A funny thing happened on the way to the Concerned Citizens of Montauk forum. I had been invited to take part by its president, Jeremy Samuelson, and had expected the subject for Saturday’s discussion might include summertime crowds, water quality, and short-term rentals. But as it turned out, the nearly two-hour meeting centered on only one thing: the United States Army Corps of Engineers sandbag seawall.

One of the problems with off-season policy discussions is how soon we forget. The South Fork, and Montauk in particular, is overcrowded in the summer, and one would think that how to regain a degree of control might be taken up. However, with Montauk’s main commercial district jeopardized by the immediate threat of storms and the long-term certainty of sea level rise, thoughts of what to do about it tend to dominate.

Much of downtown Montauk is simply in the wrong place. Few, if any, of the 90-plus people, as well as those of us on the panel, seemed to disagree with that observation. There was less unanimity about what to do.

During the forum, I said that the Army Corps’s offer to place hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand on the ocean beach will only put off the day of reckoning. Human nature being what it is, I said, once the immediate threat of the front row of motels falling into the sea is gone, attention will shift to other issues.

Paul Monte, the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, spoke for many when he said he favored an ongoing program of sand replenishment to buy time until a long-term answer is found. For that, he received a round of applause.

My comment that the Army Corps should be removed from the coastal management business in favor of a different, more natural resource-focused federal agency was well taken. The corps is all about protecting structures and private property. Tellingly, I think, its symbol is a tower-like, immovable stone fortress — wholly at odds with the dynamics of shifting shorelines and climate change.

Over all, I was impressed both by the size of the audience at the forum and by the crowd’s sharp attention. It is difficult to imagine as large a group with as intense a focus anywhere else on the East End.

Why are there Russian teenagers wearing $700 down parkas on the popcorn line at the East Hampton Cinema?

I walked over to the movie theater on Main Street the other night thinking about high blood pressure, and how I ought to exercise more, and nearly blew a gasket when the ticket-taker told me he had to search my bag. 

“Are you serious?” I asked. “What for?” 

“For guns,” he said, gesturing like his hand was a pistol: “Guns.” 

“Are you serious?” 

I turned from the ticket-taker to the suited guy in the booth for confirmation. “Is he serious?” 

“He’s serious. It’s company policy.” 

The ticket-taker poked around in my floral cinch-top bucket bag for a concealed weapon. “Not guns here, so much, but guns other places,” he said. “It’s Regal Cinema’s national policy.” 

“Really?” I said, looking pointlessly around at the Russian teenagers for sup port. “I’m still upset that you don’t sell Peanut Chews anymore — and now you have to search our bags for guns?” 

The man in the ticket booth gave a quizzical nod of empathy. 

I continued to protest: “I’m still upset that when you phone 324-0448 you don’t hear the recorded movie times anymore . . . and now you’re searching our bags for guns?” The guy in the booth shrugged, gave a weak smile, and turned away. 

Obviously, they are not as sentimental as I am at the East Hampton Cinema about phone numbers and Peanut Chews. I moved home from Nova Scotia last year, after seven or eight living in Canada, and have spent the last 18 months complaining about changes around town, much to the irritation of my children. 

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. 

What happened to the red rosebushes on the fence at Odd Fellows Hall (a.k.a. Gordon Peavy’s dance studio, a.k.a. Eileen Fisher)? How did they become so meager?

The matching, velvety-red roses on the fence at the train station? I can guess what happened to those ones: The evergreens someone planted to “beautify” the space parallel to the platform grew so tall while I was away in Canada that the rosebushes no longer get enough sun. The train-station-fence roses are a frail shadow of their former glory. Who is in charge of the roses? Can I write a letter to someone?

When did people start calling the East Hampton Town Board the “town council”?

Am I the only one who is unhappy with the newfangled Halloween ritual of marching children store to store for trick-or-treating instead of letting them run (somewhat) wild and (relatively) unchaperoned through darkened neighborhoods?

I have accustomed myself to the sight of the men and women in pseudo-Moroccan caftans or Vilebrequin swim trunks who whiz down the street on bicycles or skateboards as they simultaneously fiddle with their phones, eyes down, but I do worry I will run one of them over with my car.

