My Uncle Herman, the baby among my mother’s siblings who is well into his 90s now, took me to Lindy’s, the midtown Manhattan restaurant, when I was about 13 for a lobster.

I remember feeling paralyzed as I wondered what I was supposed to do with it and his telling me to just imitate the way diners at other tables were attacking theirs. The only seafood my parents indulged in when I was growing up had come from Jewish delis — smoked whitefish, for example. 

Fifteen years later, when I came to East Hampton, I was initiated into the joys of myriad shellfish. A quick learner, I would show off my newfound knowledge when others “from away” timidly asked whether, for example, local clams were okay. “Of course!” I would tell them, smugly.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine that some day the answer might be “no,” that our pristine harbors would, at least on occasion, have to be closed to shellfishing, particularly after heavy rains, or that the crabs I had fun going after at Georgica Pond would some day be off-limits. If anyone, local baymen included, understood what the inevitable effects of population growth here would be they weren’t saying. I learned to love all the shellfish available here, as well as the remarkable variety of fish from local waters. 

All this has changed. The future health of our waterways is in doubt. 

This week, Georgica and Wainscott Ponds were once again found to be loaded with cyanobacteria, a toxic blue-green algae. To their credit, the East Hampton Town Trustees continue to pay for a study of the waterways in their jurisdiction by a Stony Brook University scientist, and the Nature Conservancy has sponsored an educational film about nitrogen as the basic culprit. 

  So it was when I ordered oysters at a local restaurant recently, I thought I was taking a chance. Honest-to-goodness native oysters, the delicious ones from Shinnecock Bay, for example, aren’t usually on menus here. It turned out that the oysters I ordered had been farmed somewhere in Peconic Bay, which, for me at least, made their quality suspect. Nevertheless, there was nothing wrong with them — except for a lack of saltiness and scant flavor.

Don’t get me wrong, farmed oysters are better than none, and those called Montauk Pearls, which come from a local company which grows them in Lake Montauk, are excellent. But making do with something that is reminiscent of what used to be is tinged with sadness.

As for lobsters, I  like them as much as anyone else and still consider them a treat. But I know their numbers are declining in Long Island waters and that someday the better part of valor might be to simply remember what they were like.

It turns out that sea robin are fine to eat. Very fine, in fact, which is good, since my son, Ellis, has suddenly become a fishing fanatic. Sea robin have taken over the shallows near our house on Gardiner’s Bay, and for a kid just learning to cast a rod, they hit the lure with satisfying dependability and put up just enough fight to be interesting. There also seems to be an inexhaustible supply.

This past Saturday, Ellis and I stopped at a yard sale in the trailer park at Ditch Plain and bought him a blue spinning rod and matching reel. Back at the bay, Ellis reeled up sea robin with nearly every cast, filling a red plastic bucket.

Turning to the internet for help, I looked up how to clean them; the best how-to came from England, where a man with very big hands demonstrated his technique. It’s fairly simple: You cut down either side of the dorsal fins to free the skin, then cut just through the sea robin’s spine just behind its head, but not all the way so the head doesn’t come off. Instead, the head becomes a handle, and you can use it to carefully pull the skin off the tail portion — where all the meat is. After that, it is a simple matter of cooking them on the bone or slicing off fillets.

I had intended to adapt a New York Times recipe for sweet and hot shrimp, but getting home late on Monday, there was only time for the basics: a dusting with adobo, garlic powder, and flour and a quick saute in a cast-iron pan with canola oil. They were spectacularly good, with much more flavor than striped bass but free of the oiliness that bothers some people about bluefish.

Traditional trash fish, like sea robin, make some of the best eating. Then there are fish once held in low regard that are undergoing makeovers, such as the porgy, which, in the kitchens of some restaurant chefs, is being rebranded as Montauk sea bream. The fact that so-called trash fish are easy for kids to catch makes it all the better.

I was stuck in traffic, going west — on  that part of Montauk Highway that slows down after Stephen Hand’s Path and before the way off the highway to take the back road. 

I was creeping along, looking around, of course. Behind me were two guys on huge motorcycles. The first thing I thought was,“Marlon Brando in ‘The Wild One.’ ” It’s a reflex. Sorry. The next thing I thought was basically the same thing. But we weren’t moving and my mind wandered, not far from how menacing they appeared — metal helmets like upside down pots. They could have gone around and snuck up the verge. Many do. 

They didn’t. Would they fall off, I wondered, if we came to a complete halt rather than creeping along? Do they put their feet down? Are they wearing scary boots and things? Let me remind you, my mind was wandering around, entertaining itself, but I could hear their motors, the “Wild One” motors, so I kept coming back to feeling just a teeny bit threatened by their big motorcycles that were right behind me in traffic. Next to each other. In my rear-view mirrors. 

