Over drinks with a couple of friends at the American Hotel the other night, Maziar Behrooz posed the question of what this place would look like in 100 years. 

Would eastern Long Island be part of a city that stretched from New York to Montauk? Would it be abandoned as sea levels rose, or parkland perhaps? Would there be sea walls around the entire area?

Transportation would have to be vastly better, Maziar said, if the Island were to go the city route. Fast and frequent trains would serve the sprawling metropolis. Bridges across Long Island Sound might tie us to the Connecticut mainland. Things would not be the way they are today, he said.

“Montauk will be an island, itself,” I said. “Sea level rise is going to cut it off east of Amagansett, and there is going to be open ocean all the way to Hither Hills.”

Based on lowland inundation models alone, if worldwide air pollution levels remain as they are today, East Hampton will be reduced to a fraction of its landmass. Half of Springs will be underwater. What was once Hook Pond will be a bay reaching nearly to Three Mile Harbor. 

High spots will remain, the old Devon estate houses, for example, Jerry Seinfeld’s place on Further Lane, my in-laws’ house halfway between the village and Sag Harbor. The Star office and the East Hampton Library will be waterfront; Guild Hall will be gone.

“Politicians are simply not equipped to deal with it,” I said.

I can’t say that Representative Lee Zeldin walked into the hotel lobby at that precise moment, but I looked up and there he was, giving the conversation, at least for me, an even more surreal edge. I smiled and nodded; he nodded back.

According to prediction maps, the American Hotel’s first floor will be underwater by 2100, as would the rest of downtown Sag Harbor, Bay Point, and most of North Haven. Barcelona Neck will be its own small island. Northwest Creek will have grown as large as present-day Three Mile Harbor.

Even the best-case scenarios are not all that good. With extreme carbon cuts, Montauk is still an island 100 years from now. On the bright side, surfers of the future will enjoy really great waves where Gerard Drive once was.

Speaking about land-use policy at a forum in Amagansett the other day, Bill Chaleff, like Maziar, an architect and big thinker, said we were headed 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction.

“Just stopping the car, forget about turning it around, is almost impossible,” I told Maziar Bill had said. He agreed, and conversation moved on to other things, as it does, and the questions remained for another day.

We visited Winterthur, the Henry Francis du Pont estate in Delaware, last weekend at the invitation of Charles F. Hummel, the curator and scholar whose 1968 book, “With Hammer in Hand” (reprinted in 1973), describes three generations of Dominy craftsmen in East Hampton and the objects they made — clocks, chairs, case pieces, looking glasses, tables — as well as the conservative rural culture here from the early 18th century to the mid-19th. The book presents a meticulous look at more than 1,000 tools, which the Dominys used in making and repairing clocks and furniture and in building houses and an occasional windmill.

The star-crossed story of the Dominys’ house and its attached clock and woodworking shops, which stood on North Main Street not far from what is now the East Hampton Grill, begins in 1941. The Dominys were at that time known primarily for their clocks, but had moved on from their old family business. The property was owned by a neighbor.

In December of that year, he offered to sell the house and workshops to the Village of East Hampton for $6,000. The public, with other preoccupations, failed to respond to an appeal for funds by the mayor, Judson Banister. The house was eventually demolished, but the clock and woodworking shops were saved by a second-home owner, who merged them to serve as a guesthouse on his Further Lane estate. The most recent owner of the property has now given the buildings to the village.

The preservation of the Dominy tools, however, took an almost miraculous turn in 1957, when a large collection was spotted in a Southampton antiques shop; as interest grew, other objects were uncovered. They were purchased for Mr. du Pont and eventually found homes at Winterthur, where both shops were reconstructed and the woodworking tools laid out as they might have been in centuries past.

Winterthur is a 1,000-acre preserve known for American decorative arts, with 175 period rooms in Mr. du Pont’s mansion. Instead of taking a look at the period rooms, we spent most of our time there with Mr. Hummel and then took a tour of the grounds, which in sunny weather showed off thousands upon thousands of flowers: cherries, viburnums, azaleas, bluebells. . . . 

And now, in addition to the village’s owning the shops and nascent plans for a Dominy museum, there is other good news. Mr. Hummel has continued his research and prepared an expanded, digital version of “With Hammer in Hand,” which is expected to be released any day now. It will help guide the new museum. We hope to hear a further update when he comes to present a talk at a Ladies Village Improvement Society fund-raising lunch that will be held in November.

