If digitization makes keeping track of everyone and everything easy, what do those of us with old, pre-computer address books do with them? I don’t remember how I managed to get all the information from my Rolodex transferred to my computer; perhaps I spent long nights keyboarding (or maybe I hired someone)?

For those of you born after, say, 1990, a Rolodex used to be indispensable in almost any office. It is a rotating spindle on a metal stand with removable address cards arranged alphabetically. When people left a job, they sometimes made a big show of taking theirs with them, if they didn’t want anyone in their old office to access their data. I, of course, have not left my job in lo! these many decades, and I still have a huge Rolodex on a low office shelf. The Rolodex company seems to have gone digital, but I have found a couple used and old-stock units available on eBay, starting at $7.50. Each of the listings reads “Only one left.”

By now, however, the data in the folder on my desktop labeled “Old Rolodex” is historic. It contains names, addresses, and phone numbers of people and businesses I don’t remember, as well as (I must confess) many who are no longer alive. It would seem disrespectful to pluck them out.  

Although my digital address book has grown huge on my email accounts, I do frequently look up the entries in the “Old Rolodex” file. I had occasion to do that the other day, but had a strange guilty feeling as I clicked through. Guilty for not keeping up with various old friends who live on, on my Rolodex cards. Guilty for not staying in touch with a relative. Guilty for having entirely forgotten the existence of an old acquaintance. Guilty about those whose information is still listed with a now-divorced spouse. 

Sociologists — someone writing a dissertation, for instance — might be able to mine old Filofaxes (remember those?) and Rolodexes (remember when the letter “X” seemed to signify modernity?) to learn about the time and place when the data were entered. But as my file cards were done without dates of entry, perhaps not. Indeed, I have to admit that I sometimes still add people to my Rolodex. I wonder how many people still do that? All too often, I surprise myself by finding they are already accounted for. Well, forgetfulness: I guess that’s why they invented Rolodexes in the first place.

Jeannette Edwards Rattray, the late publisher of this paper and my mother-in-law, died at the age of 80 in 1974. I am uncertain why it fell to me to care for her red, leather-bound “address and telephone” book. Perhaps it was just left in the desk. She filled its narrow lines with a remarkably fine hand, and a postcard with an 8-cent Dwight Eisenhower stamp on it fell out when I picked it up this week. It gave me a turn to discover that postcards were 8 cents in the year she died. 

Mrs. Rattray traveled quite a bit, so it was not surprising to find addresses of people living in far-flung places, from Cuba to Holland, France, and Yugoslavia. She even saved the name and contact information for the maitre d’hotel of the S.S. France in 1973. 

My own Rolodex is equally revealing of the times in which I have lived and worked. Yesterday, I noticed the name of Carrie Moritz under letter “M.” I remember Carrie quite well. My mother feared I would grow up with a Brooklyn accent, even though we lived in New Jersey, so she sent me to Mrs. Moritz for elocution lessons. Thank you, Mrs. Moritz!

Unfortunately, I also remember a poem Mrs. Moritz had me memorize and recite in what was supposed to be an Italian accent. “Giuseppi da barber, ees greata for ‘mash,’/ He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache.” I can’t imagine what good she thought it would do me or my elocution.

Asked by a colleague, with whom I share a birthday, how I’d spent mine, I said, “On the tarmac, in Houston — they couldn’t get us to a gate for the better part of an hour and kept thanking us for our patience.”

A few hours of fitful sleep at a far-flung Hyatt down a road clogged even worse than the Expressway on its worst day, and we were back at the airport, at 5 a.m. 

When, on nearing La Guardia, the pilot said we’d be circling for a while given the godawful weather, I clasped Mary’s hand (not the one with the heavily bandaged forefinger, which earned us preboarding status when she said if it were banged she’d probably bleed all over everyone) and asked if we had gotten around to updating our wills. When, every now and then, I see our lawyer at the dump, I say we’ll be in soon. I’ve been doing this now for about 10 years. 

