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.

Say the word “roundabout” round about here and people go nuts. This is true even though these road configurations, also known as traffic circles, tend to work well at what they are supposed to do — route vehicles at complex intersections efficiently without causing backups. 

East Hampton Village is the most recent convert to roundabout ways, with a real doozy nearing completion where Buell Lane, Toilsome Lane, Buell Lane Extension, and the Sag Harbor Road come together. Work has gone on nearly all summer with sweltering workmen laying cobblestone and, this week, new asphalt bringing withering scowls from those who pass by in air-conditioned comfort. 

When the Buell Lane roundabout was approved, I did wonder out loud what its purpose was. Yes, there were a few motor vehicle accidents each year at the intersection as it used to be laid out. But without a doubt there will be accidents in the future as well. Slowing to look closely one morning this week, I realized there was no room in the narrow spaces for the many bicyclists who will pass through and that buses and fire trucks and other large vehicles will find it tricky to maneuver.

All that said, I find myself a fan of the new thing in all its baffling glory. The roundabout itself is more of an oval; the approaches are nearly blind, at least from the Buell Lane and Sag Harbor Road sides. Once inside the sort-of circle, especially in the direction of East Hampton Main Street, right-hand and then quick left-hand turns, which are required, seem like something out of a BMW commercial. Yet I love the roundabout despite all its unintentional perversity.

Up until the railroad reached East Hampton and Amagansett in 1895, travelers to New York City went first via Sag Harbor over a sandy wagon track by horse coach. Along the way was an open-air pit that the locals called the Dead Hoss Cemetery, where beasts of burden would end up once their time was up. Communication in the age of the telegraph went that way, too, on wires leading to Sag Harbor and then on to the outside world.

Jerry Baker operated the route for about 50 years, carrying passengers and mail to or from “the Port,” as Sag Harbor was called, and where there had been train service since 1870. A toll keeper, whose house was opposite where the Jewish cemetery is today, extracted a small sum from 1878 to about 1905, when the town took over the road, but there was a back way, a woods track for which nothing was charged to pass. 

The cost for a single horse and farm cart was 5 cents. Baker paid the toll collectors 20 cents each way. One cent was taken off if you were going to the Buckskill path, as you did not use that much road before the turn-off. The tollhouse burned to the ground in November 1909.

Baker also brought The East Hampton Star over each week from Sag Harbor, already printed, but for a single page on which George Burling, the editor, printed the local news he could gather up.

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.

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!

The landscape here is lovelier than ever this spring . . . even as our nation wallows in the muck. 

I can’t help but be reminded of something Voltaire wrote about a “best of all possible worlds” mind-set: “Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden,” Voltaire has Pangloss, one of literature’s most indelible optimists, say in Candide.

Nice weather seems to have conspired to bring an incomparable lushness to bushes, trees, and flowers this month, and even the air this week seems to me unusually scented with early summer. If you are anything like me, you find solace in being surrounded by all this natural and human-cultivated beauty. All seems right with the world.

But, oh, the contrast between our well-tended gardens and the plight of children at our southern border. Have not most of us always considered the rights of children — the right to the nurturing care of parents and other loving adults — to be a basic human right and a core value in these United States? The “zero tolerance” dictum promulgated by our White House administration and announced by our attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is enough to undermine any faith that the public at large may still have in the goodness we like to say is at the heart of America.

What do parents here “in the best of all possible worlds” tell their children these days about how other children are being separated from their mothers or fathers? Are they explaining just how our nation came to allow tent cities to be constructed to house children who have been ripped, crying, from their parents’ arms?

That this country’s former first ladies, of both major political parties, have spoken out about its cruelty and called it by its name — child abuse — gives the lie to any lingering belief that we are at heart a caring and charitable country. Is it time to sing a requiem for the American dream?

