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. 

I almost got run over

Did you — too?

Then there’s a pair of us?

Don’t tell! They’d really take aim — you know

How dreary — 

to be — Pedestrian!

How exposed — like a Dog —

To risk one’s life — 

the livelong July —

I think we’ll move to Quogue!

Every year it seems to get worse. Last night, O’en and I were almost clipped by a wide-turning tank dropping people off at the house across the street. With O’en on the leash, I unleashed obscenities. I had been waving my flashlight energetically to ward them off, but to little avail it seemed. 

As we headed home I thought I heard a woman say she was sorry, but I could have been mistaken.

This morning, a guy sped through the walkway between the cleaners and Mary’s Marvelous after others had stopped, a foot or two away from my receding chin. I yelled, as is my wont, and he clapped a hand to his forehead, realizing his mistake, I thought, though I could have been mistaken.

Then lately I have seen a toddler toddling near the end of our driveway in the morning as her mother walks a dog nearby, on a leash. The toddler too should be on a leash. This morning, I told the mother that cars sometimes drive quickly on our street, and then I thought about how, in backing out of our driveway, which we’re used to doing, we wouldn’t be able to see a toddler in our rearview mirrors. So, I turned and headed out frontways over the lawn.

I wasn’t surprised to read a letter this week fleshing out the serious injuries a 63-year-old pedestrian had suffered as the result of being hit by a Jeep in a crosswalk near the post office on June 23. Driver said she didn’t see her, if I’m not mistaken. Not that long ago, and not that far away, a 14-year-old girl was killed as she was riding a bicycle. 

I’d be mistaken if I didn’t include myself as one of the potentially heedless. You never know. 

One thing I do know is that I can’t remain in a gloomy state overlong, and so it was refreshing on Friday to see Isabel in the reeking dump. She too thinks the traffic is the worst ever. It had taken her I don’t know how long to get to East Hampton from Southampton, she said. I told her that when Mary was about to set out from Springs earlier that day to do some shopping in Amagansett I’d said, “You can’t get there from here.”

Happily, I was mistaken.

Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or independent voter, it’s easy to simply assume that Representative Lee Zeldin, our congressman here in the First District, is a reliable, reasonable, traditional member of the mainstream Republican Party. However, given his decision to invite Sebastian Gorka to headline a re-election fund-raiser in Smithtown on June 28, that easy assessment needs to be tossed out the window. Our congressman has become extraordinarily buddy-buddy with radicals and extremists of the ultra-right, bigoted wing of his party.

Mr. Gorka has been in the public spotlight not just for his stridently anti-Muslim opinions, but for his associations with a nationalist group in Hungary that openly expresses nostalgia for the days when their twisted segment of the Hungarian population marched arm in arm with the Nazis. That Mr. Zeldin, who is Jewish, should embrace a bombastic buffoon like Mr. Gorka beggars belief.

Mr. Gorka prefers to be referred to as Dr. Gorka — although there are serious questions about the legitimacy of that honorific, and about his qualifications to claim to be an expert on immigration or anything else. Despite that, he has served for a time at Fox News as a national security analyst, and worked for the Trump campaign in 2015. Along with Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, he held a short-lived post in the Trump White House, but resigned about a year ago, criticizing the administration’s foreign policy for being — get this — inadequately anti-Muslim.

 Mr. Gorka, who was born in Britain to Hungarian-immigrant parents and who immigrated to the United States after marrying an American, continues to argue that Muslims should be summarily banned from immigrating to this country. As does a racist provocateur of a similar ilk, Milo Yiannopoulos, he gets a lift from making offensive remarks. He greeted the election of Donald Trump to the presidency with an inanity: “The alpha males are back.”

 Mr. Gorka likes to peacock around at public events with a medal on his chest that was given to his father as a member of a Hungarian group, Vitezi Rend, that was notorious for enthusiastically collaborating with the Nazis during World War II. His father’s beliefs can be consigned to history but in continuing to wear this emblem of an acknowledged pro-Nazi organization, Mr. Gorka is clearly trying to tell us something. We should hear him. In 2017, he vigorously denied having been a member of Vitezi Rend during his years in Hungary, but his fellow members, when contacted by reporters, said that of course he’d been a member, and that everyone in the western Hungarian branch of the organization knew it.

