I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street. I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

Jane Bimson, who works in The Star’s front office and who I like to talk with about all things cooking, chided me gently on Monday when I raved about how easy it was. “You’re 55, and you are just now finding out!” she said, as she made a note to bake some biscotti for herself very soon.

Jane is a master in the kitchen. Her sweet pickles brighten our Decembers every year, when she hands out a jar for each person at The Star. I am told Baylis Greene quietly consumes every last slice before the day is out. At birthdays, she always makes carrot cake muffins with cream cheese frosting, leaving them on the office kitchen table to honor the person whose lucky day it is. Because I can’t have dairy products, Jane places a single topping-free muffin on my desk before I get in.

We are an office filled with foodies. Russell Bennett’s wife, Fiona, is a test chef and often sends him in with the most remarkable of treats. Matt Charron’s eats are consistently healthy, and we often talk about that. Jennifer Landes knows all about the restaurants. Laura Donnelly (who does not come into the office often enough) and I could talk for hours about scallops and beach plums. My sister, Bess, who works downstairs on East magazine, is a whiz with desserts and has a massive stash of antique cookbooks.

Kathy Kovach, who used to work here, and Carissa Katz, the manag ing editor, worked in catering on the side for years. I spent several summers selling fish at Claws on Wheels in East Hampton, getting to know the regular customers and making up names for some of them, my favorite the “Pounda Flounda Guy.” Leigh Goodstein, a former reporter, manages the Clam Bar on Napeague. I could go on.

There is a thing, I think, about food and the news business, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Years ago at a wedding, I met a woman who worked in human resources at The Times who told me they put internship résumés in two piles: those with food service experience and those without. They called in the food service people for interviews. I can see why.

Empty but for the two of us on the top deck of the Cross Sound Ferry bound for New London on New Year’s Day, my middle child and I watched the waves. Evvy, named after my late father, takes after him in many ways, though they never met. It was her idea to explore the boat, and he, like us, would have been outside on the deck while the rest of the passengers sat quietly inside, away from the wind. Pointing out Gardiner’s Island and the Ruins, I thought about him, the many things he told me about the weather and the bay, but I kept it to myself.

A half-mile off the starboard side of the John H., whitewater was rushing up and down the cobble beach on Plum Island. Evvy asked why the waves were so high. I fumbled an answer, something about the wind reaching across the Sound all the way from New Haven. What makes waves, she asked. The wind, I said.

The truth is that although I believe the wind makes waves, I do not know how it works. The basic elements are obvious enough. A breeze able to be felt on the skin on an otherwise still day ruffles the surface of the water. As the wind rises, so, too, do the ripples become chop. Given enough fetch, the chop becomes waves, the waves become swell. What drives it all is unseen.

As I recall dimly from books, notably Willard Bascom’s seminal “Waves and Beaches,” wind agitates molecules of water. The rapid aggregation of swell, which made the ferry roll sidewise on the first day of the year, is harder to grasp. Remarkable, I think, too, is that swell can travel hundreds or thousands of miles, even passing under a calm surface, like the ripples of a bed sheet being shaken.

Near the Connecticut shore, the motion of the John H. gradually settled. Each wave lifted it slightly less than the one before. Passengers who had been bolt upright leaving Orient Point put down their heads and their phones and dozed. Closer in, getting back into cellular range, phones came out and people began to stir as we pulled into the shelter of the lower Thames. There were ripples on the water as we docked, but not enough to worry the shore on the other side of New London Harbor.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, our dog-eared Webster’s dictionary tells us, “government by the worst men.”

I had been thinking along the lines of caca, and cacastocracy, and hadn’t, as it turned out, been far off the mark, but for some reason, perhaps because I remain an optimist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, I tend not to agree with the columnist’s dour outlook for the year 2019.

Trump, he seems to think, when it all comes down, will, like a wounded wild boar (my analogy), run roughshod over everyone, over the Constitution, the rule of law, common decency, all that.

Will there be sages the likes of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and Judge John Sirica (he could also have included in that number Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, and Peter Rodino) of Watergate fame to stand up to him, and, in so doing, reassert the equilibrium that our system of checks and balances intends?

Or will we be thrown — a likelihood in his view — to the wolves of party loyalty, ideological fervor, and general calumny?

