“You’re good to go,” my dentist, Perry Silver, said after cleaning my teeth.

“That’s what I said yesterday to Mary after we had the cesspool pumped,” I said. 

I don’t know, there’s something about the way you feel after you’ve had your cesspool pumped — cleansed, ready to begin anew. 

I’ve been reading Jung lately, about the unconscious and its repressed contents that we ought to face if we really want to know ourselves, and there before me, once the cover had been pried off and we were peering down, was the unconscious metaphorically speaking. 

“Not bad,” the pumper said. I gloried in his words. “Not bad, that’s good,” I said. 

My daughter was coming, that was one thing that prompted me — an avoider as well as a voider — to take action. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened just prior to a festive dinner out there in Ohio, a root-caused massive cloacal contraction that cast us to the winds — Emily, Anderson, and the kids going to his parents’ house for the night, and Mary and I to his brother’s down the street, which was unoccupied that weekend.

Mary loved it that Todd’s house was so neat, so uncluttered. “Is he an architect? An engineer?” I asked. At any rate, its sleekness was the polar opposite of ours, whose dark living room with its raggedy books, sideboard, knife boxes (so the servants couldn’t steal the knives), velvet love seat, and dining room table that can be folded up against the wall when you’re having guests over for champagne, gavottes, and quadrilles is more 18th century than 21st.

Emily wants us to open and brighten it up, to consciously face our collective mess by ridding ourselves of the ratty oriental rug, by painting the classic burgundy window trim white (maybe Anderson will get to that when he visits next week), by replacing the three-cushion Jennifer convertible couches with one or ones more conducive to conversation, and by putting the plasma TV up over the fireplace, which we won’t do because that’s where Billy Hofmann’s beautiful painting “Louse Point,” with its moody allusion to the collective unconscious, is. We never tire of it. I’m glad I told him so once at One-Stop.

A founder of the Maidstoners softball team, the other being Dan Christensen, Billy, who could also pivot neatly in turning a double play, used to say he presumed Thoreau was my guide, and that if he wasn’t, he should be. This morning, in a review of a new biography of him by Laura Dassow Walls, I read that he once said, “Surely joy is the condition of life!”

He’s batting 1.000 in my book then.

But back to the unconscious, I dreamed the other night that my late stepfather was maniacally at the wheel of a car in which I and my mother were captive passengers. He was careening down the street toward a bank — we couldn’t stop him — and, as we feared, smashed the car right into it. A shot rang out.

I’ll admit it was puzzling, until I remembered that my basketball-playing grandchildren were on their way here and that they had great bank shots. Voila. Don’t talk to me about the unexamined life. 

For whatever reason, I did not get the old Sunfish rigged and onto the beach ready to sail until about halfway through August. Summer is like that, I told myself: Something always comes up.

One of the kids finally got me around to it. Evvy had taken sailing lessons in Sag Harbor and wanted some of her friends to come over to try our boat in the bay. The Sunfish, unnamed as most are, was given to me long ago by a friend who had won it at some corporate event. Initially, its sail carried a large Pepsi logo; I swapped it for a nondescript used one found on the internet.

Simple as Sunfishes are, I miss some of the boats I grew up with. My father was a big fan of catboats, and we had a series of them, mostly old and made of wood, in my youth. The last to go was a Beetle cat, a small version without seats, in which we sailed toward the end of his life. He was 47 when he died, and he had made it plain that he wanted me to learn as much as I could about the water, sailing, and the old ways as he had from his great-grandfather on the same waters when he was a boy.

The various catboats eventually went to new owners, one after the other. We donated the Beetle to a wooden boatbuilding school after its planks got too loose for me to deal with. On its last voyage, with my hand on the tiller, I had to take it into Hog Creek and tie up at a private dock as the water came in at a rate I could not keep up with using a clanking bilge pump. 

Fiberglass-hulled Sunfishes don’t usually have such problems. With age, though, even the industrial pop-outs begin to weather. Last weekend, sailing in the bay with two of the kids, the mainsheet block came loose. A rivet had worked through the thin-walled aluminum boom, leaving a U-shape bracket dangling. We were able to get back to the beach, though, and after looking around at the lumberyard, I found the needed parts.

Time, though, is another thing. The rivets are on a shelf. The rivet gun was on the floor of the passenger side of my truck last I saw it. I have other things to do, like mow the lawn and take the recyclables to the dump. It could be the middle of September before I get the boat back in the water. As I said, something always comes up.

