I’ve been reading in comparative mythology recently, about ritual regicide, virgin births, thefts of fire, trees of life and of death, resurrections . . . that kind of thing, and apparently, at least according to Joseph Campbell, it’s all one — more or less the same stories and symbols from Day One aimed at reconciling earth with the heavens. 

“Ad astrum per aspera,” I said to O’en this morning as we headed, with hope, for The Star. And no sooner had I sat down than the phone rang. A call from the West Coast, from my erstwhile doubles partner, Gary Bowen, with whom I’ve won East Hampton Indoor tournaments in successive summers. 

He hesitated at first when I answered. “Do I sound like Mary?” I asked.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he said, I did. 

“We’re becoming one!” I said. “Like the myths — the earth goddess entwined double helix-like with the slayer of aging doubles teams.”

We talked about meeting up around February (when our ninth grandchild is to be born out there) and were commiserating about the winter and the election and about how we yearned to scrap the rurally biased Electoral College when he had to sign off to go do battle.

I shall gird my loins tomorrow, at high noon, and it is in this wise that we agile-for-our-age septuagenarians, not unmindful of our blessings, aim for the stars — engraved plaques at least. 

The Independent today quoted Einstein to the effect that to some nothing in life is miraculous and to some everything is. I would definitely put O’en, our 5-month-old white golden, in the latter camp. 

“We think nothing of walking around the block, but can you imagine what it’s like to walk around the block for him?!” I asked Mary. A garden of delights — the effluvia ever new all the time. Transcendence in the temporal. Beset by fear and desire we cling — that’s our “leash.” He is not so constrained — he just is.

We agreed that we should follow his lead. And in fact that is, when we are out on our walks, what we usually do

If, when you get behind the wheel of a car, your thoughts turn toward auto accidents, or if, when you board a plane, you worry that it will crash, you are apt to face your digital life with trepidation, too. 

When you learned that Russian rogue operators (or were they put up to it by the Politbureau?) had hacked into the computers of members of the Democratic National Committee, for example, did you say to yourself, “Yikes! I better watch out”? Or did you feel perfectly secure in being a small potato, like I did?

This week my antennas went up, however, when I received two suspicious emails in a row that weren’t connected with anything I recognized. The first came from “support” — with a lower case “s” — and no further identifiers. It asked me to reset my password. My password for what? That wasn’t indicated. I read the email but did not follow its directions. That was not a hard decision, but then the second came, from someone purporting to be Howard Yang of No. 200, Changjiang West Road, Hefei, China. 

His message was that Tankp Capital Limited had applied to register easthamptonstar as “their brand name” and that I should let him know if that company was authorized by my company “as soon as possible in order that we can deal with this problem timely.” 

I’m a pretty curious person, and I am a pretty good proofreader. The grammar was a little off. I am also someone who tries to be polite when I call a “help desk” about a problem with some device or system and reach someone whose English is heavily accented; just because the email might not come from someone with impeccable English didn’t mean it was a scam. In the case of Howard Yang, however, curiosity got the better of me.

Going to Google, I searched to find out if Mr. Yang’s address could be a legitimate one. Was there such a street and such a street number? Someone did seem to be running a trading company — selling groceries and dry goods — from that address. On Tripadvisor, I learned that accommodations were available at the 7 Days Inn or the Jinjiang Inn High Tech Zone in Hefei, China, otherwise known as Anhui. I then decided to see if Tankp Capital Limited could be found at any address. After a bit of a diversion during which the algorithms thought I might be trying to buy Chinese tank tops, I wasted a bit of time looking at a corporation named NKP, rather than Tankp, based in Dubai. After a while of perusing the mission of NKP, I looked at hotels in Dubai, too, trying to remember the one I stayed in once while en route to Ethiopia in 2011. Finally, looking for gentlemen by the name of Howard Yang in the city of Heifei, I at last came across a website called domainnamescam. wordpress.com — and, hey, presto! There he was. Good old Howard.

Concerns about how much time adults as well as children spend in front of screens have been in the news recently. American children from 5 to 16 apparently spend more than six hours a day starring at screens, while, according to the Nielsen Company, adults devote about 10 hours and 39 minutes each day to consuming media, including tablets, smartphones, personal computers, video games, radios, DVDs, DVRs, and TVs. Perhaps that’s the reason Donald Trump won the election.