The parking lots at the ocean beaches this summer were, predictably, even more crowded than they were eight years ago, but, weirdly, the water was emptier. Why aren’t there more swimmers? Do people only swim in pools nowadays?

Furthermore, where is the white corn?

Winston Churchill — supposedly — said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” I have to admit I must be middle-aged now. I will never be conservative politically, but I’m a radical conservative when it comes to preservation of any sort, even of things like Peanut Chews, the natural-born right of Americans to jaywalk, and telephone area codes.

I’d like to turn back time to the summers when small children didn’t wear string bikinis. A functional one-piece maillot or, for the very-very young, just running naked at the beach was better. The weekend after Labor Day, I saw a mite of about 5 or 6 wearing tiny bikini bottoms with no top other than a peekaboo white-crochet halter: the Kim Kardashian look for the kindergarten set.

Does this make me a curmudgeon?

The caste system out here has definitely gotten more entrenched — the class divide more shocking — since I left the country in 2009. I mean, have you ever seen so many Maseratis in your life? Are all these new Euro summer people shipping them over for the season on freighters, or what? My children, in July, took to counting them as we sat in traffic, en route to day camp: two Maseratis where the bowling alley used to be, a vintage DeLorean near where the horses used to graze at Hardscrabble, a Bugatti here, a Lamborghini there. . . .

In a Sag Harbor home-goods store, a few weeks ago, I noticed a set of highly expensive throw pillows with screen prints of Masai warriors’ faces as a decorative motif. People’s exoticized “ethnic” likenesses as an interior-decoration pattern: That’s not just bad taste, that’s a whole other level of . . . something not good. Obtuseness about our own privileges, maybe?

Because I cannot end this short essay on a grinch-like note, I will now press myself to admit that not all the changes I’ve noticed since my return home are entirely bad. Some of them are actually good.

I’m glad the public in general is finally talking about beach-access rights.

And our food, for instance, has gotten even better. It’s spectacular, really. Farm stands have proliferated; that’s beautiful to see. I cannot understand who is buying $10 single servings of bottled juice at Citarella — 10 dollars? really? for a single-serve watermelon juice? — but I practically swooned when I found smoked, locally caught bluefish salad in Amagansett not long ago.

True, I haven’t heard the cry of a single whippoorwill since I got back from Canada, but there were far more fireflies flashing and beaming in my yard all August than there ever were before. The pleasant chorus of insects at night is far, far louder than it used to be, too — are those cicadas?

I can’t get behind the chic-ifying of the Old Stove Pub, but I’m so glad the luncheonette at the Poxabogue golf course hasn’t changed, and that the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton hasn’t changed an iota, either. The only thing at the Candy Kitchen that has altered over the last decade is the ketchup dispenser: It used to be the pointy-ended squeeze-bottle kind, with which you could apply a smiley face to your hamburger patty. Do you remember? The squeeze bottle. I miss that.

Bess Rattray is a freelance writer and editor for The Star’s East magazine whose work has appeared in Vogue, Vogue.com, Bookforum, ELLE, and Salon.com.

Had I met Larry Brown at the pickup games the other night, I would, had I not been barred at the gates — “No media,” they said, though, looking about, it seemed I was the sole medium around — have told him that were he to coach here I intended to become the legal guardian of our 10 and 7-year-old basketball-crazed grandsons who live in Perrysburg, Ohio.

The more the merrier, I say. After all, we’ve got a puppy who, in dog terms, will approach their ages in little more than a year. It would enliven the house, whose upstairs, while beautifully appointed now, is unoccupied. And there’s a Ping-Pong table in the basement that’s looking lonely.

Puppies keep you on your toes, and so do grandchildren. It occurs to me, however, that it will be hard to train O’en out of jumping up if Jack and Max, in going for the hoop, which, of course, we’d put outside, are always doing so.

A friend of my daughter’s, one who’s around my age, told Emily during a recent visit to Sewickley, Pa., that her kids reminded her of me at their age, though while I can lay claim to having been as athletic (my mother said I was running at 9 months), they, as I think is the case with all eight of my grandchildren, are smarter. I can do letters, but not numbers, which, of course, is why I was entrusted to do the budget stories for this paper in the past, and why I’m wondering if I’ve counted correctly. A ninth grandchild — I think I have it right — is to arrive in February.

