What passes as a positive sign on the national front is when the headlines in the morning and the terrible thing that led the news when you went to bed are the same. Risk and scandal have seemed to come quickly in the last few months, with a fresh outrage presenting itself at almost every turn of the clock. 

So it was a fine break from all that this week when I drove over to Southampton to speak to the Tuesday Club, a group of about 20 or so retired men who get together to share a meal and talk. For whatever reason, I had not heard about the club until East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. invited me to attend and suggested that I talk about the challenges of communities living with our mostly eroding shorelines.

The tension between fortifying private property for the few and preserving beaches for everyone else was, I told the club as we waited for our salad course, the single biggest issue that will confront local officials in the years ahead. Airport noise, affordable housing, drinking water, the environment are important and have their vocal constituencies, but the beaches here are pretty much the whole deal. Lose them in a significant way, and much of the vacation home economy goes away, too.

The situation in downtown Montauk, I told them, was a taste of trouble to come. Instead of condemning and eliminating the roughly 10 motels and residences along the ocean using money appropriated by Congress for Hurricane Sandy relief, East Hampton Town took the shortsighted course, going along with the Army Corps of Engineers in a project that has already come at the cost of the public beach. The time had come, I said, for a new agency, one less in love with building bulwarks, to replace the Army Corps.

The way the Tuesday Club works is that a guest speaker lays out a topic and the group runs with it. Solutions to the dilemma I posed included one man’s saying that stone or steel fortifications were a good thing, others favoring a tax district to raise money for putting sand where a beach used to be, and another spoke approvingly of offshore barriers he had seen in the Mediterranean to block wave action. 

A notable proportion of the group liked letting houses fall into the drink, telling their owners, too bad, you were stupid to buy there in the first place. The sense was that not shifting the burden to taxpayers to cover the cost of others’ follies would be far less expensive over time. This was the kind of bare-knuckle wisdom one hears from older people, and it made my ride over to Southampton on a busy work day well worth the trip.

Though the weather’s wretched today, I know better days are coming — sportswise too, if the close scores this week are indicative.

All one wants is a good game, whether as a player or as a spectator. This winter was rather dreary in that respect, forcing one to look for silver linings, which, being a booster rather than a ripper, I’m generally inclined to do. If losses can be said to be learning experiences, there was much that could have been learned last season. It largely comes down to what I said last week, “Practice, practice . . . practice.” 

And if it doesn’t make you perfect, at least the chances are you’ll improve, and knowing you’re improving is one of the best feelings this side of a divine apotheosis.

My grandson in Ohio, who was on the B team, has now, through persistence, made the A team. Hard work beats talent that doesn’t work hard, perhaps not every time, but enough so that we ought not to be discouraged from trying, from forever trying.

Twenty-five years ago, Gordon Carberry, a former East Hampton Town recreation director who became a triathlete in his mid-50s, told Rusty Drumm that when he was growing up, 50 or 60-year-olds were physical nonentities. They are, thanks to the popularity of physical fitness regimes for all ages, entities now, as are those who are older still. It’s as if to say, “We’re still here! We’re still in the game!”

Which, of course, brings me back to the subject of my new tennis strings, the Signum Pro Tornado ones that enable the ball to rocket from my racket even as I’m wracked by advancing years. I told Lisa during a stroke-of-the-week clinic the other day that I was awaiting the Signum Pro Tornadoes with the same fervor I had in awaiting the arrival, at age 8, of my Captain Midnight Ovaltine mug. 

Come to think of it, age 8 was a very good year, a year in which I was given autographed photos of the entire Brooklyn Dodgers team and saw Jackie Robinson steal home, a year in which my father sprang me from school to go to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and a year in which on some sunny Saturday mornings I’d walk up Claremont Avenue, knapsack on my back, in search of the tufted towhee. I think it was also the first time I swung a racket, thanks to our boarder, a Columbia graduate student who took me over to Barnard’s courts across the street. “The racket swung him more than he swung the racket,” he told my mother. 

Now, in the clinics, they say, “Hit it, hit it hard,” and I do. Well, the Signum Pro Tornadoes do, the balls zinging to the left and right. Patrick McEnroe deserves some of the credit. When, some years ago, he was talking up team tennis at the Sportime club here, and I was about to undergo knee surgery and feeling — for perhaps 10 minutes — a bit morose, thinking the game had passed me by, he spoke glowingly of the new technology and of how the new rackets were brightening the prospects of those who had been thinking in a similar varicose vein.