It was Tuesday night when it occurred to me that I hadn’t — because I was flying back from having spent the weekend in Pittsburgh — seen the first half of the Steelers’ delightful 24-14 win that Sunday over the Giants.

Mary had recorded it, and so it was with a light heart that I headed down the hall, with her behind me, toward the larger TV where I presumed she’d show me — yet again, for I have never kept pace with change — how to summon it up.

“Was it the football game you were interested in?” she asked when we got there.

“Well, just the first half — I saw the second half, you’ll remember, when I got home. The Steelers were leading 14-0 at the half, so I thought it would be fun to watch.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I thought you’d watched the whole game — I deleted it.”

“You . . . deleted it. . . ?”

“Yes, forgive me, forgive me,” she said, pitiably. “Maybe I can retrieve it. . . .”

“That’s a venal . . . no, no, that’s a mortal sin, you know. Now, I’ll have to read about Emily Dickinson!”

Well, it serves me right for persisting in ignorance. I will have to learn how to record things myself. And anyway, she didn’t do it with full knowledge of the sin, the one, you know, having to do with the erasure of vitally important shows. 

“You’re forgiven — you’re not guilty!” I called out reassuringly toward the living room, where she was watching a Sam Shepard play, knowing that that would resonate particularly with her, who’s never forgotten the sign on the Pittsburgh bridge, the one painted 20 or so years ago, in big white letters, that said, “She’s Guilty.”

Why is it that women, the chief reason that there’s any joy in life, or any life for that matter, have received such short shrift by and large down the centuries, except for the few societies, like Crete, that were matriarchies?

She’s guilty? The church, and often society, would seem to have it so. 

Why that is I haven’t the remotest idea. 

And let it so be recorded.

David Brooks wrote recently about the lack of trust in our society, and how corrosive walling oneself off can be when it comes to the intermingling a thriving democracy requires.

Still, when Sinead FitzGibbon recently said concerning a golf lesson I planned to take that it was “a social game,” I replied — by way of explaining why I hadn’t played it — that I had no friends. (Other than Mary, of course.) But that I did exult in having a great number of acquaintances.

“I do a lot of my socializing at the dump,” I told her.

“Like we used to do at Mass,” she said.

“Yes, I get a lot of story ideas there — I should set up a desk and put up a sign saying, ‘The Quote Doctor Is In.’ ”

“The dump,” she concluded with a smile, “is the new Mass!”

“One does feel a bit righteous while recycling there, sorting out the wheat from the corn.” 

I recalled that her father, who is 86, once said he’d take up golf when he was old. 

“He still hasn’t,” she said.

And her mother, who, she said, was my age, which is to say 76, had “just signed up for a 100K bike ride.”

“And when will you take up tennis?” I said.

“When I’m old,” she said.

If old has to do with feeling weaker, then I am not — at least not at this moment in time. I have Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy to thank for that, or perhaps he and the life force left over from the Antareans’ visit 10,000 years ago. The residuum may be in the fern boles that O’en likes to dig up in our backyard. I won’t know for sure until I jump into the Y’s pool. 

Anima Sana in Corpore Sano. That’s the motto of the ASICS tennis sneakers I wear, though, while my corpore’s sano (for the moment, I say), my anima ain’t so sana. Aside from the question of trusting my fellows, I’m having difficulty trusting myself. Mary has said they ought to have a lost and found container at East Hampton Indoor Tennis just for me. I would say she’s as forgetful as I am, but that observation is skewed by the fact that she has many more things to forget than I do — a cellphone, its charger, rings, airline tickets, checkbooks, passports, other vitally important documents, crucial internet passwords, and the like. So, let’s just say she’s much less forgetful, but loses more things. 

I would say that that’s good news for me, for should I find whatever it is she’s missing, I can add indulgences, as it were, to the pile against the day when — through no fault of my own, of course — I may fall out of grace and be consigned to do all my socializing at the dump.

