Guestwords

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ah, the competition and camaraderie of hoops.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

July Fourth is a celebration of independence, and these are the reflections of an alumnus of the ’60s, the era of freedom.

Every March fills me with a false hope that spring is right around the corner. The inevitable rebirth of the new season is always painfully incremental. Glacial. The coldest winter I ever spent was a spring in Springs.

When I was 40 I began the previously forbidden search for my birth father.

June is L.G.B.T.Q. Pride Month, presenting an opportunity to celebrate and reflect, causing me to ponder if my awkwardness playing team sports was intensified because I was a gay kid.

I read the sign’s words out loud: “Grand Army of the Republic Highway,” adding, “I love that about America. You’re never far from our history, and we’re still fighting the Civil War.”

Why do so many men of a certain age suddenly take up gardening?

One summer evening in 1943 I ran to Dad with a big request: It was time for a Daisy air rifle.

Memories of heavenly dates at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Queens trigger thoughts of the recent loss of Scoop du Jour here in East Hampton.

Time spent on the beach with a father, and the details a daughter remembers.

I think my interest in history, as in the history of the Presbyterian churches in Springs and Amagansett, is an extension of looking into my history. Who am I?

Science can’t prove or disprove God, but I nevertheless believe that its findings can contribute greatly to our quest for meaning.

Lessons from a tumble down a flight of stairs, a hospital stay during the height of Covid, and 90 isolating days in a less-than-desirable care center.

Some variation of your life partner getting on your last nerve is inevitable. This was especially true in 2020, the year we rolled back the clock to 1918.