Paul Manafort has a nice pool. I should know, I swam in it once at a children’s birthday party. The water was fine.

I met Mr. Manafort, too. It was at a small St. Patrick’s Day gathering at a house in Northwest. Things were pretty well underway, the corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes already arrayed on the sideboard, when Mr. Manafort and his wife drove up in a fancy car. 

He did not say much, if I recall, but I was struck by the cut of his dark suit, his grumpy demeanor, and his thick head of hair as he sat in a corner of the room. I probably shook his hand; I don’t recall much other interaction. Uncle Paul, if that was what they called him, spoke mostly with family members that day.

It was only this week when news that his Job’s Lane, Mecox, house was included in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment and I went to Google Maps for a look that it all clicked. I remembered first the vast swath of slate around the pool, fully visible in the satellite view, and that a two-story pool house had ice-cold air-conditioning.

As the details slowly came back to me, I remembered that approaching the pool area from the driveway, one had to navigate some intricate brick work. Beyond that, the grounds, which the Mueller indictment said cost more than $800,000 to sculpt, undulated with deliberate earthworks (it had once been a dead-flat farm field), and specimen trees loomed here and there. A small man-made pond lay beyond that. 

To one side of the pool there was a covered area with upholstered seating, tables, and an outdoor kitchen-bar arrangement. Beyond that was a grass court for horseshoes, I think. Maybe boccie. I don’t know. Around back, there was a golf hole, about par-3. There was a tennis court, and a full-court basketball setup where Mr. Manafort’s Range Rovers were on the other side of the house.

Much has been made of the details in Mr. Manafort’s indictment about the unreported overseas money he allegedly laundered through the Job’s Lane property, a lot of it on landscaping and home improvements paid via wires from a bank in Cyprus — and none of it disclosed on his tax returns. 

I have no doubt that he could have done it, certainly  at Hamptons prices; the slate around the pool could have run more than $100,000 alone. 

Other work on Mr. Manafort’s Job’s Lane house ate up more than $5.4 million of the foreign payments, according to the Mueller indictment. 

And his suit — that might have come from the nearly $850,000 he spent at a New York men’s clothing store. With threads like those, you might have thought he would have smiled a little more.

I only realized later what had happened. On my way to drop Ellis off at second grade, I decided to stop quickly to vote. Election District 12, where I was registered, never has all that much of a line, so I figured we would be in and out of the Amagansett Firehouse quickly.

At the E.D. 12 table, however, I was told that my name did not appear on the roll. I could fill out an affidavit ballot instead, if I wanted. My immediate thought was that the Russians were messing around in United States election databases and had penetrated the Suffolk County Board of Elections. I mentioned this to one of the poll watchers. “Maybe so,” he said.

We are living through an odd time, with my first instinct doubt about the validity of the election. Score one, Vladimir Putin, I guess. 

At the table where I filled out my affidavit, another poll worker said there had been about five people already that morning with some kind of registration snag. I began to feel nervous. Could something really be happening here? 

A third poll worker tried to look me up on the New York State Board of Elections website. Nothing. He looked himself up. Nothing. He looked alarmed. The second poll worker announced that they probably should phone someone. 

After all of this, Ellis was a half-hour late, though with his “I voted” sticker on his down vest, he was happy enough. 

At work, I had a look online at my registration details, which I found associated with my work address instead of my home address. Having been booted from my box by the Amagansett postmaster this summer for not picking up my mail frequently enough, something to that effect must have been sent to the board of elections, and someone there decided I had moved and made the change unbidden. 

Rather than head back to Amagansett and try to withdraw my affidavit ballot, and then vote in East Hampton while later correcting my registration to show the accurate address, I opted to let things be. I just hope that my lonely ballot, stuffed in its sealed envelope, gets counted. 

At the very least, Ellis got his sticker.

Well, I’ve stared at Montaigne long enough. It’s time to begin. 

But what to say? Ah, it’s Thanksgiving, time to give thanks for Kitty’s torte, which I swear will be the death of me. The ingredients are not arcane, store-bought devil’s food cake mix, a box of Nilla wafers, two bags of walnuts, light brown sugar, butter, plenty of that, and whipped cream, yielding a crunchiness, creami­ness, sweetness, and softness that taken all together are nonpareil.

