I am old enough to remember going to the cinema to watch the 1945 movie musical “State Fair,” starring Jeanne Crain, whom my mother adored. With music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, how could it be anything less than terrific? 

The film also starred Dick Haymes, who scored a gold record with “It Might as Well Be Spring,” the most unforgettable, if corny, of the songs from “State Fair.” 

The last few days, the lyrics have been going through my head:

“I haven’t seen a crocus or a rosebud

Or a robin on the wing

But I feel so gay in a melancholy way

That it might as well be spring.

It might as well be spring.”

Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra recorded it, too, and I think I’ll go to YouTube to take a listen before the day is out. The unseasonably springlike weather the last few days has put me in a show-tune mood.

This week is winter break at the public schools here on the East End, and, given that we are often still stuck under a pile of snow at this point in February, it’s no wonder that those who can get away head south. It’s also the time of year when a good number of our more peripatetic (that is, affluent) residents decamp to their second or even third homes — in Key West, or Eleuthera, or Palm Beach. One of the couples at a dinner party we held the other night had just arrived home from the Dominican Republic. Another friend is planning a few weeks in Cuba.

I do rather wish I were jetting off on a trip to, say, the Yucatan Peninsula, myself, but, if I am to be honest, I’m fairly delighted just to sit on the kitchen porch of a morning and soak up the rays, letting the sun coax my mind into a warm somnolence. Taking note of the birds at the feeders just outside the windows, reading whatever newspapers remain unread, and throwing out those no longer wanted — that’s what I consider a good start to the day.

Call me sappy, but the debut of this year’s crop of snowdrops, which popped up in the yard a few days ago, has really put a spring in my step. Can the crocuses, and the hyacinths — and the lilacs, and the roses — be far behind?

The animals and birds at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens in Palm Desert were not all that lively the day we went to see them. Aside from the birds, who drew our greatest sympathy, they didn’t appear to be cramped, they had some room, though you wondered if they wouldn’t be happier freed from us.

I tried, without success, to get the laughing kookaburra to laugh, reciting catchy Rodney Dangerfield jokes: “I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother!”

“I’m telling you, ugly, I was ugly. My mother used to feed me with a slingshot.” I was constricted, though he just sat there on his perch, apparently unamused.

I fantasized about Mary freeing the vultures, until I read that sometimes they made away with small children. That gave me pause inasmuch as we were visiting two of them, ages 2 and 1 — the 1-year-old, Lucy, being an Aquarius like me. Mary is not a great believer in astrology, by the way, especially since I told her that we were “givers.” Make that “a giving taker,” then, in my case. 

We celebrated Lucy’s birthday a day early, on Super Bowl Sunday, an occasion made all the more merry by the fact that the Eagles won.

We wanted to free the bald eagle and the golden eagle they had at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens too — all the birds, in fact, though it is worth the visit to see the native desert plants if nothing else.

There is nothing much left of the desert now. Mary said she wished she could have shown it to me in the 1970s, when she lived there, a single mother in Morongo, with infant twins, one of whom is the mother of the aforementioned 1-year-old, who has that dimpled wide-eyed look Johnna herself once had. Instead of tumbleweed, it’s house house house now, and malls, many, many, many of them. 

It seems as if millions live there. Johnna said she wasn’t sure. A million maybe in high season, in all the desert cities ringed by mountains, some with snow on top — Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, and La Quinta among them. 

She and her husband, Wally, and the children live within a gated community in Bermuda Dunes, though it’s not as easy to get into as the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens. 

I’ve railed against gated communities in the past, though I see her point: Its relative isolation and the constantly patrolling security service assures her pretty much that the kids will be safe when they are playing and riding bikes.

Even at that they’re never far from the madding crowd. The traffic’s horrendous, The Times is scarce, and it was hot for this time of year, in the high 80s and low 90s, not auguring well for the summer, when, as we do in the winter, the natives hunker down. But the margaritas they were good.

One of the big surprises about the woods on the East End is that they are full of nearly invisible life among the leaf litter despite so much development and other changes. The deer have opened up the understory vegetation, sending certain birds species elsewhere, but the amphibians persist. 

Andy Sabin, who founded the South Fork Natural History Museum, is considered the king of salamander hunters here. He is leading a series of nighttime walks this month for museum guests during which encounters with these secretive creatures are all but certain. I tagged along on one such outing some years back; they are quite something and not to be missed.

