I may have been the winner of a spelling bee when I was in second grade, but now that I am above a certain age my spelling prowess is diminishing. It’s hard to stomach the fact that I sometimes have to consult a dictionary these days before committing a word to prose. (I was about to say “to paper,” but thought better of it.) Sometimes I even rely on Microsoft Word’s spell-check to be sure of certain words that used to come automatically. Oh, the indignity!

Still, I am old school when it comes to the rigors of style and grammar that I’ve hewed to in my career, and I still know my way around a proofreading galley. I’ve been writing, editing, and proofreading for so many years that it’s hard to stop, even when I am trying to relax. Reading someone else’s newspaper, my eyes go directly to the blooper and my hand starts reaching for a proverbial red grease pencil. I cannot imagine many students in journalism school these days are still learning proofreading marks — the shorthand hieroglyphics with which a galley is marked up for correction — though I could be wrong.

Many publications throughout the country use AP (Associated Press) style, which — at least among ink-stained old curmudgeons — is considered snappier and a bit more modern than New York Times style, although we at The Star do prefer more the formal usage set by The Times, while abiding by a few style-rule and spelling quirks unique to us.

There have been bloodbaths recently in the newsrooms of papers around the country, including the horrible news this week of mass firings at The Daily News and the demolition not long ago of the copy desk at The Times. Entire departments have been slashed and streamlined — and, from my perspective, the damage to the language is obvious. It is troublesome to see mistakes and missing words cropping up more and more often as The Times is rushed to print and into digital form. 

Although my spelling isn’t quite what it once was, my memory for numbers is as sharp as ever. When my kids were in school, they counted on me to remember their friends’ phone numbers. The advent of cellphones has complicated that, of course, as has the proliferation of area codes over the last 20 years. Once, 516 and 324 would do, and then 631 and 329, but they were followed by all the cell-specific exchanges, your 917s and 347s. I remember when people even sold old 324 numbers to newcomers, as a way of making cash from that numerical prestige.

How many different phone numbers are your friends and countrymen using these days? I don’t believe kids today bother to memorize phone numbers, do they? All the various numbers are simply stored into their cellphones. My daughter, who still uses old rotary and push-button phones from the 1980s and 1970s (she says it is because the older phones were better built and never break, but I think it’s really more of an aesthetic choice) claims that one of her summer interns last month was unable to operate a push-button landline phone when confronted with it.

I use a cellphone, of course, but have resisted programming my contacts’ numbers into it. This isn’t so much because I don’t love cellphones — although, truth be told, I do not love them, and never want to be one of those people whose head is always down and whose nose is always in the screen. No, the real reason I still rely on my brain for phone-number storage is because it still gives me a second-grade thrill to be able to brag that I remember them all.

Each year, the shorebirds that have just finished nesting far to the north arrive around the end of July. If they were successful as parents, their young of the year will be on the flights too, landing along the shore of Gardiner’s Bay to feed and fatten and, soon, to rise and fly south toward their wintering grounds.

The wind birds, as the great Peter Matthiessen called them, set down on the sand beaches, in the marshes, and along the ocean, as a sure a sign of the impending change of season as turning leaves. Though it is still high summer, their cheeps and whistles speak of urgency, the need to keep moving, an inchoate fear. Fall is coming, they say. The unspeakable, far worse, will be close behind. 

Even though the wind birds have never experienced ice and snow and frozen ground, somewhere deep in a brain shaped by tens of thousands of years of trial and error, a signal flashes to move and keep moving.

We, too, are the same in our own way, always trying to distance ourselves from the inevitable winter, though we will not know it even after it arrives. But as the shorebirds race along the wet sand, it also is a time of abundance. The invertebrates they need to continue south are almost ridiculously abundant here, bouncing like popcorn in a hot pan as I walk barefoot on the beach. Small knots of sandpipers pick at them with remarkable speed. 

Spooked as I pass, they lift off quickly and land a distance away to resume their work. Life is good, they say. Let us feast. Their whistles sound of joy.

Helen Rattray, our publisher, confessed as she went to open The Star’s side door the other day that she had forgotten whether she’d driven down here from her house up Edwards Lane, or whether she’d left her car at home.

I told her “not to worry,” that I’d read in The Times that very morning — her delivery had been curtailed, I’d learned from her column of the week before — that they’d discovered a promising Alzheimer’s drug, and that, moreover, Italian scientists had discovered a 12-mile-wide lake on Mars, under a mile of ice, but nevertheless. “There may have been life on Mars, maybe there are microbes there now,” I said.