The torte isn’t Kitty’s only Thanks­giving dessert. She makes pumpkin pie, apple pie, and pecan pie as well. At the first Thanksgiving we ever shared together years ago, they all (Mary, Kitty, Georgie, and their mother, who soon was to be my mother-in-law) placed bets as to which dessert the gentleman caller would come back with from the kitchen. They all lost. I came back with every one of them. 

With age, I’ve had to cut back. So it is just the torte now, and maybe half the pecan pie.

The turkey, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the green bean casserole, glazed carrots, and heady wine are all very fine, but the canted dark brown and white miniature monument to delight is pretty much all I think of as we hold hands at the dining room (not that we have a dining room) table, humbly grateful for our blessings and for our persistent optimism in the face of all the countervailing evidence. 

I know. I should be wishing for world peace, or at least for domestic peace, or, at the very least, for some peace of mind, but invariably I am torte-ured on this day devoted to communal sharing by self-serving thoughts.

If it were just one piece — and I always swear I will limit myself to one piece — that would be all well and good. But it’s never one piece. At the end of the evening, I plead for someone to take what’s left — and there’s usually quite a bit, for not everyone is as addicted as I — but no one ever does.

When will the younger generation step up? But no, they “eat healthy‚” these days. Why, son, did you know I once ate a five-course meal, which I chased with an entire gateau Basque? You never know what’s enough until you’ve had more than enough. Blake said that, I think, but enough. Would you get me one more small piece while you’re up?

The first time I visited the house I live in now, the shelf at the bay window in the dining room was filled with great, big flowering Christmas cactuses on a painted, dark-green copper tray. They brought color into an otherwise dark wintertime room and, taken as an entirely natural holiday decoration, they were perfectly suited to my taste. Their brilliant red flowers and deep green foliage were enough to perk up any cold afternoon.

When, years later, I turned out to be in charge of the cactus garden in the bay window, I was lady bountiful. I gave the largest plant to my upstate niece and a smaller one to a son who had a place of his own. And then, without careful thought, I gave all the rest to the deer. They were delighted that I had put them outdoors for the summer; our yard had neither a fence nor a gate. So long, Christmas cactus.

A year or two ago, I started again from scratch, because I wanted Christmas cactuses again at the bay window. And now, just as the holidays have arrived, I am rewarded. 

Truth is, it’s a good thing the Christmas cactuses are doing so well this season, because they balance out other botanical news in our household, which is not so jolly. I am sorry to report that I left a huge, ancient jade plant — perhaps 30 or even 40 years old — that I had taken great pride in, outdoors during an unexpected cold snap this fall, and it didn’t survive. We belatedly dragged it back inside after two hard frosts, and it sits now in the corner of our sun room with its thick branches drooping and dying sadly, the Charlie Brown of jades. 

Except for the fact that one of the larger Christmas cactuses now in the dining room was a present from my granddaughter Evvy two birthdays back, I hardly remember when or how my new array arrived on the scene. I had acquainted myself with the Christmas cactus species, Schlumbergera, but I’d never been systematic about accumulating or caring for them. I randomly gathered four three-inch and two six-inch pots without ascertaining which variety, or color, they were. I’ve just watered them once a week, and  been smart enough to keep them inside in summer.

Despite this benign neglect, about two weeks ago I realized they were all budding like crazy. By this morning, one had started to flower. These Christmas cactuses may no longer be quite the floral showcase I remember from the 1960s. There’s no longer a copper tray to add to their glamour, and I still don’t know if the flowers will be a hodgepodge of magenta, pale pink, and deep red. But they still make me very happy.

Recently, I listened for eight of 11 waking hours, sitting in on a Killer Bee reunion on a Friday night and, the following morning, attending an equally long Hall of Fame induction ceremony at East Hampton High School. 

It was, I thought, a new world record for me. I’ve had a long love affair with my own voice, beginning in grade school when I first began to wave my hands wildly whenever questions were posed — at least in English, history, religion, and foreign language classes. “Teacher, teacher!”

Perhaps that is why I became a journalist, sensing I needed to balance out a proclivity to proselytize and to blurt out answers with some attentiveness to others.

(Speaking of proselytizing, I wonder why it is that this paper has included it among its epistolary no-nos, along with libel, obscenity, and nonexclusivity. Aren’t just about all letter writers proselytizing, inasmuch as they’re trying to persuade others to their point of view?)