The puppy has already outgrown the crate we had, and in bringing a bigger one upstairs this morning — on loan from a co-worker, Kathleen— I said to Greg, who was helping me, that O’en might be easier to look after in the office than at home — because we hadn’t taught him to read yet. 

Seriously, if Larry Brown becomes East Hampton High’s boys basketball coach, won’t this place become a lodestone for young relations, however distant the bloodline and however far-flung, who love shooting hoops?

The dribbling tide might put a strain on the school systems, but it could well revivify East Hampton’s aging population. It would get the blood flowing again.

Or maybe puppies alone will suffice.

A biblical-grade plague descended on Montauk in recent days, according to residents and visitors. And what has people talking is not the oversupply of bros and hipsters. 

Swarming black flies have suddenly appeared at Montauk Point and on north-facing beaches in stunning numbers. As far as I know, these are not the same dreaded black flies of New Hampshire and Maine — those things leave swelling welts; the Montauk menaces just hurt like hell.

I first met up with the flies with my son, Ellis, at Hither Hills, where we had gone to snorkel and look at fish on Saturday. Going into the water, there was no sign of what was to come, but when we emerged it was as if we had stumbled into a nest of hornets. 

Slapping at our legs and arms, Ellis and I ran to my truck, jumped inside, and started to go. The problem was that a good three dozen of the flies had followed us into the cab. It was difficult to fend them off my exposed ankles and drive at the same time, let me tell you.

Monday night, getting out of the water after surfing near Montauk Point, it was even worse. Hundreds of them, drawn, it was clear, by the moisture on my skin and surfboard, rushed in. Cursing and stumbling, I made my way as quickly as possible back up the trail. The bug spray that I had stashed with my flip-flops did nothing at all, diluted, I assumed, by the saltwater still on my skin.

It is kind of a fitting thing, I suppose, right when the waves are getting good, thanks to Hurricane Gaston far out in the ocean to the east and surfers have a little more time to get in the water, that a new challenge, like the flies, arises. There’s a bit of poetry in that, cussing like a sailor nothwithstanding. 

Perhaps someone among our readers knows where a bundle of damp beach things came from and will tell me. I found it on an upholstered stool near the living room door one afternoon in early August, and accused my 15-year-old grandson of knowing who left it there. He had arrived that day alone and left on foot and was as puzzled as I.

The bundle contained a thick, dark-blue towel about six feet long with a handsome insignia on it for Fighting Chance, the Sag Harbor organization that aids those struggling with cancer; a pale-orange T-shirt made of nylon and elastane with the brand name O’Neill emblazoned across the chest, and a red pair of GapKids extra-large boy’s bathing trunks. The shirt and trunks were obviously much too small for the 15-year-old and ridiculously too big for either of my 6-year-old grandsons.

I took them to the laundry room, where they have remained, and when I picked them up to take another look, a week later, they were still damp. August certainly was muggy, wasn’t it?

None of the neighbors is a young man, and no one seemed to have visitors who would fit into the trunks or shirt. Could this be one of those cases in which random roving summer visitors wander into the wrong house? You do hear about people coming home and finding strangers napping in the flower bed or porch swing.

Well, if anyone can claim these things, please give me a call. They looked almost new, and the swimming days of summer are nearly over.

Another August mystery, at least for me, is how the term “August people” became ubiquitous. I must lead a pretty sheltered life in the summer — hiding out, as so many of us do, to the point of almost becoming antisocial — because I hadn’t heard these words used pejoratively until a recent Star staff meeting. 

About a month ago, when a Bloomberg journalist phoned to ask for my opinion on what the nickname for this summer would turn out to be — something usually comes to the fore, like “the summer of the Surf Lodge” or “the summer before Sandy,” in reference to the hurricane — I suggested “the summer crowding got out of control,” which she said was too obvious to catch on. (She was right. It’s not exactly catchy. And heaven knows we’ve been saying the crowding has been “the worst” every summer for 15 or 20 years now . . . though this year, honestly, I think the cultural consensus is that it’s finally and indisputably true that we’ve reached maximum capacity. Anyway.)  