According to Recoil, which is a “firearms lifestyle publication,” Mr. Gorka, on a daily basis, likes to walk about armed with two pistols, two flashlights, a knife, a tourniquet, and the U.S. Constitution. Given his beliefs, which are completely antithetical to many of the ideas of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, it seems unlikely that he has read very far beyond the Second Amendment. The rest of his Boy Scout kit is laughable, is it not?

Nevertheless, Mr. Zeldin chose Mr. Gorka to be the big attraction at his fund-raiser. That Mr. Gorka is seen as a drawing card in the First District is a sad sign for all of our Republican friends and neighbors, most of whom are, of course, respectable, reasonable, and moderate citizens. I would like to think that, given a chance to reflect on the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations of Mr. Gorka, they would share my disgust that he was put on a pedestal by our own congressman. 

What did the Greatest Generation fight for? Not for this.

Mr. Zeldin is, by all accounts, a perfectly charming and easygoing man who, in person, is easy to like. By his association with a radical nincompoop like Mr. Gorka, however, he has crossed a line. It is time for Republicans in our district to reassert the decency and common sense of their party.

It may be that Mr. Zeldin thinks it is preferable, on the political stage, not to worry about his or anyone else’s Jewishness, not to make too big a deal out of it. But anti-Semitism is on the rise, not just in Hungary, but here, and our congressman just took a giant step onto the wrong side of history.

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?

A couple weeks ago, the New York City L.G.B.T. Pride march left Lower Manhattan all but paralyzed. I grew up on Christopher Street, less than a block from the historical Stonewall Inn, and the parade passes in front of my mother’s house every year. 

My mother lives there with her boyfriend, dog, and two cats. Occasionally she stays to enjoy the show, but usually she comes here for the weekend out of sympathy for the animals, who don’t appreciate the constant noise and massive crowd outside. So, like any good son whose parents are away for the weekend, I usually invite a few friends over to watch the parade from the fire escape. This year was no different.

I issued an invitation on my Instagram so that people could get by the police barricades. This year the changed route made it harder to get to the house, but if you have an invitation with an address on it, they let you through (the same thing is true of New Year’s Eve in Times Square). The changed route was an attempt to speed up the march, which, by my approximation, did not work; there was still marching outside around 8 p.m., when it usually ends around 6 or 7.

The parades started with the Stonewall Riots, initiated by Marsha P. Johnson on June 28, 1969. The bar down the street from my childhood home was one of the only places in New York where L.G.B.T. folks could come and be themselves, and for this reason was subject to constant violent raids by the New York Police Department. A month after the riots ended, the late Brenda Howard, the “Mother of Pride” from the Bronx, organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. A year later she organized the one-year anniversary, and the annual parades became her lifelong passion. Pride month was first officially declared by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and again in 2000, and was again proclaimed by President Barack Obama in every year of his presidency.

In recent years, Pride has become something of a national holiday, with all the marketable trappings of Christmas. When you Google “pride month,” the site morphs into a rainbow-spattered version of itself, even now that July’s heat is upon us. When you order an Uber in June, the slug-trail that shows you the route of the driver is a shimmering rainbow. The Stonewall Inn itself is now something of a tourist trap, and the crowds and perpetual line outside have always kept me out (I much prefer the nearby Duplex). The corporatization is not lost on my friends. Their favorites are the radio station floats, the Ru-Paul’s Drag Race floats, and we all freak out when Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of “Broad City” fame point at us from their float, but they pay no mind to the corporate “advertisers.” 

I’m a big podcast fan, and Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, writers for The New York Times Magazine who host the Times podcast “Still Processing,” put it well in their “We Louvre the Carters” episode: “I’m saturated with rainbows, they’re coming out of my tits, they’re everywhere in the city, I just don’t like this corporate slapping a rainbow label on something for a month. Seeing these corporate floats, I just wanna grab a microphone and pull a Janet: Let me know [sings], what have you done for me lately?” (In an intersectional slipup they also praise fans of the Mexican soccer team in Germany who, a Star writer pointed out two weeks ago, chanted homophobic slurs at the opposing team’s goalie.) The corporate veneer of the march used to bother me too. I mean, T-Mobile? T-D Bank? As a kid I couldn’t even figure out why they were there. When I got a little older, I realized it was a marketing scheme. Then I wondered, who are these people, the actual mass of people marching? I started realizing what makes the parade special when I really looked closely at the faces above those pink T-Mobile shirts. They’re not a corporate influence, they’re not heartless capitalists looking to market their company to these potential customers, every other day of the year they’re normal storefront employees. 