And now, Bjorn again, when they say hit it hard I do.

Our Medicare broker suggested that I might try a supplemental plan that would cost me nothing.

Nothing? Yes, nothing, for the federal government in cases such as mine subsidized the insurer $14,000 annually, he said. All I had to do, it seemed, to avoid the dreck of in-network, out-of-network, inexplanatory explanations of benefits, co-pays, referrals, deductibles, and such was to stay healthy, as, for the moment, I am, I think.

I admit I was beguiled. After paying $220 a week for I don’t know how long so that Mary could be protected to some extent from the slings and arrows of misfortune, paying zero for a supplemental plan (in addition, of course, to the $134-per-month Medicare excisions from our Social Security checks) was tempting. 

I could do what I wanted to do, Mary said (an invitation to act that carried with it, I thought, a vague hint of impending catastrophe were I actually to do what I wanted to do). 

I could do what I wanted to do, she continued, but only if I were unambiguously, incontrovertibly aware that she would no longer, no longer, act as my administrative assistant, personal secretary, drudge, slave, or whatever. Unless, of course, I were certifiably up against it and not merely feigning utter incompetence.  

And then — because she’d actually read the brochure, something I rarely stoop to do — she recited a long list of pointed questions that I should ask before plunging in.

As for her, she was opting for peace of mind. In other words, she was willing to ante up more for an AARP supplemental plan that did not include bills, co-payments, lists of in-network hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies, et cetera — one that would obviate all the annoying phone calls, all the reviews of itemized charges (“Five dollars for an aspirin?!”) . . . all the dreck, in short.

“What if you’re on the operating table and the anesthesiologist is out-of-network,” she posited — an example that struck a chord with me, for that sort of news has been imparted a couple of times in my explanations of benefits. “I’d ask him for a few slugs of Jameson’s then.”

Seriously, it didn’t take me long to decide to side with her. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

There was a visible and audible sigh. 

I had done the right thing.

New hearing aids are coming soon! And now when the I.R.S. calls I won’t have to hand the phone to her.

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.

In the weeks since a dead tree outside my office window was taken down I have become aware of how many near-misses there are on Main Street on any given day. 

Until Kevin Savastano came with his saws and bucket truck one cold Friday, the beech, with its silvery bark like an old elephant’s hide, had blocked nearly completely the sight line to where Buell and Dunemere Lanes come face to face. Now, if I glance away from my computer, within moments, it seems, some driver has dashed across another’s path. 

Staring out the window from my second-floor perch late last week, I watched a truck hauling a double-deck trailer that had just delivered golf carts to the Maidstone Club nearly collide with a big diesel from Mickey’s Carting hauling a roll-off container filled with what looked like half a torn-down house. Somehow, they managed to miss each other, the Mickey’s driver braking hard, the golf cart guy sailing through at full speed.

On Tuesday evening as I wrote this, an older man in a Prius avoided an oncoming sedan only by inches as he made a hasty left from Buell Lane.

During the summer, the village cops block off the approach to Main Street from Dunemere with a row of orange cones. For some time, there has been talk that the state (Main Street is a state road) might put in a roundabout there or stop left turns from Buell Lane altogether. If drivers continue to take chances, that may soon come to pass.

In truth, my perspective had been limited to the sounds of actual contact, so I had no idea how bad it was out there. The tree had given me one sense of things; its absence gave me another. 

Kevin Savastano said it was a good thing that we had taken it down, as it was in bad shape and going to fall one way or the other.

Woodchips alone mark the spot in the Star driveway where the beech stood. I miss it and am, if anything, more aware of it now that it is gone. I thought it was just a tree, not a shade pulled over what turned out to be a whole other view.

Recently, I moved some of the Durants’ volumes, about 20 pounds’ worth, from my office bookcase to make room for others equally as edifying. 

I have been majoring in edification these many years, trying to make up for lost time. Soon, I will have read all, or most of, the books that I ought to have read, and in fact was assigned to read, 60 years ago. And then I can become atomized in peace. 