Guests assemble at the museum to be led to a location kept on the down low for fear of poachers. Yes, apparently, there are people who want to collect rare and endangered amphibians and might pay to obtain them. On the night I went on the walk, we parked at a cul-de-sac in a hilly section of woods and embarked, headlamps and flashlights lit, into the gloom.

The salamanders specific to the Northeast have evolved a particularly innovative breeding strategy. As snowmelt and winter rains fill low places with water, they emerge from hibernation to lay eggs in so-called vernal pools (a lovely phrase or earthly drag-queen name, perhaps). Once the eggs hatch, young salamanders creep off into the woods to forage on their own, grow, and get ready to return to the pools years later in winter’s ebb to mate.

Andy has chased their seasonal rounds for decades. During the exploration I attended, he pulled on hip boots and, with a dip net, waded into a thigh-deep pond to ladle a few tiger salamanders into a white plastic bucket. They were large, larger than I thought they would be, draping their black and yellow-blotched forms well over Andy’s cupped hands as he showed them to the roughly 15 of us taking part. 

Andy will lead three more salamander searches this year. Information about how to join him is available from the museum.

I’ve been known to complain that those who bought second homes here in the last few years are not like those who arrived earlier, in, say, the 20th century — who, I liked to insist, made an effort to learn East Hampton history, meet remarkable locals, and discover native flora and sometimes even fauna. Lately, however, I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong. Perhaps it has something to do with the resurgence in the idea of locavore food, and the millennials’ celebration of old artisan crafts, but I see more and more fresh faces taking an interest in our common East Hampton history.

It was standing room only, for example, at a recent East Hampton Historical Society event at Clinton Academy. To be sure, year-rounders were in strong evidence, but so were others, ranging from young to upper-middle age, who seemed new to the room but were obviously delighted to take in indigenous stories told with knowledge and humor by Hugh King and Ken Collum about two of the 20th century’s prominent physicians here, Doris Zenger and Dave Edwards. 

Socially, as well, I’ve  met newly arrived residents who have disproved my earlier opinion about newcomers. For example, at a dinner party just before the scallop season opened this year, I got talking with a woman who not only knew that a day would be set aside so residents could dig a few for personal consumption before professional Bonackers got to work commercially, but planned to take advantage of it. She sent me a photo afterward. It showed her in full regalia and waders, holding a handmade wooden box with a see-through bottom, which she had a carpenter make for her just for shellfishing. I never got around to asking her about the New York City law practice from which she had recently retired.

And then there are two men who came “from away,” as locals used to always put it, to become the most extraordinary experts on the work of East Hampton’s Dominy family, who made furniture for a century or more (some of the finest examples of which can be seen at Winterthur in Delaware). No one could be more devoted to preservation than they are.

I once was a newcomer here, too, many moons ago. For the first few years I got a pass as far as boning up on local history and  lore went, because I married into a family who wrote books dealing with local history, both fiction and nonfiction, and could reflexively defer to them. As the years have swept by, however, and given the intense attention to community that has gone into making The East Hampton Star the paper it is today, I can claim to have amassed a fairly reliable store of knowledge about what made East Hampton such a fine place in centuries past. You can ask me what the old spelling of Sammy’s Beach was, and I will be able to answer.

In the introduction to his 1979 book, “The South Fork,” Everett T. Rattray, my late husband, wrote: “The South Fork is native now to a relative handful; it could be native to thousands more if they would undertake the necessary naturalization exercises, which include some long looks beneath the surface of things.” 

He would be pleased to know that many are now doing so.

“You have to write the piece that goes with this rap: ‘No Conca, no movie theater, no diner, no Black Buoy. (Variety Store? You’re right, it’s still there.)’ ” This from a book editor quoting back to me my lament for the wreckage of Sag Harbor.

I’d emailed her in the fall, I forget why, maybe because she’s a parent too, and so seemed to agree that the emotional crater left behind by the disappeared Conca D’Oro pizza parlor was going to be particularly difficult to crawl out of — the kid hangout, the antithesis of Hamptons pretension, the throwback, if not exactly to a time of a gas station on every corner, at least to those days when from downtown you could make out the distant whine of engines up in the woods at the Bridgehampton Racetrack, a siren call to something, anything, happening out here.

