Digging opened Saturday for the East Hampton Town Trustees 2018 Largest Clam Contest. I should say officially opened, since it is my well-nursed suspicion that somecompetitors prospect for potential prizewinners all summer long, reserving the heftiest quahogs in deep hidey-holes for a shot at September glory.

The winning clams are big all right, as big as your head almost. I’ve never seen the like, and I’ve been clamming on and off for over about 50 years. Damned if I know where the really huge ones are found — other than Napeague, from where, without fail, comes the crowning bivalve.

Other than glory and bragging rights, there is no big money or valuable prize. Still, the story goes that one year when someone entered a Napeague clam claiming it was from one of the lesser harbor categories, the sharp-eyed judges were able to pick out the fraud. I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t there.

On Sunday, the day after digging officially opened, as I said, Ellis and I and my oldest friend, Mike Light, headed out in the boat to a favorite flat with our rakes. The clamming was slow at first as it often is. Mike pulled up a few near where we had anchored. But the action wasn’t active enough for me, so I went prospecting. Closer to shore, I felt the bottom change — softer, with a layer of fine gravel on top. I jammed the rake down. One, then two, then three. “Hey guys,” I shouted, “I’ve hit the mother lode!”

There is an odd thing about clamming. Once you hit a good vein, it is near impossible to force yourself to stop. As our baskets filled, I went to the boat to grab an official trustees clam bag, into which I transferred them by the dozen. Still we could not pull back.

“I am going to put my rake in the boat,” I promised, pausing three times to scratch up a few more. Mike begged me to take the rake out of his hands. Ellis could not be stopped. With sunburned backs, even after we had stowed the gear aboard, we kept at it, probing in the sand with our fingers and toes, cramming clams into our swim shorts pockets.

We won’t know until the contest Sunday whether the fat, nearly pure white clam that Mike found or a thick, mean-looking number of Ellis’s will be in contention. They are safely in one of those hidey-holes keeping hydrated until we enter them in advance of the deciding weigh-in.

The rest of our 50-pound haul has various obligations to look forward to in the kitchen: clams casino, clam chowder, clam fritters. That is, other than the two dozen we had for lunch over linguine an hour after getting home from the boat; they are already gone. Ah, September. 

A dead whale washed up at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett on Monday. Another hit the beach east of the Maidstone Club yesterday. Predictably much of the response was downcast. “Sad,” some said, implying that human activity in the sea was to blame. 

Maybe it was the hand of man that killed this particular whale, a minke, or maybe it was not. The cause could be determined conclusively after a study of its carcass and tissues by biologists. Like all living creatures, though, death must come, and a hard east wind like the one we have been having on and off for the past week will drive some of them ashore.

Time was that drift whales, as they were called, were of tremendous importance here. In the early days of the East Hampton plantation, there were few laws, but a good number of them, as well as agreements with the native inhabitants, concerned whales found along the beach.

 The 1648 deed for East Hampton executed with the local sachems reserved for them the “fynns and tails of allsuch whales as shall be cast upp.” Moreover, the colonists agreed to pay 5 shillings to any Indian who found a whale. Unequal treatment was true from the beginning, though; a white “man of ye Towne” would be entitled to a piece of the valuable blubber three feet wide.

At the Town Meeting of November the 6, 1651, John Mulford was ordered to “call ont ye towne by succession to loke out for whale.” Two months later it took a Town Meeting to resolve a dispute over how a whale would be divided among residents. 

Wyandanch, the sachem of Long Island, put his mark on a deal by which Thomas James, the town minister, would get “one halfe of all the whales or other great fish shall at any tyme bee cast up uppon the Beach from Napeake Eastward to the end of the Lland. . . .” Lion Gardiner, of the island that bears his name, would get the other half. What, if anything, Wyandanch got was not described. 

James and Gardiner, perhaps the leading citizens of the time, were exempt from the communal dirty business of cutting up whales. Instead, they were to “give A quart of licker a peece to the cutters. . . .”

Whales were valuable enough at the time that debts could be settled with their oil or bone, the baleen. And they were valuable enough that the Town Court was called to settle several disagreements in the early days, including one in 1674 when James Loper sought redress after John Combes stole a portion of a whale from Loper’s cart. Combes countersued, claiming that Loper had snatched up bone and whale that belonged to him. 