She walked, I thought, with a lighter step on being vouchsafed that news, the best I can recall reading lately in these best-forgotten times.

I had written recently that the president didn’t know his own mind, and then I read in one of the late Lewis Thomas’s elegant essays that he didn’t know his own mind either, that it was pretty much of a jumble, and that the mind, to his mind, still remained a mystery, not to mention the brain. 

You do wonder where thoughts come from. “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day,” Fitzgerald wrote. But why so bleak? I find my most eureka moments — and this may be telling — occur at just about three o’clock in the morning, well, nearer to four, as I sit, head in hands, on the pot. Things come to you, is all I’m saying, out of the blue it seems, which is why Mary always says when I’m stumped by a crossword puzzle that I should forget about it for a while and that in so doing the answer(s) will come. And she’s usually right. Don’t forget to forget; that way you’ll remember.

Yes, it’s usually at around four in the morning when the answers to whatever it is I’ve been mulling over come. Which brings to mind what Val Schaffner once told some labor investigators who came to The Star — I hope I’m remembering this correctly, but anyway — to wit, that we were working around the clock, not just from 9 to 5 — a 168-hour workweek. Dreamtime’s not downtime — it counts. On the subject, I’ve pretty much given up remembering my dreams in detail — Mary’s, which tend to be far more novelistic, sagas sometimes, being the more interesting ones — but I am astounded by their range. And though there are the habitual ones of clinging against steeply pitched, rain-slicked slate roofs, slogging, belly first, through endless muck, or punching and punching without effect, there are others, such as I’ve been having lately, in which I can run, sprint even — utterly at odds with the sober facts. The farthest I’ve run — pant, pant — lately was maybe 100 yards to give Kenny Dodge his credit card, which he’d dropped on leaving the office.

It’s all a mystery, isn’t it, from nucleated cells on, Mary, of course, being my favorite multicellular organism. When she was away not long ago, far away, ministering to babies — I’ll cotton to them when they begin throwing balls — I kept thinking of the character in “Amarcord” who, squatting on a tree limb, shouts, “Voglio una donna! Voglio una donna!” I want a woman! I want a woman! Isabel played it for me on her phone. O’en’s tone, and meaning too, is similar when he goes “OWooooh, OWooooh.”

Isabel runs with him then, or I walk with him. He needs exercise to take his mind off these best-forgotten times. We try to reassure him, we try to reassure ourselves. 

Lewis Thomas thought we tended toward symbiosis, rather than toward predation. I would like to think he’s right when he says, “If we can stay alive, my guess is that we will someday amaze ourselves by what we can become as a species.”

A drug for Alzheimer’s, there may be or may have been life on Mars. Wow!

While I was neglecting to properly maintain my yard this summer, a colony of wasps built a nest on one of the outer walls of the outdoor shower. 

The nest was situated far enough below eye level that I hadn’t noticed it on those rare mornings when shame had motivated me to mow the grass, take a clipper to overgrown vegetation, and pick up fallen tree branches. 

For a long while, the wasps and I lived in harmony. They permitted me the carefree use of the outdoor shower — even though a vigorous swinging open of the door could have smashed their domicile — and I, their unwitting host, provided them with a landscape unruly enough to satisfy even the most prodigious pollinator. 

Our relationship began to change a few weeks ago when, after emerging from the outdoor shower and shimmying an outstretched towel to and fro against my back, I experienced two simultaneous stings, one on my shoulder blade and one on my scalp. 

I blamed bees. Sure, it seemed a bit odd that two bees would have launched a coordinated strike against me, but who was I to question nature? 

Days later, as I was entering the outdoor shower, I was stung in the face, and that’s when I realized, while in the midst of screaming profanities at the sky, that a trip to the hardware store’s pest control aisle might be in the offing. 

When I finally eyed the nest, I was amazed at its size. I later learned that wasps construct their nests, which resemble papier-mâché sculptures, by layering chewed pieces of wood and plants. The matte-gray orb that hung from my outdoor shower looked like the ghost of a disco ball. Months of mastication must have taken place to create this structure. 

The more I learned about wasps the less eager I was to eradicate them. Colonies of social wasps are started each spring by a queen who was fertilized the year before and had the fortitude to survive the winter. She begins building a nest and then rears a brood of female worker wasps, who take over the construction duties. 

Only females have the ability to sting, but wasps of each gender, when they sense danger, emit a pheromone that sends colony members into, as a National Geographic article put it, “a defensive, stinging frenzy.” 