There is no doubt that the forceful separation of children from their lifelong caregivers is a trauma from which they may never fully recover. Just this week, the American Psychiatric Association warned that children treated as the detainees are being treated are at high risk of developing depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. One of my friends points out that this policy is an incubator for anger and antisocial lashing out, once these children are older. The Trump administration (ignoring statistical proofs that crime rates among immigrants are lower than those among natural-born citizens) claims its policy is motivated by the desire to deter crime, but just think of that! 

Further undermining all decent Americans’ struggle to awaken the nationwide consciousness of the harm being done to these innocents is the assault on truth through which the president and his supporters have attempted to deflect and defend their “zero tolerance” policy. The president wants to be a big tough guy, the toughest and strongest on immigration-law enforcement; on the other hand, he doesn’t want to take responsibility for the harm he is doing, and has, absurdly, blamed Democrats for his own “zero tolerance” policy, which only went into effect a few weeks ago. 

I’m told that the private security corporations that have been contracted to run the detention centers for children are advertising job openings in Florida and Texas. I’m also told that a march across the nation in protest has been announced for June 30. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Independence Day and our traditions of liberty than to take our American sons and daughters to Washington, D.C., or to Main Street to exercise their right to free expression on this despicable assault on their fellow children.

It was distressing to read that the traffic snarl exacerbated by the U.S. Open had eased during the weekend, which means, I guess, that they really are going to have it again, in 2026.

I’ll be 86, perhaps having by then taken up the sport, though, frankly, I wonder why old people ever do. They’re creaky, their suppleness, if they ever had any, has left them, and it’s a maddening game, hardly what you want to be playing when you’re about to evanesce.

Actually, golf is the last game you want to take up when you’re old. It is, as we saw this past week, a young man’s game. Tiger Woods, though he is to be praised for playing at such a high level again following spinal fusion surgery of a year ago, missed the cut, and while Phil Mickelson didn’t, he finished at 16-over, tied for 48, his age.

Speaking of the latter, I had thought, when I first heard of it, that he had executed what in polo would be a nearside backhand shot — with the right hand having swung the mallet over the mane of the player’s pony before reversing the course of the ball — on the 13th green on the third day.

Mark Herrmann, I believe, likened it to a polo shot, and I was very proud to have put a name to it, but when I saw the video it was clear that I’d been wrong. He chased it, pivoted, and, having taken up his accustomed stance, sent it back again toward the hole — a disappointment, to my mind. Still, it was bizarre, as everyone agreed, and, because of that, I was inclined to let him off the hook, for I can’t stand the slavish obeisance paid to the rules of the game. That Mickelson was unruly, even for a moment, was worth the price of admission, which, I’m happy to say, was in my case waived, being a member, however vestigial, of the, ugh, “media.”

I had barely been able to get through the credentials process, digitally illiterate as I am. I submitted my photographer friend Craig Macnaughton’s application twice, hinting at the level of esteem I have for him. And also because he, in contradistinction to me, really wanted to go.

And so he went, and I, who’d been as apprehensive as he had been eager, didn’t. 

And it all ended well. Craig’s photos were terrific, better than any I’d seen in the daily papers — which is all the more remarkable given the fact that, despite the glad-handing, the U.S.G.A. has stiffed us when it comes to getting inside-the-ropes access since 1995.

Those — the 1986 and ’95 tournaments at Shinnecock Hills — were the days. Things were more humane then, less regimented. You could run into, and shoot the breeze with, Jack Nicklaus on a quiet Sunday afternoon before everything began, you could listen to and learn from Pete Smith, the then-superintendent, a member of the Shinnecock Tribe, which had owned the land and had built, with the receding glacier’s help, the singular course, and Alex White, the septuagenarian caddiemaster. 

You could read Larry Penny’s poetic description of Shinnecock’s flora and fauna: “When the colors fade and the light pales, look up and listen again. The woodcock is on the wing, fluttering in the semi-light, dancing on high to impress his mate . . . whippoorwills fly by at shoulder height with mouths agape, hawking insects. . . .”