Later, I asked around and found that a number of friends and colleagues thought “August people”could be used for the whole season, to indicate it really had been the most dire: the summer of the August people.

Unpleasantries were described: a tenant who screamed at a landlord, claiming he was spying on her, when he arrived to pick up the garbage; a woman at a shop counter who angrily demanded her change be made more quickly; more and more drivers refusing to give way when obviously appropriate; neighborly pleasantries greeted with snarls and snubs; “namaste” being turned into a passive-aggressive come-back . . . and on and on.

“August people” as a concept was explained by the theory that visitors become tense and unpleasant, and occasionally aggressive, because they are desperately trying to squeeze the last few drops out of a waning summer (for which, in some cases, they have paid dearly). But this year, I was told, the August behavior had begun in July.

It was the summer of rudeness, they said.

Now, I’m not sure I buy it that the rudeness was turned up a notch, but I don’t really have anything better to suggest.

But while we’re on the subject: If you read my account here last week of the first Hamptons Institute panel at Guild Hall, at which the audience booed and hissed, you might be interested to hear that the second panel, on the Supreme Court, went smoothly, with nary a catcall. The audience was quiet and respectful of what the panelists had to say, and Alec Baldwin was engaged and engaging as moderator. It was August, yes, but everyone acted just like April.

I was sorry to miss the third panel, but from the live-streamed version on YouTube, it seemed the audience had reverted to form.

Shorebirds, sanderlings, probably, dashed ahead of the uprushing water at Wiborg’s Beach on Monday evening as storm waves broke all the way out to the horizon. Hermine, which started as a tropical depression in the Florida Straits about a week earlier, had crossed into the Atlantic and by then had drifted to within 200 miles of Long Island. 

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center began paying close attention to the system on Aug. 28, first calling it tropical depression nine. By last Thursday it had strengthened to a tropical storm and was threatening the Gulf Coast of Florida. Hermine eventually made landfall near St. Marks, Fla., with winds of about 80 miles an hour.

On Saturday, after Hermine’s winds had declined, it popped out on the Atlantic side, regaining some strength and starting a halting course more or less northward into our area. By the beginning of the week, the forecasters were calling Hermine a post-tropical cyclone, meaning that it was no longer behaving like a tropical storm and was not nearly a hurricane. Its effects began to be really felt here on Labor Day, with fast moving clouds, light rain, and a riled-up ocean.

Although much of the weekend crowd had left early because of news reports and an evacuation order issued in error by the county, there were plenty of people on the beach, watching the spectacle and taking pictures with their phones. 

The sanderlings seemed nonchalant, racing in on their fast little feet to probe in the sand as a wave receded, then taking wing and flying quickly back up the beach when an other wave approached. Their quick reactions probably explain why they appear indifferent to us on the beach.

Shorebirds are a tough lot. There’s one that I sometimes see on the rock jetties at Georgica taking waves on the head as it picks around the seaweed for something to eat. With all the invertebrates to be had, a dunking is well worth it, in an evolutionary sense.

The sanderlings were at it again when I checked the beach the next morning. We might head to the shore to look in awe at the power of it all; for the birds it is an abundant free meal.

I remember Arthur Roth likened dying to getting on a train. Here comes the train, he said, soon before he did. I’ve got to get on.

I, on the other hand, am thinking of jumping out of a plane. I did that as a youth, for a brief period, and, as I said to Rob Balnis, my personal trainer, the other day, it was at the same time scary and fun.

Whenever Mary and I go by Spadaro Airport, I say, “Why don’t we jump out of a plane,” but she will have none of it. I won’t either, not after having seen a friend of mine’s cheeks flap like a Bassett’s ears in the wind in the video of his 75th birthday’s descent.  I just say it to get a rise out of her. 

I didn’t puff myself up too much in telling jump stories at East End Physical Therapy. I just did it in training, I told them, never in combat. And there was no free-falling to speak of, only for the first couple of seconds before your chute, attached to a communal clothesline of sorts, popped open.

