A close friend called on Tuesday to say he had been in the hospital emergency room overnight for treatment for an allergic reaction to meat.

Time was no one much knew about the now-dreaded alpha-gal allergy, much less that it was brought on by the bite of the lone star tick. As far I know, I was patient zero, at least in the New York area. My first attack came in about 1991, a couple of hours after eating pepperoni pizza while helping to install an interactive exhibit for children at the South Street Seaport Museum.

One thing about anaphylactic shock is that it makes you very dumb. At least that happened to me. After the pepperoni stepped up and kicked me, I walked to a pharmacy, took a fistful of mind-numbing antihistamines, and got in my truck, headed for the Long Island Expressway. To this day, I can’t pass a certain stretch of houses on the service road at about Exit 21 without flinching. I will spare you about what was along the side of the road before I fell asleep in the front seat. As I said, it makes you dumb.

After a few more attacks, I found a well-recommended allergist in Manhattan. It took several rounds of tests and a detailed food diary before the meat allergy became clear; she had never seen it in any of her patients. I even got on some national network or other’s morning show, in a segment about people with weird allergies.

These days, alpha gal is old news. Pretty much every restaurant server here knows about it. This is a relief because for years I had the suspicion that I was being seen as a food nut when I asked that extra care be taken with what I was about to be served.

Probably my worst allergic reaction came when I was a co-moderator for a debate between Representative Tim Bishop and Lee Zeldin at Westhampton Beach High School. Joe Shaw, the Southampton Press editor, and I had met for dinner earlier that night at Starr Boggs; I had the fish. Thing was, the brownish sauce my fillet was swimming in was made with meat stock. 

About halfway through the debate I felt a telltale itching at the back of my head. Then my lips started to tingle. As the closing statements began, I leaned over to Joe and whispered that I had a, uh, medical situation and would have to run out the minute they ended.

All was good as I darted up the aisle and asked a cop through thickening lips if there was a 24-hour pharmacy nearby. He gave me directions, and I took one step toward the parking lot. Suddenly, Mr. Bishop blocked my path, looking to make one final point. I stood there wondering what to do. At last, he was done.

A couple of antihistamines later, I was headed home in the truck. “What else could I do?” I thought. I was lucky to have made it home. Like I said, it makes you dumb. 

By the way, the last time I wrote about ticks, the good people at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital sent over a nice tick kit with an identification card, tweezers, a magnifying glass, and alcohol swabs, as well as advice about how to remove the little terrors. The kits are available at programs run by the hospital’s tick-borne disease resource center and can be requested at 631-726-TICK. They are worth having on hand.

I love the movies and saw every film I could get tickets for during the Hamptons International Film Festival last weekend, but one movie in particular left me with something of an emotional hangover. 

“I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” which was made in Romania, is a contender for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In it, a young woman who is a theater director attempts to stage re-creations of the Odessa massacre of 1941, in which tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were rounded up, then shot or forced into a building that was burned to the ground. The populace looked the other way or, more to the point, took part. Above all else, the film attempts to show that ordinary citizens were complicit in horrendous wrongdoing, and perhaps to warn about the future. The film was shown here on Oct. 5. 

Two days later, The New York Times ran a story titled “God Was on Vacation” about 95-year-old Iancu Zuckerman, who grew up in a Romanian town called Iasi. There, in June 1941, “soldiers, gendarmes, and enthusiastic volunteers,” as The Times put it, rounded up several thousand Jews and then murdered many (“with guns, iron bars, or sledge hammers”) and piled the rest into freight cars to nowhere that became death trains. Mr. Zuckerman was one of 137 crammed into one car; he and only seven others escaped. 

As a child, I knew my maternal grandparents had come from a country called Romania, and I romanticized it. My mother said it was a shame that my grandmother had forgotten the language. The story goes that my grandparents lived some 49 miles from Kishinev (Chisinau), in Bessarabia (or Moldava), far enough away to survive a notorious 1903 pogrom. My grandfather arrived in this county not long afterward, in April 1906; my grandmother, with her daughter Yetta, who was to be my mother, and two small boys, arrived here that November, having hidden in hay wagons and walked from as far as the Black Sea.

Only 3,876 Jews were tallied in Moldava in 1897, but their population had grown by World War II. It was reported that from October 1941 to mid-March 1942, Romanian military and local authorities murdered 25,000 Moldavan Jews and deported 35,000 to certain death.