The vacant Conca storefront may have been in the back of my mind as I crammed in the next best dinner I could think of on a Monday night, a couple of Pierson High booster club frankfurters in sweet white-bread buns, one French’s-only as a starter, another as the main course squirted with two different colorful streams of condiment for variety, the meal finished off with the butt end of my fourth-grade daughter’s leftover mess, all ingested in mere seconds as the Whalers and Bees warmed up in preparation for their recent tête-à-tête, and all three dogs for 4 bucks, the nice booster lady had informed me, math I’m still trying to figure out. 

About the game, for you parental units out there skeptical of teens these days, let me put it this way: Effort was not an issue, was in fact in ferocious evidence, particularly on Pierson’s part, the boys hammering the boards and raining threes without the help of their thousand-point man, Will Martin. He was missed more in the bleachers, as he’s fun to watch, this baby-faced assassin who’ll smoke your ass flat-footed as he slashes to the hoop, then calmly floats back up the floor, blond head cocked to one side like he’s negotiating the inclined deck of Captain Havens’s whaling vessel in a heavy swell. 

As for the Bees, they looked like a team not used to playing together, as my wife put it, incisively, I thought. Maybe next year.

Yet for all the shouting and high spirits, what ghost was that haunting the Sag Harbor gym? For the visitors too. I mean, Bridgehampton: What’s to become of you? How many more regular folks can you stand to lose to the saner economies of the Carolinas? How many more 19th-century houses have to come down? 

And those kids sacrificing their bodies for the sake of a loose ball deserve a magical place of their own come summer, like the old drive-in movie theater. Is that maudlin to say? Or merely pointless. I’ll go ahead and add to the grievance list those two six-foot-tall fiberglass soft-serve cones Carvel wanted atop the shop but Southampton Town ordered mothballed decades ago. The supports are still there, if it’s not too late. God forbid there be a glimpse of joy intruding on that dreary suburban stretch of Montauk Highway. 

It was noise complaints that did in the racetrack — the worst loss the South Fork has suffered, more than a few of us believe. And now the same judgment is being visited upon another large tract where interesting things happen, the East Hampton Airport. So here’s a modest proposal: Rather than silence surrounded by mostly empty second homes and an unchecked army of deer, how about doubling down and putting a luncheonette in the terminal? The kind of place you could get a tuna melt, fries on the side, chocolate malted with a coffee back. Sit under a lacquered wooden propeller mounted on the wall and watch the planes come and go. The occasional refueling. See who deplanes and treads across the tarmac to points unknown. Good for old people with nothing to do, good for kids. 

I know, I know, don’t hold your breath. But we’ll always have the hardwood.

Baylis Greene, Bridgehampton High class of 1985, is an associate editor at The Star.

The other night on the “NewsHour,” our source for horror on weeknights, they showed the light that could not until recently be seen in what was heretofore thought to be vast outer blackness.

It was comforting. “We’re looking at heaven,” I said, “all the light that can now be seen.”

Well, I didn’t mean by that to imply I’d been convinced, though, as I say, it was comforting inasmuch as the revelation did nothing to disabuse me of a feeling that has persisted, to wit, that despite the suffering that attends us, all will be well. Or, as my French stepmother used to say, “Tout s’arrange.”

“It’s nothing,” my father reported his mother-in-law as having said to Lucette and him on her deathbed. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

I do wonder sometimes if the life to which we cling so isn’t a dream from which we’ll awake. Sometimes it almost seems as if it’s a sideshow. Nay, most often it seems like a freak show, so confounding at times that I’m prompted to seek refuge from the madhouse in Mud House.

And refuge in “The Book of Joy,” a compendium of conversations in which the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu engaged not long ago, two leaders who know well what suffering is, but who, despite that, are joyous, their joy being linked to suffering. Theirs is a state, I presume, beyond happiness and beyond mere optimism. 

There is a large photo of the Dalai Lama laughing in our daughter and son-in-law’s house, and sometimes I wonder why he is. I can only conclude that it is because he is supremely accepting, that he’s never trying to force the issue. Still, inasmuch as I’m a citizen in an exhortatory nation, I would like to have a bumper sticker made that says, “Strive for Beauty.” For me that sums it up.

“We are same human beings,” the Dalai Lama says at one point, and, at another, Archbishop Tutu says, “We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another . . . human beings are basically good. . . . Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.”

Theirs too is a light you can see, and much closer, and yes, it too is comforting. Jack Graves

An Idaho lawmaker uncomfortable with climate change being taught in the state’s schools — or perhaps simply uncomfortable with education itself — said kids ought to be able to determine on their own, for instance, whether the globe upon which we live is flat or spherical. 

