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Guestwords

Guestwords: Winter in Springs

On a winter drive with my husband one Sunday afternoon, we started to list all the people we’ve known from the neighborhood who are no longer here — their absence struck a powerful note.

Jan 27, 2022
Guestwords: What to Tell Your Architect

The surprising connection between home design and phobias.

Jan 20, 2022
Guestwords: A Foodie’s Foodie

Brent Newsom, in memoriam.

Jan 13, 2022
Guestwords: The Virtues of Monotasking

In the last few weeks of 2021, my body put a stop to overtasking and sent me to the corner to think about what I’d done.

Jan 6, 2022
Guestwords: At-Home Test Fails

I had just hit some second-rate jackpot and felt a combination of instant relief and long-haul anxiety. Yippee, we could take a test. Uh-oh, what if my wife and/or I tested positive?

Dec 30, 2021
Guestwords: Xmas Story

Just how did modern civilization make the transition from spirit, light entering the world, to matter — to the materialism that marks Christmas Day?

Dec 23, 2021
Guestwords: Buy/Don’t Buy My House

Bottom line? We want our house loved and enjoyed the way we loved and enjoyed it.

Dec 16, 2021
Guestwords: The Palmer Method

A public education debate has been raging between cursive and printing enthusiasts for several decades now.

Dec 9, 2021
Guestwords: Knee Jerks

Walking the dog was fine. Tennis was fine. Life was fine. Until Labor Day, when my knee blew up like a balloon. So what do you recommend, doc?

Dec 2, 2021
Guestwords: Giving Thanks Anew

On Nov. 25 and every day before and after, I will thank God, Destiny, Fate, Chance, and the prejudice of white descendants of European immigrants for my good fortune. But is that something I should celebrate?

Nov 24, 2021
Guestwords: Turkey Unmasked

Thanksgiving last year was just weird. Now I’m once again looking to escape P.T.S.D. (Post Turkey Stress Disorder).

Nov 18, 2021
Guestwords: At the Battle of the Bulge

So what did Joseph DiSunno do about having no oil in his truck as the Germans closed in?

Nov 11, 2021
Guestwords: Boating While Swamped

Over the course of 15 years running a registered charter fishing boat and taking people out to Montauk Point, I have issued five official mayday distress calls and sunk two boats — with customers on them.

Nov 4, 2021
Guestwords: Ghost Town, a Love Story

What is it about Sag Harbor that brings out the spirits?

Oct 28, 2021
Guestwords: Consider the Rake

Because I can physically see the work getting done as I rake, I view things with a beneficence I can’t summon in life’s more static moments.

Oct 21, 2021
Guestwords: Game 7, St. Louis, 1946

Recollections of a day in Missouri when everyone was a Cardinal.

Oct 14, 2021
Guestwords: Columbus Bows Out

On Columbus Day weekend, revisiting Philip Roth’s breakthrough collection with an eye on identity politics.

Oct 7, 2021
Guestwords: Hail the Rooster

The more people learn about roosters, the more they will appreciate them and want them to have full lives. They will even develop positive attitudes toward their crowing.

Sep 30, 2021
Guestwords: Beware the Rage Rover

The problem these days is not just the quantity of the traffic, it’s the quality.

Sep 23, 2021
Guestwords: R.I.P. Mike Gordon

Mike Gordon was a dear friend I had met on the softball field in Bridgehampton. The melding of machismo and kindness in one man was irresistible.

Sep 16, 2021
Guestwords: Hamptons Pride at Last

This Sunday marks a new, overdue, and outright joyous event in Hamptons history: the launch of its first organization devoted exclusively to Pride.

Sep 9, 2021
Guestwords: Growing Into Yom Kippur

After a decade of renewed participation in Jewish life, I see the new year celebration not as a misplaced jolt of spirituality but as an integral part of the religious calendar, a culminating event and a fresh beginning.

Sep 2, 2021
Guestwords: White Whale Memories

I remember vividly the first Moby-Dick Marathon reading at my bookshop in Sag Harbor. Some 38 years ago — June 16, 1983, to be exact.

Aug 26, 2021
Guestwords: Covid Time

Time is the priceless container of all we have, and, after all, it will get used up eventually. For those of us who are not young, it feels like a cheat — a blank in what is left of our time.

Aug 18, 2021
Guestwords: In Praise of Pickup Games

Ah, the competition and camaraderie of hoops.

Aug 12, 2021
Guestwords: Going Home

I am 74 and diagnosed with end-stage heart and kidney disease. The doctors said there was not much more they could do. Go live life.

Aug 5, 2021
Guestwords: When the Living Is Easy

Memories of funky, beautiful, artistic Springs in the summer of ’64.

Jul 29, 2021
Guestwords: The Way We Were

The release of the Netflix mini-series “Halston” coincided with my discovery of a letter I’d written to a friend in Europe in early 1978 and never sent, containing my firsthand account of a busy Friday night when the designer played a starring role.

Jul 22, 2021
Guestwords: To Potato and Privet

Thoughts on “The Potato Book,” a droll, tongue-in-cheek time capsule of a book with a 1970s warning in Truman Capote’s foreword.

Jul 15, 2021
Guestwords: Where Man Was Born

Throughout this past year, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I have returned again and again to the lyrical prose of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Tree Where Man Was Born.”

Jul 8, 2021