Oh, and when I say “we,” it is really she who sees to much of the dreck of our lives. And thus I wrote to her last night on her Valentine card: “Roses are red / violets are blue / I’m so exhausted / I bet you are too.”

It’s a long way to Zihuatanejo, it’s a long way to go, but it’s worth it. We love the Las Brisas hotel there, and the people. And though its structure, a sort of half-pyramid set into a high seaside cliff, may remind one of ancient sacrificial rites while ascending the steep stone stairs, it also is a paradise — a conflation that the crepes flambées we had at the Coconuts restaurant in town illumined. 

“The sun, the sea, and thee,” I would say to Mary, looking up from yet another transcendental margarita. “Rather than shut up and listen,” as Sean Spicer has said, “we should shut up and look. If everyone did, what a wonderful world this might be.”

We had never, in all the years we’ve been going there, seen the baby turtles released. That usually happens around Christmas. This time, we saw the baby black leatherbacks make their unsteady but inexorable way into the vast, vast ocean twice, swept away at last by the ebbing surf. It was a wonder, yes, even more so than the Super Bowl, though on a par with the birth that day of our ninth grandchild. May her life be blessed as ours have been.

David Brooks lamented the other day that Americans are tending to stay put, while in the past they moved about quite a bit, were more adventurous. The short answer to that, I think, is health care’s exigencies.

When you had Blue Cross-Blue Shield, it didn’t cost much, and you could change jobs and locales without worrying about that coverage lapsing. My father did many things, quitting and moving on, he told me, whenever he got bored, which he often did. I think health insurance was not the issue for him, or for his generation, that it is for us.

In fact, I’m not sure health itself was the issue in my parents’ day that it is for us. You took what came and didn’t expect that much. Life spans were shorter, but now, especially given all the improvements in medical science, we’re clinging more to life. (I’m always reminded in this regard of what the French woman said: “Do you Americans want to die of good health?”)

Also, I don’t think people, people in general, were aware in the past of the seemingly endless list of diseases, physical and mental, that can attack you. Every parent knows of them now, and they’re rendered all the more fearful and timid because of this knowledge.

So you stay put, and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics will work. Before we went to Mexico, I was almost put on them, having had a tenacious cold, which would have been a cruel irony inasmuch as, when on them, as you know, you have to stay out of the sun and cannot drink. In the end, I found the margaritas salvific.

Though while the climate there is far more, I think, to Mary’s liking, she’s always talking of moving to Canada, while I, who wilt in the heat, keep saying we should move to Mexico. She’s worried we might run afoul of the cartels, but I think frostbite would be worse.

Of course, we’ll stay put (this place being among the nicest places to stay put in), and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics work.

Leo the pig does not do much in the winter. Actually, Leo, a house pet of unusual size, never does much at all. It’s just that on these early mornings, when I sit at the kitchen table thinking about what to write as he stands idly by, his easy ways are more obvious.

If I can generalize about pigdom from having watched Leo going on five years now, their dominant motivation is in their stomachs. Sun up or not, as soon as Leo hears me stirring, he scrambles out of his bed near the fireplace and with a string of loud grunts and whines demands to be fed. If one of the dogs gets near he gets downright operatic. “Shut up already,” I think, “or it’s the knacker for you.”

Leo is not dumb, as basic as his needs may be. He knows how to push open the front door to let the dogs in or out, and has my predawn moves around the kitchen memorized. If I veer away from what Leo believes is the plan, howls ensue; oink has very little to do with it. I feed him first lest he turn up the decibel level, and then get around to what I need to do. The dogs, polite, wait by their bowls. But Leo has a thing for dog food, too, and expects me to scatter some kibble on the kitchen floor for him to find. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, I suppose, the highlight of his day. The wet nose marks on the tile dry up soon enough.