The distance between my house and the Star office building is less than a hundred yards, and some of the nicest moments of otherwise ordinary days are spent walking between the two. It’s a quick moment of stolen solitude, to listen to the wind in the high trees and, quite often, the roar of the ocean, about a mile away. I am supposed to walk a lot, at least according to the medical profession. But hurriedness often intervenes, preventing me from scheduling longer, proper hikes, and this gives my many short back-and-forth trips between house and office more significance than they might otherwise merit.

Among the last people to leave the office after dark about two weeks ago, I was headed toward home when a vehicle followed me slowly with its headlights on, lighting my path up the dark lane. I had walked past the lamppost that marks the boundary between The Star’s driveway and the East Hampton Library parking lot next door and continued my slow perambulation toward my house without looking back to find out who was lighting my way.

The truth is, I cherish these walks despite the fact that a doctor told me not so long ago that my feet were “kaput.” Time was, way back when, that I spent several summers as a counselor at a phenomenal summer camp for inner-city children on a 1,000-acre tract of untouched woodland in the northwest corner of New Jersey, where it meets New York and Pennsylvania. Everything we did there was intended to be in harmony with nature, and I still try to reconnect with that feeling. Simple campsites were spread out through the woods, and it was a point of pride if you were a counselor moving alone at night not to use a flashlight; a flashlight would be almost a sin, out there between the trees and under the canopy of a star-dusted sky. Now, all these years later, as silly as it sounds —and despite my night vision no longer being the best — I still balk at carrying a flashlight, especially on familiar ground.

To be certain, I’m not exactly the surefooted person I once was, even on sidewalks. So even though I didn’t like the idea that someone in a vehicle following me home the other night apparently thought I needed help finding my way, I accepted it as a kind gesture. 

The vehicle and its headlights kept up with me and eventually turned around the circular driveway adjacent to my house as I was about to reach the front door. Seeing the vehicle for the first time — I hadn’t looked back to see who was following me because I wanted to prove I didn’t need any help — I saw a white pickup truck. Assuming my son, who owns one, was at the wheel, I offered a somewhat perfunctory wave of thanks. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned he had nothing to do with it. Who was at the wheel? I still don’t know.

There are many perks that come with growing older: Children who are now adults, if you are lucky enough to have some, will remind you of certain realities you ought not ignore. (For example, in my case, I am frequently instructed not to drive at night. And at Thanksgiving, one of my kids not only shared the preparations but just about took them over, and I was greatly relieved.) But, still, I naturally cringe when I watch or hear others tell their parents what to do and when to do it. They ought not to forget that it’s empowering to be left to your own devices for as long as possible. So, whoever the mysterious Good Samaritan was, with the headlights behind me: Thank you so much . . . but no thanks.

We were going head to head the other day, in a wide-ranging discussion with some other longtime summer people turned almost-year-round, about never-ending construction on our streets and whose lost real estate opportunities and dumb decisions, over the years, were dumbest and lostest.

We’d all bought our houses in the ’60s or ’70s, years before the South Fork became the Hamptons, when you’d walk along Main Street pushing a stroller and shopkeepers, seeing an unfamiliar face, would come smiling out to introduce themselves. We agreed that compared to almost anything else, we could hardly have made a better investment.

But everyone had a story also about the land that got away, the vacant acre that could have been acquired years ago but was not — sold, last year or last month, for some preposterous figure, cleared of tall trees and underbrush where small furry creatures roamed, and built up to within an inch of the lot lines with monster houses lacking nothing but moats.

Big is nothing new here. The 19th-century “cottages” in East Hampton Village were built with eight or 10 bedrooms plus three for staff — only it’s now happening on parcels too small to contain it. I hear the East Hampton Town Board is thinking of imposing new standards that would limit a house’s size relative to the size of its lot; good luck with that. The town is far from alone, of course; the “too-much-money syndrome,” as Paul Goldberger calls it, is spreading nationwide, changing the look and character of beleaguered neighborhoods everywhere. Last week a resigned North Shore village official told Newsday that “this is the way people want to live these days” and suggested that his village’s code might be “behind the times.”

One of the first things I remember about the South Fork is big, ugly billboards, spaced out along the Napeague stretch almost as far as Hither Hills, advertising everything from motels to cigarettes and car dealerships. That was in 1966, when Sidney and I ventured out from the city to rent something for the summer in Amagansett, which, we’d heard, had broad, beautiful beaches that made up for its being more than four hours away from civilization.