At any rate, I was just looking over some notes I made from the Durants’ “Our Oriental Heritage” and found:

“Confucius said that good manners, too, must be a care of the government, for when manners decay the nation decays with them.” 

Speaking of which, I didn’t watch the decayer-in-chief’s speech the other night. And though the president’s tone apparently was less grating, I gather he — as Dick Rodriguez, The Star’s former linotype operator, used to say about our editorials — didn’t say anything.

Meanwhile, before our tax breaks out here vanish — mortgage interest, property taxes, state taxes, and things like that — I am seeing how far above the rumored future $30,000-per-middle-class-family tax deduction I can go. I’m treating it as a challenge, and it’s one I think I can rise to. First thing we do is deduct all the books — Mary’s too, for she talks to me about them — as a professional expense. Hearing aids as well, for if I didn’t have them I wouldn’t be able to hear her when she talks to me about her books. Nor would I be able to improve upon the language of my interlocutors.

Actually, I do have some new hearing aids now, behind-the-ear ones, though much tinier than the cumbrous bananas I used to wear, which enabled me to hear conversations up to 50 feet to my rear as lips flapped away two feet in front of me. 

These hearing aids, I’m happy to say, are great improvements on those old ones. When I pee it’s a symphony, gusts of wind make me jump (as they do O’en), masticating’s a delight. . . .

It’s a cacophony, that’s for sure, but I don’t want to be a walking gated community, I don’t want to wall myself off. I’d only make — and I don’t mean to be unmannerly — one exception. 

People used to be surprised when I said that the beach along the southern reach of Gardiner’s Bay has eroded at about a foot a year since about the time I was born. When my parents had a small house moved to the property in the early 1960s, there were just over 400 feet between Cranberry Hole Road and the high tide line. One of these days, I’ll go look at a neighbor’s recent survey on file at East Hampton Town Hall to know for sure, but I’d say the distance is no more than 360 feet today.

The funny thing about the beach is that it is relatively stable most of the time. Before the 1938 Hurricane, folks from away looked at the setting along Dune Road overlooking the ocean in Southampton and assumed that was how things were going to be for a long while. Sept. 21 of that year arrived a beautiful sunny day; by night, something like 275 houses and a dozen lives had been swept away.

Gardiner’s Bay beaches can handle an ordinary winter. But when the wind rises to a gale and holds from the northeast for several high-tide cycles, it is another thing entirely. The worst storm I recall, a three-day blow, took 12 feet of dune. Now I watch a stunted cedar just back from the edge. When it falls, I’ll know the jig is up.

Back in 2012, as Hurricane Sandy approached, my friend Jameson Ellis and I went onto the dune with the idea of placing one of those self-operating game-hunter’s cameras on a tree to record the action. It had started to blow hard from the east by that time, and we could find nothing we thought stable enough to strap the camera on. 

Yellow-tinged water was moving laterally, from east to west, along the dune. We went back to the house fearing the worst and carried my tools from the basement up to the second floor in case the bay flowed in later. There was nothing else to do. Sandbags would have been pointless, and there wasn’t any place to get them anyway.

Oddly enough, the beach survived Sandy just fine. What changed was my perception. I had always said that moving the house back from the beach would be my kids’ problem. 

For whatever quirk of nature, the highest part of the dune in the 1960s is long since on the bottom of Gardiner’s Bay. Now, each foot landward that the bluff crest creeps is lower than the last. Soon enough even someone standing in the driveway of our house will have a glimpse of the water.

These days, the feds require houses in our coastal floodplain to be elevated something like 15 feet above sea level. In some parts of Long Island, the Rockaways, for example, this has spawned a new line of work for businesses — driving pilings into the sand and such, then placing existing houses on top of them. The first floor of the neighbor’s house, whose property survey I mean to have a look at, is level with my upper deck; the view from their second floor makes my house look like a miniature model, like those in the Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road.

When he was considering where to place the house before I was born, my father asked some old-timers how the area had fared back in 1938, and he chose a site on a rise as far back from the bay as possible. Other property owners who came along later were not so prudent. Today, a house off to the east is almost fully on the beach. Several more are but one bad storm away. My place will join them someday, but it has a few years to go before I call in the pile drivers.

Now what shall I write about this week. . . ? Silly question. Of course it’s John 3:16!