Regular readers will remember my previous columns about the farm my mother’s father bought, a 180-acre farm in dairy country in the Catskills, where we spent bucolic summers. On fertile ground in Bessarabia, the family had been what could be called middle class. They cultivated grapes and danced on them to make wine. Their life was good. The war notwithstanding — or perhaps because of it — my grandfather was trying to re-create in the Catskills what had been good about the homeland, and to share it.

When a woman with whom we were talking one night at Cittanuova said she had never felt she was any better or any less than anyone else, I said, “That’s it.”

That, I thought, is the way to be, or the way to want to be, certainly in an ideal democratic society — open to others, unshackled by fear or envy or pride, willing to engage on equal terms with anyone, to listen to and reflect upon what everyone has to say. 

We seem far removed from that sensibility now, the even-tempered give-and-take that can lead to progress, stuck in a rut of contumely, rashness, and self-aggrandizement, to the exclusion of all. Fear rules, sowing hatred and discord as through heedlessness an egalitarian society and nature suffer.

There are, of course, exceptions, and one I’m thinking of is close to home: I-Tri’s work with teenage girls, who, once they’ve trained for and participated in a triathlon, a daunting task, even for the athletic, and have come to know and appreciate themselves and their teammates better through interactive esteem-building sessions, realize — their fears having been overcome — that they can do anything.

Overcoming fear, I-Tri’s founder, Theresa Roden, has said, “sets us apart.” Indeed, it was for this, she thinks, that the International Triathlon Union’s women’s committee recently singled I-Tri out for an award. And, come to think of it, there are no tryouts for I-Tri: Anyone, everyone is welcome. 

We celebrate individuality in this country, and also, if our ideals are to be heeded, community. Individuality and community. Ideally, we’re a team, like I-Tri, each working to maximize her or his gifts, and all working as best we can to make of many one. Lofty goals, yes. But achievable if, at the end of the day, we are all in this together.

Ms. Roden wants to take this farther than the East End — into the country, into the world. And, as David Wilmott used to say at the end of his editorials, why not? It is a lesson well worth the learning.

Isabel, with whom I work — a terrific long-distance runner, by the way — said on reading the story I’d written on I-Tri last week, that that was it, just as I’d said when the woman in Cittanuova spoke. I never felt any better or any less than anyone else. And, might it be true, that the better you feel about yourself, the more inclined you may be to celebrate others, your teammates, even to the extent, as is the case with I-Tri, of running back a half-mile after you’ve broken the tape to run with the last one to finish, hand-in-hand, across the line. If I-Tri were adopted throughout this country, think what we could do.

You might remember a radical reimagining of East Hampton Village that was put forward last year by a group of architects lead by Maziar Behrooz. It was called “Restoring Forward: A Vision for East Hampton Village,” and among the other revitalization ideas it proposed — which included adding walking and biking paths and greenways, and creating park space where there is now parking space in the Reutershan lot — was the creation of a cultural zone at the west end of Newtown Lane.

It occurs to me that the village already has a cultural zone — and that I live in it.

My house is behind the East Hampton Library, which is a stone’s throw from my workplace here at the Star office, which is next door to Clinton Academy (home to many fascinating exhibitions and history talks) and directly opposite Guild Hall; a few paces from Guild Hall are two museums, the growing Mulford Farm grounds and Home, Sweet Home. Soon, there will be another museum here in this hub: The old cottage behind the South End Burying Ground will open to the public as the Gardiner Mill Cottage Gallery, housing landscape paintings depicting East Hampton in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The resplendently restored Thomas Moran Studio is within walking distance, as well.

Living here in the heart of the village is a blessing. For starters, it’s handy to be able to pop home from work on the flimsiest of excuses (a need for a cookie or to pat the dog) and in any weather. And being so close to these worthy institutions is good for the mind as well as the body. I find myself trotting across Main Street to go to shows at Guild Hill constantly, from the Metropolitan Opera live broadcasts to documentary screenings during the Hamptons International Film Festival. 

People often complain that there is not enough to do here in the off-season, but I cannot agree. If anything, we have an overabundance of museum buildings sitting ready to be put to good use for the enjoyment of the public. Two of our cornerstone institutions, the East Hampton Historical Society and the East Hampton Library, do great work when they run slates of events for families at Clinton Academy and in the various meeting rooms at the library, whether it’s a talk about the “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918 or a crafting class for toddlers. 