The Dominy legacy is nationally significant because no other similar collection of rural American craftsmanship over such a long period exists. Not only were three generations of tools preserved but account books, letters, bills, notes, receipts, templates, and machinery, all of which tell a cultural and historic story. The details of how this all came about, Mr. Hummel says in “With Hammer in Hand,” is “as fascinating as the objects themselves.” 

One of the things that sets East Hampton apart from so many other American communities is respect for its own history. Up here around our office, Main Street looks much the same as it did 100 years ago. Some of the houses here date much further back still, as much as a century before the Declaration of Independence. My own office window view is of the Mulford farmhouse on James Lane, built shortly after Capt. Josiah Hobart aquired the land in 1676. By that measure, the Star building at 153 Main Street is just a baby, built around 1900 for my great-grandfather as a pharmacy with an upstairs apartment. My office on the second floor overlooking the East Hampton Library was until not that long ago a bathroom. 

As far as getting in touch with the past goes, one could do far worse than this end of the street, though actually being here is no longer necessary. An online collection at the library provides access from anywhere to, among other things, editions of The Star from 1918 to 1968. The plan is to soon have the years since the paper’s establishment in 1885 available as well.

Searching the East Hampton Star archive in the Digital Long Island feature at easthamptonlibrary.org gives a picture of how much distance we have traveled metaphorically from a page-one call for substituting wood for coal to aid the World War I effort in Europe to a story about the soon-to-open Montauk Downs golf course clubhouse in 1968 — written by our current sports editor, Jack Graves, no less. 

Browsing the old Stars turns up some surprises and peculiar coincidences. A November 1919 edition reported that a 61-pound striped bass had been netted in the ocean near Mecox and referred to a 101-pounder that Capt. Nathaniel Dominy seined up off East Hampton some time earlier, which was said to be the largest of its species ever. In the modern era, the official record bass weighed 81 pounds. The Dominys were the subject of Helen S. Rattray’s “Connections” column last week and will be discussed next Thursday by Hugh King during an outing organized by the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society.

 That the past was of interest is clear from a 1923 Star I happened on in the library collection. A front-page account by Harry D. Sleight gave great detail about an armed sloop, the Hampton, built in East Hampton or Southampton for the purpose of trading with the slave plantations in Jamaica and elsewhere. A 1757 manifest lists pork, barrel staves, Indian corn, onions, horses, and sheep among its outbound cargo. And so it goes. I recommend the archive to anyone curious about East Hampton in earlier times, or those just looking to spend a bit of time forgetting today’s troubles. After the latest news from Washington about the president’s firing of the F.B.I. director, this seems even more necessary.

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is his taste — not just in gold-plated toilet-paper holders, but in food. He may be plunging the world into dangerous waters, with aggressive talk aimed at North Korea and threats to take the United States out of the Paris accords on climate change, but he also is setting a terrible example for bad health, particularly among low-income Americans, by what he eats.

President Trump is an avowed lover of junk food. He particularly likes the Quarter Pounder and Filet-O-Fish from McDonald’s, with fries. He is also apt to devour a bucket of fried chicken from KFC or Popeye’s and wash it down with Diet Coke. He absolutely loves a meatloaf sandwich with mayo. His favorite home-cooked meal is a big, thoroughly well-done, slab of meat. 

Several years ago, he marketed frozen Trump Steaks through the Sharper Image, priced at between $199 and $999 for a pack of four. It was a public-relations boon for the Sharper Image, even though no one was buying the beef. “The net of all that was we literally sold almost no steaks,” the C.E.O. of Sharper Image told a reporter last year. “If we sold $50,000 of steaks grand total, I’d be surprised.”

By contrast, Michelle Obama, with her Let’s Move! and Healthy Hunger-Free Kids school lunch program, promoted fitness and nutrition, especially among children. But the example Mr. Trump sets as Eater in Chief contradicts all the advice coming from medical and nutrition sources these days about how to live longer and healthier lives. Mr. Trump claims to know more than anyone else about almost everything, from women’s rights to wall-construction to the art of war, so why would he have to listen to what the doctors, scientists, and nutrition experts have to say about taco bowls? 

The former first lady knew that obesity is the cause of serious health problems. She planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. She was quoted joking about her husband’s disciplined food habits, alleging that his late-night snack was seven (not six or eight) almonds. Mr. Trump likes to snack on Doritos and Lay’s Potato Chips. Now, I like a nice potato chip as much as anyone, but they shouldn’t be a mainstay of an adult’s daily intake. Mr. Trump obviously gets a bit of exercise when he plays golf, but his way of keeping his weight down is to save calories by eating only the topping on a pizza and leaving the crust on the plate.