At jump school, we leaped from a 34-foot tower, 34 feet apparently being the height at which you either would or wouldn’t. And if you froze, they sometimes gave you a little nudge. There was no standing on ceremony. One guy prodded thus, did a 180 and grabbed the tower floor with both hands and dangled there. “He was the most athletic of us all,” I said. 

We were attached to a line there too, one that slanted down toward a berm. “Like a zip line?” said Rob. “Yes, like that.”

“Me and Jerry Hey used to take paperbacks with us when we jumped — there was this wonderful bookstore where we went all the time, Tuttle’s, of Okinawa and Rutland, Vermont, who would ever have thought of that? I used to read James Agee’s ‘A Death in the Family’ as we circled the drop zone. Hey would be reading Henry V’s ‘Once more unto the breach . . . stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. . . .’ ”

We were paper tigers, not King Henry’s kind. There was no noble lustre in our eyes. I wound up clerking for the chaplain and did time teaching tennis in satisfaction of a minor offense before I was discharged, having never left the island except to visit Yap and Babelthuap.

“At any rate,” I said to Rob. “I’ve come to the conclusion that jumping out of a plane serves well as a metaphor for birth and death. And I wish I could tell you, when it comes to the latter, whether my chute opens.”

I had been saying that I was going to Nova Scotia, but that turned out to be one of those typically American mistakes about Canadian geography that so horrify our neighbors to the north: Prince Edward Island, which we visited last week, sits above Nova Scotia and is a province of its own. 

Everyone refers to the island as P.E.I., and I did, too, despite my aversion to cutesy short takes, acronyms, and the like. We had been told Prince Edward Island is like the South Fork of 40 or 50 years ago, but based on a week’s evidence I disagree. P.E.I. is another country not only because — as in all of Canada — its signage and governance are bilingual, with written French and English everywhere, but because the people seem to share a disarming temperament. They’re easy-going, warm, and engagingly friendly!

Of course, I did find myself making comparisons. Like the East End, Prince Edward Island has a three-month resort season (although it’s now true that ours stretches to May and September), and many businesses there that cater to tourists close up, as many of ours do, after Labor Day. Also, we’re both into potatoes. Some 88,000 acres in P.E.I. are planted in spuds, I was told, providing one-quarter of all those grown in Canada. I told anyone who evinced even mild curiosity that eastern Long Island was once known for its potatoes, too, but that our fields these days mostly sprout McMansions. P.E.I. also grows wheat, barley, and canola. Lobster remains a common denominator; the P.E.I. lobster is a bit smaller, on average, than those that are still harvested by the boatload in the Gulf of Maine. And we feasted on mussels and Malpeque oysters.

In much of Canada, especially the west and north, aboriginal people are a powerful presence, but on P.E.I., as on Long Island, aboriginals’ presence isn’t very evident to visitors — in our case, the Montauketts, in theirs, the Mi’kmaq. Tourists on P.E.I. tend to be from Ontario or Nova Scotia, or from Japan, of all places. What draws droves in tour buses all the way from Tokyo? The timeless appeal of the “Anne of Green Gables” books, which schoolgirls everywhere clearly still adore.

Then there are the Acadians. As a child I learned about their plight in the 18th century from Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” but I didn’t know that others, who sought safety in the Canadian Maritimes, suffered expulsion and tragedy, too. We visited P.E.I.’s Acadian museum, on the west end of the province, which described what befell them, as well as their eventual return. Today, those of Acadian descent savor their own culture and support public schools where French is the first language.

As for the landscape, it is similar to what ours used to be — in that the classic P.E.I. vista is an open stretch of potato fields ending in beach-grass-covered dunes and ocean waves — but there are many very distinct differences: For starters, their soil is red (really red! there’s even a folk song about red dirt, and shops selling “dirt shirts” dyed with soil). Much of the province unfolds in gorgeous rolling hills dotted with cattle; we watched combines as they mowed hay, leaving behind picturesque rows of big, round hay rolls instead of haystacks. We visited a goat farm, and a mill making wool blankets. Ocean dunes and empty beaches stretch for uninterrupted miles on the north coast.