You’ll notice that in regard to hand-waving I left out math. I tried to blend in with the woodwork in math class. In math it was the silence of the hams. Begin talking about train A and train B even to this day and I throw up my hands, not as an importunate show-off, but as someone about to be assailed by a swarm of yellow jackets, which actually happened recently and was not pleasant. 

Knowing something more than math’s basics (I can figure out tips in my head and slice budgetary pies with a reasonable degree of accuracy) ought to be on my bucket list, for I do believe in self-improvement, but while I know my days are numbered, I’ll probably go to my grave innumerate. I know math has its delights. In the next lifetime perhaps.

Back to paying attention to others, I’m glad when it comes to the above-cited cases that I did, even though the sessions lasted four hours each. It wasn’t as if I were at a town bored meeting or attending a political forum; however, the Killer Bee alums’ reunion, though born of criticism having to do with the recently premiered “Killer Bees” documentary film, and the Hall of Fame ceremonies were joyous occasions. 

And joy — at least when I’m thinking straight and simply listening — is what it’s all about.

Anyone who reads this column will have an idea of where I stand politically, but they haven’t heard much, if anything, from me about religion. My first husband and I used to say we had the same religion, by which we meant none. Our notion was that my Jewishness and his Protestantism were entirely secular. (It will remain for our children to say whether they missed a religious upbringing.)

Ev went a step farther than most. Coming home from college one day, at a time when The Star still did job printing, he found a membership booklet being prepared for the East Hampton Presbyterian Church — and physically lifted his name off the page. Those were still the days of what was called “hot type,” but even if you don’t know much about printing before computerization you can imagine how it worked. 

I grew up in a household that was one generation removed from Jewish immigration, and with the adults around me I learned about what happened to European Jews during World War II. My maternal grandfather had arrived here in about 1906 during a period of frequent pogroms in Bessarabia. I understood why he often said we could not trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t argue, either. 

Like my Jewish relatives today, I have always been comfortable in my ethnicity. Jews had a significant presence in the Bayonne, N.J., of my childhood. That community wasn’t free from bigotry; I sometimes heard bad comments about the black minority, although I never witnessed hatred in some physical form. Coming to East Hampton, I found that my mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, stood tall against prejudice. Out to dinner one night she told an East Hampton relative a thing or two when he came to our table and started denigrating Jews. I knew anti-Semitism existed here, as elsewhere, but it never seemed to warrant much attention. Haters will hate. 

But the news that anti-Semitism is rising in this country today, here as well as around the world, has to be confronted. According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged more than one-third in 2016 and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. The increase includes harassment, particularly since last November, and a doubling of anti-Semitic bullying and vandalism in nondenominational schools serving kindergarten through 12th grade.

It may be coincidental that anti-Semitism has been more frequent since last November, when Donald J. Trump was elected, or it may be simply that his election, combined with the flourishing of social media, unleashed hate and hate groups that had heretofore kept to the shadows. President Trump’s attempts to hold back immigration, particularly of Muslims, and his callous attitude toward unaccompanied minors entering this country from across our Southern borders, not to mention the Dreamers, who were brought here as children, fit an unacceptable pattern. Who will be targeted next? 

Mr. Trump’s lukewarm response in August to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va., which resulted in a protester’s death, is a case in point. Satisfied that he is not an anti-Semite because his daughter converted to Judaism upon marrying Jared Kushner, he may not have heard the white supremists in Charlottesville who chanted “You shall not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” Or he might not have found that offensive. 

We cannot know what is in the president’s heart, but I do trust that our community’s leaders and school and religious officials understand how serious this is and are on the alert. 

It would be about now that the football season would be winding up, assuming we had a football team. 

The fall has come and gone with no football games, and I can’t say I’ve sorely missed them. The girls swimming team was great, ditto boys cross-country, the boys soccer team was good, the girls volleyball team was good, the boys volleyball team was good, the girls cross-country team was good, the field hockey team was not quite as good as I thought it would be, ditto the girls tennis team, golf, as always, was good, though not great, as it has been in the past, and girls soccer, though vastly outscored, will inevitably come along some day if the hordes of young girls I saw kicking the ball around up at the high school at the end of summer stick with it. 

So, even absent football, whose four-down, linear format is obviously more sportswriter-friendly than games that flow, such as soccer or rugby, or even field hockey, despite its continuous baffling whistles, there was plenty to write about this fall when it came to local sports.

