Opinion

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.

The Tibetan horoscope foretold “sudden change or obstacle,” and here it is. The present planetary alignment is said to “force a more spiritual outlook by causing material loss.”

We call and write our friends more now that there is a glimpse of mortality on the horizon and the time to think about it. But the paradox to this newfound closeness is that we cannot express our connection in the physical world.

Whether you qualify it as “social” or “physical,” dis­tancing is not how any of us anticipated spending the spring of 2020. This week, the actual and psychological distances we have to travel to get through this thing just seemed to keep growing.     

The guaranteed way to get through the Covid-19 era is distraction. Here an accomplished physicist diverts you from thinking about the coronavirus with puzzles, problems, wisdom, and humor.

On the South Fork, almost all storefronts are dark and workplaces closed as part of a statewide effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But landscapers appear to be a large and visible exception. This puts workers, among them some of the area’s more vulnerable members of the labor force, at increased risk of exposure.     

It cannot be stressed often enough that maintaining quarantine conditions is critical now that Suffolk's COVID-19 cases have grown to nearly three times the available hospital beds in the county.     

"Houston, we have arugula!” Mary cried after hanging up with One Stop Market, which has been wonderful, providing curb service during these trying times.     

The news about the city folk emptying the South Fork supermarkets is frightening.

It felt like a drug deal. We made initial contact in an email exchange. Over the phone, we arranged payment. I drove to Sag Harbor. Gwen opened the door a crack and handed me the package. There it was, the goods I had been trying to get hold of since the weekend — a 1,000-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle.     

The admonition from health and government officials that everyone stay in place in order to curb the spread of Covid-19 suits my husband and me just fine.

In a region dependent on the service economy, when demand drops to near zero, so too does the income many East End residents need to get by.

Suddenly, every parent is a homeschooler, and everyone is an artist. We’re playing music, performing, dancing, writing stories, and making art. Creative expression is at an all-time high. Who could spare the time for this two weeks ago?

The problem evident now is that the towns failed to calculate the cost of ever-increasing residential development. It has long been clear that in the critical areas of water supply, pollution, and emergency medical services the ultimate effects of growth have not been adequately anticipated.

Amid the coronavirus crisis, many thoughts around the East End have turned to gardening. There is both time now, what with movement more limited than usual, and a sense that supplementing one’s own food supply with homegrown fruit and vegetables is a reasonable precaution.

So, there I was, on Wednesday last, with a stuffy head, and a very, very occasional cough, rheumy eyes — as usual — but wondering.

Many people who work in the trades on the East End -- painters, carpenters, and other hardworking folks who frequently cope with fumes and dust on job sites -- might have a box or two of spare N95 masks in their storerooms or the back of their work vans.

The Star would like to issue a call directly to tradespeople, asking them to please look into the back of those trucks, the bottom of the closets, or their tool boxes to see if they have any unused N95 masks still in their box or plastic packaging.

Among the positive impacts of our coronavirus isolation has been what you might call found time: hours and hours each day for the books I intended to read, television programs I wanted to watch, and operas I didn’t want to miss.

Local food production was not always a sure thing. There was a time when development threatened to gobble up the remaining farmland on the two Forks.

Despite the acrimony and a surprise third candidate, the prospect of a contested election for East Hampton Village mayor has already proven to be a good thing, at least for a clash of ideas.