We were hoping the reporter would suggest the legislator read up on Eratosthenes, or, in the alternative, that she and he go outside and put two sticks in the ground somewhat apart from each other so they could observe the different shadow lengths they cast, or that they look at a ship coming up over the horizon, or that they sit down with a laptop and Google the many photos that have been taken of Earth from outer space, or photos of lunar eclipses. But she held her tongue as our personal surface temperatures rose, my baseball cap creating a greenhouse effect.

Presumably, when it’s become abundantly evident that coastal flooding because of melting polar ice and the consequent sea rise has displaced legions of people around the world, when the coral reefs have all died off in acidic oceans, and when extreme weather events such as hurricanes, deluges, wildfires, droughts, heightened air pollution, heat waves, and insect-borne diseases have produced incalculable damage, he will acknowledge that it’s time for the subject to be taught in school, provided, of course, that the kids are encouraged not to jump to any conclusions . . . about climate change, or a heliocentric universe, or the laws of motion, or any of that.

It takes a while for things to sink in, a couple of thousand years, say, in Eratosthenes’s case. Of course there were — nay, still are — naysayers when it came to the teaching of evolution in schools too. If we are the pinnacle of an Intelligent Designer’s experiments, beginning with slime mats four billion years ago and moving onward and upward from there, it’s pretty sad.

And since not everyone can be a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, a Newton, or an Einstein, who were able to figure things out for themselves, I’m glad there are teachers there for the rest of us, to acclimate us to the world in which we find ourselves, to pique our natural curiosity, and to nurture in us the ability to reason — the ability, once set on our way, to think things through.

We have a teacher in our family, a very good one, who does all the above, and I hate to think that she might ever be hindered in her work, the most essential in society. 

The right to life, free inquiry, free speech, and the pursuit of happiness trumps the right to bear assault weapons in my book. It’s not even close.

The president says he doesn’t want anyone from “shithole countries,” and then I thought about the people I’ve most admired: Gandhi, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr. . . . Shithole countries can produce some great men.

They’re pigmented all in my pantheon, spanning the globe. Not that I have anything against Scandinavians, good socialists all.

But when will the day come when people, rather than by the color of their skin, are judged by the content of their character? That is the question; one raised by a visionary resident of this acknowledged land of the free, who in seeking balance was struck down for presuming to think that human beings harm themselves in harming others and help themselves in helping others, a vision that presupposed an equitable, vibrant society, one in which, moreover, poverty would be abolished.

“A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself,” Martin Luther King Jr. said hopefully, though these many years later it has yet to do so. 

“We are same human beings . . . we are the same,” the Dalai Lama says, to which Archbishop Tutu adds, “You blossom, really, because of other people.” Or, as Ubuntu has it, I am I because of you and you and you. 

We could be an equitable, vibrant society if we had the will, but it’s not there at the moment. Mark Shields said the other night that the president’s racist sentiments were damaging to the spirit of the country, and that’s no mean thing, spirit perhaps in the end being the main difference between a country that is whole and one that’s a shithole. 

Walls won’t do it, whether they be the walls we’ve built in our psyches, or about our gated communities, or the one that the president, his arms folded tightly about him, would build along our southern border. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Not good for the spirit, and spirit is the main thing. 

Sorry to say, I did not get the name of the reader who stopped by The Star last week with a small skein of darning thread. 

I had written a lament about the absence of suitable yarn at the Sag Harbor Variety Store with which I expected to mend a hole in a wool mitten. Time was, I might drive over with an old sweater looking for material to close up a hole eaten by a moth and be able to buy a small amount in a near-perfect match wrapped on a card. I was, it seems, one of the few still looking for yarn; the store no longer keeps a supply.

By coincidence or luck, the Coats & Clark’s silvery gray darning cotton the reader brought by is close in color, if not texture, and I mean to try it.

I was surprised by a second response to my column, this one an email from Peter Fitzgerald, who suggested I stop by Black Sheep Knit Works in East Hampton Village. A kindred soul, Mr. Fitzgerald went on to say, “As someone who has a shed full of things I fully intend to repair (they accumulate faster than I fix them somehow), I commend your good intentions.”

And that brings me back to something I have written about before: the near-hoarding quality of those of us with, perhaps, the ability to fix and repair material things but not the time. Darning a glove or sock is one thing, but letting a leaky cold-water faucet under the sink go on for six months before being shut off at the valve crosses some sort of line.