Beyond food, Leo’s interests run to pushing the furniture around to get my attention when it is time for a scratch or for sleep, in that order. In his middle age, Leo chews on the woodwork less frequently than when he was young. However, anything new that we place in the house where he can get to it gets a good working over. 

As I type this morning, Leo has knocked down a mop and is appraisingly pushing it around the kitchen floor. Next, it’s over to the bathroom to see if anything interesting has been left in the wastebasket and to pull down the towels. This will have taken a great deal out of him, and he will head back to bed shortly. By the time the kids are up and getting ready for school, he is back in his bed, eyes closed as if he had not already made my morning a living hell. “He’s not so bad!” they will declare when I complain later on.

At a time when Americans are lining up on opposite sides of what seems to be an increasingly wide divide, it was heartening that the film “Moonlight” won the best picture Oscar on Sunday night. The story of “Moonlight” follows the physical and emotional trials besetting a boy growing to manhood in one of Miami’s poorest black neighborhoods, Liberty City. I had seen it in the fall when it was featured at the Hamptons International Film Festival. On Saturday, I was fascinated by the man who adapted the “Moonlight” script from his play “In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” Tarell Alvin McCraney. Forget Horatio Alger, Mr. McCraney’s magnificent trajectory may prove that this country still is a land of possibility after all.

Mr. McCraney was destined for the creative life from the time he was in high school, at Miami’s New World School of the Arts. Like Chiron, the protagonist of “Moonlight,” he was tormented as a child for being gay. Mr. McCraney’s mother, like Chiron’s, battled drugs. Unlike Chiron, however, Mr. McCraney was a surrogate parent for three younger siblings. He nevertheless got a B.F.A. in acting from DePaul University in Chicago in 2003, and then became a graduate student at Yale, where he studied playwriting. Acclaim first came while he was at Yale for a trilogy of plays set in Louisiana among the Yoruba: “In the Red and Brown Water,” “The Brothers Size,” and “Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet.” Skip ahead some 13 years, and he is now to become the head of Yale’s School of Drama, in July.

At the Academy Awards on Sunday, Mr. McCraney took the stage with Barry Jenkins, who directed “Moonlight,” after the award for best adapted screenplay was announced. Mr. Jenkins also grew up in Liberty City, and although they did not know each other there, he understood the autobiographical aspects of the story. Accepting the screenplay award, Mr. McCraney said they had had less than a month to shoot the film. Speaking of Mr. Jenkins, he said, “This man did it in 25 days with a cast and crew that was in and out in Miami in the dreaded heat. But we did that with love and compassion and fullness.” Because of the unheard-of mix-up in announcing the best picture, the “Moonlight” principals did not get to the stage to speak again. Earlier, however, McCraney had said, “This goes out to all those black and brown boys and girls and non-gender conforming, who don’t see themselves. We’re trying to show you you and us. So thank you, thank you. This is for you.” 

Along the way, Mr. McCraney has written six other plays and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, for which he has directed a pared-down “Hamlet” and adapted “Antony and Cleopatra.” And, since 2013, he has been able to devote himself to his work as the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

The director Joseph Adler, who met Mr. McCraney when he was a high school student in Miami, speaks of him this way: “Even though he’s gone on to international acclaim, the fact that he wants to come back makes him unusual. And he hasn’t changed a bit. His humility, compassion, and genuine concern for people are remarkable. . . . By that I mean profound, lasting, meaningful works along with what is as, or perhaps more, important: the ability to touch, inspire, and give back to those in the here and now. He is a gift-giver.”

Last week was the first birthday of the rest of my life. 

Well it’s not like I just got over a disease and I now have a new lease on life. Nothing like that. This was the first “celebrated” birthday in my life that I had not been with one or both parents, or, as an adult, in the company of an important boyfriend, significant other, or spouse, a first celebration solo. 