This is not a Democratic-versus-Republican issue. President Clinton obviously wasn’t the greatest role-model, either. He loved McDonald’s, too, and he loved his Southern barbecue — but after having had several coronary bypasses and two stents, he is now a committed vegan.

Mr. Trump apparently watches a lot of television, but I am sure he hasn’t paid attention to reports about the higher cost of food and the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods. Of course, if he happened to hear any such thing, he would call it fake news. Let them eat beautiful chocolate cake?

What I am really getting down to is the unconscionable gap between rich and poor in something so elemental as the food we eat. The Trump administration’s proposed budget threatens programs that help poorer Americans, including children and the elderly, eat decently; these include nutrition assistance via the Older Americans Act, which helps 2.4 million older adults who might otherwise go hungry, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is run through the Department of Agriculture.

At Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, simple, hearty seafood dishes inspired by the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln were served. At Trump’s inauguration, steak with chocolate sauce and a chocolate soufflé accompanied by cherry-vanilla ice cream were the highlights. Do I need to say it? You are what you eat.

My son-in-law and I were treated to a squash lesson by the young Egyptian pro, Mohamed Nabil, at the Southampton Recreation Center recently. He was kind, kept feeding the ball back to us so that we could smash it crosscourt or down the rail, and it was a lot of fun, especially for one whom the game has long passed by. 

Squash, as Mohamed says, is “exhilarating” — that’s probably the best word for it. I liked it too when he said that in order to win you had to be calm on the outside and very angry on the inside. 

I suppose part of it is wanting to outdo your father — or stepfather, as in my case. It was he who taught me the game, in my early teens, when I was even more excitable than I am now. 

I was a terrible sport then, as now, and he was a Christian martyr to have put up with me. We played in the plastered courts at the Edgeworth Club, in the basement, beyond the duckpin bowling alleys, and the thwack, thwack, thwack sounds the hard, hot ball made as it came off the walls was . . . exhilarating. 

Later, he admitted to letting me win at times so that I wouldn’t go off in a huff. 

Much, much later in life I wrote him a letter thanking him, whose patience I must have tried many times, for always being there for me in trying times. He said it was the best letter anyone had ever written him. Though I had forgotten, he said, one thing. He had (pace A.R. Gurney) taught me how to play squash.

As I say, we played singles with the hard ball then (used only for doubles now), and, as must have been the case with most Americans before meters replaced feet, we — my college teammates and I — were dismissive of the squishy English ball that the rest of the world used. America was great then, remember?

Anyway, that squishy ball later became universally used, and the court was widened just a bit to make the game even more maddening for a prima donna such as I, who because squash has long passed him by limits his strutting now to tennis — an easier game if truth be told.

If you’re agile and you like getting your heart rate up and feeling marvelously exhausted after half an hour or so of all-out effort, during which you have repeatedly ripped the ball (which warms up after a while) down the rails, dinked it into the front corners, teased up lobs so that they die in the back, and ceaselessly stretched yourself full length in mad, exhilarating pursuit of your opponent’s shots, you should give it a try.

And here’s to you, Dad, for teaching me.

After Matthew Lester died this January, his mother, Dana Miller Lester, posted something online about dandelions. 

Dandelions had been a special thing for Matthew. He had become interested in them as a freshman at East Hampton High School, learning that they were a favored food for honeybees. In a letter to this newspaper three years ago, Matthew challenged the people of East Hampton not to put herbicides on their lawns in order to protect the common flower often thought of as a weed. “Let’s help the pollinators, and in doing so, help ourselves,” he wrote.

Dandelions are everywhere this spring in as massive proliferation as I can remember. The Hook Mill green dapples with them. Like stars at night, the grass between our office and the library is studded with their modest yellow faces. They freckle the triangle that sets James Lane off from Main Street. In the distance, they climb up the small hill in the yard at the Mulford Farm.

As an Eagle Scout project, Matthew envisioned planting a garden suited for bees at the farmhouse museum on North Main Street. His Scout troop intends to see it done in his memory.

Dana works at White’s in the village, and when I saw her this week I mentioned that I wanted to write about Matthew and the dandelions he treasured. Dana and I had been in high school at more or less the same time way back when, and I am always glad to see her, but Matthew’s suicide left me at a loss for words with her. The dandelions finally gave me something to say. 

