I stand very much corrected. Last week, I wrote with some frustration that it was now impossible to find a parking place at Ditch Plain in Montauk after 10:30 on a sunny weekend morning. I was wrong.

When I rolled in around 9 a.m. more recently, vehicles were backed up from the main lot onto DeForest Road. Others, left by drivers in no-parking zones, tempted expensive citations once the town traffic control officers got there.

The next data point was my friend Tim’s text saying the lots there were full by 8:45 a.m. on Sunday. Then, Russell in the Star front office moved the dial back to 8:30 a.m., when he had taken a pass through all three lots without luck.

Saturday had been cool and blustery with a hard wind from the northeast, so no one much went to the ocean beach, which might have contributed to what economists call pent-up demand. Sunday morning was lovely, with moderate wind and a bit of leftover ocean swell of the slow and easy sort Ditch surfers know and love.

I circled Dirt Lot, slowly, behind my friend Jeremy in his beat-up pickup, who apparently gave up and left. On my way out I was nearly in position to grab a lone spot that opened up by the portable toilets, but a driver on her way in saw it at the same moment and, being nearer by just a car length, began a 94-point turn to snatch it away from its rightful occupant — me. I did not particularly care and went downtown for a scone.

Well, it is not entirely true that I abandoned my surfing mission with equanimity. As I made my left onto the highway, I ruminated grumpily about how backward this town is in not providing sensible drop-off areas the way they do at some beaches on Martha’s Vineyard. And I groused to myself that I was damn sure that no one on the town board had tried to get a parking space at Ditch on any weekend recently — or else they would have done something, right? (Note to self: Remember to ask the candidates for town office about this when they come around in October.)

Everybody is saying that the driving here is the worst they can remember. That may be so, or maybe it’s not, but it’s inarguably the pits where beach parking is concerned.

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.

I read about “terminal lucidity” the other day, and breathed a sigh of relief inasmuch as I’m still wondering what it’s all about.

“At the end of life, it seems,” I said to Mary, “people who’ve been in comas and the like come to and ask how their grandchildren’s Little League season has been going.”

Actually, I don’t have to ask how the Little League season has been going: It went very well, thank you. It was Tyler Hansen, a 9-year-old, who caught my eye as I arrived one evening for the games at Pantigo. Strike, strike, strike. He was throwing nothing but strikes, and with zip too. I turned to a woman at my side — his mother, I was to learn — and said, “Wow, this kid is impressive!”

I don’t want to give him a swelled head, but his grit and his mechanics were so evident that it’s stuck in my mind, and I’ve seen many Little League games in my time, including those played by the 1991 team that won the district and county championships, the team that Brendan Fennell seemed always to bail out with grand-slam home runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and with East Hampton trailing by three.

That may not be utterly lucid, but it’s the way I remember it. Just as I remember Andy Tuthill repeatedly hitting a 4-year-old’s equivalent to a 500-foot (well, make that a 400-foot) homer with his father and me looking on, and Ross Gload’s three home runs into St. Joseph’s College’s parking lot, each farther than the last, in the small school county championship game of 1994.

Funny what you remember. Roberto Clemente’s rifled throws from right field that caught by surprise runners who’d made a wide turn in rounding first base is another. And how sad Muffin and I were when we heard he had died.

So perhaps baseball in East Hampton will come around again. If it does, we’ll have people like Vinny Alversa, Henry Meyer, Tim Garneau, and Kevin Brophy to thank for it, not to mention the players themselves.

It really is a matter of the spirit — not just mind and body — as I suppose is the case with all exceptional teams.

The spirit grows and flourishes and moves on.

Corn and tomatoes. What more could anyone want at the height of the season? Right? 

But nothing, even luscious just-picked corn and tomatoes, is simple on the East End anymore. I wrote East End rather than South Fork or the Hamptons to describe this region because the food grown on the yet-to-be Hamptonized North Fork is surely among the best anywhere in the country.

We boast of perfect meals at this time of year, with fresh local fluke or porgies, perhaps, adding to the pleasure of corn and tomatoes. But no matter how good such a repast may be, it is, well, old-fashioned. The atmosphere of excess that pervades the air in these parts at the height of the season even affects the fish and produce we buy. If you have enough money, the world is your oyster, literally and figuratively.