Last summer, I started work on putting a favorite surfboard back into shape after a friend had driven it into the sand and snapped off the nose almost a year earlier. The board is still waiting for a final coat of resin and sanding. In my basement and workshop you might find as many as 10 antique chairs awaiting attention. There is even an old hammock from Mexico hanging near a broken canoe paddle, which I have long intended to tend to.

There is joy in making broken things work again, which is why we hold on to them, I suppose. And yet from their dark, cobwebbed places in the corner of a basement or the back of a shed they call to us, mocking us for not letting go. If the worst thing anyone can say about Mr. Fitzgerald and me is that we keep too many things for too long in the hope that we can resurrect them, I guess that is not all bad. I am sure he, like me, believes that he will get around to them eventually.

One cold winter’s night about 26 years ago, two friends and I shivered on West Third Street, craning our necks and peering in the large window of the Blue Note Jazz Club, straining for a glimpse of Ray Charles. We were barely employed musicians then, sharing a small apartment in Hoboken and busking in the subway when times were especially tough (they usually were).

On Saturday, I nodded hello to the shadows of those three poor scruffs as I strode into the club, now flush with 40 dollars and then some, to sit at the bar, sip wine, and listen to Jools Holland bang out rhythm and blues and boogie-woogie on a grand piano.

I’d seen a blurb about Mr. Holland, an original member of the band Squeeze, and his show at the Blue Note, “Piano, Vocals, and Drum Frenzy,” in the “Goings On About Town” section in The New Yorker. Learning that Ruby Turner, a wonderful British-Jamaican singer, would accompany him at the Blue Note, I had to attend.

Squeeze was a marvelous band that crafted superb, Beatles-esque pop in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since 1992, Julian Miles Holland has hosted “Later . . . With Jools Holland,” a BBC program on which new and established musicians perform and are interviewed by the host, who often joins in. 

My introduction to Ms. Turner came on “Small World, Big Band” by Mr. Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, a sprawling, 22-track release featuring blues and pop artists including Paul Weller, Stereophonics, Van Morrison, Taj Mahal, and Mark Knopfler. George Harrison’s final performance, completed shortly before his death in 2001, is one standout track. Ms. Turner’s contribution, the elegiac and deeply stirring “Nobody ut You,” is another.

But Saturday: Curse you, Metropolitan Transportation Authority! Fifteen long minutes ticked by before the F train pulled into the station, and by the time I got to the Blue Note, the bar, which accommodates just a dozen stools, was full. But, unlike that frigid night 26-odd years ago, fortune smiled. The nice lady at the door said that if the show wasn’t sold out, I could upgrade to a table seat for an additional 15 dollars. After an hour of lurking uncomfortably behind the bar patrons, I received the welcome news and was led deeper into the venue. 

How about this one, she asked, pointing to an empty chair. We can do better, I thought, though by now the joint was jammed.

And then I saw it: amid the dense crowd, an open seat, not three feet from the stage, directly in front of that grand piano’s keyboard! I was the new companion of a family of three, who had flown from Orlando so that the ninth-grade pianist among them could see Mr. Holland. They had apparently been the first arrivals, and I silently thanked them for their enthusiasm, their punctuality, and for not having had a second child. 

And then it was show time, and Mr. Holland and the drummer, Gilson Lavis — another Squeeze alumnus, smartly attired in three-piece suit and tie — were fantastic, surely living up to the show’s title with a flurry of rollicking, stomping duets.

On a frantic, boogie-woogie rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the pianist himself took flight, his left hand pounding an insistent bass as the right danced up and down the keys. Taking an odd, delightful turn, the musicians segued into, and then out of, a most uptempo take on Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major as the crowd sat, spellbound.

Finally, the gregarious Mr. Holland announced, “It’s time for our last very special guest of the evening, one of the most famous people in the whole of England.” No, he said, it “isn’t Her Majesty, the Queen.” Making her debut at the Blue Note — “apart from last night and the night before” — was “the living boogie-woogie queen of England.”

Ms. Turner, with her accompanists, brought the house down, belting out “Rock Me,” made famous by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; “To Love a Child,” and, finally, “Peace in the Valley,” the latter two featured on the 2015 album “Jools & Ruby.”

The lights came up, and so did the soundtrack, and the crowd made its way to the door, and as I thought again of those poor scruffs straining for a peek at Ray Charles so many cold winter nights ago, the unmistakable sound of a Wurlitzer electric piano sounded and the late legend’s “What’d I Say” filled the venue:

“Hey mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long

All right now, hey hey, all right!”

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.