Traffic began to move a tiny bit and one pulled up on my passenger side. 

Ohmygod.

I roll down the window a smidge. Is he going to go by or what? He motions to roll it down more.

Okay, is he an undercover cop and I’m being pulled over for having catnip in the car? I smile, of course. You want to be nice when you are nervous and of course the news makes anyone in a car nervous, with a motorcycle pulling up. Hi.

“Your gas cap is hanging,” he said. 

Uhhhhhhh, not expecting that.

“Oh my,” I said, “I don’t know what to do about that out here on the highway.”

“I’ll fix it for you,” he said, stayed put as I crept a bit forward, and he tightened the cap. 

“You are my hero,” I said to him when he pulled forward to give me a thumbs-up that it was all fine.

And it was all fine, and I got off the highway at the back road and tooted to the guys and waved. 

Thanks, gents, whoever you are. I learned a thing or two out there in traffic. 

I have passed that slowdown almost every day since and I haven’t failed to think of them, hanging back, noticing my gas cap, wondering if they should do something — easy not to — deciding to help the dame in the silly car. 

So grateful to them. Godspeed.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star and an illustrator whose work can be seen in the first two issues of The Star’s new magazine, East. 

So, I did it. With help from a kind, generous friend in Montauk, I got another car. Not a 240, but a Subaru, 2001 Forester. Had about 80,000 miles on it. Nice.

I haven’t put a bullet through the old Volvo 240 yet. I have visions dancing in my head, after my book comes out next year, of another advance, paying off the Subaru, then getting the 240 wagon back on the road. Or maybe not. Maybe another new-old 240. Call me a member of the 240 Love Club.

All this car talk leads to my Giant Rincon bicycle. It was my main form of transportation for many months, straight through the winter. Then I had a car, and left my beloved, bedraggled bike out in the yard. Car here, car there, drive your car everywhere.

Until one morning I stepped on the bathroom scale. Jeez! Time to get back on the bike. 

Since soaking in the sobering sight of those numbers that do not lie, I’ve been on the bike every morning at daybreak, come rain or shine. 

Except, of course, the time I went down for my ride and found no bike at all. A thief had made off with it during the night. But the creep got his, when the gears jammed. He tossed my bike into the bushes a couple of blocks away, where East Hampton Town Police Officer Grace Peterson spotted it 24 hours later. Thank you, Grace!

I have stuck to my regime, stretching the ride out daily. My favorite course right now is away from town past Ditch, then double back through Ditch, to Shadmoor State Park. When we lived on Caswell (so many years, too many years ago), I used to love to run through the park, with its great hilly, narrow paths, tricky with rocks. My knees and ankles aren’t up to that run anymore, but on the bike it is a dream. Work, work, work up a hill, then fly down the other side, keeping eyes peeled for the boulders that stick up through the glacier-compressed soil.

Daybreak is the only time that ride is safe. Get out there before the joggers, and the other bikers. And the sun, low in the eastern sky, highlights the rocks to avoid as you’re flying downhill. 

On weekends, that course is out. Even at daybreak, there will be someone on the path. Instead I head up Edgemere to the train station, then parallel the tracks west to Navy Road, pedaling up the hill at Edward Ecker Sr. County Park, flying down the other side. On the way back, I go counterclockwise around Second House Road. 

I am averse to riding on roads without shoulders. But with the half of Second House I bike, there is a good stretch of sidewalk, generally abandoned at that early hour.

Every day I step on the scale. At first, change came slow. Frustrating. But this week, the numbers that don’t lie say 10 pounds gone. It’s a start.

See you at daybreak.

T.E. McMorrow covers police, courts, and planning and zoning matters for The Star.

How was it possible to have attended all my high school’s football games and learned nothing about the game? As you might surmise, I was simply interested in other things — boys, for example. I was more attracted to the ones who played basketball. Besides, the only reason I went to all those football games was not because I was a fan but because I was a drum majorette.

Why am I thinking of football out of season, on a day like Tuesday, deadline day, when we were having such beautiful summer weather? Football came to mind last weekend because some of my grandchildren were playing their version of it on the front lawn. 

There were two kids on each side, ranging from 6 to 13 years old, and they quickly discovered I didn’t have a clue about flag patterns, zones, or hail Marys. I thought the game was divided into downs and that a new game started each time a fourth was called.

“It’s quarters, grandma,” one of the kids told me when she figured out what I was talking about.

