Guestwords

   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.”    

    That State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who represents the very gay-friendly South Fork, as well as the rest of eastern Long Island, has refused to vote yes on a same-sex marriage bill so far this week has, unfortunately, not been a surprise, even if it is deeply disappointing. With the Senate locked in a 31-to-31 stalemate over the issue, Mr. LaValle could have played the hero with a reversal to vote in favor of the measure. That, however, did not appear to be likely as the battle raged on in Albany.

I thought as I carried the watering can from its place upended near the coiled hose at the southeast wing of our house to rest it atop the coiled hose at the southwest wing so that I could mow the tall grass that had grown up through it that my entire life had led me to this moment.

    Why had I done it? I’m not sure. One inner voice said, “Pick up the can,” the other, “Forget about the can, Jack, go back to watching ‘SportsCenter.’ ”

    As I was walking up to the stage at the Heritage Park Amphitheater in Simpsonville, S.C., a few weeks ago, the butterflies started to make some noise in my stomach due to what was about to happen. The singer I play with, Janiva Magness, and I were about to go on right before Buddy Guy and B.B. King — the two bluesmen who have had the greatest influence on my guitar playing since I was a kid.

  It seems to be a reasonable solution to the Springs School’s useable-space crunch that the district would borrow an East Hampton Town-owned building on school property to use for classrooms. However, a deal should not be struck without keeping in mind the needs of the larger Springs community.

    Down at the beach at about 4:20 on Tuesday morning to fish yet again, I stood at the water’s edge, batting at mosquitoes, just as the eastern sky was getting pink and orange. My wife says that I am obsessed, crazy to be getting up so early, but the way I see it, with three kids and only the shortest breaks between the newspaper and responsibilities around the house, I have to take my relaxation when and where I can find it.

Getting ready this week for a trip that will carry me 8,410 miles away, I’ve found myself thinking, incongruously, about flying to Block Island long ago.

Since last summer, he has made cherry, apricot, mango, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, peach, plum, blackberry, and beach plum.

New York State Senators were expected this week to approve a bill that would legalize same-sex marriages.

I flailed about trying to work in sync with a group of women whose cores are iron and who bend like reeds in the wind at Carolyn Giacalone’s cues as I strain in the general direction of my toes wherever they may be.

A lot of people are described as larger than life. Dad was larger than life, and he lived that life large.

Ray Gualtieri had a stormy tenure, mostly of his own creation, but finding a replacement will not be easy, despite the position’s hefty salary.

Celebrities have never been the stock in trade of The East Hampton Star, so it was not all that surprising that we first learned Liza Minelli had sold a truckload of stuff at a yard sale here last weekend from an item on Page Six.

There is a hearing at East Hampton Town Hall this evening on an update to the overarching policy document that guides land buys using money from the community preservation fund.

Last weekend, we cleaned the barn. Nearly 200 years old, it is a ramshackle, dusty old edifice that is literally packed to the rafters with junk and treasures.

The name Dominic Baranello no longer rings a bell among many in Southampton, or anywhere for that matter, but he once ruled the Demo­cratic Party of Suffolk County as the last of the old-time political bosses.

A friend of mine was ready to go to Italy not long ago, to hike along the Amalfi Coast by day and drink wine by night, but then his mother-in-law injured herself in a fall and his wife took sick, and the vacation had to be postponed.

I’ve always been concerned about what I eat,Even when I don’t follow through with my better intentions, which is often, they’re on my mind. Now that I have kids, I spend an amazing amount of time and energy thinking, talking, and worrying about what goes into them.