My favorite every year is the police section. My generation, raised in the midst of the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crash, has an unbelievably low level of confidence in institutions, and I am no different. I went to public school in Lower Manhattan, and most of my friends are non-white. I’ve spoken to police on behalf of friends too terrified to do so months after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by Officer Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland. 

I have what I would call a healthy distrust for police. 

But, every year in late June, you can find me sitting teary-eyed on my fire escape, cheering officers I would otherwise eyeball cautiously. It’s not because I necessarily believe in the institution they represent. It’s because I believe in each of them, because I know that their day-to-day life is not easy, made difficult by toxic masculinity and old norms, and today they each deserve to stand and be recognized.

Alex Lemonides is a reporter at The Star.

One hundred years ago this week, The Star reported, East Hampton observed Independence Day with the biggest and grandest celebration ever held.  More than 600 members of the New York State Guard marched in the July 4 parade, and the context made it page-one, above-the-fold news:

“To Americans the day came with a new significance and impressiveness and to our allies in the Great War it brought a new understanding of the principles which have now become theirs.”

At 10:30 that morning, the Sixth Separate Battalion, under the command of Major L.D. Dyer, assembled on the Harriet F. Herrick Playground on Newtown Lane. Seven of the eight Long Island companies taking part motored to East Hampton, the reporter observed, with the exception of Greenport’s, which came by boat.

Unlike today’s Main Street parades, this one began at Hook Mill and headed toward the Village Green. A reviewing stand was set up at the Osborne house near Dayton Lane, from which Supervisor N.N. Tiffany, Brig. Gen. James Robb of the State Guard, and other officials watched.

At the Village Green, the Sixth Battalion formed an open square around a raised platform; those who wanted to listen to the speeches filled in the empty space at center. The actor John Drew, for whom Guild Hall’s theater would be named, made the introductions. Speakers extolled East Hampton’s beauty and described the devastation in France and Belgium by the Germans. 

One of the speakers, Gen. Howard Duffield of the 9th Coast Artillery, warned of enemy agents here on the home front “playing the German game,” while pretending to be loyal citizens. John V. Bouvier Jr., the grandfather of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, spoke of a son, then at war in France, and told the women in the crowd to save their clothes so they would not have to spend money on new ones. The war could not be won without women, he said.

All this was followed by a baseball game pitting a team from Fort Jay on Governor’s Island against a squad from Camp Upton. Fort Jay took it 8 to 3. That evening, a military ball was held at Clinton Hall, with nearly 150 couples on the dance floor. Troops from the Montauk Army camp, who had not been able to take part earlier in the day, made up for it at the ball.

Twenty years later, as the war in Europe was over and the next one was only then getting underway for America, East Hampton marked the Fourth of July with fireworks at Main Beach, a concert by the town band, and John Bouvier, by then 72, was back at the speaker’s podium to extoll the day’s praises.

Well at least the president didn’t claim the enemy of the people misquoted him — he had, in fact, misquoted himself, he said, when it came to Russia’s meddling on his electoral behalf.

It was all very well for Whitman to say he could contradict himself because he contained multitudes, but when it comes to presidents you like them to wheedle the multitudes down a bit before spouting off, before giving aid and comfort to people who don’t wish us well. As I said last week, cleaning out the cranial closet every now and then makes it tidier.

Though with this one you don’t know what to believe. Nor does he, apparently, know what to believe. Because he doesn’t know his own mind. Other than the pre-eminent fact that he is pre-eminent. 

But the All-Star game was fun, wasn’t it? All those home runs. Their boom, boom, boom still resounded this morning as I gazed up from the outdoor shower into the outreaching trees, putting aside for the moment all thoughts of gloom, gloom, gloom, and doom, doom, doom. It’s the papers. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em, for you do want to stay up on all the lies and calumny and disasters man or God-made (whose reputation, as a result, has been tarnished too). 