I suppose expanding variety was to be expected. After all, for years fish markets here would sell primarily tried-and-true fish caught in local waters at the right season. Most city folks arrived here with a taste for fish and other foods from all over the world, and little awareness of why one might prefer a fish that is local and seasonal. 

About three years ago, I asked the person behind the fish counter at the East Hampton Citarella if the bluefish on display was local, like the sign said, although I knew bluefish had yet to arrive in our waters. My friends at the Wainscott Seafood Shop set me straight: Certain fishmongers had taken to calling fish caught anywhere along the East Coast local. Okay. I got it. 

By the way, bluefish, which my family thinks makes great eating, is so unpopular these days that it isn’t often put out for sale even when it is abundant here. Fishmongers have taken note, it seems, and are more likely to offer red snapper, for example, which is indigenous to the Gulf of Mexico. 

I have no quarrel with red snapper, and, as for produce, I am willing to try almost anything that comes along. Garlic scapes, for example. I brought a quiche home the other day from Open Minded Organics in Bridgehampton, intrigued that it was made with scapes (the stalks of garlic) and fennel. It was good, and obviously more nutritious than one with traditional ham and cheese.

Checking up on the Halsey family’s Green Thumb in Water Mill, one of the longtime organic produce markets on the South Fork, I found it had gone upscale, or you might say, been carried off with the tide. It grows and sells Asian produce, including red and green mustards, mizani, tatsoi, and shiso. I haven’t looked the latter up just yet. The Green Thumb also makes seven different kinds of pesto. That’s right. Seven! 

I forayed into the farmers market in the Nick and Toni’s parking lot when it first opened for the season to find numerous out-of-town vendors with high-priced goodies. Sang Lee Farms of Southold was among them. Depending on whom you ask, Sang Lee may be from away  — or completely local — but, either way, I am not going to complain about the innovative and tasty sweet potato sliders I took home.

Yes, exclusive Manhattan restaurants have popped up here this summer, but in any event the East End has become more and more like the metropolis even in the food we buy and take home. If this is a revolution, I am happy to take part in it.

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. 

Apparently, dogs go through a teenage phase. This according to the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Science in England, which, after much research, found that our canine friends display traits that are similar to those of human teens.

No offense to the learned institution, but I’m not buying it. With an actual 17-year-old human in my house, as well as a dog who went through his supposed teen phase a few years ago, I feel I have empirical evidence to invalidate the university’s conclusion.

Teenage behavior in dogs, say the scientists, which occurs when the puppy is just under a year, is characterized by refusing to respond to commands they sweetly obeyed when they were younger, outright rebelliousness, and a tendency to be impulsive, distracted, and erratic. “Training a dog during this phase is crucial or an owner could soon be living with an ill-mannered, undersocialized, hyperactive animal,” concluded the researchers.

While I will concede to a few tenuous parallels here, my own painstaking research in the field has led me to question whether the scientists delved any deeper than the mere periphery of the full-blown, kaleidoscopic teenage experience.

For a start, there is no mention of a teenage dog’s incessant need for Wi-Fi and phone chargers, or the arguments and eye rolling engendered by this need, especially when traveling. Or the long and ultimately irretrievable hours spent playing Xbox, an important and defining phase for at least male teens on the human side.

And if we really are to think of dogs as teenagers, how does one begin to explain their complete indifference toward Snapchat and Instagram?

Then there’s this: If a used, balled-up sock is lying on the floor, there’s a good chance you could get your dog to pick it up in its mouth. True, the probability of the sock then landing in the laundry basket is slim, but with hours of training, involving treats and kind words, it could happen. Not a chance with a human teen.

But it’s not their fault. Apparently, the human teenage phase includes a long spell of selective blindness that renders balled-up socks invisible, along with wet towels and discarded clothing, and also used cups and plates and half-empty bottles of soda.

What about the insatiable appetite of the human male teen, in particular, that often leads to eating mounds of pasta and meat snacks at 1 in the morning? It’s true that a dog too would happily scarf down the pasta and anything else in the middle of the night if presented with the opportunity, but that’s not a teenage phase for a dog — that’s just being a dog at any age.

Ever needed to have a conversation about pot smoking with your four-legged teenager? Or sex? I should hope not, since, at the very least, the latter was probably taken care of a while ago with an operation at the vet’s.