Here’s hoping that the Moran house and the Gardiner gallery — not to mention the Hedges barn that is soon to be raised on the grounds of Mulford Farm — will throw their doors open with frequency, too, for residents of all ages to learn and have fun, even when the weather turns to snow.

Now that Brett Kavanaugh no longer has to defend himself against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault, he can get on with screwing us. 

It’s been a long time coming, and were it not he it would have been someone else with equally illiberal views. It is supposed to be a liberal country, you know, inasmuch as we pay no fealty to a king (though maybe to movie and TV stars and pro athletes) or slink about whispering under the thumb of a dictator, but rather are supposed to make of ourselves a commonwealth of purposeful individuals, checking the swings the pendulum may make toward anarchy on the one hand or statism on the other. The idea, I take it, was that if power were to reside with the citizenry — with citizens sufficiently aware of the ways power could be abused — it might through the holding of frequent elections be sufficiently diffused. 

We have one such election coming soon, and let’s hope that there will be some redress, some righting of the ship, the minority party now controlling the Supreme Court as well as the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency, the latter office having become pretty much synonymous with the abuse of power. 

To help turn the tide, my wife has been knocking on a lot of doors lately on behalf of Perry Gershon, a voice of reason amidst the turmoil that seems to surround us. I told her she had met more people in the past few weeks than I had in my entire reportorial career. At least it seems that way. Of the two of us, she is more the political animal, as it were, eager to exchange ideas with others, more willing than I to listen, and to reflect, more concerned with the well-being of all, and more sensitive — even to the point of becoming physically affected — to injustices, which, of course, abound. My late mother called her “a great cheerer-upper,” and she is, genuine in her hope that in this society, in this world, we can do better by one another.

She said not to single her out, as I was about to, when her candidate won the Democratic primary here not long ago, that her contributions had been negligible, that she was just one person in a large, and well-organized, effort throughout the district. All right. I am encouraged, then, that there are many like her, that she isn’t the only one who would like to restore checks and balances to a society that has become warped. Judy D’Mello wrote recently that there are encouraging signs too among the 18 to 24-year-olds. Maybe they’ll vote in big numbers this year, availing themselves of absentee ballots.

I hope that this country will eventually live up to its promise, that it will become less stratified, more egalitarian when it comes to wealth, race, and class, and, yes, even more inspiring when it comes to according to everyone the chance to be the best they can be.

This week, we learned it was likely that Jamal Khashoggi, a 59-year-old journalist for The Washington Post and a Saudi dissident who lived in the United States, was not only murdered by the Saudi government, but, according to Turkish authorities, tortured first, his fingers cut off while he was alive, his body dismembered entirely — with a bone saw — once he was dead. A bone saw. Dismembered.

The history of Western civilization speaks of beheadings — execution by guillotine or sword as a swift and efficient method. Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England, was among the most famous monarchs to be beheaded. You would think that the guillotine would suffice among today’s despots, but apparently not. 

My daughter reports that one of my grandchildren heard the headlines somewhere and asked what her mom did for a living: “Are you a journalist? Are they chopping up journalists?” Her mother, making light at first, replied, “They don’t chop up journalists like me, who write for fashion magazines.” Later, however, it was time for a discussion, on an 11-year-old level, of the role of news reporters in defending liberty by being the watchdogs of democracy. 

No one is drawing and quartering news reporters in this country — yet — although our president, the very week Mr. Khashoggi went missing, seemed to find it mighty funny to joke about beating them up. The audience at the rally at which he spoke joined in the comedy and chuckled along. That the president, if he could get away with it, would be happy to jail journalists who point out his failings seems patently obvious at this point. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days when our worst parenting worry was that our kids might be influenced negatively by the violence in video games and rock-music lyrics.

The current big man in the White House has already demonstrated a breathtaking capacity for cruelty, seeming to glory in separating children from parents at borders, and cheering when refugees fleeing from persecution and violence are sent home to face prison or death. Here in the First Congressional District, our own zealous congressman, Representative Lee Zeldin, gets into the spirit in a television commercial currently in rotation in which he promises with relish not just to stop but to crush and destroy MS-13, the dangerous street gang.

I have never believed the average American has a taste for blood, or would enjoy physically punishing political enemies — dissidents, dissenters, investigative journalists, and other “enemies of the people” — but unless and until the majority of citizens in this country stands up to firmly and finally put a stop to all this, the jury is apparently still out.