Town Meeting in about that time established a law dealing with whales found floating dead without visible marks of a wound from a harpoon. By then the men were busy with the chase during whale season from small boats, and under the sharp eye of the watch, dead whales could be claimed well before they ever hit the shore.

These days, after the biologists’ work is done, whales are loaded onto a truck and taken off for incineration. As far as I know, none of the Montauketts living in this area has asked for their promised fins and tails for hundreds of years.

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.”

I am an admitted clotheshorse. I remember what I was wearing for most of the momentous and semi-momentous occasions in my life. I have already written about my two wedding dresses (for one wedding), but I also remember exactly the bridesmaid dress I wore to my friend Jane’s wedding when I was 17 and home from college for the occasion. 

Am I a rarity? A frippery? A flibbertigibbet? An airhead? In the shallow end of the gene pool? Maybe, but I sure have some fun stuff to think about as I peruse the closets of my past.

I remember what I wore to my first day of high school (black sweater set borrowed from my mother, slate blue straight skirt, Capezio black suede skimmer flats, pointy toes), important because for eight years I had been in a school uniform (navy blue, white shirt, navy blue knee socks). 

I remember what I wore at sleepaway camp. My first shorts were red, navy, and turquoise and I had white T-shirts and white sneakers. I remember what my eighth-grade graduation dress looked like (white piqué with narrow lace insert at the waist, semi-full skirt), what I wore when I graduated from high school in 1962 (beige linen sheath, front pleats, buttoned up the back, sleeveless), and what I wore to my graduation party that night (an Indian-print sleeveless shift, very bohemian, and thong sandals, ditto). 

I remember what I wore on my first date with the man who eventually broke my heart (purple camp shirt, olive green vintage Bermudas; we were taking a drive) and the first date with my future husband, who, by the way, did not ever break my heart (pale yellow cotton sweater, Yves Saint Laurent pleated-front pale yellow gabardine trousers, no bra; it was 1981).

I remember what my college graduation dress looked like (white shift dress from DiPinna, sleeveless, white sling-back Pappagallo shoes), and I remember the first little black dress I ever owned, where I went in it, and with whom I went (10th grade, school play at Collegiate School, Loel Morwood).

I remember almost my complete wardrobe from a three-month car trip around Europe with my first very serious boyfriend, Ralph Bogertman, in the late ’60s, when trousers were frowned upon for traveling young women. I took five little dresses and washed them in the sink and dried them on the back seat of the car. One was navy blue with white dots, one was vermillion, with cut-in armholes and a great A-line swing, one was a subdued tan poplin shift. Do I need to continue? This was 1966 and very swinging London. 

I remember every vintage fur coat I bought at the Ridge Trading Company on Great Jones Street, back in the day before that area was cool. I remember every Marimekko dress I ever owned and the ones that got away. 

I know what I was wearing in Pompeii when my late husband and I traveled from Rome with a car and driver. I remember what I wore in Venice and what I wore climbing the Duomo in Florence. I remember the bathing suits I wore on my scuba trips and what my custom-made quarter-inch wetsuit looked like (red and black, with a stenciled initial on the chest). I remember a Norma Kamali bathing suit that was red and white striped and was truly amazing. 

Some memories are jogged by photographs seen in albums, of course: the cocktail hat I wore for my entire fifth year of life in Peter Cooper Village.

I remember what I wore the first day I started working at Glamour magazine (long-sleeve navy blue silk shirt-dress, tied at the waist, with camel Pappagallo heels with navy blue toe) and what I wore my last day at that job 32 years later (tan Donna Karan pantsuit, white T-shirt, gold-ish Yves Saint Laurent sandals). 

I remember the first day I turned up the collar of a white shirt, and I have done it with every shirt since. It was the mid-’70s at Glamour magazine; Anne Shakeshaft did it and it looked great and I copied her.

To this day I could draw most of the clothes I have ever owned, and many of the shoes and boots and bowler hats and Annie Hall looks, and prairie skirts, and Victorian whites. I loved “le smoking” and I still embrace the look, though it doesn’t work so well outside of a city. 

I remember wearing tweed and lace to the first party I went to solo after my heart was broken, and what I wore to an infamous “red party” when I had recovered from that broken heart. 

