My rubber-band ball, made entirely from rubber bands, grew bigger every day. It was bigger than a softball, bigger than a  grapefruit. It was heavy and perfectly round. I liked to bounce it, like Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” off the wall of my first office at Vogue magazine, when I got my start in 1998. Everyone loved Steve McQueen, the 1970s tough guy with cruel lips, in the summer of 1998.

Bam. Pause. Bam.

People often ask me about what life was like at Vogue, back in the Gilded Age before the Millennium, before 9/11, before the collapse of print media.

Recently, I was asked to retrieve from The Star’s attic contacts and negatives of Troy Bowe, the former Killer Bees’ point guard, in action. The request set my head to spinning like a leptoquark, for, as I told Carl Johnson, who had made the request, “It’s a black hole up there, a bottomless pit from which it has been said nothing escapes.”

AMAGANSETT

Mary Karoussos to Stonyhill L.L.C., 120 Stony Hill Road, Dec. 11, $1,927,476.

Glenn Behr to Handy Lane 6 L.L.C., 35 Handy Lane, Dec. 22, $1,675,000.

Outerbridge Associates Inc. to Handy Lane 7 L.L.C., 45 Handy Lane (vacant), Dec. 22, $1,675,000.

Glenn Behr to Handy Lane 2 L.L.C., 30 Handy Lane (vacant), Dec. 22, $1,570,000.

Laura Behr to Handy Lane 1 L.L.C., 24 Handy Lane, Dec. 22, $1,200,000.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

John A. Groody to STO 68 L.L.C., 68 Mecox Field Lane, Dec. 22, $6,100,000.