Greed is the big sin, one of my sons-in-law says, and I guess that the urge to aggrandize, especially in the land of the fee [Don’t you change this, editors, or I’ll take my column and go home!], is pretty rampant. There’s no we in me, and our leader is the avatar in that. But doing for oneself is just the half of it. To be balanced, to live up to this nation’s oft-touted ideals, we must also do for others, in whatever ways we can — even to the extent of covering local sports. So, since he’s unbalanced, he must be checked.

This was to have been the City on the Hill, which would inspire, and to which all would aspire . . . the beacon of freedom, go to the light . . . the envy of all. The beacon’s getting dimmer, the cheering more faint. 

The World Cup was fun, wasn’t it? Won by a former ally. Wimbledon too.

Chill out, give thanks, I wrote, from Brooklyn, in a typically mawkish letter to The Star eight years ago.

I remember the afternoon too well. The 100-degree heat in the sixth-floor walkup, the sliced-open palm in a window air-conditioner installation gone wrong, and the south side of Williamsburg’s essential soundtrack to summer: incessant car alarms and stereos 24/7/365. And always, the lamenting of summers gone by.

Entertaining as the melee could be, I wrote to urge the warring parties of The Star’s letters pages to step back from the gaping partisan divide and remember how very fortunate they were, enjoying another summer on the South Fork. 

Twenty months ago, I wrote, from Amagansett, a typically weepy “Relay” about the last day of summer — in my experience of that summer of 2016, if not the calendar’s. A self-pitying account of a day in October, it was all long shadows and falling leaves and an unconscious yearning to hibernate, dolefully played out on a dock and a boat on the harbor in Montauk. 

And on Monday night, I wrote, from East Hampton, this typically soppy “Relay” about the first day of summer, which, like the last day of summer, arrived a month late. 

It had been a long week, what with the usual work I perform as an Enemy of the American People (Sad!), Mother’s five-day visit, and negotiation of a car purchase, and when the East Hampton-to-Lindenhurst-to-Orient Point-to-East Hampton race had been run on Friday, there were just a few hours left until Saturday and early-morning longshoring in Montauk.

It’s dirty work and my clothes are quickly damp if not drenched, but that one-way ticket to somewhere, I keep telling myself, isn’t going to buy itself, so earn and then earn some more.

Damp and dirty but done in the early afternoon, instead of driving back to East Hampton I accepted an invitation to hang out at Ditch Plain Beach with my friend and Y and Y’s friend, Y2. 

Y is renting a room from my friend for the summer, and brought Y2 along when she came out from Brooklyn on the train on Saturday morning. It’s a small world, after all: Y2 used to work at a groovy restaurant-lounge around the corner from my sixth-floor walkup. We knew each other slightly, across the aughts, in Brooklyn, where Y and Y2 are in an all-girl punk band. I am in awe.

But the thing is, Saturday, July 21, was the first time it felt like summer. I’d barely been on a beach before that afternoon, and on Saturday the clouds and windy, unsettled air had dissuaded many from a swim or surf. Mostly alone and close on a couple of beach towels, we all caught up and had a few sips of beer and laughed a lot and looked to the cliffs and the horizon and the heavens, and we felt so fortunate and happy. 

Later, I remembered what I had forgotten: The world is bigger than a wind farm, an airport, an election campaign, and perfluorinated chemicals. People discuss and do other things, like music, and art, and adventure, and that is mostly the province of the cities. That is why Y and Y2 came from far away to live there, and my own thoughts of returning gather anew — once the temperature has dropped below 80, that is — as do thoughts of venturing farther afield, to the field of infinite potentiality.

But on Saturday, it was good just to lie flat and look at the sky and, for a minute, have nothing at all to do. Later still, at the Star Island Yacht Club, we came to know the bliss of a late-afternoon drink by the pool, until it was time for Y2 to take the train back to the city. 

On Flamingo Avenue, windswept and enveloped by David Bowie’s “Soul Love” blaring like a Williamsburg car alarm from the new convertible’s stereo, we hurtled toward the train station, carefree and exhilarant in the moment. “New love, a boy and girl are talking / New words, that only they can share in / New words, a love so strong it tears their hearts / To sleep through the fleeting hours of morning.” 

And then, a deer bolted from the brush and across the two lanes, and I stomped on the brake, and Y and Y2 screamed and threw their arms high, and we all laughed and marveled at the nearness of the unknown. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star. “Re: Person I Knew” is an album by Bill Evans recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1974.