I have dressed to please a boss (I got fired anyway) and to please a fella (he broke my heart anyway), so I gave that all up and I dress for me.

I have had fashion mistakes, and I remember them in detail, too. A hot pink wool coat was a fabulous success, à la Jackie Kennedy, but a pink strapless dress worn with turquoise satin heels was a total failure, as was a vintage purple Joan Crawford-type evening dress, which never played well with the chartreuse elbow-length gloves I decided to wear with it. I still cringe in afterthought.

I remember when I saw my first Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat (lipstick red) and I remember that I bought my first one the same day.

I can also draw, pretty accurately, the floor plans of every place I have ever lived. You might call me a visual rememberer. 

Why would that red prom dress I wore to a dance at Yale with George Frazier IV burn itself into the retina of my mind? And the pale turquoise chiffon semi-formal I wore to the sixth-form weekend at St. Mark’s School is as easy to conjure up as the boy, Ramsay Wood. I could draw that dress today, I remember it in such detail.

These outfits represent where I hung my hat, where I worked and lived, and with whom and without whom. The thread, the ribbon that ties it all together is what I wore, and why I wore it when I wore it.

And by the way, I still have that Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat, and almost 50 years later, it has never broken my heart.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star, the shopping guru behind its “Gimme” columns, and usually the most fashionable person in the room.

“Welcome to ‘Friday Night Lights,’ Dad,” our daughter Emily said as we walked — she with easy confidence, and I with mouth agape, stunned at the sight of so many, thousands upon thousands — toward Perrysburg High School’s football field, where the Yellowjackets (“Once a Jacket, Always a Jacket”) were playing the Panthers of Toledo’s Whitmer High School, whose quarterback was said to be Ben Roethlisberger’s nephew, a sophomore already being courted, so I was also told, by the University of Michigan.

Before we entered that stadium in northwestern Ohio, a stadium flanked by towering bleachers bursting at the seams with screaming fans and with even taller light towers transforming night into day, Emily made sure I shelled out for some proper Yellowjacket gear, a frenzied buying spree capped by a fistful of 50-50 raffle tickets. 

I almost got a nosebleed walking up to the top of the bleachers, which, when finally there, afforded a panoramic view not only of the field and of the scores of children (two of them Emily and Anderson’s) darting about in the shadows of the goalposts, but of the village of Perrysburg and the Maumee River that courses by it as well. My guesstimate is that there were 5,000 or so there that night, maybe more, which is to say about 20 percent of Perrysburg’s population. I had, as I said, never seen so many. And this didn’t include the bands, the cheerleaders, the dancers, and twirlers.

“It’s like the Roman legions,” I said as they marched onto the field at halftime. I half expected to see acrobats vaulting over the horns of bulls. In the headiness of it all, any caveat having to do with concussions fled from my temporal lobes.

And it wasn’t just football. The next day, in a small college town an hour of soybean farms away, junior high and high school boys and girls from 60 schools in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana swept wave upon wave out onto the green Tiffin Cross-Country Carnival’s courses as their parents, coaches, relatives, and friends full-throatedly urged them on.

The sense of fellowship — at the football game (the Yellowjackets lost, lopsidedly, but their twirler was fantastic) and at the cross-country races — was palpable, uplifting, an innocent joy you never wanted to end.

Hurricane Esther had weakened into a tropical storm by the time its winds doubled back on eastern Long Island in September of 1961, and as a newcomer to East Hampton with no experience of the effects of heavy weather in coastal regions, I was excited and looking forward to the storm. The headline in The Star on Sept. 28, 1961, read: “Hurricane Esther Finally Dies of Old Age: Few Regret Passing of Two-Timing Line Storm.”

By then, we had moved a small, four-room house from the head of Three Mile Harbor to family property on Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett, and considered ourselves adventurous to have settled year round in such an exposed place, where we had no neighbors for a mile or so in either direction. I remember being ready to witness the worst of it, and we drove out to Louse Point to have a look at the water before things got bad. 

But we weren’t brave, or foolhardy, enough to stick it out in the house as the hurricane approached. As we did during subsequent blows, we went to town for the height of the storm. I think that year we stayed with my mother-in-law in her house behind the Star office.