I think about Matthew every time I see them, I told her, and I’ve seen  them a lot lately. The bees less so. Maybe it is too cold for them yet, with gray fog-filled wind blowing in from the ocean. 

The thing about the dandelions is that I wonder if there are really so many more of them this year or if, because of Matthew, I just see them more clearly. The bees, once they do show up again, will find plenty to feast upon, a fine honor to a young man gone too soon.

I had been asked to make O’en’s dinner and had not — at least by the appointed time — and heard about it, concluding that it had not just been the dog’s dinner, but the last 32 years.

When takers are called on things by givers, all sorts of justifications dance in their heads. I react to criticism about the same way I do to an opponent’s volley at the net — I smash it right back. I can do “put-upon” quite well, though I am no innocent, as Mary well knows. It was only one thing she’d asked me to do, on her sole workday, and I had dropped the ball. (Actually, I’d been hitting quite a few of them earlier that afternoon at East Hampton Indoor, which contributed to my tardiness.)

Oddly, we’d been talking lately about couples who somehow carry on once love’s blaze has died down, living separately in the same house, and have agreed that neither of us could or would do it. Yet there we were, estranged for a day or two, in lovers’ limbo. 

Once we were able, we talked of a column I’d written long ago in which I compared love to a carburetor (you remember them?) inasmuch as adjustments every now and then had to be made. 

Ironic that I, who had been heedless, wrote recently that we should all pay attention. 

Fearing that her adjustment might be to wash me out of her hair and send me on my way — thus rendering me twice shed maritally — I set about spring-cleaning labors of Herculean proportions. 

Six or so trips to the dump later I was done; and although I was done, I was — judging by her look and how it felt then between us — not finished, I’m happy to say.

So I was down at Town Hall the other day, picking up my dump, ahem, recycling permit, and a clam, uh, shellfish license. As I waited for the next available assistant clerk, I noticed a Latino man taking care of some complicated business at the next assistant clerk’s station. A moment later, a tall man with a long beard wearing a white crocheted cap came in, seeking town taxi paperwork.

No one besides me looked up when the tall man’s cellphone loudly announced driving directions, saying he should make a U-turn. He pulled the thing from his trouser pocket and silenced it. It would be only speculation to guess where he was from. 

According to Google, his cap is called a Kufi, and is worn by Islamic men in many countries. The Latino man was perhaps from Central America, or Mexico, but unless I asked, I would not know for sure. The three of us at the counter made up our own United Nations of a sort, and reflected in a minor way East Hampton’s past, present, and future.

Of course, the sample at the town clerk’s office was much too small to be significant. The Census offers a glimpse of a far-more complex demographic reality, even though outdated and incomplete. Of the resident population in 2010, the last time a field sampling was conducted, 5,660 Hispanic or Latino people lived in East Hampton Town, of which just over 2,300 came from Ecuador alone. These figures are out of a total of about 21,450 people, meaning that Latinos and Hispanics made up more than 26 percent of the population at the time, with Ecuadoreans almost 11 percent of the total.

The population has changed since 2010, for sure, and it changes from season to season. The Census is conducted in April; even seven years ago, the summer makeup of the local population would have been different. Driving a child to school early on Monday, I noticed what looked like a group of Jamaican men on bicycles headed east on Amagansett Main Street in the foggy drizzle. The Census had nothing to say about them.

In June it will be 50 years since Israel and its Arab neighbors, Syria, Egypt, and Jordon, fought what is known as the Six Day War, a conflict in which Israel secured a military victory, though, to put it mildly, hardly a lasting one.

My husband and I were a young married couple, pleased as could be to live in a small house near Gardiner’s Bay with our three small children, a place that was calm and surrounded by environmental beauty. We were stay-at-homes, happily so. He was even reluctant to go to New York City, though he had had a good year there getting a master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism.

But then dear friends made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They were planning to bring their commodious sailboat back to the States from Antigua, where it had spent the winter, and we were invited to tag along. My parents were alive and well and could take care of the kids, and we couldn’t say no, even though the youngest was not yet a year old. 

Fifty years ago: a joyful excursion into a part of the world that was new to us and bound to be exciting. The Wonny La Rue would pick us up on Great Inagua, an island at the southern end of the Bahamas that I, certainly, had never heard of. Even going there would be an adventure and a treat. Life was turning out the way it was supposed to.