Those of you freshly called “widows” and “widowers” know that the first birthday after the loved one is gone is a weird one. That first solo birthday is not actually an event you embrace or enjoy. Mostly you want it just gone (like the first Christmas: too many changes, too much missing). In my personal memory that first year was a blur, not fast, just blurry.

But, having passed all the firsts in the year after the death of my husband, I am now on to the next chapter. I find I am no longer thinking in the plurals of “ours” and “we.” This new chapter is called “My, Me, Mine.”

My birthday, thanks to an invitation from a wonderful pal, was spent in the Virgin Islands. (The irony of a widow in the Virgin Islands was not lost on me, by the way.) I was invited to hang out for a long weekend with her and mutual friends at her fabulous house on St Thomas. Or, was it a coincidence that it was my birthday. How lucky am I? 

The house is at the far east end of the island, overlooking the St. Thomas yacht club across the small and oddly named Cowpet Bay. Palm trees, turquoise water, and good buddies. What a treat to leave the East End winter for that east end.

I slept listening to the tropical tides lapping at the iron shore below the infinity pool, which was 10 steps away from my sliding door. I watched a rainbow during one of those crazy tropical storms that last minutes. I put on a mask and snorkeled and paddled off the beach at Magens Bay and watched two sea turtles having a lunch of seaweed about 10 feet under my tummy. I slathered on sunblock (near the Equator, you know) and stayed hydrated (ditto). And the clouds, well, the clouds are fantastic, and the sun kind of does go down like thunder, though there is a bit of dusk after it is gone, contrary to Kipling. 

Being a loosely knit group of three dames and sometimes four, and two guys but sometimes three, some of us did one thing, some did other things, all did some, and at times I was solo beside the pool, which, can I mention again, overlooked totally turquoise water, clear as a bell and dotted with boats I could wave to if I felt like it. 

My room faced the sunset, which bounced off that bay and off the infinity pool and gave me no end of pleasure as I took pictures of reflections. One afternoon, in the pool, I looked over the edge and down in the vegetation and palm trunks and there were iguanas in courting mode, bobbing heads and looking like Jurassic Park. My imagination was, at times, in overdrive. Where was my camera when I needed it?

St. Thomas is one hour earlier, so my island time was different from their island time, and while I was in a place where I could sleep as late as I wanted to, I was awake before dawn. Who knows why. 

I was aware of the moment when the night peepers outside my window shut up in favor of the early morning birds doing their vocal exercises. (Discretion being the better part of living another day, for the peepers.) I heard the tiny sounds of birds landing on a sugar-water feeder. Sneaking outside I tried to get a good picture of the many hummingbirds that were having their breakfasts. All this surrounded by flowers in colors that are so glorious they have no name and a tiny little lizard on the screen. 

My birthday dinner, surprise, was at a long table, beside the marina near the ferry to St. John. A band and a bunch of new friends and funny cards and gifts totally topped my special day. The singer with the band tried really hard to get my name right when she sang (to my total embarrassment) “Happy Birthday” to me, so I can say that a Doral, Duvall, Donnell, and Doowall was/were all serenaded along with me. My birthday cake was a slice of local pie with a candle. What could be better than this?

About 20 minutes from the house, in downtown Charlotte Amalie, there are nifty old warehouse buildings with wonderfully painted arched doors housing all the local color and duty-free stuff your heart could desire. The harbor is bustling. Gigantic cruise ships come in and disgorge countless thousands of sea-legged folks who want to spend their retirement savings on gemstones and designer luggage. The cruise ships look like the mother ship from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when they cruise out, lights ablaze, much like a slice of pie with 72 candles, all lit up. What a sight — bedazzling and keeping the economy going, but also clogging the streets and venues so the locals stay home, if they can, on the days the ships come in. (We did that.) 

Two local friends drove us around, thus we were able to get to a beach that was too far to walk to (Magens Bay) before church let out, so as to get a good parking place. We got dropped off at the ferry to St. John without having to figure out where we were going to park, and we always took the scenic routes so I could take pictures. 