As host of the third panel on timely, serious issues under the umbrella of Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute on Monday, Alec Baldwin wore a number of his many hats comfortably. The topic, “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” was explored by Mr. Baldwin and a prestigious panel: Nicholas Lehmann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a frequent essayist for The New Yorker, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!,” the long­time muckraking radio program, and Bob Garfield, the author of five books and a podcast on journalism and advertising and a co-host of the radio and online program “On the Media.”

Mr. Baldwin said he has been a news junky since he was 10, something we know here at The Star from the letters to the editor he has submitted over the years. As president of Guild Hall’s board of trustees, he helped plan the panels and took this one to heart, asking tough questions and eliciting generally jaundiced views of the corporate media and TV pundits from the panelists. He even found an occasion to bring down the house with his comical and by now familiar Donald Trump impersonation.

Acknowledging that the panelists could all be considered liberals, he said Guild Hall had tried but failed to get an avowed conservatives like Tucker Carlson to take part. And he drew out an apparent lofty consensus: Despite apocalyptic change in how and where people get news, and the many questionable sources, intellectual honesty continues to be the reporter’s credo.

As someone who has dedicated more than the last 50 years to newspapering, it was an evening well spent. The conversation was informative, sometimes provocative, and helped put “fake news” in perspective. Besides, Nicholas Lehmann had quite a few things to say about today’s Columbia School of Journalism, where the late Everett Rattray, who edited this paper from 1958 to 1980, and I met and sealed our fates.

The panelists bemoaned the lack of press coverage of local and state government across the country, saying it resulted in the loss of an informed citizenry, and Mr. Baldwin cited the Los Angeles Times as a major newspaper that managed to do it all. I couldn’t help think he could have applauded The East Hampton Star for being a community forum, where issues are brought to light and opinions of all stripes are published week after week in our expansive (and sometimes exhaustive) letters pages. Turn this page and take a look. There are 40 letters this week.

Would she want to learn how to make beach plum jelly, I asked my eldest child one morning this week. We were in the truck, driving to a college prep class, and she was going on only a few hours’ sleep.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like the taste.”

“But maybe it would be good if you learned so if you wanted to make jelly some day, you would know how,” I said.

“That’s what the internet’s for,” she answered.

She had a point, but it was one that made me instantly melancholy. I had picked up jelly making in our kitchen as a child. My father, who had learned how to do it from his grandparents, if I recall, passed on a skill that connected me to them, and through them to a long line of Huntings and Edwardses and so on, back to the 17th century.

I think about the people who lived here long ago just about every time I go onto the dunes when the beach plums are ripe. I think about the Native Americans who arrived millennia before the Europeans and how they must have exalted as the days of summer drew shorter and the sweet and tangy purple fruit began to swell. 

Early European visitors observed that the native people cooked meat with the fruit that grew wild on these shores. They also saw them preparing dried sheets of the pulp to save for the cold, barren months.

I could tell from the broken pottery and fragment of fire remains that used to spill from a dune across the road from my house that native people indeed had been here at some point in the past. A new summer palace for a part-timer rises about where as a child I used to find dozens of quartz flakes, evidence that someone long ago had made stone tools there.

It is perhaps sentimental for me to feel a connection through beach plums to the European ancestors and the people whom they deliberately displaced with a thicket of legal restrictions. Early East Hampton Town records are filled with laws restricting native people’s access to guns and powder and penalizing them sharply for the most incidental transgressions. 

I think about all this each year in the beach plum patch, which no one, even the most determined 16-year-old, is going to find on the internet.

Lots of people went to Southampton over Labor Day weekend to do lots of things, but I went to cross over from “the Hamptons” into the Shinnecock Nation, which was hosting peoples of many tribes, and all kinds of visitors, for its annual powwow. 

It smelled of woodsmoke and sage. Walking slowly around the grounds, the sound of anklebone jingle bells swelled and faded as dancers behind me approached and passed. The vendors sold Shinnecock clams, Wampanoan frybread, Aztec tacos, and Mexican-style corn, mixing and matching cultures.

My heart set to the drumbeats, as it always does, the moment I arrived. 

Preteen friends in powwow garb hurried through the gates into the dancers’ area behind the stage. Their footsteps, without effort, fell onto the soft ground in that circular, staccato native dance, in sync with the drums. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know just what I mean; it’s a step at once grounded and skittery, like the way some small animals move through the woods, a connection and light touch upon the earth, the push and pull of a magnet.