“After rains, the gray tree frogs utter their melodic one-note trills and the Fowler’s toads their drawn-out whines from the shadowy waters of the pond on the sixth hole. Cottontails and pine voles sport, and Reynard comes to look for them. In the late summer the slender ladies’ tresses orchids abound.”

You could feel connected then. No more.

It was a missed opportunity. On Sunday night my friends and I spent our time waiting for a table at Salivar’s in Montauk and watching a crowd at an outdoor reggae show. Would that I had had the sense to take a photo with my phone. It might have made the front cover.

The band was at one end of a deck with its members’ backs to Salivar’s dock. Maybe 200 young people were jammed together in front of them, some dancing, others shouting to one another over the music. The lead singer, a wiry guy in a green T-shirt, climbed onto a railing and leaped toward the crowd. When the set ended, a woman in a flouncy black dress made a beeline to talk to him.

Nearer to us, four women in their 20s played corn hole. My dear friend Michael, a man of great decorum, said that he found it difficult to separate the name of the game from another connotation of the phrase. Play consists of two or more people tossing beanbags at a, uh, hole in a piece of plywood. John, the other friend with us that night, explained that the game was popular with millennials. I felt as if we had been sent on a mission from another planet. Then the buzzer we were given went off, and we were seated. I ordered sushi.

Back in the old days, before its current incarnation as the successor to the Westlake Clam and Chowder House, Salivar’s was a more down-home kind of place. Tap water was served in chunky, brown-glass glasses, and there was shrimp, but no sushi. Breakfast used to be served at some crazy-early hour to cater to fishermen headed out for the day; now, by the cut of their jibs, the crowd are renters and hotel guests.

On weekends at the old Salivar’s during the lunch rush, a female clown made rounds of the tables, alternately entertaining or frightening the children. Now there are three bars, including one on the roof, where from time to time yoga classes, of all things, take place.

Yeah, Montauk sure has changed. About a week ago, a photo taken in the hamlet’s 7-Eleven circulated online showing a man from behind browsing in one of the aisles naked but for a pair of boat shoes. No explanation was provided. Speculation was aplenty.

The naked boater was not among the crowd on Sunday, but had he been, I don’t think anyone would have been the least bit surprised.

Call it an addiction, but I’ve been bereft this week without The New York Times. I have had a copy delivered to my door pretty much every day of my adult life, but suddenly it has ceased to appear. My husband has called every day, even managing to reach a real, live human being, and has consistently been reassured that not only will the next day’s paper arrive, but all the back copies, too. It hasn’t happened, and we are a week into this saga. Crisis!

I am only being half facetious. While it is true that we have other means of accessing The Times — the laptop, on which I receive my “Daily Briefing,” the cellphone, on which my husband relies — these digital versions provide only so much of what is in the print edition, and for a news junkie like me it just isn’t enough. 

Sinking into a newspaper in print is my morning ritual. With my morning Times in hand, I settle on the sun porch. I begin by flipping through the pages and reading headlines. Usually, after finishing the first story that catches my eye, I go back and start on the front page again. I always have a nagging feeling that I might miss something of importance.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Young people, even members of my family and The Star’s staff, don’t seem to need the daily Times. They apparently pick up headlines here and there via email or social media and know everything about everything crucial in the day’s news without sitting down and focusing on it. I have the nagging feeling that maybe they are the ones missing something.

We’re still trying to solve the mystery of the missing Times. Is some early morning dog walker purloining our copy? Is there a new delivery person who doesn’t know how to find Edwards Lane, the street we live on? (We are rather off the map, as a private road.) Should I draw up a sign with a huge arrow pointing up the driveway? 

To be honest, The Times isn’t the only news source I’m addicted to. Come evening, I must have the “PBS NewsHour,” and then I like to go to MSNBC to see what it is focusing on, and then I switch to Fox News for a while to get the other side of the story, and then go back to MSNBC to catch Rachel Maddow. 