During Hurricane Belle in 1976, now with three children, we decamped to join friends at the imposing three-story house at the corner of Buell Lane and Main Street in East Hampton Village owned by the Morris family. Quite a crowd gathered there. We grilled hot dogs in the living room fireplace and the kids ran wild. Despite warnings about the danger of falling trees and flying debris, I was determined to take my old Cadillac (which a friend called the Brown Cloud because it had a tan body and white hard top and such a smooth ride) out for a spin, because I wanted to find out what it was like out there in the wind. I drove around the block, I think, and returned safely. 

Everyone had plenty of drinks during Belle — it was the 1970s, after all — and when night came, the five of us snuggled into a big bedroom on the second floor . . . and that’s when we got a lesson in hurricanes: An old elm at the intersection came crashing down on the side of the house, damaging a wall and a window. As it turned out, we would have been safer down by the bay on Cranberry Hole Road, where there were no trees to fall and where, despite the storm surge, the waves did not come over the dunes. 

We thought the whole episode pretty hilarious at the time, and I think there remain several families who remember that unforgettable house-party night at the Morris house and our near-miss with the elm. 

I wasn’t laughing this week, however, when Florence came ashore in the Carolinas. By Monday, Florence, even though downgraded to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of only 35 miles an hour, had killed 10 people in North Carolina and six in South Carolina, the result of continuing heavy rainfall and unparalleled flooding. 

We thank our lucky stars for being spared  this time. One of these days, the experts tell us, we won’t be so lucky.

A month from now we’ll know if there will be a course correction politically, as many hope, though how many will back up that hope by voting — presumably for a more evenhanded, more thoughtful, less lacerating society — remains to be seen. I hope there’ll be a record midterm turnout.

In an age when it is abundantly obvious that people must act more in concert with one another than against one another, the earth’s health and the health of the people who live on it being paramount, nationalism, born of fear, is raising its hateful head again.

“Don’t talk to me about the environment,” my late stepfather once said, drawing the word out at length, especially the second syllable, and eliding it with the third. 

But it occurs to me what else other than our surroundings — surroundings of which we are, while we’re here, a part — is there to talk about? It’s all about the environment, in fact, and our environment, the state of nature, the state of the world, seems to be suffering, even while agreeing that it is our lot, much more than it should.

If language is humankind’s best gift, then we ought to treat it better, rather than debase it so as many do now, “social media” being one of the prime offenders in that regard, or if not an offender in and of itself, a preferred channel, then, for offenders who are committing lingual assault in the first degree. 

We talk of values and the need to defend them, but you wonder every now and then what it is we’re defending. The right to proclaim our pre-eminence in the world? The right to threaten others (when they’re downwind of us) with thermonuclear annihilation? The right to belittle, to demean, to foam at the mouth, to preen, to prate — as in “Make America Prate Again” — to debase public discourse?

I see few examples of the evenhandedness, reason, and well-considered actions that so interested this society’s founders, our birthright, really, values which deserve allegiance and which deserve defending. Let’s revive them again.

If you are looking for a break from the bustle of the film festival this weekend, one of the more untrammeled options is the modest farm museum on North Main Street in East Hampton.

The museum is in an old farmhouse and focuses on ordinary life from the 1880s to the 1930s, a period of peace, war, growth, and rapid change. The last quarter of the 19th century brought artists to East Hampton; Winslow Homer made a pioneering visit in 1874. The rakish members of the Tile Club arrived in the summer of 1878, among them William Merritt Chase, Homer, John Twachtman, Stanford White, Alden Weir, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The East Hampton Star printed its first edition in December 1885. Train travel from New York City to East Hampton began 10 years later, in part to serve a burgeoning summer colony up by the beach.

But the farm museum is less concerned with these milestones than in the anonymous lives of the town’s ordinary residents. It was with pleasure that I accepted an open-ended offer from its organizers to speak on Sunday during a community turkey dinner. 

My thought was to speak about the value of history and to say that the past is not only important on its own but for what it says about the present. East Hampton has long been going around in what I think of as a history cul-de-sac, obsessing over the leading families, the ones that got here in the 17th century. But that leaves out a lot.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, when the first English colonists came across the Sound from Connecticut to establish this beachhead, the last names were nine in all: Barnes, Bond, Hand, Howe, Mulford, Rose, Stratton, Talmadge, and Thomson. 