On stage the M.C. welcomed dancers and drummers representing different tribes, moving through their traditions, enacting stories, marking the wheel of life, honoring the Great Spirit.

A seagull flew diagonally across the field of clouds overhead as Arvel Bird, a composer and performer, stood front and center with flutes and electric violin. The wind, rising, rustled branches of the tall trees, livening the background of green. “The wind spirits are waking,” he said. Before playing a song from his “Animal Totems” CD he talked about the message a young hawk trying to fly has for us in its example of determination and fortitude.

I left before the Grand Entry lineup of all the dancers dressed in colorful ceremonial clothes, but stopped to buy an Arvel Bird CD. I was looking forward to putting it on at home whenever I need a breath of life, an elevation of spirit.

In the parking lot, the hatchback of his minivan raised open, the man who had earlier sat eating barbecue fresh from the fire was adjusting his full regalia, a spread of long dappled feathers blossoming from his back like the mouth of an anemone. 

The moon was up, almost full; enough light lingered for me to see the shine of the blue bay at the end of the lane. I turned right, toward the highway, and back into the fray.

When I got home the tree frogs and cicadas were making their own music, the steady rolling chirrupy voice of one chorus overlaid with the 1-2-3 rhythmic saw-buzz of the other. 

From across the street and through the woods came the sharp sounds of an edgy band, one of five playing at a party at the cold glass-and-iron trophy house built by the Euro-rich neighbor of a friend. 

The night before, drawn by the sounds of a party, the young people at her house went over to the neighbors’ to see what was going on. There were colored lights shining into the woods, music, fabulous guests.

One of the visitors remarked upon the neighbor’s house, and on the scene. A native Spanish speaker, the wealthy owner waved his hand. “All this,” he said, “I don’t know why.” 

Neither do I. But for it, the East End has been transformed, a heavy imprint on the quiet interconnected waterways, woods, fields, and skyways that the powwow dancing celebrates.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

The job of editing letters to the editor landed in my lap a few years ago and has remained there ever since. I don’t know whether I was given this difficult task because the editor or managing editor decided it would be a suitable slot for an old hand like me or because they thought it would keep me out of harm’s way (or prevent me from doing harm as I “age in place,” as the saying goes).

Readers know that The Star publishes every letter it receives provided it is exclusive, neither libelous nor obscene, and the writer is identified. Of course, the letter also has to arrive before our deadline of 5 p.m. on Monday. Recently, the East Hampton Star motto “Shines for All” could well have been changed to “Letters for All”: We ended up publishing 35 letters in each of the last two editions. We are proud of this service, an open forum — one of our previous editors called the pages “Freedom Hall” — that we believe is healthy for the community and that has for many decades now been a medium through which important issues and ideas have been raised leading to important progress in government, in our local organizations, and in our school districts.

In order to keep the letters pages from becoming an incoherent hodgepodge, each missive is edited to conform to our standards of grammar and punctuation (but otherwise, in general, left as written). Because we are a newspaper of record for local municipalities, it is incumbent on us to check the accuracy of the titles of the various entities mentioned: Is it Workmen’s or Workers’ Compensation, for example? We give each letter a headline taken from words or phrases within it, and then we put them in what seems to be a common-sense order, grouping those on the same topic.

That sounds easy, right? But there’s more: the human element. We typically have to engage with the letter writers, devoting many hours to checking that names are real and not pseudonyms, checking addresses, deciphering bad handwriting, transcribing, and fielding angry phone calls from cranks and from those who don’t agree with an opinion someone has expressed in one of the letters.

In the past, if there happened to be, say, 20 or more letters in a given week, we would find the  time to engage their writers, by phone or, later, by email, in a more or less pleasant give and take about anything confusing. Even recently, with so many letters, the majority of writers make it easy. Those who write regularly are usually savvy enough to make sure they aren’t just composing the same letter each week, and they become familiar with the process.

It may not be surprising, however, that there also are a few letter writers who try our patience. Some have an urge to submit a flow of letters that are very long and/or technically obscure and therefore difficult to proofread. Some refuse to understand that we cannot print letters that have been sent, en masse, to a score of other publications. Last week, one writer wanted to know why he couldn’t have two published in the same week, and then, when we agreed, kept changing his mind about which of the two should be published first. We let him know our decision was to use the first first, but he wasn’t satisfied. Now imagine engaging in this way with 35 writers. It adds to my gray hair each week, and holds up the whole process of going to press.