And yet, and yet. . . . When the chips were down, a fellow East Hamptoner reminded me at a holiday party not long ago, Americans tended in critical moments to put their shoulders to the wheel and to do, in concert, the right thing.

We were talking about countering East Hampton Airport’s pollution (the airport itself being a Depression-era offspring of that can-do spirit), but his assertion can be applied to the amelioration of any number of ills, whether environmental or societal, that cry for attention.

I am an optimist and I believe him, not the dour David. People of good sense will stand up, sweet reason will win the day, that’s my New Year’s prediction.

“We’re going to be in for some snow, O’en,” Mary said as we were driving along last Wednesday, before realizing she’d mistaken me for the dog, a good sign.

That she would think to compare me, a Mr. Burns look-alike (in fact, I can rub my hands, and, with a protruding fang, say, “Excellent, excellent” just as he), with such a dignified, snowy-coated beast was comforting, especially in weather that is becoming anything but.

I still worry every now and then, as does she, that we are a bit boring as masters, too old to trot along with him, at least in my case, and too eager to pull the sliding glass door shut when he’s still wanting to chase tennis balls in the frigid gloaming. 

As a ball-chaser he is mercurial. He’ll do it for a while, if he’s pretty sure there’s a treat waiting, in which case he’ll follow the commands — “Bring it . . . Front . . . Sit.” But eventually he’ll get distracted, by a stick, the scent of a mole, or some such, affording us the chance to duck back inside to warm our hands.

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen. Of course, to be fair, there should be lotion Trumpians could apply, too, lest they be irradiated by World Federalists. That having been said, as they say, I found that people were quite friendly when we were in Naples a few years ago, probably because most of the other vacationers we met were from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Canada, where from time to time we say we should move to, if it weren’t so cold, which serves to underline the point I made above. Cold place, warm hearts. Warm place, old farts.

Temperate place, warm hearts and old farts, I guess, which is why we’re still here, engaged in the eternal round of despair and hope, small town contention and amiability. Come to think of it, despair and hope pretty much dominated the conversation at the media forum in Sag Harbor that we went to today. There were challenges to be sure, not the least of which was posed by the perplexing half-done crossword puzzle I’d taken with me, but there was hope too that local news, offered in varying formats, through print, websites, podcasts, and local access television, would remain germane, a future that seemed assured when I arose from the American Hotel table an hour or so later with the puzzle finished in its entirety, usually a sign of good things to come, even if it looked as if we were going to be in for some snow.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”

A New Year’s resolution may be an indulgence in wish?ful thinking, but I’m determined to fulfill a modest resolution I’ve made for 2019. It’s simple: I am going to sort through my T-shirts and give away most of them. Exactly when I took to buying T-shirts in large numbers is clouded in history. Suffice it to say they come from only two or three retailers and can no longer fit in a bureau drawer, so they clog my closets.

Giving away clothes makes us feel good; we like to spin it as an earth-friendly effort at recycling. (Although, if you have ever seen a good documentary called “T-Shirt Travels” you know how not-so-wonderful the used-clothing trade actually is for local industries in the countries where our castoffs end up, though I guess it might still be better than the landfill.)

Many residents here donate their nicest unwanted clothes to the Bargain Box, the secondhand shop run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, which — despite having become quite tony in recent years and not always as big a bargain — is still chockablock with fortuitous fashion finds. Young men of my acquaintance have found perfect tuxedos at the Bargain Box, and there always seems to be a plethora of secondhand designer shoes and outfits.

My daughter tells me she and a close childhood friend had an argument in the Bargain Box’s dress?ing rooms, over Christmas, about a beautiful Carolina Herrera poppy-colored skirt suit with cutout lace trim that was on sale for $10 and probably was originally priced at 200 times that; it didn’t fit either of them, but was too tempting to leave on the rack. (The Herrera suit, I’m told, is currently on a jet plane on its way to Seattle with the victorious childhood friend.)

I am afraid that the staff who manage the Bargain Box would laugh me right out of the building if I showed up with my T-shirts. They would likely suggest I take them to the row of donation bins at the dump, but I am not enthusiastic about that.

Everything that goes into those bins is bundled into bales and resold in less-affluent communities and countries, from the Canadian Maritimes to Zanzibar. No doubt you have seen men, women, and children in faraway places wearing clothes with all kinds of American logos? The reason people on the other side of the world are photographed in Bonac football jerseys and “I’m With Stupid!” T-shirts is because the clothing-bale industry has knocked local fabric and clothing manufacturers right out of business.