Almost nobody we knew had ever heard of the place. A year later, when my proud father told someone that “my kids have bought a house in Amagansett,” the man looked at him quizzically.

“Why?” he asked.

“ ‘Why’? What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“Why are you against it?”

(Say “in Amagansett‚ in Amagansett” fast. Get it?)

The billboards were gone when we returned as new mortgagees the following spring, the town board having won a prolonged legal battle to enforce the anti-billboard provisions of the zoning ordinance it had enacted 10 years before. Gone, too, was the vacant acre next door, which had been offered to us for $5,000 soon after we bought the house. Five thousand dollars? No way!

Most everyone in the room that night had a similar story, some with happy endings (nice new neighbors), some not. (One woman asked the architect of the castle rising almost in her backyard whether they would be planting trees for screening. “Of course,” he answered. “They don’t want to see the dinky pool out there.”)

If the evening devolved into a contest of sorts — who’d lost the most money by sitting tight when they could’ve jumped — we won. Here’s why. Right before we were to sign the contract of sale, a friend called my husband with a tip on the stock market. Buy shares of something called Berkshire Hathaway, he advised. One share of the brand-new venture was a little over $19. 

No matter. We were about to spend $35,000 on a house, and that was pushing it. We passed.

By buying the house, which we love and still live in, instead of the stock, we gained 50 years of contentment, and lost, according to Berkshire’s current price, about $34.8 million.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

When Rob Balnis asked if I were coming to work out Saturday morning, I immediately said yes, inasmuch as the football game would be Friday night, at Mercy.

“We’re 0-6,” I said, “and so are they.”

“Really? I thought we’d won a couple.”

“That’s probably because of the way I’ve been writing things up. Losses become wins in my vernacular. You always want to look on the bright side,” I said, by way of explanation, before humming a few bars from the Monty Python song. 

Then he stuck the knife in. “What happened to the Steelers?!”

“A friend of mine is a Dolphins fan and he asked me over to watch the game,” I said. “I was so sure they’d win I told him I’d take a Xanax before I came — I didn’t want to annoy the hell out of him. Ultimately I didn’t go — a blessing in retrospect — and went to puppy kindergarten instead, which, in contrast to the game, was pure joy.”

Frankly, as a pick-me-up I know of nothing, nothing really, that can beat puppy kindergarten. They’re all so happy to see each other, having apparently absented themselves from felicity for a week. Unleash them and the party’s on — at play in ARF’s backyard.

I would recommend attendance to anyone, especially to anyone beset at times by depression. You will come away saying, like Florentino in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” keep on sailing.

Henry, I’d thought, would be our last dog, but, as my brother-in-law reminds from time to time, if you have love to give, give it.

“I’m the one being trained,” I said in the newsroom the other day when asked how O’en’s training was going. 

Trained to give my heart to someone else, which, for me, at least, isn’t easy. 

So I’m determined to do my best when it comes to that. It will be, I’m quite sure, my last chance.

Let’s not blame the election but bad international news coverage for not knowing about the Peace Boat. You may not have heard about it, and I would not have if I had not been paying attention to what Judy Lerner, a part-time East Hampton resident and a nonagenarian, has been up to lately.

Peace Boat’s mission is to promote a nuclear-free world and the 17 “sustainable development goals” of the United Nations. It left Japan on Aug. 18, headed for 21 countries in 104 days. It docked at Pier 90 in Manhattan last month, with five atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki aboard, here to offer testimony at the U.N., and it sponsored a “Floating Festival for Sustainability” onboard on Oct. 20. Judy Lerner was there.

Ms. Lerner was honored with the William Sloane Coffin Jr. Peacemaker Award in early October by the Peace Action Fund of New York State. A longtime special-education teacher and former teachers union president who raised three children in Harrison, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., she has been a peace activist since at least 1971, when she was among the founders of Women Strike for Peace, which fought nuclear testing. She has been all over the world, fact-gathering and attending forums, including Cuba (when it was off-limits), Vietnam (with the antiwar movement ), Japan, China, Kenya, and Denmark. 