Not that I’m complaining. I believe The Star’s role in publishing letters, which began as a promise to readers, has become a civic institution; it is a responsibility that none of the other local publications can match. Week after week, the letters provide readers with information and opinions on issues of myriad concern and offer reflections on ideas both simple and profound (and sometimes silly). To be sure, it is sometimes a heavy duty task, but the letters to the editor can also be a laugh. I hope you agree.

Saturday morning, 10:32 a.m. to be precise, might be a good time to stop at the Montauk Beer and Soda store to pick up a water and orange drink for a thirsty kid. Or so I thought.

Montauk has changed a lot since the old days; we all know this. Still, I was not in any way prepared for just how busy it was this past Saturday when I rolled in thinking I could take the kids to the ocean beach.

The Kirk Park free lot was full, with drivers circling in vain looking for a spot. That should have been the first clue. Eastbound traffic was backed up and creeping when I turned right onto South Elmwood, hoping for a quick stop on the way to Ditch Plain. Ellis wanted something cold to drink. How bad could it be?

The place was hopping, more power to its owners, but wow. Meaty 20-somethings stood in the aisles trying to figure out what supplies to lay on for the day’s drinking — ice, 12-packs of Bud Light, that kind of thing. Much looking at cellphones and texting and discussion were involved.

Transactions at the front of the long line to the counter seemed to be complicated, too, involving who was going to pay for what. Two tall young men standing next to us waiting to pay looked and smelled like their partying from the night before hadn’t really ended.

Eventually we got our drinks and chips and continued east. By then, close to 11 a.m., it was too late to find a parking space at the beach. We passed the main lot at Ditch, then East Deck, and peeked in at Dirt Lot. Not a chance. We turned around and drove to Georgica all the way up in East Hampton, where parking was plentiful and we had a good remainder of the day on the beach. Still, I was left with a bad feeling.

Why, I thought, should Montauk, once so open and laid back, now be completely overrun? Does the fact that some people are making piles of money justify the fact that an Amagansett family cannot go there unless they get out of the house by 9 on a weekend morning?

Yes, it might have been wishful thinking on my part to assume that we could have accomplished this on a Saturday in Montauk, but that does not make it okay. Indian Wells in Amagansett has been residents-only for a long time. It’s time something similar was tried out east.

Henry Thoreau said, “Joy is the condition of life,” and I believe him. Certainly O’en, our white golden, does, especially now that he has as a houseguest a goldendoodle from Ohio named Fozzie.

They are inseparable. Well, that’s putting it mildly. They’re the most vigorous, courteous love-makers I’ve ever seen, neither one lording it over the other unless that’s the scene they’re playing. Roles switch in a second, sort of like an ever-whirling yin-yang. Sometimes they just lie there, a foot apart, mouths agape, looking fondly at each other, exhausted.

The other night, Mary said she heard whimpers and thought they came from Emily’s bedroom upstairs where Fozzie sleeps in a crate. But no, it was O’en who was being plaintive. I could almost imagine him, eyes upcast, 12-string guitar in hand, singing softly, “Ay, ay, ay, here at your window. . . .”

When Fozzie descends the stairs in the morning, it’s as if they haven’t seen each other in ages. O’en leaps at the gate that has sequestered him in the kitchen, forepaws upraised and extended in utter delight, pouring forth his soul abroad in such an ecstasy!

I do worry what will happen when Fozzie has to go. Undoubtedly, O’en will be depressed, but he’s too much a part of us now to idly part with him. There was a time when we worried that maybe we’d bitten off more than we could chew, but we’re pretty much in sync now. He, the beautiful boy, dines on braised organic free-range chicken thighs, a recipe of Thomas Keller’s, and fluffy organic brown rice with which occasionally we mix in some bits of Cabot’s extra-sharp cheese to firm up the stool. Taking care not to intrude, we ask periodically, rubbing our hands together, if everything is to his satisfaction.

“This is the Hamptons, you know,” I say to Emily. “What do the dogs in Perrysburg eat? Kibble?”

She shoots me a look. “With children and Fozzie it’s L.C.D., Dad, as in least common denominator. We keep the bar low. Your children have grown, it’s just the two of you, I can see that. But tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off?”

