Opinion

Who would have thought when a pandemic hit the United States that instead of stocking up on guns, Americans went grocery shopping?

Amid generally good compliance with the New York State Pause order, the Memorial Day holiday excesses were at a minimum.

Only in government would it make sense to take a working public service and place it completely on hold while developing a new one.

Memorial Day seems an appropriate time to bid farewell to a longtime pursuit — in this case, this: my weekly column, “Connections,” which has appeared in The East Hampton Star, come rain or come shine, come hell or come high water, since 1977.

The fact that we as a community have to contend with far more people than we can comfortably carry on our shoulders was made amply clear last week when the East Hampton Town Board dispatched a panicked letter begging the state to shut the door on tourist stays.

To some, spring means cleaning, courtship, or crocuses. To the baseball addict, though, spring is the end of that dark, languid void of silent suffering between October and April. Not this year.

Given the challenges East Hampton Village will encounter between now and the election, it made sense to name someone to fill the open position. But process matters.

I’m playing tennis in the morning,
Ding, dong, the balls all will be signed,
Pull out the hopper, let’s do it
proper,
But get me to the courts on time.

Learn something new. Of all the thoughts I have heard or read on enduring the pandemic lockdown, this has been the best advice.

I am proud of The Star's literary standards when it comes to language, proud of our effort to represent the lives and interests of not just the wealthy and the grand but of the working people who make up the fabric of our community.

When the pope suggested that the coronavirus might be the Earth’s response to the man-made climate crisis, was it magical thinking? Or was it a sound, even useful, metaphor.

We talked with a potential financial adviser by phone one recent morning, he in Charlotte and we here, and were told that the resultant plan was positing a life span of 100, which I thought was a little on the rosy side given what’s been going on.

This is a thank-you to the readers, our friends. Newspaper people like to think we are doing important work. Sometimes, though, we might feel as if the rest of the world does not see it the same way. Not so now.

It hit me yesterday, when one of the kids pointed out that she was going to be done with school in two weeks, what the heck are we doing to do with them this summer with camps not opening and movement still restricted?

It’s not just fear of Covid-19, but how the pandemic has affected the grocery-store supply chain that commands my attention these days.

Popular culture has appropriated the traditional philosophical term “existential,” and the new, fashionable usage clouds philosophers’ contributions.

Golfers can golf, and have been able to for most of the past two agonizing months, but tennis players, unless they have private courts, have been waiting around wondering if they’ll ever be able to play again.

Don’t we want this to be a happy place? A friendly place? And isn’t how we feel often self-created? Friendliness is intentional, driven partly by the idea that our own friendliness might brighten the community around us.

When the coronavirus refugees began arriving about the middle of March, I wondered what the ospreys would think.

Given my insistence that time has come to sign off on “Connections” — at least as a weekly obligation — various family members have started sending suggestions for special, quirky, or interesting columns.

As Americans, we don’t consider “holidays” a given, but if there is any one idea that unites us, it is our shared experience of summer’s pull. We anticipate summer with the hunger that precedes a much-needed meal.

I would like to say a word about my former landlady, Barbara Johnson, without whom I would not have been able to stay in East Hampton.

Talk of a return of baseball this summer, sans fans, sends our faithful correspondent tripping down memory lane and stumbling into the N.F.L. draft, quarantine-style.

Leafing through old issues of The Star from the time of the so-called Spanish influenza, its effects here could be told from the number of dead and ill.

After a few days of the new regimen, you may begin to start wondering what’s going to kill you first, the coronavirus or being in such close proximity for so long.

The similarities between Covid-19 and climate change are striking. In both cases, it isn’t too late to make it less bad than if we do nothing, and “less bad” is as good as it gets.

For me, boredom has always exerted a siren pull — to the extent that once, inspired by a spate of entropic films coming out of Europe in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I dreamed of heading up my own film studio dedicated to producing the kind of profoundly listless screenplays that I couldn’t get enough of.

Watching a live stream of the East Hampton Town Board’s Tuesday meeting, I began to think about the tattletale impulse.     

Passover week found me leafing through a big file folder of my mother’s old recipes, along with a few cook-booklets from days gone by. My goodness, what a time capsule she had squirreled away.

During our walk with O’en (I used to complain that our neighborhood was comatose, now I’m grateful that it is), Mary said she might reconsider the popovers she’d planned to make. “Ah, flattening the curve?” I said.