We have to keep listening. We cannot just plug our ears and wish it would go away. Listen for red flags. It is a red flag when you hear a leader speak of those he doesn’t like in terms that dehumanize them: It isn’t just ugly talk when a leader calls immigrants “bad hombres” with “dangerous criminals among them,” or calls some women “dogs” and “fat pigs.” Such words are rhetorical devices for degrading human beings and making them seem less deserving of fair or decent treatment.

I read recently a column by an 88-year-old who had discovered it was contentment that kept his peers going. What happened to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?

Mary thinks you can be engaged, which I prefer to be, and content at the same time. Perhaps I’ve been mistaken in thinking of contentment as synonymous with self-satisfaction, a rather sedentary state to my mind.

Keep on moving is my mantra, one imparted by the late Andy Neidnig, who, all the runners here know, followed his advice as long, and as noteworthily, as he could.

And speaking of moving (and of being moved), I’m writing this week about how Michelle Del Giorno’s Rock Steady Boxing classes at her Epic Martial Arts studio in Sag Harbor are invigorating and strengthening students of hers who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. 

One of them, Laura Stein, told me before Friday’s class that when a friend of hers had professed interest in joining the group, she’d told her, “Sorry, you have to have Parkinson’s first.”

Sensei Del Giorno keeps the energy level high during these rigorous 75-minute workouts that include repeated rhythmic shadow boxing, heavy bag work, and much footwork too. When she asked the students, one after another, what most impressed them about Rock Steady Boxing, heightened confidence, increased motivation, and the pleasure derived from coming together and cheering each other on were mentioned, as was the apparent salient fact that when it comes to ameliorating the neurodegenerative symptoms of Parkinson’s — the tremors, the problems with balance, movement, and even with speech and memory — it works.

A longtime exerciser, Stein told me “it was like getting slugged” when she learned last February that she had the disease. Soon, though, she was punching, fighting back with Del Giorno, pushing herself in new ways, coordinating her mind and body through boxing’s rapid-fire movements — engaged yet content in the company of friends.

There is a political divide in East Hampton but it’s not the one you might think. Instead, on lawn signs and in letters to the editor, local candidates are said to be running for the “town council.” Though the East Hampton Town Board has forever been called “town board,” “East Hampton Town Council” is becoming more common unfortunately, even though it has no basis in law or history.

White colonial government began here in 1649 with a town meeting like those called to order to this very day in Massachusetts, where most of the first Englishmen here came from. Townsmen met roughly once a month to make laws, parcel out land, deal with livestock, and settle disputes. Any freeholder who did not show up was to be fined 12 pence. The phrase “town meeting” lasted until after the American Revolution, when New York State codified a new governing structure for its towns and villages.

Poking around in the East Hampton Library’s digitized documents, I found in “Minutes of Meetings Town Board” from 1903 to 1918, the first entry in the volume, written in slanting script on April 18, 1903: “At a meeting of the Town Board this day . . . Benjamin H. Barnes was elected as Chairman of the Board for the ensuing Term.”

If The Star’s coverage over time can be said to reflect common usage, “town board” wins the popularity contest by a mile; “town council” shows up now and then over the years, but hardly ever and often in other contexts. The earliest mention of a town council here that I have been able to find was in a 1930 wire story about a Brookhaven Town councilman. In the library’s digital archive, the earliest Star reference to a town board was in January 1918 — the collection’s first searchable year — reporting the swearing-in of Justice of the Peace Hand in front of the East Hampton Town Board.

Where this town council thing comes from I don’t know. It could be that when political advisers from out of town see that a candidate is seeking a position as councilman or councilwoman they assume that means the panel itself is the council, tone deaf as that might be. 

The idea of a council also implies there is no supervisor. The supervisor is a member of the five-person town board — as precisely set out in New York State law. Or maybe eliminating the supervisor seeks to elevate the position above the rest of the board, making the post a power unto itself in the mold of our current imperial presidency, unchecked by Congress and packing the courts.

Those candidates today whose signs and advertisements state they are seeking a place on the town council clearly have not paid attention to tradition, to put it mildly. I wonder just what else they do not know about East Hampton.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, my friend Mike moved into a house set back a good way from Main Street, behind what is now the Ladies Village Improvement Society headquarters. I had never paid much attention to the old place until Mike and his mom were there and it became kind of a home away from home for me, but on nights when we happened to be walking by after dark, coming back from some mischief or other, it gave me the shivers. Little did I know.

This is not a ghost story, per se, but let’s say if I believed in ghosts, I would most certainly think the big house was haunted. 