You know, you’re always referred to it on those signs you see in the ballparks. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Well that’s all well and good, though why we should want everlasting life I’m not sure (didn’t the Buddha say life was suffering?). Anyhow, let’s read on:

John 3:18 (which you don’t see referred to in the ballparks, but which you may soon) says, “He that believeth in him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Has there always been an immigration ban in heaven too? 

My father, who was very well read, used to say that while he appreciated the Eastern views as to religion, he was, in the end, a Westerner. I suppose I am, too, though, at least in my waning years, I find myself more inclined toward the God-within view than the God-without one that comes with confessions, atonement, self-flagellation, and self-righteous thoughts as they relate to nonbelievers. 

A Westerner? And yet pretty much all the major religions arose from what Joseph Campbell calls “the nuclear Near East.” Perhaps it’s more apt to say that many of us in the West are Near-Easterners, then, when it comes to religion. 

And look at the Near East now, the cradle of civilization, largely in rubble, in ruins. It’s a cruel irony that this was where all those high-minded ideas came from — that — if faithfully observed — would enable us to live as one.

We are one, in fact, as Campbell in his four-volume work on the world’s mythologies points out. It’s all related. There were lots of virgin births, lots of self-introspective retreats and inspiring returns, lots of sacrificial stand-ins, and lots of resurrections. . . . 

We are all brothers and sisters — nobody has the inside track, the upper hand. 

Life’s a terrible beauty, as Mary (and Yeats, of course) says. Though I think it could be even more beautiful and less terrible if we acted as if we were at home here rather than so estranged. 

Heaven can wait.

What is it about staying in one place or, for that matter, moving around? I moved around a fair bit in younger days and still think of myself as that kind of footloose spirit, but the truth is I’ve been living in one place, here on the East End, for upwards of three decades, and in my little house on an old field lot in Springs for more than a quarter century.

The knowledge of this place, deepened year after year as the groove of the seasons keeps shaping my experience of time and my memories, is a force so central to my life I can no longer separate it from who I am.

I love knowing the world this way: as the time of the yellow flag irises around Town Pond or the days of lacy flowering trees or cherry blossom time or the time of year when that one curve along Accabonac Harbor with a certain mix of trees pops with color and tells me it’s fall, or when the overhanging bower along Old Stone Highway is a doorway into a magical snowy world. 

There’s the evening of the first spring peepers in the wetland behind my house — disconcertingly early, on Feb. 28 this year — the night of the first fireflies that send me to a quiet evening session in the hammock outside, the return of the osprey, whose piercing calls, flying over my yard, make me look up, the annual dragonfly swarm. The freezing nights of coal black that make the stars pop. 

I’m uncertain this is a thing I should admit, but if you asked me to outline my life’s highlights, they would be many of these things: another time sitting in the kitchen doorway listening to a thunderstorm roll in, another cozy day in the house both lulled and enlivened by the motion through my windows of the falling snow outside, a summer dusk sitting out in the garden dirt weeding, a glass of rosé at hand, when the year’s first screech owl starts its eerie song. The always startling discovery of the long-lived garter snake that comes out of the stone basement wall to sun itself on my doorstep each year.

The things that happen again and again, and the special ones: turning back home after leaving only a moment ago, to find a tall egret stalking up my walk (as if it was waiting for my departure to call for a party at the house, I always said); the night I sat in the yard with a little dog on my lap and realized two screech owls were overlooking us in the tree, and then watched another two, and another two, fly in. The moment, waking after a sweet nap in the hammock, me and a deer only a foot or so away locked eyes and, in unison, both let out a shriek of surprise. 

And there was the surprise of finally knowing about the massive tree in the woods out back — a giant Ent-spirit, I’m certain — only after it was felled in a storm, its root system upended, its massive structure calling my attention to that impressive thing I’d been living near, unknowingly, all this time. Somehow I’m proud of that, and all these things. I feel, despite other myriad, abiding questions about life, that I’ve landed in the right place — or one right place. 

I love the things that endure: knowing the treetop shapes that surround my little world, feeling the arc of the year through the changes and benchmarks of nature. 

Recognizing the different cheeps of the woodpecker hatchlings either fussing for attention or excited by a parent returning with food. Seeing what changes and what lasts — will the barn swallows be back this year, the orioles? Will the phlox on the old cottage site come back, the tiger lilies, the iris patch? Where will the tall comfrey stalks pop up, or the milkweed?