Recollections of a number of their descendants have faded. But some have not, and for those of us who have ties to the old families, things get complicated pretty quick trying to figure out the genealogies. When I was at East Hampton High School the joke was that those of us who went way back would call each other “Cuz,” as in cousin — and we probably were if you looked back far enough. In middle school and later, I went out on dates with a distant relative. It was no big deal, even if the kids from away gave us grief about it.

Of course, those early colonists worked hard and were part of the foundation of the American experiment, but they were just part of the story. The muscle and sweat that built East Hampton and the New England colonies, what would one day be the United States, was not just this handful of “upstreet” folks. There were native people, people of African descent, and scores of families that moved here for one reason or another. 

The last names were Bennett and Lester, Halsey, Dominy, Field, Filer,  Gann, Hicks, King, Loper, Payne, Schellinger. There were Sherrills, Strongs, Tillinghasts, Vails, and Van Scoys. There were the Pharaohs, Cuffees, Fowlers, and Lynches, Cards, Iaconos, DiGates, Bistrians, Motts, Andersons, Schencks, Bahnses, Pittses, Eckers, Duryeas, Joneses, Hayeses, and Carters, and on and on.

History is a lot more than just stories about the leading men. And that is what I think the farm museum is so good at — pointing out that everyone in his or her own way contributed to what East Hampton is today. And that this is a story that keeps writing itself.

They say “The Bookshop” is boring, which, of course, quickened my pulse. I have loved boring movies for years, and, in fact, once suggested that a new studio, M.B.M. (More Boring Movies), be formed to market them. 

Americans as a rule love action, blood, explosions, guts, glory, though it’s not particularly my cup of tea, “Godless,” whose women really could shoot straight, being an exception. 

In other respects, though, I’m typically American, a lover of sport first and foremost as the surest way to salvation. 

“Ah, you ran the 800!” I’ll say to a mother of two whom I wrote about in her high school days. 

“I remember you at the age of 6 crying when your pom-pom got rolled up in the mat at a gymnastics class,” I’ll say to another, now the stepmother of a terrific high school long-distance runner. 

“Mr. Graves,” still another will say, on running into me on the street 20 or so years after having graduated, “you misspelled my name throughout my high school career.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “I’ll run a correction this week.” 

(Indeed, it would probably take an entire issue to run corrections of all the errors I’ve made over the course of a 50-plus-year career — an interesting idea when you come to think of it, and that I have come to think of it on Yom Kippur seems to me especially serendipitous. I must atone, I must atone. . . .)

Anyway, it’s by their sports that I know the younger generation — younger generations, I should say. It’s how I stay connected.

I remain connected to my for-the-most-part boyhood home through the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, though, as we’ve been reminded lately when it comes to the Steelers, it’s not so much “the Steel Curtain” as it is the Steel Sieve, and the extracurricular carrying-on among some of the players has risen to the level of low farce. “The centre cannot hold,” I sighed, as Russell Bennett commiserated, “especially when it comes to kicking field goals and points-after.”

However, locally it is wonderful to consider the season that is upon us. I don’t think I ever remember a fall when so many of the high school’s teams were so compelling. As I’ve said, you don’t have to win all the time to catch my attention, just make it interesting. And this from one who loves boring movies. Go figure.

If only, if only. If only I had known that Blossom Dearie was performing in New York into the early 2000s, when I was living there, a hungry musician who had somehow conned enough people to become the pro audio editor and then a senior writer at Billboard. 

If only, if only I had really gotten to know Aretha Franklin’s catalog, and not just the hits that every wedding band from here to Siberia plays ad nauseam, and been thusly motivated to con my way into every concert within a 500-mile radius. 

But there was that snowy, happy Sunday, late in the winter of 1996, on the Upper East Side. Was it her birthday? I don’t know, but a New York radio station was playing Aretha’s music all afternoon, and, armed with an ancient stereo packing a cheap cassette recorder, I filled every cassette tape I could find. 