Football, while exciting when the plays work, has been shown not to be that good for developing — even developed — brains. At the pro level, we continue to watch — accessories before the fact, as it were, slouching in our recliners — yet at the high school level the emotional rewards to be derived from gridiron grit and explosive plays may no longer, given the preponderance of brain injury findings, outweigh the risks young players run — in the short and long runs, repeated nonconcussive hits having also been shown to exact a serious toll over time. 

A rose-colored glasses guy, I never thought you could get terribly hurt playing high school football here until seeing not long ago two of our players go down with concussions on the same play. 

Yes, concussions can happen in other sports too — in soccer, with its constant headers, in ice hockey, with its checking into the boards, in wrestling, with its throws to the mat, in basketball, with its sharp elbows under the boards, even in swimming if you swim headfirst into a wall, as I did once, though that was in another country and I was drunk.

Someone told an inquiring photographer this week that he missed the smell of leaves burning in the fall. I do too, though they say leaf smoke isn’t good for you. 

With me it’s kind of the same with football. It’s being borne into the past, if not ceaselessly. I miss when the games were played at Herrick Park, I miss when everybody came and leaf smoke was in the air. Rugby anyone?

In my mind’s eye, Thanksgiving Day looks — as it probably does for many Americans of a certain age — like a famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom From Want,” that appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post during World War II. My father was a Post subscriber and a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose inaugural speech in 1941 invoked four necessary freedoms: freedom from want, along with freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom from fear. Rockwell painted all four, which he turned into consecutive Post covers in 1943.

 The point of the “four freedoms” covers was to evoke all that was good about America, those virtues in midcentury including a general prosperity and a lessening, post-Great Depression, in the numbers of citizens who went to bed hungry.

Were any Americans at the time concerned that the image of a white nuclear family presented by Rockwell as a standard of American life was a bit homogeneous, when those fighting abroad came from what we used to call a melting pot? I wonder.

Thanksgiving was not particularly celebrated when I was a child, but as an adult in East Hampton I grew to treasure it. From a small dinner party with my mother-in-law as the only guest (and a scar on my right thumb because I handled goose fat carelessly), it grew to a multitudinous affair with up to 20 or even 30 people, embracing extended family, old friends, and the occasional passer-by. The Thanksgiving we celebrated in the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be a white, black, Christian, Jewish, and atheist affair. I loved it. Sometimes things got a bit noisy, with pots and pans making music in the living room. (Yes, those were the days when everyone drank a lot more than they do today.) I’ll never forget the year Tom Paxton sat with a guitar in his arms, a child on his lap, and a new song for us to hear. 

For the most part, however, our rituals were based on the foods at table. One of the regulars wouldn’t let anyone else mash the potatoes or turn out her airy pumpkin mousse. One family member could always be counted on for an inventive vegetable presentation. I made Oysters Rattray, which differs from Oysters Rockefeller because sorrel is imperative for the green topping. And every year, another family member who had been practicing the art since about the age of 12 did up Florence Huntting Edwards’s Chocolate Sunday Pie. We were prosperous, yes, and privileged, too. Homogeneous we were not.

Lately, those of us still standing have been looking around us with increasing consternation when it comes time to plan our Thanksgiving gathering. Where has everyone gone? Some of the old crew have moved south, many are no longer living, and the rest of us have aged. Inevitably, our Thanksgiving traditions will have to change. 

This year, with only five or six participants ready to join around the table, we threw in the turkey baster along with the towel and have decided to indulge in the unthinkable: Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant! Who would have thought it possible? I’m fairly certain this sacrilege won’t become the new normal, and that we will return next year to the oysters and the custard pie. But maybe the time has come to invite in the next generation of old friends.

I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving for only about half of my life, as I moved to America some 25 years ago. But already I’ve decided that, like Christmas, Thanksgiving is nothing more than a set of repeats: Its uniqueness is its groundhog nature. Same food, same faces, same tablecloth, same fancy china.

The only thing that breaks the predictability is that if you happen to be a parent, which I am, you get to watch with each passing year the metamorphosis of your offspring, from minor to major. 

My son is 17, on the cusp of going off to college and then who knows what. He and I are close. Well, as close as anyone can be to a teenager. It comes and goes, like cell reception in Northwest Woods. Sometimes I hear his deep, comforting voice, and other times it’s just static and snatches of some indecipherable language. 