I will never forget a jammed, warehouse-like store called Frenchie’s in the small town in Nova Scotia where my daughter used to live; it was stocked entirely with items from these secondhand bales. It was amusing to realize while browsing that all of the clothing, recognizably, had originated from donation bins in the Boston area: In among the woman’s cashmere pullovers from J. Crew and the used lacrosse uniforms, we found a green T-shirt with the logo of Concord Academy, the boarding school in Massachusetts that my daughter attended.

As for the Bargain Box, it has been a year or more, but I remain sorry that the L.V.I.S. decided to stop offering children’s clothes there. Apparently, it just didn’t make economic sense to give over valuable selling-floor space to a kids’ clothing section that didn’t turn much of a profit. Also, I’m told, it was difficult to find reliable volunteers to take on the unglamorous, week-in-week-out task of sorting and pricing things for this particular department.

Still, the fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

It seems to me that a thrift shop is, in this regard, a moral venture. Not only do thrift shops almost invariably benefit charitable causes, and not only do they enable recycling, but they lend a needed hand to those who cannot afford boutique shopping. “Waste not, want not” is indeed a noble dictum. Perhaps someone who reads this — someone with experience in the clothing trade, or a pair of friends — will be inspired to offer their volunteer services to our beloved Bargain Box.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass. 

I never have to go very far from home to be enlightened.

The temperature had fallen below 20 degrees on Monday when I set out to return a book to the library, and the big question was whether The Star office’s driveway-side door was closer to the library’s front or back door. 

These are the calculations of a senior citizen in winter.

A few months ago, the library installed a handy-dandy beverage machine that grinds and brews a choice of Starbucks coffees, as well as chai and cocoa, which cost only $1 if you take your own mug or $2 if you take a paper cup, and the lure of the coffee machine brought me to the front door of the library. Because it was so cold, I opted for hot chocolate. Continuing my cold-avoidance maneuvers, I walked through the stacks and out the library’s back door to minimize the number of steps back to my desk.

These are the simple pleasures of a senior citizen in winter.

I love going to the library, and very much enjoy its architectural elegance. How lucky we are to have such a well-run and well-supplied institution at the heart of our village.

Being there also gives me an opportunity to glance at a portrait of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, which hangs near the reference desk. As a member of its board of managers, as well as a neighbor, she was a force in the library’s evolution. Indeed, she had grown up in “the Purple House,” which stood between the library and the Star office, where the north wing of the library was constructed in the 1970s. She, like me, made frequent triangular trips between the compass points of home, work, and enlightenment.

The “East Hampton Free Library” had its beginnings at Clinton Academy at the turn of the last century and moved slightly south, nearer Buell Lane, in 1912. Its driving force was a group of 12 local women; its first librarian was Ettie Cartwright Hedges. Interestingly, it was another determined woman, Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse, who donated the land as well as the money to construct the original part of the pretty building, which was meant to look like a timber-frame house in a village in Kent, England, where East Hampton’s original settlers were said to have come from. 

Guild Hall and the John Drew Theater, as well as the Nature Trail, were also gifts to the community from Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo.

Last Saturday, I was among the crowd gathered at Guild Hall for a Metropolitan Opera screening of “Adriana Le­couvreur,” starring the marvelous diva Anna Netrebko, and had time to think about the enduring bounty of these Woodhouse gifts. 

What sort of village would we be, without Guild Hall, the library, and the Nature Trail? I know my own everyday life would be much diminished, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

We’ve returned from a Thanksgiving dinner on the Eastern Shore that would have made even Ina Garten envious. And the house, whose core dates to 1876 or so, was beautiful, the most beautiful one I’ve ever been in.  

Fearing that we might wear thin — I mean, our repertoire is not endless — we stayed the first two nights at the Tidewater Inn in Easton, about 20 minutes from my cousin’s house, and while the room was a bit cramped (people must have been smaller and/or less demanding in the 1940s), we stuck it out. And I’m glad we did, for Frederick Douglass, as we learned from flags at every street corner, was a native son. As was Harriet Tubman, the bartender at the Pub told us.

“Of course, he couldn’t wait to get out of Easton,” Mary said, but still it was interesting to know he was from there, and to know that there is a well-reviewed biography of him that has just come out.