Plus, there’s the heartwarming human energy that teenagers devote to friendships and sociability, which I am often reminded of during 1 a.m. culinary exploits, involving clanging pots as a group of them attempts to make mounds of pasta and meat snacks. My dog, on the other hand, would have had such a hard time sharing his pasta with his friends that it could never have been so endearing an experience.

In fact, it is this ease of human teenagers to spend hours around one another that will always set them apart from dogs. What with their total self-sufficiency as a pack, their freedom to please no one but themselves, their never-ending openness to experimenting with the new, the strides they have made toward connecting with scores of people around the world, many of whom they’ve never met, and the mind-set they frequently exude that the future is all theirs and that it will be entirely compliant with all their expectations, why shouldn’t they spend the entire weekend in bed? I never got any of that from my teenage dog.

Frankly, I think dogs have a long way to go before they can do “teenage” properly.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter at The Star.

Every year at about this time, people get to saying that they have never seen it so bad. What they mean mostly is that the number of cars on the road and people on the beaches seem greater than ever. 

Heading west on East Hampton Main Street on Tuesday after hearing Carlos Lama’s David Bowie tribute band, I was squeezed out of my lane by someone in a Tesla, which swerved, then slowed for a distance, and floated at an odd angle off Woods Lane toward Baiting Hollow without signaling. The driver did not seem drunk, exactly, more likely distracted by her passengers or talking on the phone. It was hard to know.

Summertime hassles are nothing new. I was looking at a copy of The Star from July 1967 the other day and was amused by the lead story about the then-increasingly popular pastime of surfing, particularly at Ditch Plain. In an effort to keep boards and maybe reprobate surfers away from ordinary bathers, the town board authorized $5 permits, with metal tags issued by the town clerk that presumably surfers would have to wear. The ordinance also limited the hours surfing would be allowed.

A young Chip Duryea spoke for the Montauk Association for the Preservation of Surfing, or MAPS, in opposition to the metal tag and the location of the only area at Ditch designated for boards. “Hot-heads, dope addicts, or those with half a load on” were not surfing anyway, Mr. Duryea said.

The July 6, 1967, story went on to describe “chaotic and unbelievable” parking conditions at Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett, as well as “filth and debris on the beach” and cases of indecent exposure. 

One woman told the town board that the beach had become a “ ‘filthy hole,’ with groups of ‘L.S.D. hippies’ sleeping on mattresses.” And to think that today we complain about people sipping rosé at the Surf Lodge and think that’s a problem.

The summer of 1967 was, it turned out, the beginning of the end of free parking and free love at town beaches; a system of permit stickers for town residents came along shortly. All others would have to find another way to get to the beach, hot-heads, dope addicts, or LSD hippies, or not.

The dune line to the east, and for a distance west, of my north-facing house on Gardiner’s Bay has been moving landward for as long as I can remember. Looking carefully the other night, I noticed a dark horizontal line in the low bluff, what was once the bottom of a bog, perhaps, above which was centuries’ worth of white sand, like vanilla frosting on a cake.

This stratigraphy caught my attention while I was walking to Promised Land and back with my son, Ellis. He had been home all day with the remnants of a summer cold and was eager to get outside when I returned from the office. The short hook of beach where Multi-Aquaculture is now is covered with old bricks and rusting things, relics of the fish-processing plant that once operated there. 

Until about 1968, bunker steamers, as my father’s generation called the big, low boats, would bring freshly caught menhaden, bunker in the local parlance, to the dock at Promised Land. There, it was taken up into the giant, now-gone steam ovens and cooked down for oil and meal. The smell, which I can still remember, was astonishing and overpowering and why our house, about a half-mile upwind, was the nearest one to the plant until after it closed for good. Old gears, fragments of conveyor-belt chains, and broken firebrick remain, though, and for a 7-year-old recently interested in treasure-hunting, it was all solid gold. 

On the walk back with our loot — me with a bird skull, Ellis with an assortment of bones, plastic, and metal bits — the light was just right to see the line in the dune in strong relief. The dunes here go way back, I presume, to the period when the last glaciation receded, leaving bare sand and gravel in its wake. Wind did the work, assembling the loose sand into dunes, which it then shaped and scalloped. With very limited exception, that process ended long ago on eastern Long Island.

Now, as sea level relentlessly creeps upward, the dunes are being taken apart. At our house, erosion has cut through the highest portion of the post-glacial dune line and is beginning to chew its way down the progressively lower landward slope. To the east, several of the houses built 50 or more feet back from the edge years ago now dip their toes in the water at high tide. On Tuesday night, one of my neighbors had three men out putting up snow fence on metal stakes, like King Canute, in an effort to trap any sand at all.