In addition to Acadian culture,  a musical throwback to the Scots and Irish who settled in P.E.I. certainly makes it very different from eastern Long Island. A ceilidh (pronounced KAY-lee) is basically what the Nova Scotians call a “kitchen party”: a good-humored musical evening. Ceilidhs are popular tourist attractions, and they seemed to occur every night in small community halls rather than pubs. 

The one we attended was led by a talented musician on accordion, piano, and guitar, and an Irish jokester and storyteller on harmonica and accordion. The audience sang as directed and clapped and stamped its feet with gusto. Two young women showed off their step-dancing prowess. A 50-50 raffle was introduced with a song and explanation that the money went to the women’s institute that ran the hall. A man from Ottawa won $90 Canadian.

Another surprising difference between P.E.I. and home is that the surf there, arriving on the beaches over multiple sandbars — and, coming down from the north over the Gulf of St. Lawrence without as broad a fetch — is too low and mild to attract surfers, who don’t seem to exist. Despite the warmth of the water, we saw none (and hardly any evidence of yoga chic).

Then there is Charlottetown, the capital — a town, really, rather than a city — which boasts old  buildings that have not been torn down, three bookstores, a used-comic-book store, and a candy store called Freak Lunchbox, which sells every imaginable sweet, from the familiar to the intentionally disgusting (to the delight of my grandchildren, and the disgust of grandma). Of course, there was also an “Anne of Green Gables” store and “Anne of Green Gables” chocolate shop on Queen Street, the main commercial thoroughfare.

At The Star, I have tended to disparage travelogues readers sometimes send us for publication, thinking I’d rather pay attention to the opinions of someone who isn’t “from away,” a term that is still used in P.E.I., as it still is, in some circles, here. Still, I really want to tell you about my trip to Prince Edward Island . . . and I will try to bite my tongue next time I scoff.  

I have always been able to draw. Not Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci draw, but I have always had the knack to make a thing look like the thing it is supposed to be. 

As a grammar school student, faced with high school, my parents encouraged me to apply to the High School of Music and Art. Uh-oh, a portfolio was needed for that. 

Now, I could draw, but I was never the easel painter artist who followed a muse and just had to create. I was always the fulfill-the-assignment kind of drawer. So, for the portfolio I had to make as a seventh grader I listened to my mother (who acted as my art director) when she suggested I look at the spots in The New Yorker and try to do some stuff like that. (Note to The New Yorker: Thanks.)  And then she said, “Just look around and draw what you see — a shelf of stuffed animals or a pile of shoes.”

She reminded me it was not so much the subject as how the subject was drawn.

That summer I developed an eye for clutter (seventh graders are really good making clutter), and I developed what later was called “a tight hand.” In short, that means a confident pen line without the sketchy wobbly bits, a pen or pencil line that could draw the contour of a chair or even a face without needing or wanting to stop. I got into Music and Art, and I continued to learn how to look. 

As for drawing, I got a few “art jobs” after college, all really in part because I could draw small and tight. An employment agent was the one who told me I had a tight hand, and she sent me to a job designing custom rugs. There I needed to be able to draw and then paint a very realistic rose three-eighths of an inch across. (Take a ruler and look at it and try it. It ain’t easy.)

Tiny roses and shaded acanthus leaves were added to my skill set. Meanwhile, as gifts for my parents’ friends in Orient, in the summer I would continue to draw people’s houses. Many of the large houses you see on the hill as you drive on the causeway toward Orient were rendered by me in pen and ink during those summers.

One of the best jobs I ever had was for an art materials company. I was doing graphic design for them but part of my job was, amazingly, to draw whatever I wanted, Photostat the drawings, color them in using the product (Bourges paper), and give the samples to sales reps to use on the road. Perfect, no? 

Finally I landed a job at Glamour magazine doing promotional graphic design. My portfolio of drawings got the attention of editorial art department, and (freelance) I became the illustrator used by Glamour for the whole of the 1970s. Eventually, I could draw how to bone a chicken, roll out a pie dough, how to short-sheet a bed, rewire a lamp, and how to put your hair up in pin curls. I had to draw exercises from Polaroid photographs and figure out how to illustrate trimming your own bangs. 