As I watched him at the Thanksgiving table, his long limbs spilling around him, chatting effortlessly despite being the only person under 35, I realized that all the received wisdom about teens, about the talking back and the mess, the sulking and the door slamming, is mostly just sitcom clichés. I’m actually pretty astonished at how good humans are at getting through the chrysalis stage.

And that’s the other thing about these festive holidays: Each and every year you get sucker-punched by sentiment. That ability only a select handful of days have to repeatedly overwhelm all sense of judgment and intellect. So by the time the meringue and pumpkin pies, the ice cream and the sweets made it to the table, I was already as wobbly as the cranberry jelly, on the verge of dampening the whole festive thing.

In my lachrymose state, I realized that one of the biggest lessons about being a parent is that until you become one you have no idea of what love is, or like, or even what it’s there for. That urgent, delicious loin-warming feeling that you had understood to be love was really only something to be prefaced with “making” — it’s the tease, the amuse-bouche, the glimpse, a warm bath compared to the riptide of the real thing that arrives with parenthood. Up until then you’ve just been paddling in love. Growing up, nobody ever tells you this, parents never explain this fact to you — that one day you won’t be able to feel the bottom of your loving, that you’ll drown in the stuff.

Parents don’t tell their children this, of course, because by the time they’re adolescents or teenagers, to try to explain the depths of that terrifyingly transcendent fundamental act of nature that is loving your child is too difficult and choking. Most likely if I tried right now, my son would curl up into a skinny, athletic-clothing ball of hellish embarrassment, arms scything the air.

The funny and sad thing is that the time when it’s easiest to express these feelings, when there is the least emotional resistance between parent and child, when all that love is most obvious and free flowing, is the one time your child will never remember. Those first years when he couldn’t blow his own nose, when you picked him up and rocked him and watched him speechlessly as he slept, are simply blank. 

Later, as a child grows up, the relationship is muddied with practicality, with life’s lessons and mistakes, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behavior, soccer games, and tiredness. And that’s the part a child remembers of his childhood. He’ll remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when all he was immersed in was an ocean of love, and even though we parents will never forget it, a child remembers none of it.

I’ve decided the greatest design flaw of human beings is that we don’t remember our childhoods and can’t recall the moment we uttered our first words or took our first steps, the first time we tasted chocolate or fell asleep on a father’s shoulders. My son doesn’t remember these things. He won’t until well into the future, someday when perhaps he’s a parent, and then, sitting around a Thanksgiving table surrounded by faces and food so familiar that you come to realize they are only there for the transmission of memory and remembrance, it will all come to him.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter at The Star.

Approaching Indian Wells, I stopped my truck on the beach to look at a flock of small sparrow-like birds. It was about a week ago. I figured I would take a few last casts of the season into the ocean. Big bluefish and a few striped bass remained around, or so I had heard.

Small birds are not my thing. To me, all the sparrows and warblers look pretty much alike. Not that I wouldn’t want to be able to tell the varieties apart, it’s just that I didn’t learn about them as a kid and that there are too many of them that move too fast to truly get to know at this busy point in my life. Seabirds, gulls, raptors, these I take a stab at identifying.

Yet the flock drew my attention. From a distance it looked like the birds were hopping. Once the truck was no longer moving and I peered through binoculars, I could see what they were up to. Each bird would jump onto a stalk of beach grass, its feet clasping around the fat seed heads. The bird and stalk would drop to the ground together, the bird would let go, the stalk would whip up, and the bird would pick at the seeds that had fallen. The process would be repeated.

This was, mind you, on the Amagansett National Wildlife Refuge section of the beach, where there are no snow fences on the natural, sloping fore dunes. Elsewhere, I have noticed lately, snow fence does indeed trap windblown sand, as intended, but also creates a barren microenvironment of little interest to the birds. It crossed my mind to wonder if anyone had ever done a rigorous impact study or really asked whether all the miles of snow fence were, on balance, doing good.

Birds’ adaptations to the Long Island environment never fail to amaze me. Though there were no fish interested in my offerings that day, scoters dove just offshore, picking something, I knew not what, off the bottom. Gulls worked the edges of the bar at low tide, eating small fish or invertebrates exposed by the outrushing water.

The flock of seed eaters moved away to the west before I could get a good enough look at them to try to find later in a bird book. There was plenty more beach for them to comb.