Snow fences work at building new dune up to a point, but when they are placed where the water now wants to be, they are, in the end, a waste of time and money. One good storm and it is all for naught. 

That is what the dark line at the base of the dune is telling us. The bay is rising. The beach is receding. And there isn’t a thing three men and a roll of snow fence are going to do about that.

Speaking of having one’s wits about one, I, on my return home the other day from a hectic day of doing nothing, worrying as I was about what I would possibly write about that week — summer largely being what a sportswriter’s imagination says it is — I called out, “Have you seen my wits, Mary?”

“Think — where were you when you last had them about you?”

“I’m not sure. . . . I could swear I had them about me when I was in the outdoor shower this morning.”

“Well, look there then.”

“. . . I was looking up through the trees at the blue sky. . . . Ah, here they are! Wait a minute, I’ll gather them about me to see if they still work. . . . Summer is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake! Do you find that sufficiently witty?”

“Wit’ll do.”

“If you can keep your meds while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . . .”

“Please.”

“Once more unto Citarella, dear friend, once more . . . stiffen the sinews, set the teeth, and stretch the nostrils wide. . . .”

“Lay it on, Macduff.”

“Bring me no more private callers. Let them fly all. Till the Walking Dunes come to Newtown Lane I cannot taint with fear. . . . I have supped full with horoscopes. . . . Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty place from day to day to the last tweet of recorded time. It is a tale told by a cidiot, full of surround sound and chicken curry, signifying nothing. . . .”

“. . . Nothing much to write about, that is.”

“Something will turn up, something will turn up. . . . Well, I’m off.”

“You have your wits about you?”

“I do. Thanks to you.”

“Well, drive safely then. Don’t forget the kale, and farewell.”

An image of a grandmother with an apron tied around her waist showing someone young how to make a cake came to mind last week. I am not certain whether it was wishful thinking or guilt. The truth is, I never bake much of anything and don’t even remember making chocolate-chip cookies when my kids were kids.

What actually happened in my kitchen last week was that my granddaughter Evvy, who just turned 13, was hanging around my house, saying she had nothing to do. She took me up on it when I rather halfheartedly suggested she bake a cake. Turns out, she is a whiz at baking cakes.

It’s a new world, we know. Evvy didn’t need me or any other grandmother to tell her how to go about it. She just went to her iPhone and found a recipe. Fortunately, the necessary ingredients were on hand: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, Hershey’s cocoa, safflower oil. But, oh dear, when it came to pans for a layer cake, there were none. I could have sworn we used to have many, many cake tins, left over from the days when my daughter used to take any excuse to bake a cake — snowball coconut cakes for birthdays, bundt pans for blueberry cakes, orange frosted with chocolate. . . . Anyway, taking this discovery in stride, Evvy used one square baking dish and one shaped like a star. We would have two single-layer cakes rather than one tall one.

I was amazed to observe that Evvy had her baking techniques down pat. For example, she cut parchment paper to place at the bottom of the pans so the cakes would be easier to get out, and even just the cutting out was a tricky feat with the pan shaped like a star. (I don’t know why I have parchment paper around; probably for some exotic specialty my husband cooked one night.) She used a toothpick to test for doneness when the timer she had set on her phone buzzed (I knew how to do that part!). Finally, she put plates on both sides of each pan so the cake would be easy to turn right side up once it slipped out of the baking tin.

As I sat wondering how to make icing, Evvy had it down to a science. There was heavy cream in the refrigerator — I guess I’d bought it to eat with the last of the strawberries — so she whipped it up, then took a simple plastic bag and turned it into a pastry bag by making a hole at one corner and holding it just so. My goodness. In no time the cakes were decorated with swirls, stars, circles, and slashes. It was a celebration.

I asked Evvy’s father afterward if he had taught her to bake. The answer was no. Not him, he said, noting that he had recently made a cake from a Duncan Hines mix. But he added that Evvy sometimes makes a cake in a cup.

Old fogey alert: It turns out that Evvy learned to bake — and bake well — via YouTube, Instagram, and maybe some reality television shows about baking competitions. Social media have replaced me, and maybe you, and done a swell job at it. Well, I guess grannies have other things to do these day. I’m off to yoga now.