Many years ago, when I was a young bride, my husband and I joined an East Hampton couple in going to Dartmouth games. Over the years, we must have attended at least 15 games with our friends Marlys and Peter, starting with one at Princeton before our children were born and attending others in New Haven as well as Hanover, where Ev and Peter had attended Dartmouth. Eventually our children came along, as wonderful photos of them in a tree in Hanover attest. But for me, the tailgate picnics were what mattered most. 

Peter and Marlys were outstanding cooks and providers. Many years have passed, but I haven’t forgotten Marlys’s pork pies or Peter’s Scotch eggs. (Maybe Laura Donnelly can describe the latter for readers who don’t know them.) That Ev and I were less accomplished was proven one fall day when the split-pea soup we had brought along in a Thermos exploded.

I seem to have only two distinct, and very personal, memories of those football weekends, and I guess it isn’t surprising they aren’t about the games themselves. One was during the Vietnam War, when all male citizens between 18 and 35 were required to register for the draft; I remember the crowds shouting “Fight, fight, fight!,” and being struck by how unacceptably oblivious of the outside world that chant was in wartime.

The other memory is funnier. I was incredibly impressed at one college game when a player I am now told was a running back caught the ball at one end of the field and spun away from attackers to make a long and sinuous run all the way to the goalposts. I was so impressed I began cheering loudly. The only problem was that we were in the stands among our fellow Dartmouth fans, and he was on the opposing team

“Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” Dylan Thomas said, and so I’m playing tennis this evening with the Wednesday group — 16, sometimes 20 of us doing battle in the waning light.

Come back with your racket or upon it, I imagine Mary saying. 

I keep a compound-fractured one by me at the office — a reminder that I should sometimes temper the burning and raving. I should add that that wreckage was wreaked when I was a mere 72. I’ve matured since — I no longer blame myself so sorely if I lose, just my partner. 

Lately, I’ve been looking to Jim Nicoletti as a guide — he has that intense calm that I aspire to, taking dead aim, as Harvey Penick said in his little red book about golf, though it holds for tennis too. 

Take dead aim. You can see it in the eyes of the Little League pitcher, Jack Dickinson, in Craig Macnaughton’s photo for the sports pages last week. Jodie Foster once said pretty much the same thing at a Yale University graduation, though she was speaking as an archer, with bow extended, sighting down the arrow’s shaft toward the target.

Take dead aim, she said, and you’ll be fine, in whatever you choose to do.

Frankly, it’s just fun still to be able to play, whether taking dead aim, or not, as is often the case with us. 

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” 

“Though much range is taken, quick hands abide. . . .” 

That’s Tennyson on tennis! On Ulysses actually.

It does occur to me every now and then that there’s a wide world — not to mention the universe and unnumbered galaxies and black holes — out there beyond my outdoor shower.

And while much of it I find uninviting, there are still broad vistas in America yet to see — breathtaking views of mountains, canyons, rivers, plains, and valleys that are bound to knock my socks off and remind me that, although a defending club Class B champion, I am but a speck — a speck beckoned by Mary and tennis.

A recently married couple I know moved from their apartment in Queens into their first house last week, and what a house it is!

Just shy of 3,000 square feet, not counting its ample decks, the two-story house is on a wooded lot of about an acre, and they bought it for $270,000. The property is a good 45 minutes west of Bridgehampton, off the William Floyd Parkway in Shirley.

Take a look at the classifieds in today’s Star or go to one of the real estate websites to see if you can find anything — even a tiny vacant lot — at that price here.

Their house lot is unusual in being quite narrow but very long. Whoever developed the area managed to place the footprints of neighboring houses at varying depths from the road so they do not intrude on each other. In addition, the neighborhood is dotted with many tall, healthy trees. And, oh yes, the land across the road is a county park.  

The house has three good-sized bedrooms, a Jacuzzi in one of the two main bathrooms, a large open loft with several skylights, and a basement where a former owner was able to create an apartment with a separate entrance — kitchen, bath, bedroom, and living room — while leaving plenty of space for utilities and storage. If it sounds like a bargain, you better believe it.

The house was built, solidly, in the late 1990s and has built-in air-conditioning and a vacuuming system, which are in good condition. Its style is unique, I think, but hard to categorize. 

The exterior, perhaps influenced by Egyptian architecture, rises to a central peak, but some of the walls, inside and out, are curvilinear. An alcove off the living room, for example, ends in a rectangular space at one side while the other side, following a sidewall, is curved. Two somewhat mysterious hollowed-out spaces at eye level on either side of the living room doorway to the bedroom wing are apparently intended to display artwork. My young friends haven’t figured out yet what to put in them, although otherwise they are already comfortably at home.

And there is more. The former owner, a widow in her 70s, left behind a still-registered 20-foot runabout with a 40-horsepower outboard at no extra cost.