My husband doesn’t join me in all this. He is more a digital-screen junkie than a news junkie. Even though he sits in the same room as I flip through my evening television news cycle, he concentrates on his computer the whole time (these days, doing research and writing on one of his great-grandfathers, a noted architect of the Gilded Age). And therein lies the difference between us: He is younger than me, turning 78 in August. Does that make him young enough to be a member of the digital generation?

I’ve been thinking about a topic very much in the news these days, which has not gained as much attention as it should — understandable, considering all the emergencies, especially emergencies involving children in recent weeks — and that is the Supreme Court decision on June 27 that public employees do not have to pay the costs of collective bargaining by unions that represent them if they have not chosen to be members. In general, the court’s decision has been assessed as a further weakening of the strength of unions at a time when they have been in continuous decline. And this reminds me of how vital a union was for my father.

He was born in 1898 on Clinton Street in New York City to Polish immigrants, and he did not go to school beyond eighth grade. He may have been a proverbial newsboy; after working in various places, including a button factory, he was getting old enough for a real job when a relative helped him become a Prudential Insurance agent. Gregarious and energetic, the job suited him to a T.  

Prudential had instituted a major innovation in life insurance by that time, writing policies for workers, not just for the middle class or wealthy. These policies cost only pennies a week, and insurance agents made the payments easy by visiting customers at home to pick up weekly premiums. My father liked the exercise he got by going up and down the stairs of the lower-class brownstones to which he was assigned, chatting with the housewives of men who were at work, and often offering advice.

Later on, he would talk about similarly collecting payments on annuities, an annuity, in the parlance of the day, being a retirement fund someone created for him or herself that would pay out regular sums beginning at some future date.  

In 1951, having been a Prudential agent for a long time, my father was among those members of the American Federation of Labor Unions who voted to strike. It was newsworthy because it was the first formal job action by a white-collar union in the nation. And that is what I remember most, because my father was pictured on the front page of The Daily News reading while on the picket line none other than James Jones’s debut novel, “From Here to Eternity,” which was published that year. It took three months of negotiations for the agents to win working improvements and recognition of the A.F.L. as their bargaining agent.

I am certainly not going to try to summarize the positive effects unions have had on working conditions over the years, although the good they have done is overwhelming. (Well, okay, just a few things: the minimum wage, the right to sick leave, the creation of Social Security, protections for whistleblowers, maternity leave, overtime pay . . . the list goes on and on.) I am proud of my father’s place in the hard-working world and, given how far we have traveled from the idealism of those days — and given how many union-won worker rights have been chipped away by the modern environment of permanent freelancing, job insecurity, and benefit-free part-timer scheduling at places like Walmart — feeling a bit sentimental. 

This time of day, when the sun can be seen in stripes on the dark grass and on the ferns and there’s a breeze and some of the birds can be heard, is my favorite. Maybe O’en’s too. 

He’s lying on the deck looking out, for movement, any movement, Dave, deer, joggers, though he just lay back, flat out, with a sigh. I say, “O’en,” but he doesn’t respond, happy in the moment, which is all he knows, and which is all we should know. Then our minds would really be open. But, alas, they are filled, nay, stuffed with things, a lot of which we’d probably be better off without.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could clean them out like closets every now and then. But the prejudices and fears — as well, yes, as the fond glimpses — remain, so, when it comes to the bad stuff you have no choice but to acknowledge it, and, if you want to be a human being, which I once confessed was my ambition in life, face it down.

How then can anyone say, as the present Supreme Court justice nominee has, that they have an open mind. 

“What are your prejudices, sir, what are your fears, and can you tell us how you’ve successfully dealt with them in rendering objective judicial decisions?”

You will follow the original intent of the founding fathers? But those fine, stirring words were written in slave-holding days, in days when many women and many children too were chattel, when, aside from the elite, rights were out of reach. People had to fight for them, it was messy, not so neat, not so strictly constructionist.

And so we have evolved — yes, the Constitution is a living document, I’m happy to say. And only when it has been treated as such have we become more human. 

We have been inching toward polity, though it’s been a slog. 

Please don’t set us back.