Driving around there isn’t the easiest thing: There are deep ditches alongside the roads, bordered by dark, tall pines. Several times in those dark pines we had to back up nervously, trying to find our way to the tree in whose thick bark was implanted their tiny house number.

Mike, my cousin Margot said, rather liked it that way. It reminded me of my late Uncle Louis, who lived up on Waterworks Road, in Sewickley, Pa., and insisted that the rutted dirt road remain untended. Still, everyone descended, or ascended.

Uncle Louis and Aunt Gwenny’s was a gathering place, much like my cousin Margot’s. She welcomes you with open arms as you stare, mouths agape, not knowing that people still ive like this. Many bedrooms, many living rooms, many fireplaces, and many dogs — five black Labs by actual count, all as welcoming as she.

While the setting is rarefied, on the banks of the Tred Avon River, with Oxford just across the way, one feels, once having been given the grand tour, at home.

And, man, can Margot cook, a fact hitherto largely unknown to me. Mary, who’s used to playing hostess to two score on Thanksgiving, wanted — wanted very much — to help, but everything was in order, everything taken care of. She was utterly delighted when told she could wash the dishes. And I, wanting to be useful too, made margaritas — the recipe for which, vouchsafed by East Hampton’s own Alex Silva, you can find in one of Ina Garten’s early cookbooks.

There were 11 of us at dinner, the youngest being 3, and there was affection all around, everyone having a chance to talk, everyone having a chance to listen, and everyone having a chance simply to reflect in silence. It was an exceedingly pleasant feeling, one that I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced in quite the same way before. 

It brought to mind the general’s toast in “Babette’s Feast,” one of my favorites, and its lines from Psalm 85: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Outside of that tiny section of Central Park, people went about their business, that business apparently the holiday-season orgy of materialism or the enthusiastic annihilation of livers and brain cells, Saturday being the annual SantaCon, an event that the late, great Village Voice once described as “a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” 

Around that mosaic, though, those hundreds, several of them wielding guitars and a handful of other instruments, were remembering Lennon on the 38th anniversary of his murder. The songs flowed, one after the other, one guitarist or another strumming or singing an introduction in an informal, festive sing-along and celebration of Lennon and the Beatles. 

It’s always so nice to see people of all ages and ethnicities come together, forming a sort of microcosmic New York City within the city, a microcosm of humanity itself, in its collective impulses to gather together and express itself. Better still when the expression is uplifting and positive. All you need is love, love is all you need, was Lennon’s message to the world in 1967. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, he intuited, later that year, with a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide. 

And yet, despite the merry chorus of New Yorkers and visitors to the Capital of the World, where Lennon had persevered, over the strenuous and paranoid protestation of Richard Nixon and his ilk, to become a permanent resident of the city he loved, an overwhelming sadness would not, could not fade away. 

George Harrison, said his widow, Olivia, “was really angry that John didn’t have a chance to leave his body in a better way, because George put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.” 

Lennon was not afforded the luxury of calmly going into the blinding, burning light, mindful that his and the universal mind are one. How could he, with a fan/fanatic squeezing a trigger over and over, shooting holes in his body? 

Nineteen years after Lennon’s murder, the nation was shocked by a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado, two students murdering 12 schoolmates and a teacher. And then, the trickle became a deluge, among the carnage 20 first graders and six adults in Connecticut; 49 killed and 53 wounded inside a nightclub in Orlando, and 58 killed and 851 injured — you read that right — from gunfire and the resulting panic when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. 

This year has been a predictably bloody one in the gun-crazy United States of America. Seventeen more students and teachers were killed, on Valentine’s Day, at a high school in Parkland, Fla. It was the year’s deadliest mass shooting — as of Monday, anyway — but far from the only one. On the 311th day of the year, the 307th mass shooting took place, this time inside a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Twelve were killed — 13 if you count the shooter, who turned the weapon on himself in the end. 

In a sad but sadly foreseeable irony, some of the patrons enjoying country music at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks had survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas one year before. There are now Americans who have personally experienced two mass shootings. 

According to the John Lennon Official account on Instagram, more than 1.4 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Will we passively bury the bodies, offer our eminently useless thoughts and prayers, and await the next shooting, surely knowing by now that nowhere is safe?

Saturday was so very cold in the park, and I left, after an hour, with Lennon’s words rising from the crowd and into the wintry air. “A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.