“Only on special occasions.”

“Well, he is a wonderful-looking dog.”

“He is. We don’t walk, we take the air. And so it ever will be. Though I know that whenever he’s in our embrace hereafter he’ll be thinking of Fozzie.”

The East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan is an amazing 114-page document including tables, charts, and maps. It was adopted in May 2005 after about a year and a half of study by professional planners and of public debate. For the most part, we hear of it these days only when an official or activist points to something in it that is relevant to a current project.

The plan was largely based on data dating to 2000. Is there any wonder that many of its recommendations seem out of date? The town’s recent hamlet studies, which had been recommended in the plan, concentrated on commercial centers, without particular attention to other issues effecting the quality of life or even broader aspects of the economy (I’m thinking of the boom in home-based businesses, the “trade parade” and traffic in general, and the regrettable impact of the luxury-business takeover of our main streets). The forums held surrounding the hamlet studies helped gauge public opinion, yes, but they hardly provided fresh ideas about the current effects of zoning and growth.

Most East Hamptoners surely agree with many of the goals in the comprehensive plan. For example, to “maintain, and restore where necessary, East Hampton’s rural and semi-rural character and the unique qualities of each of East Hampton’s historic communities” is one such laudable goal, and to “take forceful measures to protect and restore the environment, particularly ground water” is another. Another goal that remains pertinent is to “reduce reliance on the automobile [and] encourage investment in alternative transportation — including sidewalks, bikeways, rail, buses, shuttles, and ‘shared’ cars.”

Where opinion might begin to veer away from apparent consensus is on how to reduce the impacts of human habitation, how to “provide housing opportunities to help meet the needs of current year-round residents, their family members and senior citizens, seasonal employees, employees, emergency services volunteers, and other local workers,” and how to “encourage local businesses to serve the needs of the year-round population and reduce the environmental impacts of commercial and industrial uses.” That these goals pretty much refer only to the year-round population might be enough reason to think a revised comprehensive plan is overdue.

Because the political climate in East Hampton is, like the nation, more inherently divided than it was a dozen years ago, it undoubtedly would be a much tougher challenge to revise the plan than it was to create it. It might take almost twice as long to complete, which is likely to bring us to 2020 before a revised plan could be adopted. That would be a good 15 years after the existing plan was approved, and much too long a hiatus, given the pressures of continued population growth and the escalating needs of seasonal residents and summer revelers.

As we get closer to November, it would help voters — perhaps even be definitive  —  if those seeking election to the East Hampton Town Board showed the public they know what is in the comprehensive plan and told us where they think it is on target or falls short. Their ideas about what it would take, in time and money, to bring it up to date, would also be interesting.

Jordan’s Run, in memory of a young hero, wasn’t of course just a race, but a time to reflect. 

The memory that our government’s incursion 14 years ago into the cradle of civilization was impulsive, with profoundly tragic consequences, only serves to compound the suffering it has spawned and to widen the circle of compassion that attends it, even unto the small towns where the death of a soldier — a Marine in this case — comes, as Joi Jackson Perle said the other day, as a shock. 

And so it was that when Steve Xiarhos, a police officer from West Barnstable, Mass., with whom I’d been talking near the finish line, took off from his wrist the bracelet commemorating his son, Nicholas, who, like Sag Harbor’s Jordan Haerter, had also given his life in the Mideast, I said, truly, that I was not worthy.

He gave it to me still, saying, “I think you are, I think you have a good heart.”

“Maybe it will make me stronger,” I said, putting on the band, which said, “Cpl. Nicholas G. Xiarhos, USMC, 7/23/2009 * Garmsir, Afghanistan.”

“Maybe I can help others more. . . .”

I was deeply touched, deeply affected. I asked, “How old was your son?”

Twenty-one, he said. “How old was Jordan?”

“Nineteen.”

Nick, who was to die in combat 15 months later, had been one of those saved by Jordan, who stood his ground and fired when a truck packed with explosives was speeding toward the Marine barracks in Ramadi, Iraq, in the early morning of April 22, 2008. That act of heroism, of self-sacrifice, earned him, posthumously, the Navy Cross.

The rightness or wrongness of our representatives’ decision years ago is beside the point, which is that Jordan and Nick were honorable, and that they have united us in suffering and in compassion and, yes, in the joy that was so evident at the foot of Pierson’s hill that day, July 30, which would have been Jordan Haerter’s 29th birthday.