Shirley is one of the hamlets in Brookhaven Town, near Great South Bay and its tributaries. It is about 60 miles from Manhattan and only a 20-minute drive to the Tanger Mall in Riverhead. A search for information on the internet turned up a description of the community as working class; I guess that is pretty accurate. And along with Riverhead and the East End towns, it is in the First Congressional District, so we vote together.

A map shows Shirley as just west of the Moriches, which are sometimes considered steppingstones to the Hamptons. This geography underscores the fact that the South Fork and Shirley are quite near each other — though, at least in terms of real estate, very far apart. 

Mary’s been transforming our house lately, at least transforming it to the extent that it can be transformed. 

It has, I suppose, always been a shack, as my mother, who lived in a brick house with a slate roof, once said, though it’s been to our liking, and now, with Mary’s grace notes — a brightly painted basement with a Ping-Pong table for the ages, a dilatory outdoor shower, and attic rooms as well appointed as any — it has become a more and more habitable shack, from bottom to top.

In this way we struggle against entropy. When my late stepfather said that there seemed to be no end to things that needed repairing, I misunderstood his sigh at first to mean those demands were wearisome, rather than godsends. We struggle against entropy in different ways, but the thrust is — whether by shoring up, as he did, or by cheerily assenting to it while doing the crossword puzzle, as I, whom he once dubbed “a mechanical moron,” do — the same.

“The next thing’s on me,” I said to her, referring to the leaky master bedroom shower that’s not been used in the past half-dozen years. Another one on the first floor works, so we’ve been using that one, you see.

But then I realized that there appears to be little else left in the way of home-improving to do. How much gilding will the lily take? We must string these things out. We’re teardowns in the end, after all. 

So I’m doing what I’m quite good at — putting off the day of reckoning, by working out rather than out working in the garden. Everyone’s too busy now anyway, one can hardly think, and the ticks appall. 

More attention will be paid, I’ll warrant, when autumn leaves start to fall.

The osprey are not the first birds to wake up and start carrying on. Near Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett in the minutes before dawn, when there is only a scattering of light in the east, birds I cannot name by their voices alone twitter from the scrub oak.

It is not until there is sufficient light to peer into the water for prey that the osprey launch from their nests and begin to soar. But from the sound of their keening and because they call from so high above the bay, I assume there is more to the morning for them than hunger. 

Birds are, ornithologists tell us, not interested in aesthetics, which seems reasonable. Yet osprey tuck all sorts of shiny and colorful things into their nests. I remember when, as a child, my father pointed out a green plastic child’s Army jeep toy among the sticks in a nest on Gardiner’s Island. Just down the road from my house in a nest at the old fish factory this summer, you can see ribbon and bits of Mylar balloons.

Watching the fish hawks, as we called them growing up, spiral slowly in the sky, it is hard to escape the notion that they are doing so for pleasure. They are at too great a height even with their extraordinary eyesight to hunt; their cries sound more like conversation than warning.

I had also been flying over the house a couple of weeks ago. My oldest friend, Michael Light, had brought his small plane east from California for the summer, and he took me up for a look early in the day on the Fourth of July.

I don’t recall if it was Michael’s observation or my own, but one of the main things we talked about over the aircraft’s headsets was that everything below seems softened from 700 feet. This is especially so for me, since, at the newspaper, our stock in trade as much as anything else are points of conflict, many of which have to do with who wants to put a house where or which road is at high risk for car crashes. All that fades away from the air. Osprey have the right idea.

At the beach the other day there were beautiful sights — one of Amanda Calabrese, who was to have been named this week to the United States’ competitive lifesaving team, whirling through the waves in a long, sleek lifesaving craft of which she was obviously the master, and the other of the back of my wife’s head as it and her body rose and fell gently with the water in the late afternoon.

She loves the beach, for its suspension of time and for the feeling there of general good will. I wonder if a day at the beach ought not to be prescribed for all troubled souls.

People who’d begun to set up their things in front of us asked if it were all right — as if our view might be ruined! No, no, not to worry. There’s still enough of the sea to see and there’s world enough and time.

With Mary it’s a ritual — a tea ceremony of sorts. First you put up the umbrella, then lay everything out, the chairs, the chips, the thermos of limeade, and then, anchored in the sand, you take flight in a book, realighting now and then to see junior lifeguards, boards held at their sides, dashing through the surf. 

And girls won these races every time it seemed. Joe Dunn did it. He was the one who filed the lawsuit that let a thousand athletes bloom. One of them, his daughter, put his name forward, and it was done. He’s deservedly in our high school’s Hall of Fame. Life here is so much the better for it. My life as a sportswriter is so much the better for it — there’s so much joy in Mudville now that justice, mighty justice, has won out.

And the hot dog with sauerkraut, it was good.