Now, pretty much everything is scenic in its own way, and while I would have walked around on my own, the roads terrified me. They drive on the wrong side of the road and they do it really fast. There are no shoulders along these narrow lanes, just bushes, views, oncoming cars, free-walking chickens, and, yes, East Enders; there are deer on this island, too, and there isn’t much room for one car much less one coming the wrong way around a bend. 

I was astounded that anyone could or would do this driving, but they do and they can, and that was also a birthday present: that I didn’t have to drive, anywhere. For that I am really, really thankful.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

By the time Bernie Sanders swept the New Hampshire Democratic primary and urged voters to go to Bernie Sanders.com to make online contributions to his campaign, Barack Obama had long since revolutionized presidential fund-raising by using the internet in the 2008 race to seek donations and to gather information and organize the ranks. (Time and Twitter moved on.)

It will come as no surprise if I say I admire Mr. Obama. These last few weeks of his tenure, and his eloquent farewell address — in particular, his willingness to address the topic of race head-on — have secured his place in my mind as an exemplary president and a fine human being.

So it was a bit annoying on Tuesday to receive an email, purportedly from him, asking for $1. Anyone who has gone to a political website in the last few years is likely to be familiar with the experience of inadvertently signing up for innumerate emails from candidates running for national office and, naturally, asking for signatures on petitions as well as, of course, money. 

As Trump supporters are wont to say: Isn’t it time to move on?

The small print at the bottom of the Obama email noted that it wasn’t actually anything to do with a presidential campaign, or really much to do with Mr. Obama, but was from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, although that wasn’t spelled out in the body of the text. The name of the organization is in any event somewhat misleading because it assists only those in or seeking to be in the House of Representatives.

The subject heading of the email — “unfortunately,” with a lower case “u” — drew me in. In part, it read: “Helen, I’ll make this quick — I’m emailing for $1.” It went on in what were supposedly Barack Obama’s words: “As my time in office comes to a close . . .” and so on.

What I find annoying about these emails, in addition to the $1 thing they always try, is that I don’t remember ever having given money to the D.C.C.C. before; in fact, I’m quite sure I never have. As a rule, and as a journalist, I have never registered in any political party. Nevertheless, it seems I must have made some sort of donation in the past that flagged me as someone who could profitably be entered into the email pipeline, forever to be tapped on the shoulder and asked. 

Whatever side of the political fence you fall on, it is likely that you, like me, have received many insincerely personalized messages in the last year, with pleas from candidates whose names you barely recognize, from all over the country.

But really, do any email recipients in 2017 still believe patently silly statements like this one in Tuesday’s email? “We still need 35 more Democrats from 11937 to step up before Friday.” Still need 35 for what? I get the Zip code, but why Friday?

I know the word “algorithm,” and can throw it around, but I don’t have a clue about algorithmic procedures. Which brings me back to the internet. If an email from an organization with which I have no quarrel and which is signed by someone I admire contains information that is less than 100-percent factual and reliable, how am I supposed to believe information that comes from it at more important moments? And what am I supposed to make of the email promises of those whose points of view I do not even share?

I want to begin by thanking our granddaughter Ella, who’s 8, for having turned my wife’s Ping-Pong game around, for having raised her Ping-Pong self-esteem (the fiery competitive spirit she’s always had) so that Mary and I are now on an even keel Ping-Pong-wise.

This is very important to me because she usually creams me in backgammon and, whenever we can find the rules, in gin. I have no card sense, none, though I will play these games to humor her. But it’s batting balls back and forth that I really love, and Ella, bless you for having said to Mimi, as you call her, that getting a Ping-Pong table was the best thing we ever did.

It’s a state-of-the-art royal blue Kettler that Geary Gubbins somehow put together in the fall after we’d had the basement brightened, neatened (the 10-year statute of limitations having run out on her brother’s tools), and dried out a bit. 