I spent a few days observing the nest from afar. It was a hub of activity with some wasps in a seemingly constant state of alert for potential threats, while others went off in search of food. I admired their commitment to community. They were doing exactly what they were born to do, albeit in a location that was inconvenient to me. 

I would have begrudgingly forgone using the outdoor shower and allowed the nest to remain until the winter’s cold caused the colony’s demise, if it were not for the fact that I have visitors — both human and canine — coming to stay with me at the end of August. At that point, according to National Geographic, more than 5,000 wasps could be in residence. For the sake of my friends, I told myself, the cohabitation needed to end. 

After reading up on some of the safer, more cowardly ways to rid your property of a wasp nest — do it either early in the morning or at night when the creatures are at rest, do it while clothed head to toe in case of attack, and do it with a pesticide spray with a long reach — I chose Sunday at 5:30 a.m. as my D-day. 

I am pleased to report that the attack occurred without incident to me, and saddened to recall how unfair a fight it turned out to be. The pesticide-soaked nest now hangs lifeless, a testament to one man’s refusal to let nature run its course. 

Part of me wishes I had received a few more stings for my actions, but, since that wasn’t the case, I decided to punish myself. Later that day, I mowed the lawn during the peak of the afternoon heat.

Jamie Bufalino is a reporter for The Star.  

Trudging up the dune path leading to the beach on Tuesday evening, Sisyphus came to mind. I was midway through finally building a swim raft to moor out front in the bay and, in several trips, had carried my tools, number-two cedar deck boards, and dock foam from the house along the rising serpentine path, then down the steps, which I had built to the beach.

My labors were not quite as useless as Sisyphus being condemned by the gods to rolling a stone up a mountain only to have it fall back under its own weight and have to do it again. And yet, there was something similar going on, more similar perhaps than Hercules mucking out the dank Augean stables. Albert Camus argued that there was joy in Sisyphus’s endless toil; the rock was his thing.

My thing is building stuff. Maybe more accurately, thinking about building stuff. I had picked up the chunks of blue dock foam that will provide buoyancy for the swim raft on beaches here and there for more than a decade, storing them in an Augean heap near the woodpile. On a college visit trip in Maine last week, I picked up a mooring anchor; the framing planks came from a friend renovating a house in Springs. I bought some galvanized chain made in the U.S.A. and a shackle made in China at the boatyard. The cedar came from the lumberyard in town.

As I nailed down the last of the deck boards this week, the sun was setting. Soon, the Devon Yacht Club cannon fired, and I sat down to contemplate my work. The raft was large, far more of a thing than I might move by myself. Come fall, I will have to figure out how to get it on higher ground, lest storm tides take it away. Then, come spring, I will have to take it back down the mountain, unaided even by the gravity that to this day pulls down Sisyphus’s rock. But it will be of no matter; such is my thing.

Hats off to Sylvia Overby, who told me at the Little League ceremony at Maidstone Park the other day that Adderol was used to treat ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as I was later to learn) and thus helped me finish a crossword puzzle that had been causing me to fidget. I excused myself for a moment so I could run back to the car, which was parked nearby, to fill in the missing letters.

Usually, on finishing a crossword puzzle I toss it, as a cat would a dead mouse, at Mary’s feet, or in her general direction, saying in so doing, and with no little pride, “Now, I can begin my day,” though sometimes it’s, “Now I can begin yesterday, or the day before yesterday.”

And now that I’ve looked up ADHD on the Internet, I find that, crosswords aside, I tend to manifest certain of its symptoms. 

“Often fails to give close attention to details” is listed as one. Bingo. 

“Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities.” Ditto.

“Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish chores.” Oh, boy. 

“Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly.” What?

“Often talks excessively, interrupts, and blurts out answers before questions have been completed.” Moi?

It all reminds me of the new doorknob I bought recently at the hardware store to replace one that had become so sticky that no amount of WD-40 could bring it around. 

Part two of that chore, of course, was to affix it, which I tried to do a few days later, with much cursing, of course, only to find once the little bolts were screwed in all the way — it took forever to align them — that you couldn’t pull it to, nor could you, moreover, lock it, even from the inside. 

“What shall we do now?” Mary, who was as nonplused as I, asked.

“There are no problems, only solutions — the juice of five limes, half a lemon, and an orange mixed in with three cups of ice, a cup of Triple Sec, and a cup of tequila being the solution in our case.”