I’m blessed to have neighbors who also care about these things, who mark time this way, who share their observations. It bonds us in this little enclave as we swap those moments, helping each other define our place in the year, in this world. 

We know our trees — my stalwart linden, catalpa, and centurion cedar, the massive pines and maples across the street. We trade tidbits like currency, sharing the little gifts and gratitude for our lives on this patch of land.

Once upon a time I walked into this empty house a young woman who’d just, astonishingly, signed mortgage papers, who’d just signed on to I knew not what. I poured champagne into a paper cup and sat down on a milk crate in a cold and empty shell that lacked heat and had most recently housed a squirrel or two. And embarked.

I believed a home base, a home place, would not bind me, but set me free. So many things have turned out differently than expected — for just about everyone, I’d guess. 

There’s so much to be said for a deep knowledge of a place, for decades of sunsets over the same view. It gets deep, not old. Sometimes, though, you only know the shape of those deep roots when the wind exposes them and shakes things up a bit. 

So what is it about moving around and learning a new lexicon of place? That’s the other half of the balance, maybe the thing that keeps things grounded — and a subject for an essay all its own. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

A handful of parents, a batch of schoolchildren, and a pair of grandparents, including me, went to East Hampton High School on Sunday to see “In the Heights,” this year’s musical, and to say we were glad we had done so would be an understatement; we were blown away.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Hamilton,” composed the music and lyrics for “In the Heights” back in 1999, as a student at Wesleyan University. After making it to Broadway, the musical won four Tony awards before touring companies took it across the country and abroad. It tells a story, in song, of three days on a single block in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The coffee from the bodega is light and sweet, and the mostly Latino residents, who come from different national backgrounds, are facing the future, which is changing.

The two leading roles were played by freshmen, Alfredo Chavez as Usnavi De La Vega, who owns the bodega and really can rap, and Talia Albukrek, as Nina Rosario, who has a sweet and very expressive soprano. People tend to gush a bit too much about student performances, even those that in truth aren’t that remarkable, but it would be hard to overstate the excellence of this cast. Talent after talent shone across the footlights. 

Even those in character roles drew smiles of admiration and — no kidding — not a few tears of emotion from the audience. The director, Laura Sisco, integrated each in a way that not only recognized differences among the male and female ensemble dancers and chorus but highlighted them. Inventive and lively choreography let them whoop it up, especially in a nightclub salsa scene. 

While specific to a time and place, the plot resonates here, where many families are immigrants concerned about increased scrutiny and where the schools are learning how best to educate a diverse student population. Everyone present at the Sunday matinee, whether onstage or in the school auditorium, surely felt the emotional reverberations of telling this story of community and diversity in these times.

 We were touched even while laughing as we learned, toward the end of the play, that Usnavi’s late parents, who were from the Dominican Republic, named him for painted words on the ship bringing them to America: U.S. Navy.  

At the conclusion, Usnavi — who has come into some unexpected money and seems to be winning the heart of the girl of his dreams (played by the charming Ciara Bowe) — decides to stay in his home, the Heights. He sings:

Yeah, I’m a streetlight!

Chillin’ in the heat!

I illuminate the stories of people in the street

Some have happy endings

Some are bittersweet. . . .

Ms. Sisco, who runs the Creative Edge, a dance studio in Montauk and Amagansett, had directed her first musical at the high school, “Rent,” last year. Her skillful execution was enhanced by the efforts of Karen Peele Hochstedler, the music director, Brian Niggles, the set and lighting supervisor, a few other professionals, and many students who helped construct the realistic and ingenious set (“Wow!” people around us said as the lights went up) or joined the pit band.

Counteracting any impression that the show — with its unusual polished and knockout set — had cost the school district a hefty sum, Ms. Sisco said the budget was just slightly higher than in previous years and that many things were “repurposed, recycled, borrowed, and created.”  

The fact that it had such a strong impact, she said, was probably because of the unusual length of time devoted to character development. “As a team,” she said of the kids, “they did research and shared experiences.”

Ms. Sisco said she and the other adults involved were “really trying to elevate it to the next level.” And, oh, how they definitely did.