Most of my socializing seems to happen in fall, with light entertainments accumulating in October and November like berries sliding off a plate into a bowl.
I’m not sure who all these people are who want to throng together at wine tastings and art openings in July and August, but it isn’t me. The problem with the population increase of July and August is that all these outlanders cram themselves into spaces too small to hold them — restaurants too small to fit all the Instagram influencers, parking lots too small to hold all the G Wagons, cell towers with too-feeble bandwidth to shoulder all the iPhone users. All that crowding makes everyone irritable and you just want to be left alone. I know I’m not the only one who spends summers engaging in strategic but inconvenient maneuvers to carve out some private space, some elbow room.
Counterintuitively, it’s when the crowding calms down after Labor Day that we want to gather in groups again. Is it just me?
Now that I have become a middle-aged hermit who is wearing a pair of vertical creases between her brows by the sheer force of the perpetual scowling, of course, what counts as a social gathering bears little resemblance to the all-night parties I enjoyed in my bar-top-dancing years. Before, say, the age of 35, nary a week went by without a round robin of literary parlor games, picnic outings to Brighton Beach (riding in the open back of a pickup with our hair streaming in the wind and “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls blasting on the truck speakers), and dancing until sunup in sweaty basements among perspiring but sexy strangers. When I say I return again to social life in autumn I mean that this week I actually left my house to watch “One Battle After Another” at the Regal Cinema in the company of old friends and then had them over for a modest dinner of chicken and rice spiced with star anise, eating not in the dining room but on a vintage cotton tablecloth on the “sun porch.”
There are also plans afoot for attendance with friends at the Festival of Preservation in November at Sag Harbor Cinema, to see restored versions of “High Society” and “Footlight Parade.” Whoopie! I may have to comb my hair. I’m actually lacing up my shoes and going to the big city midmonth for my birthday; Alison and Sarah and I will be getting pedicures and then attending happy hour for trays of good, iced oysters at a discount price. And, as a grand finale to this absolute bacchanal of wild carousing, my kids and I will be hosting two or three family members for Thanksgiving. It’s getting crazy ’round here.
October and November are pleasant months if you, like me, enjoy the preparation for a social event as much as, or more than, the event itself. I mean, if you like making an outing out of selecting the gift-wrap ribbons at the Variety Store (and decorating December’s gifts in front of the television while you rewatch all three seasons of “Detectorists”) as much as you actually enjoy Christmas morning, when no one is ever as grateful or as jolly as they ought to be. Planning the party is more than half the fun. I’ve managed to secure a gallon freezer Ziploc bag of fresh sorrel, requisite for the annual eating of Shinnecock oysters Rattray with sorrel and Pernod sauce on the fourth Thursday in November. Halloween means it’s nearly time to bake the “make and feed” Christmas cake studded with currents and dried cherries, believe it or not! It makes a wonderful fragrance in the house.
Have you heard about this thing called “third space”? I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but it’s urban-intellectual-speak for anyplace that’s not home and also not a workplace, where you meet up by happenstance with random others and linger about, chatting, gossiping, and not being lonely. To be a third space it has to be accessible to anyone, really, so an exclusive art museum probably doesn’t count. A luncheonette, a barber shop, the post office, a yoga studio or gym (I suppose).
The problem with the South Fork is that we’re lacking in third spaces these days. We sure do have a ton of coffee shops — the coffee shop is our primary third space, although none of them here have the seating capacity to accommodate the sitting-around-all-day coffee culture of old Vienna — and there’s always the library. And John Papas. But we’ve gotten awfully deficient in union halls, corner stores, bars, bowling alleys, and, as I may have mentioned, general stores. We’ve got a vitamin deficiency when it comes to third spaces. East Hampton has social scurvy and our teeth are falling out.
It’s possible I might make it out the door one evening this fall for trivia night, but don’t save me a seat. Just start without me if they’ve started asking about the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb or the Treaty of Westphalia, and I am still home wrapping fruitcakes with dime-store ribbon.