I invented a few characters who could not cope with the “sticky situation” of the month, and my drawings even got fan mail. Thanks to a collaboration with that art director, Michelle Braverman, I was the illustrator for the “How to Do Anything Better” guide and I got to draw stuff for money.  

In the 1980s that knack for what my father called “expository drawings” led to some cookbook illustrations for the author Maria Robbins of Springs, whom I had met through my husband. 

Her cookbooks led to other cookbooks and when Maria’s editor moved on and changed jobs I managed to stay in her phone directories. 

Every few years some crazy pregnant exercise book or “bread machine cookbook” or book on how to help your special needs child integrate learning with fun would need illustrations and I would get a call from that very loyal editor. Then I would haul out the very same pens I had used in college and at Glamour (Rapidograph 00 point, India ink) and do the assignment. They were always fun and I always learned how to draw something new.

Full time in East Hampton for many years now, I still practice “seeing” in my capacity as contributor to The Star and I still draw stuff. 

Fast-forward to March 2015, with many, many little books under my belt and a good relationship with my very loyal book editor. (Thank you, Maria, for the path to Marian Lizzi of Penguin Random House.) On that day in March, my friend Mo Cohen at the Ladies Village Improvement Society, where I volunteer, pointed out an article in The New York Times business section about a Scottish lady who was making a name for herself drawing coloring books for grown-ups. 

“Mo,” I said, “I can do that. I can do a coloring book, I can do that!” (Thank you, Mo. I might have missed that article had it not been for you.) 

I went home and emailed Marian Lizzi. “I can make a coloring book for you,” I wrote. 

She wanted to see samples and I sent some of the cluttered interiors I had always drawn. The next day came this message: “Can you give us 60 in a month?” 

I could, and I did, and the clutter of my life became a coloring book.

Eight months later there are people in Indonesia and Malaysia and Russia and Brazil coloring my drawn pages. Some share the colorations with me, and their work makes me so proud that my work is out there for them. A lady wrote to me to say coloring helps with the pain of her fibromyalgia. 

The ripple effect of ink on paper is quite remarkable. The pen is truly mightier than the sword.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer and illustrator for The Star and the newspaper’s East magazine. Her coloring book, “Color Me Cluttered,” was published in 2015. 

The phone rang and, seeing it was my daughter, I answered it. Why, she wondered, was I not already at the Hampton Classic?

I was going, I was going, I said — not with unbridled enthusiasm though — in a little bit. And were we prepared for the storm, she asked. Of course we weren’t prepared, I answered. 

Well, if it turned out that we needed anything, we should not hesitate to call. I told her we would, marveling at the ease with which round-the-clock weather channels can induce widespread panic.

I’ve lived here for practically half a century, and there’s only been one time when we’ve been without power for more than a day or two, and that was because the Long Island Power Authority’s map of our neighborhood hadn’t been updated in a generation, which, because they thought it was sparsely populated, and with mostly summer homes, landed us at the bottom of the list, until Bill Leland set them straight. 

Yes, yes, I know, someday, someday. . . . It was the same with Mary’s mother. For years, she predicted the market would crash, and, after years and years, it did, and she could at long last say I told you so. 

Gloom and doom will eventually get you somewhere. Sell, sell! Evacuate, evacuate!

Are we like sheep? Sheep passing in the night? Sheep pissing in the night? But then if there are no lights, there is the lawn. Lights are a boon, yes, but, as I said to Mary’s sister, Georgie, the other night, with a certain bravado, “There are two things I can’t live without — women and paper towels.”

I expected she might reply in kind, though, skipping men, she acknowledged that paper towels were indeed a necessity.

At any rate, I finally ambled over to the Classic. And, lo, to my surprise, found on arriving that they’d started the Grand Prix an hour early! The rumored storm had prompted the change. I, clueless, as ever, hadn’t gotten the emailed word. 

But I had only missed the first rider, the weather was beautiful, and the class was over in record time — in well under two hours. It was with a light step then that, soon after, with my head filled with just the right number of facts, I left the showgrounds, eager to celebrate with Mary the end of summer. 

Sometimes it pays not to know before you go. Jack Graves