The next day, it may have taken Dave, our neighbor, all of two seconds to diagnose the problem, which was that the latch had been inserted upside down and therefore the desired coupling of the latch with the strike plate could not be achieved. He flipped the latch assembly around and voilà. Dave pays close attention to details. He finishes chores. I doubt that in his youth he was ever called “a mechanical moron,” as was I, by my late stepfather. Generally, I’ll embrace a critique like that. Say that my prose is as dry as a mudflat after a heavy rain, or that what I write about is beside the point, and I’ll preen. But to have been labeled a mechanical moron at an impressionable age — 22, I think it was — has taken such a toll emotionally that I become hyperinattentive, even to the extent of vanishing, when anything requiring assembly and accompanied by detailed instructions arrives. 

But now the psychic weight has been lifted! It’s not that I’m inattentive, phlegmatic, unorganized, excessively talkative, or downright annoying. I’ve got ADHD!

I’m sure Mary will be relieved to hear it.

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.

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh I worked one college summer as a waitress at an enormous restaurant on the New Jersey shore called Zaberer’s, which was run by a seriously tanned man who grandly called himself “The Host of the Coast.” The main attractions there were lobster — steamed lobster, stuffed lobster, lobsters everywhere — and “Zaber-ized” cocktails served in glasses the size of bathroom sinks. I was 18, and reared on the idea that lobster was special, kind of like the champagne of seafood, second only to caviar, and watching those people come from near and far to strap on a plastic bib and eat these things only underscored the thought.

They’d probe every corner of the shell and literally suck every teeny tiny bit of meat out of every single delicate leg, grabbing my hand if I tried to take away their plate because I mistakenly thought they were done. They’d pull the meat out of the claws and pull the cracked shell apart and peer inside so intently I wanted to hand them a loupe. They’d pull off the top of the main shell like they were lifting the hood of a car and then raise the lobster’s exposed innards to their mouth as I looked on, thinking, “Oh no. . . . You’re not going to . . . oh boy . . . eat that greenish-yellow stuff too, are you?”

After that, I needed a cocktail. Zaber-ized.

I only mention this because I’m not sure if you’ve seen the price of lobster lately at the store, but the prices suggest it has turned into the Everyman of seafood. Restaurants will still gouge you for one. But a sign I pass on my drive to work brags “Lobster 4 for $58.” The price at Citarella Monday was $14.99 a pound, or $5 cheaper than some shrimp, $10 to $15 cheaper than fresh tuna or halibut or some steaks, and just a few dollars more than a pound of sliced turkey meat will set you back at the deli. Seeing all this reminded me of a magazine colleague who flew to Bali on the spur of the moment once because he saw the Ritz-Carlton there was offering $99 rooms and, he later told me, he realized “I can’t afford to stay home!”

If lobster is this cheap compared to other fresh food, the question is not whether we should be eating more lobster. The question is how can we afford not to?

It seems crazy. And I’m not sure why or when this happened. A once-homely vegetable like kale is having a renaissance. Avocado toast is showing up everywhere though it’s also messy to make. I swear to God, I have tried to like chia seeds. I really have. But it’s like eating sand.

Lobster, on the other hand, is totally delicious. It’s also easy to cook. It can be boiled, broiled, steamed, grilled, poached in butter, even microwaved, which I did not know until recently. (The instructions say be sure to poke some air holes in the carapace or that yellow stuff will explode all over your . . . never mind.) There’s lobster rolls, lobster quesadillas, lobster ravioli, lobster earrings (kidding). Literally 100 uses for lobster.

But the mechanics and ethos of eating lobster are, well . . . complicated. That’s the answer that came up in conversation with a couple of seafood shop workers I talked to over the weekend. One grocer told me some people seem to think serving lobster at dinner parties is a quick way to get friends to hate you, because it still seems posh to some. Another fish seller blamed lobster’s unpopularity compared to other seafood he sells on people’s ever-shortening attention spans. Lobster, he said, is too much work to eat.

The other thing, of course, is something David Foster Wallace touched on in his famous essay “Consider the Lobster”: People struggle with killing a lobster themselves, or even feeling directly responsible for their deaths. And for whatever reason, that’s a moral dilemma they don’t feel when they’re chowing on a burger or picking up their fresh slaughtered chickens at Iacono’s, though you can see the chickens right there, running all around the yard.

Which reminds me of another story another friend told me once about how he and a girlfriend actually broke up because of a lobster.

He was a sportswriter and she flew with him to Australia for a vacation before the Sydney Olympics. My pal really liked this woman and paid for their first-class flights, the whole trip, hoping to have a romantic getaway. Once in Sydney, they decided on their first night to go to a fancy restaurant on the harbor and passed a big lobster tank as they walked to their seats. My friend said he was already in a sort of reverie even before he cracked open the menu he’d just been given.