And then I was hooked. Like a drug administered by Dr. Feelgood, “Call Me,” “Ain’t No Way,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Angel,” “People Get Ready,” “Oh Me Oh My (I’m a Fool for You Baby),” “Tracks of My Tears,” and “Dark End of the Street” were the ones I could no longer live without. Most days, I would not leave the little apartment on East 91st Street for the long, early-morning trek to my crappy job as a Wall Street drone, in those unhappy pre-writing days, without listening to at least a few of them. 

How to describe the joy and sorrow simultaneously conveyed in that voice, and in her own, just-right piano accompaniment? These were the very essence of the blues: within the anguish, the uplift; in the deepest despair, the eternal, perfect soul bared. 

It’s in the desperate grieving of “Share Your Love With Me,” the soaring, piercing wails of “Ain’t No Way,” the galloping piano of “Since You’ve Been Gone,” the gentle introduction of “Baby, Baby, Baby” and its climactic middle 8: 

Those that we love, we foolishly make cry

Then sometimes feel it’s best to say goodbye 

But what’s inside can’t be denied

The power of love is my only guide

Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, this is just to say

Just how much I’m really gonna miss you.

And it’s in a thousand others, and the Soul Town station on SiriusXM Radio has been given over to the Queen of Soul in the aftermath of her liberation, last Thursday morning. It’s hard to drive with tears in your eyes, baby, baby, baby. 

In his wonderful autobiography “Rhythm and the Blues,” the late Atlantic Records producer and executive Jerry Wexler wrote that “Aretha was continuing what Ray Charles had begun — the secularization of gospel, turning church rhythms, church patterns, and especially church feelings into personalized love songs. Like Ray, Aretha was a hands-on performer, a two-fisted pianist plugged into the main circuit of Holy Ghost power.”

I had one occasion to speak with Wexler, who later in life lived in East Hampton, and with whom I shared something beyond our love of rhythm and blues. As a music journalist at Billboard, he coined that term, rhythm and blues, in 1949, for what the trade previously called “race records” and, before that, the “Harlem Hit Parade.” 

I interviewed Wexler, in 2002, because I was writing Billboard’s obituary for Tom Dowd, a longtime Atlantic Records producer and engineer. “By 1967,” I wrote, “Dowd was recording and mixing one hit after another at Atlantic Studios. Paired with the recently signed Franklin, Dowd and Atlantic producers [Ahmet] Ertegun, Wexler, and Arif Mardin formed a team that seemingly couldn’t miss. . . . Between Feb. 8 and Dec. 17, 1967, Dowd recorded and mixed Franklin’s ‘Respect,’ ‘Chain of Fools,’ ‘Baby, I Love You,’ and ‘Since You’ve Been Gone,’ all of which topped the Billboard R&B chart. ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ and ‘Ain’t No Way,’ also recorded in 1967, reached Nos. 2 and 9, respectively.” 

If only I had seen Aretha in concert. The closest I came wasn’t very close. In February 2003 I spent an afternoon at Madison Square Garden, one day before the Grammy Awards were to be held, interviewing the remote recording and broadcast crews as they prepared to broadcast the event in 5.1-channel surround sound for the first time. “The raw excitement in Effanel Music’s remote recording truck, known as L7, was every bit as palpable as the awareness that new ground was bring broken,” I wrote in Billboard (hey, I’m no Aretha Franklin). 

But Aretha was going to read the nominees for Best Something-or-Other and, standing in the cheap seats a hundred feet away, I watched the Queen, clearly bored, run through her lines from a teleprompter during the rehearsal. She did not sing, but at least I heard, from her lips to my ears, that voice. 

I like to think that musicians have no use for racism, that petty differences like the color of one’s skin are forgotten as quickly as they are observed, dissolving in the communal act of soulful expression, and in one player’s reverence for another’s playful, sublime, or just downright funky creation. 

Amagansett’s own Paul McCartney, whose songs “Let It Be” and “The Fool on the Hill” Franklin chose to record, provided solid evidence last week. While the president, whose administration resembles a monster truck rally a little more every day, remembered of Aretha that “She worked for me on numerous occasions,” Mr. McCartney took to the president’s preferred medium, Twitter. 

“Let’s all take a moment to give thanks for the beautiful life of Aretha Franklin, the Queen of our souls, who inspired us all for many many years,” he wrote. “She will be missed but the memory of her greatness as a musician and a fine human being will live with us forever.”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.