I had envisioned unending games, and had bought a space heater toward that end, but until Ella entered the equation, the handsome table wasn’t used all that much because Mary — despite the fact that our games were always close — thought she wasn’t up to my speed.

Ella proposed a freer format. One could serve twice, as in tennis, and serves were alternated point after point. Games were to be to 10, not to 21, and if you could fetch back onto your opponent’s side of the net a ball that had hit the floor, whether simply by way of a lifted shot or by caroming the ball off a wall, as in squash, that would count.

Thus less constricted, Mary, with whom I’ve always batted ideas back and forth in somewhat similar fashion, began to play with more verve, and the other night, after she’d creamed me 10-3, and as I was muttering to myself, she went upstairs to give Ella the news. 

I won one that night, she won two, whereupon she said it was over, which was fine. I was delighted. Whatever rules she wants to play by. Perhaps more will be added as we go along. That’s what kids do, make them up as they go, and that’s what makes it fun.

The day after the election, I was so freaked out that I moved all of my furniture around. I get it: the need to make myself feel safe, nesting in a time of crisis, etc. Well, it worked out, but not completely. 

Because of this ongoing uproar, I find I have a continuing and mighty need for personal control over my environs, so, a week ago, I took the baloney by the horns and decided to have the inside of my house painted. 

I know what you are thinking, and trust me, I should have listened to you, but I did not. My vague reasoning was that it had been 15 years since the one and only paint job and the rooms really needed freshening up. In reality, I was looking for a light in the darkness, and a road through the chaos, post-election. Chaos. In the midst of chaos, I created more chaos. What was I thinking? 

Well, it turns out I wasn’t thinking at all. Whatever you think I was thinking, I was not thinking that. I was just reacting, in that reptilian, back-brain of flight or fight that helped our ancestors survive in a hostile world. I guess my hope was to create warmth and comfort and a predictable world for myself.

However, what this paint job did instead of immediately giving me a bright and shiny future was to have me turning back time. 

I was experiencing the political version of Cher’s song “If I Could Turn Back Time,” and at the same time preparing to be painted. I began to  see my life flashing before me, running backward. Time is relative, relatively speaking. I found pictures of relatives I had forgotten I had. On Facebook there is this Throw Back Thursday thing where people visually recollect by sharing photos from the olden days a few years or a few generations ago. I found I was doing that while sitting on the floor amid shopping bags and bins ready to be filled with the stuff that I live with every  day. 

Taking things off shelves was particularly interesting. I found things I had forgotten about, things I didn’t care about at all and things I was really happy to find. Having found these things, I also immediately lost them in the deconstruction of their longtime hiding places. 

The dialogue with my things went like this: “Where have you been?” “Who/what are you?” “Wow, look at this thing?” “What was I thinking?” “What/ where should I put it now?” “Oops, where did I put it? It used to be over there. I just put it in with the. . . . Where did I put that? Where will I put it if I ever find it again?” And on and on.

What I found: a photo of myself in high school after I bleached my hair with peroxide and before it all broke off; a picture of the man who broke my heart, also called “the Crush” if you read my other “Relays”; a copy of Rolling Stone with John and Yoko saved in a glassine sleeve; four copies of “Eros,” and a very old copy of “Black Beauty” printed on cotton. And that was just from one bookshelf. I found interesting books I meant to read but will never get around to and interesting books I plan to get around to soon. 

I found that taking everything off the walls makes me not want to put anything back up, that rooms have really odd echoes with the rugs rolled up, that I do not have to put pictures of my late husband’s mother (whom I never met) on my family picture wall, and of course I found that I have way too much stuff, which I already knew. I have been drawing stuff (for magazines and lately coloring books) and I have been photographing stuff for this newspaper. 

I am known in shopping circles as Hunter Gatherer because I shop for stuff to photograph and publish in The Star. Stuff is the staff of life, in my opinion . . . but I digress. 

What I also found, aside from newly empty places on my walls, was an appreciation of the life I have lived and how much I have enjoyed it so far, broken hearts be damned. 