The Gardiner Brown house, as it was known before the L.V.I.S. set up shop there, stood much closer to the street until 1924. It was called brown because it was brown in color in its later years. The Gardiner White House, occupied as a summer home briefly by President John Tyler and his wife, the former Julia Gardiner, was up the street. It lost its roof in the 1938 Hurricane and was demolished.

When the brown house was built for David Gardiner, the fourth proprietor of Gardiner’s Island, in 1740, its front door was about where a white pole-and-picket fence stands today. At some point, a sidewalk was laid along the street, which stopped abruptly at the Gardiners’ stone steps, then resumed on the other side — on the other hand, perhaps one of the family, vexed about the intrusion, had the steps built over the sidewalk. 

During the Revolutionary War, when the British occupied East Hampton, Redcoat officers billeted in the house. Tradition has it that their revelries offended the natives. Much later, another David Gardiner raised half-cow, half-bison hybrids there much to the amusement of the local children who would peep at them through a rear fence. The history of the house was presented recently by Chip Rae as part of a program at the East Hampton Library on the Gardiner properties at the East Hampton Library, which will shortly be available on-demand at the LTV website.

For Mike and me, things got creepy when we were roughly in the eighth grade and the house caught fire, killing an older man who lived there alone. The story we heard somehow, whether accurate or not, was that while his torso was recovered from the debris, his head was not.

For what seemed like months to us, a Dumpster remained in the driveway at the side of the house’s gutted east wing. At night, wading through the damp smell of burned wood we imagined the man’s missing skull hidden deep inside and quickened our step. To our young minds, it seemed reasonable that there had been a murder and that the perpetrator had set the fire to hide the evidence.

We never found out anything more, but to this day it is difficult for me not to think about the old man’s head even when browsing among the books in the L.V.I.S. shop inside — never mind passing by, late at night, on foot.

Happy Halloween.

It was 6:30 on Tuesday morning, the time I usually get up, but I wasn’t ready. Although the cold snap was ending, I grabbed the thick New Zealand blanket, a long-ago present, and made myself quite comfortable on a living room couch. The next thing I knew it was after 8 — to be exact, 8:03 by my watch. For me, that counts as a lazy morning.

Plans are under discussion for my husband and me to move into smaller quarters in the not-too-distant future, and as a result many of the objects we have lived with forever are now looked at with new take-it-or-leave-it consideration. 

As I lay there under the mohair, I looked around the room, pondering: What will go and what will stay behind? We surely will take the New Zealand blanket with us, but what about more substantial objects? Would I move my main chest of drawers into our future “granny” cottage? (An aficionado said part of it is a highboy made by the famed Dominy craftsmen of East Hampton.) And what about our plethora of couches and love seats? How many couches should the optimal cottage contain?

The good news about our overabundance of furnishings is that my daughter and her kids are going to move into the house where I have lived for the last several decades, so it will fall to her to care for objects like the antique grandfather clock, which surely is not going with us, and the pretty old piano, which I admit to be leaving reluctantly. There is something liberating about shedding oneself of responsibility for all these bulky antiques, a weight both literal and metaphorical lifted.

In any event, we are blessed with a wonderful range of family possessions, including a corner cupboard filled with ceramics and other objects brought home from Shanghai and Constantinople in the 1920s by my late mother-in-law. I am happy that they will go on to the next generation. And happy, frankly, that they aren’t my problem!

When I inherited the house, the attic and store room were full of such things, mementos accumulated by a family that never wants to let go of anything, especially if it is of historical interest. Did any of us ever really need the entire back catalog of National Geographic magazine issues? I won’t feel guilty about letting those lie when we move out. Or the basement room full of handmade goose and duck-hunting decoys from a century ago. 

But, oh my, my husband and I had better get down to business and start facing all the mundane things and heaps of papers we ourselves have accumulated in closets and drawers and on countertops, not to mention in the basement. I shudder when I think of the basement. Chris put his entire collection of L.P.s on shelves down there, and they will have to be sorted; surely there are collectors who might want them, and come and get them? 

My daughter says she thinks we must start packing in earnest by midwinter. She and her kids will take care of everything upstairs, including the attic and store room, and Chris and I are directed to start with the dreaded basement in January, then turn to our bedroom in February, and so on, so that the packing is complete by June. 

I can’t decide if a closer deadline would make the decision-making easier, speed up the process, but in the meanwhile, I will get up off the couch and try to heed a bit of advice attributed (perhaps dubiously) to Albert Einstein: “Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”