  Ms. Lerner was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for 20 years. Now the director of the executive committee of the 1,000-member Non-Governmental Organization Department of Public Information, she spends three or four days a week at the U.N., where she works to engage others, particularly the young, in its activities.

Cora Weiss, a part-time East Hamptoner who was profiled in The Star in August, gave a few words of introduction to Ms. Lerner at the dinner at which the Peacemaker award was presented. Speaking of Mr. Coffin, she said he could gather people of different persuasions together. “And you,” Ms. Weiss said, referring to Ms. Lerner, “persuade people also: to campaign against nuclear weapons, to call for no more war, to work together with other peace groups, to learn about the United Nations, and to call for education for peace in our schools.”

Noting that she was almost 95 years old, Ms. Lerner also spoke. “I only hope that I reach 100 years and can look back at all of my work and struggle for a world without war. . . . Together we will not only ensure peace and equality, but we will do something else significant. We will disrupt aging!” 

East Hampton is often thought of as a place where celebrities roam, and that is not incorrect. But among our celebrities are people who would never think of themselves in that way, but whose life work may help make this a better world.

William Wordsworth’s words came crashing into my head as I tried without luck to think of something cheerful to write about yesterday.

The unexpected, accidental death of Janis Hewitt, the East Hampton Star’s longtime Montauk correspondent, threw a wrench into all our proceedings.

The world is too much with us; late and soon

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;          

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Janis wrote for The Star for so many years that her work fills six thick manila folders in the backroom file cabinets, going back to at least 1996 and clipped from the newspaper by a part-time librarian before everything was digitized. She covered the gamut — news stories, features, and many, many personal columns under the “Relay” head. It was Janis’s 1996 front-page story that announced that Montauk residents had turned down a proposition to incorporate as a separate village by a 3-to-1 margin. A few years later, in 1999, she wrote about the “nightmare” of finding seasonal housing for the summer work force. The title was “Where to Put the Irish.” 

But it is likely that she will be remembered most for the humor she brought to the “Relay” spot, which is handed around among the staff. My guess is that there are more of them from Janis than anyone else past or present who works here.

The first Janis Hewitt “Relay” I found as I made a quick survey was published on March 14, 1996. In it, she said she had decided to spend her first winter in Montauk in 1973, and she went on to describe a Santa parade during which it snowed.

The deadline for this column has long passed, but I can think of nothing — or no one — else. Today’s Star has a story about the accident that claimed her life, but the full obituary her life will have to wait for another day. Suffice it to say that if Janis had decided to write her own obituary it would be full of humor.

You can find a number of Janis’s columns by going to The Star website and searching for Janis Hewitt Relay. 

News that the Maidstone Club, having just gotten a new irrigation system in place for its golf course, now wants to build a new bridge over an upper reach of Hook Pond reminded me of my childhood in East Hampton Village. In those days, the mid-1970s, we could roam a lot more freely than kids can today. 

From about seventh grade on, my friends and I spent a lot of time poking around Hook Pond and the Nature Trail dreen. From my family’s house behind the library, we could walk with our fishing poles and a bucket of worms across to Jeffery’s Lane, past the club tennis house, and onto the course’s longer bridge.

Other times we could push a little farther, crossing the bottom of a field that was still farmed to get to a shorter, falling down span known as Joiner’s Bridge. That bridge, which also reaches the golf course, was recently rebuilt by the new property owner on the private side of the pond. It still appears as if it is decaying into the pond, but this time on purpose.

In retrospect, I suppose we were trespassing when we cast for bass and perch from the pond’s bridges, but no one ever objected. In fact, golfers often would stop to ask how the fishing was going. Nowadays, the feeling is different; I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone fishing from either of these bridges, let alone the Dunemere Lane vehicle bridge, and there are signs reminding would-be visitors that the course itself is private property. May­­be there are fewer fish. 

My son, Ellis, and I got it into our minds to see what was what from the Main Beach side of the pond the other day. And, while we saw signs of fish splashing on the surface, we could get nothing to rise to our hooks.

For my dollar, I would prefer not to see another bridge over the pond, which belongs to the town trustees, but if the club insists that it has to have one, perhaps it might be willing sweeten the pot by allowing the public to fish from its crossings again.