Had I not decided to be painted (and that was a clear reaction to the election and the inauguration), I would not have stirred up my personal pot. And in turning back time, and considering other family photos to go in the empty frames, I would not have found, tucked into an album, a letter to me from my aunt Sara Henderson Hay, a poet. 

The date of the letter is part of the interesting timing here: It was written on Jan. 29, 1964. Turning back time, it would have been delivered to me on the day I am writing this, Jan. 31. Sent to me in my freshman year of college, it referenced a fella, new to my social life, and a fella she thought I was done with (who amazingly stuck around until 1979). Since boyfriends were on her mind she included a poem in the letter that she said had been written a long time ago, but which she thought was “a slightly ironic little comment which you and your roommates might find amusing.”

Perhaps the proximity to Valentine’s Day inspired the timing, then and now. Who knows? 

Advice to Young Ladies

by Sara Henderson Hay

Love the proper man, my sweet,

At the proper age. 

When he stands upon his feet

Matrimonially complete,

When his assets all appear

Matrimonially clear.

Till that proper stage,

Keep your silly heart secure.

If a lover passes

Find him as devoid of lure

As he is when viewed through your

Mother’s glasses.

She sent it with love, and though she is in heaven, I share it with you with her love.

I am so happy that I got painted so that I could find this letter and turn back time, if just for a little while. And now to the putting back of all that I have torn asunder. Maybe there are more goodies to be found. Stay tuned.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The East Hampton Star, is also the illustrator of two recent coloring books that address the comforts of home and the creativity of chaos, “Color Your Happy Home” and “Color Me Cluttered.”  

This week’s snow notwithstanding, this winter has been a letdown, at least as far as ice goes. For skating the only option has been to pay for time on one of the local rinks. Likewise, the chance that there will be iceboating this year declines every day that we get closer to March.

In the mid-1970s, when my father was given our first iceboat by George Fish, a doctor and family friend with a house overlooking Three Mile Harbor, it seemed that every winter would dependably produce enough ice to sail upon. Mecox Bay was the center of a considerable flotilla of boats, some large two-seaters, most, like our second boat, DNs, so called after the Detroit News, in whose shop the first of the relatively inexpensive, light and nimble craft were built. 

Many of the freshwater ponds were good. Memorably, one glorious season, homeowners in the Georgica Association let us use a landing on Georgica’s west side to get to its beautiful glassy surface. Three Mile Harbor froze as well one year or two. We sailed from Hand’s Creek across to the main navigation channel and back again, passing baymen spearing eels through holes they had cut in the ice. We sailed on Montauk’s Fresh Pond and on Poxabogue, anywhere that had a big enough slab. We don’t get ice like that much anymore.

The iceboat that came from Dr. Fish’s garage was a Mead Glider, a two-seater probably built in the 1930s and repaired and altered over the years. We called it the Bat, for its batwing sail, which had a single batten that ran from the mast out to the leech, or loose, edge. Its hard ware was largely cobbled up from toolbox assortments and not necessarily up to the stresses of sailing over a hard surface. 

One winter day at Fresh Pond, in about 1978, the Bat struck a pressure ridge in the ice, and the mast came down on top of my father and my friend Mike, who, as he tended to do, and still does from time to time, howled in protest.

It was last year or the year before, on a Monday in early March, that we last sailed in the Bat. I had left it at Mecox after the weekend, and my friend Jamey and I met there to take it out for a ride as a light snow began to fall. 

By the time we lifted the sail, the snow was falling in heavier clumps; sailing through it was marvelous, we could not see the edge of the horizon nor tell the difference between ice and sky. More snow came down, and as we rumbled along, we had the sensation of flying through space and that the clumps of icy flakes were stars.

The bat and the DN are stored in the barn behind my mother’s house. As I said, it would surprise me if we sailed this year, but the boats are ready, and so am I.