High tide came late on Friday, late enough that no one was awake or on the beach when my old, red kayak floated away. It was my fault, really. 

The kids had dragged it up a way after paddling around in the bay the previous evening. I had been sleepily watching from a hammock and said that I would take it the rest of the way to the safety of dry sand. Hungry for dinner or addlebrained from a long, hard week, I simply forgot.

Ellis, who is 8, and I were on the beach the following morning messing around with a metal detector when I noticed the kayak was gone. Sentimental and possessive about such things, I made my son walk up and down with me, looking for a clue. Then, we hiked in on a new trail at Promised Land to scour the beach there. Nothing.

High tide had come around 10 p.m. on Friday. The  wind was variable and light then, from the south-southeast. Guessing where the kayak traveled was just that, guesswork, and, frankly, whoever happened upon it over the weekend most likely would have considered it a gift from the gods. At any rate, no one has yet phoned the town police, to whom I reported the loss as soon as I noticed it.

Then, on Sunday morning, an East Hampton police officer got in touch with me to say that his girlfriend’s father, who is a commercial fisherman, had picked up a red kayak floating in the bay and that I could stop by the house. It was in the driveway, he said. Heading over, I was excited, but it wasn’t to be. The thing was red all right, but it was not mine. 

Looking into replacements later that day, I was disappointed. The manufacturer, Hobie, has followed the trend of adding bells and whistles to everything and anything, all knurled surfaces and military action hero fantasies. Even flashlights are sold as “tactical” these days. Gone are the sleek and effective lines of my old boat, blown from a plastic rotomold before my eldest child was born.

Most of Sunday was spent circumnavigating Gardiner’s Island with Geoff Morris, a sharp-eyed friend since childhood. From the boat we scanned the shoreline through binoculars, arriving from Three Mile Harbor first at Cherry Hill Point, near where Captain Kidd buried treasure. Then, we went north around Bostwick Point, east to Whale Hill with a pause to land a couple of keeper porgies, then to Eastern Plains Point, into Tobaccolot Bay, south around Cartwright Shoal, then beating slowly against a hard chop into Cherry Harbor, and out over Crow Shoal and back to Three Mile. No kayak.

Studying the island so closely was a reward in and of itself, however. And, back on land, the sting of my relatively trivial loss dimmed. A man in New Jersey whose kids had all grown up and moved away from home had one to sell of the same model, albeit blue. I might go get it; I might not. I just hope that my red kayak’s new owner loves it as much as I did.

Since the East Hampton Library placed a dandy touch-screen coffee machine on its circulation desk last month, some of the Star staff have spent a lot more time next door. That might not be the case with the enigma that is Russell Bennett, who takes regular breaks to sit in one of the comfortable leather chairs and flip through a book. For several of the rest of us, the lure of made-to-order coffee, for $1 if we take our own mug, is irresistible. 

On both Monday and Tuesday this week, I was able to hold out until about 3 p.m. Then, a ceramic cup in hand, I went next door to the library with my dollar bills. Conversation around the Starbucks-brand machine is light and, for me, a nice diversion from the day’s typing. Upon return, coming up with new ways to vex elected officials or write a mouth-watering description of a Saturday church barbecue is a whole lot easier — even after a half-caf, one of the coffee beast’s many options.

Mugs are never a problem around this office, or the library’s break room, as I found out. While there may never be a teaspoon in the upstairs kitchen silverware drawer, mugs we’ve got. We have so many, in fact, that earlier this year when I made a fine Manhattan clam chowder for a friend’s potluck birthday, I boxed up about two-dozen random ceramic mugs in which to serve it. I have not yet dropped by to pick up the box; its absence has made scarcely a dent in our office stash.

Dennis Fabiszak, who runs the library, told me that he applied to Starbucks for the machine after numerous requests from patrons. It dispenses chai, three roasts of coffee, and hot water for tea. Other than in the Long Island Collection area, where irreplaceable hoary town records of great value are kept, we can drink our drinks of choice anywhere in the library.

My East Hampton grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, for whom one wing of the library is named, used to spend long hours there researching her history books. The story goes that my father would sometimes be sent down from the house, which is just up the lane, to tap at the window and remind his mother of mealtimes. One wonders what heights of greatness she might have attained had she had access to a powerful brew as well.