Great Inagua, which is just north of Cuba and Haiti, is home to thousands upon thousands of flamingos that roost on its huge salt lake. Internet sites estimate the number of what Inaguans insist on calling “fillymingos” as between 60,000 and 80,000. The human residents of the island number only about 1,000. It is said that when huge flocks of flamingos fly up at one time the clouds turn pink. The Morton Salt Company also has a home on the island, its facility producing about a million pounds of salt a year. We were thrilled to see the flamingos and did not take in Morton Salt.

Inagua is a flat, dry, seemingly lackluster place. Waiting for the Wonny La Rue, we stayed in a house whose keeper was a woman called Nurse. Our room was separated from the hall by a wall that didn’t reach the ceiling. We saw no shops; a neighbor sold chickens, and another household goods.

Any sense of quiet was broken, however, by the intrusion of tragic reality. Papa Doc, the long-lived Haitian dictator, had absolute power at the time. It seemed that money-hungry mariners had promised to take a group of desperate Haitians to Nassau, only to drop them only 135 nautical miles away on Great Inagua, where there was nothing for them. (Does this sound familiar?) They were in the island’s primitive prison when we arrived, and we witnessed their being corralled aboard a Haitian government boat for whatever their fate was going to be. Not a very cheery start to an idyllic vacation.

And then Nurse told us war had broken out in the Middle East. She had heard it on the radio and was inclined to quote biblical verses to the effect that the end of the world was ordained. I ignored what she said the Good Book had to say, but felt absolutely awful that we had left our children at home at a time of war. 

By the time we got home, Israel had taken control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Fifty years ago, and the rest is unfortunate history.

Can it be true that this column has appeared in The Star more than 2,000 times?

Apparently, that is the case, at least approximately. And if the number is really thereabouts, how have I come up with something different to say every week? 

Well, to be frank, I haven’t. 

I would be the first to admit that I have touched on my favorite subjects more than once over the decades — from inherited antique kitchen implements (a prehistoric popcorn-maker has made more than one cameo appearance here in print) to family pets (my various searches for succeeding generations of canine companions) to gardening glories and mishaps (the deer, oh dear, have become a near-obsession).

This morning, as the deadline looms, the best subject I can come up with is to boast retroactively about how I took to computerized word-processing way back when my colleagues were still using the proverbial blue pencils. I probably have bragged about this in print before, and I offer my apologies to any oldtime readers who might remember that. . . . But what interests me about it now is that I have come to realize that my own private limit for new-technology adaptation has been met. 

Once I was at the forefront of it all, getting the staff at the Star office onboard with an early program called XyWrite, but these days I have taken an aversion to new electronic devices and the fuss and bother of learning to use them.

I realize this kind of talk makes me sound ike a curmudgeon, but take my cellphone, for example. It is definitely antiquated. It’s not exactly a flip-phone — it doesn’t have a cover that flips, 2001-style — but I don’t know what to call it other than an un-smart wireless device. I bought it in 2011 (!)  but have never bothered to explore all the apps on it; I didn’t recognize the term “apps” in 2011. Nor did I pay attention to the fact that you could use it to browse the web. Although I did take a few photos with it, at first, I quickly decided they weren’t good enough to bother about. Give me my old point-and-shoot any day.

Having an old phone is a lifestyle choice for me. I’m something of a Luddite, I suppose.

From time to time, I have considered buying an iPhone and asking one of the grandchildren to tutor me in its mysteries, but I haven’t succumbed. I even rejected my husband’s offer to give me his old iPhone when he upgraded to the latest (gigantic) version a short while ago. (He’s not a Luddite.) Instead, I continue to look around more with dismay than amazement when I encounter hordes of people with their heads down and their fingers at work on those little rectangles. Am I just an old fogey, unwilling to try anything new — or am I taking a stand for life in the real world?

Passover, the holiday that commemorates the Jewish people’s exodus from slavery in Egypt, has just passed. The story told at traditional seders ends with the song “Dayenu.” The Hebrew word means “it would have been sufficient.” God is said to have bestowed many things upon the people. The most telling perhaps is if He had led the people out of Egypt but not given them the Ten Commandments, it would have been sufficient. 

The food, family, and fun of Passover seders were highlights of my childhood, and I seem to have embedded what was a religious concept into my everyday secular life. If I have a wireless phone that connects me to whomever or whatever I need to reach, it is sufficient.

And if I have said this same thing here before, I hope you have forgotten it — as I obviously have.