“I think I’m going to have the lobster!” he said, eyes bright.

“Oh no you’re not,” she replied.

He knew she was into cat and dog rescues. But lobsters? Come on.

“Don’t do this to me,” he said. “I want the lobster! I’m going to have the lobster. Why can’t I have the lobster?”

“Because” she shot back, “I made eye contact with them!”

Johnette Howard is a reporter for The Star.

“The woods‚” hereabouts, used to mean quiet expanses where one could wander alone among stands of white pines, find a path to a hidden pond, and hunt for trailing arbutus, an evergreen groundcover with small pink blooms in early spring. (The internet tells me they also are called mayflowers, which makes sense, but what my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, called them was woodpinks.)

Today, however, what we see in Northwest Woods in East Hampton, as well as in the woods of Southampton, to the extent that I have poked around in them, are man-made neighborhoods peppered with examples of excess. 

“Excrescences” would be too harsh a description, I suppose, for the largest of the stuccoed or stone-sided mansions that have cropped up down the long and winding driveways that until recently were dirt roads or footpaths. These grand houses apparently are filled with Stanford White-style staircases and dining-room tables big enough for two dozen or more.

I’ve been thinking about dirt paths in the woods these days because I have had to find my way in recent weeks to a yoga class in a studio off Millstone Road, in the woody region between Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, which is led by an excellent yogini (although she would hate that coinage). 

Finding Millstone Road was a problem the first time I tried; I got to Scuttlehole, then turned in the wrong direction, and then, after driving around for a while, gave up. After that, someone hung a red balloon on a tree to mark the driveway for outlanders like me, although, with balloons now rightfully considered unacceptable environmentally (especially by the sorts of people who practice yoga), we have been warned they will soon be removed. Instead, we were told all we had to do was drive to the fourth dirt path on Millstone Road, regardless of whether we came from east or west. 

The dirt path to the studio is definitely in the woods. Eventually, it circles a long, low building, where the property owner, a master printmaker and inventor, has set up shop and also constructed a small building with a second-story space full of light, perfect for yoga and contemplation, although he apparently intended to use it initially as an art gallery. 

I may not like the disappearance of the uninhabited white pine forest, but I’m not so much of a curmudgeon that I would deny the positive side of a modern world in which we lucky few get to go to yoga classes in lovely settings (beach, woods, even the middle of the bay on a paddleboard) on any random weekday.

 I don’t think I can give you, or your GPS, good driving directions to my yoga class, but I would be happy to tell you how to join us, provided, of course, you like going into the woods.

“Only two more weeks,” I said to the young woman at the liquor store, who, I thought, did not entirely comprehend. 

Scott Rubenstein wanted to know exactly what I meant when I’d said there was no summer here. “No summer as it is traditonally known,” I said. “You know, when you’re lying dreamily in the hayloft on a late summer afternoon and the air is redolent with the effluvium of cow manure.” Ou sont les étés d’antan?

Speaking of which, we — well, most of us — got it wrong in last week’s column when, owing to a last-minute editorial snafu, it came out that the fellow perched on a tree in Fellini’s “Amarcord,” had cried out, “Voglio una donne!”

“No,” Aldo, with whom I was playing tennis a few days later, said. “It’s ‘voglio una donna.’ ” 

I had initially written “dona,” and that’s where the trouble began. The plural of “donna” was “donne,” Aldo said, and, clearly, Mariolater that I am, I hadn’t meant to say, in Italian, or in any other language for that matter, “I want women!”

Mary is quite enough, all I’ve ever wished for, the paradigm of her gender, beautiful for one, I never tire of looking at her, a boon companion for another, I never tire of talking with her — it used to be thought almost obscene by other family members.  

She is, in brief, true blue, and we are most times wonderfully linked, but she sometimes is baffled by my waspy indirection — as am I — and by its tendency to set us apart, as if at times I were creating a gated community of one.

Ah, but once I’ve thought about things and have acknowledged that my habitual reaction is to scuttle sideways whenever called to account — Mr. Mercer didn’t call me “Mr. Responsibility” in high school for nothing — there is, I’m happy to say, reconciliation — what, in fact, we all want. 

Steve Sigler spoke to me about this years ago, in the last interview I had with him. Mozart, whose music gave him joy, was all about reconciliation, he said. No wonder, he said, that Mozart had died so young. 

Reconciliation: That is all ye need to know.