voters in November — East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and his two-member majority on the town board are no doubt taking stock of where they stand and thinking about what they might do differently in 2012.

We are cleaning our windows today, or rather they are being cleaned on the outside by professionals, and, inside, Mary is standing on the sink counter with folded newspaper — pages that presumably aren’t worth reading — doing the Palladian window that gives out onto the bare ruined choirs of the spindly white oaks in our backyard.

If my New Year’s resolution for 2011 had been “dispel with financial insecurity,” I would have succeeded, but not in the way I planned. I always expected to finally feel monetarily secure when a big bag of money, a la Tex Avery, complete with dollar signs emblazoned on its burlap sides, plopped into my lap with an accompanying appropriate cartoon sound effect.

One New Year’s resolution I hope to keep is to get to the dump more frequently. I, for whatever reason, just did not take adequate advantage of my $100 East Hampton Town garbage permit in 2011.

    Banning plastic shopping bags of the sort you get at the food store will solve one problem; specifically, what to do with them when you get them home and unpack the groceries. Southampton Village recently outlawed the bags and now East Hampton Village officials are considering doing the same. From its beginnings in San Francisco and Ireland, a national and international movement to curtail the use of the bags has been spreading.

    My friend “L,” a New Yorker through and through, has always been a model second-home owner. We’ve been friends for about 40 years.

    I married into a family that had been here since colonial times, a family that cherished its roots and wrote about them. In a sense, L followed suit. At first, I thought New Yorkers who summered here were like her: smart, educated, and fun. Even though I wasn’t long out of the city myself, I didn’t consider myself one of them; I thought of myself as having become local, even if locals thought of me as “from away.”