I told our eldest daughter that she was living in northwestern Ohio the Suburban Dream, which she knows. 

It’s quiet, it’s safe, her two athletic sons are moving every moment, and the houses — the ones in Perrysburg’s historic district, anyway — remind you of Sag Harbor’s architecture, frozen in time, pleasing to the eye. 

Modern-day America, the malls, the tract housing, is not far away, but far enough so that you’re really not aware of it as you sit on her porch on East Front Street, across from which is an estate that was given by Mrs. Stranahan to the municipality for everyone to enjoy. 

Its horticulturalist said she’d be glad to come over to tell Emily the names of her trees. I mean, you’ve got to know the names of your trees. The estate leads down to a winding river, the Maumee, near Fort Meigs, where the Americans twice withstood sieges by the British and their Indian confederates during the War of 1812 (so things were noisy once, though most of the residents had by then decamped). 

Her in-laws too live right by the river, about four miles distant, the house set off by itself, its front porch and turret on the second floor facing it. There’s always a breeze. A hammock’s off to the right under a cottonwood tree. There’s a garden and an old red garage. Mary calls it paradise.

Perrysburg is named after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie. You’ll remember it was he whose flag said, “Don’t give up the ship,” and who, following the naval victory, wrote General William Henry Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” which has since, of course, been transmuted into “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

They call Perrysburg a city, but population-wise it’s no bigger than East Hampton, which is a town — for most of the year at any rate. Our editor thinks the figure here may rise now to as much as 100,000 on summer weekends, qualifying it as a city, I suppose, and pushing the excitement meter reading here to the max. I told Emily I was sorry there were no celebrities to fawn after out there — adding that that fact undoubtedly was reflected in their lower standard of living — though she said she was quite happy where she was, and I think she meant it.

It wasn’t a hairpiece. Or a toupee. It was a full-blown wig, a helmet of synthetic hair that I kept on a Styrofoam wig stand in a corner of my loft where nobody but my wife would see it. 

It wasn’t some off-the-rack model from Ricky’s. I had it styled in Macy’s wig salon, which was on the main floor of the Herald Square emporium, adjacent to the cosmetics department. Fresh from assaults by atomizer-brandishing salespeople, women would look askance as they passed the young, smock-covered man whose obvious rug was being so carefully snipped and combed. They regarded me with sympathy, the way you look at a dog suffering a grooming at a kennel.

It was 1971. I wasn’t bald yet. The purpose of the wig wasn’t to hide baldness but to hide my hair. Three years before, classified 1-A by my draft board, I reluctantly put my name on the waiting list of an Army Reserve unit. Several months later, and just in the nick of time, my name had reached the top. When the time cameo sign up, go to jail, or leave the country, I signed. 

Except for four months spent in basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, my six-year tenure in the reserves consisted of weeknight meetings at the unit’s headquarters in Newark and two weeks at Fort Dix every summer. We were a clerical unit. If we were ever activated, we would be stationed at Fort Dix as a reception station for new recruits. Did I already say I was lucky? Privileged? But that’s another story.

For three years I kept my hair neatly trimmed in order to pass inspection at weekly meetings. I remember with considerable embarrassment showing up for the first day of my new job at the Museum of Modern Art in bellbottoms, a turtleneck, a sport jacket purchased four years before on Carnaby Street in London — and short hair. No wonder Roberta Smith, today the powerful art critic of The New York Times, then a secretary in the painting and sculpture department, shook her head and let loose a disparaging chuckle when she first saw me. 

Then I heard about the wig scam. It wasn’t legal, but more and more reservists were buying wigs under which they would tuck their long hair when in uniform. Hence, Macy’s. It was worth the discomfiture of that public grooming to be able to let my hair grow as long as it was able to — which was never quite as long as I wanted. But, finally, I could pass.

By the time I was discharged in 1974, my hair was long and thick in the back and receding in the front. My mother’s father and her two brothers were bald. My older brother was well on his way. I had avoided conscription, but, six years later, found myself caught in the crosshairs of male-pattern baldness.

It was probably 20 years later, when she was 8, that my daughter first called me avocado-head. It didn’t bother me. In fact, because I knew long before it happened that it was inevitable, losing my hair has never been an issue for me. Except for those moments when I catch sight of a photograph taken when I was a senior in college, shirt unbuttoned, a big smile beneath my tousled head of wavy hair, and wonder what might have been — and whatever happened to that wig.

Mark Segal is a writer for The Star who covers the arts. 

It is strawberry time again, which means time to think about putting up some preserves from the local crop. But the way things go, South Fork strawberries are usually gone by the time I get around to pulling out the canning kettle.

Spring and the beginning of summer have a too-quick quality in this and other ways. David Kuperschmid, our new fishing columnist, said just the other day that the porgy fleet in Cherry Harbor had pulled anchor already, presumably following the bite into cooler, deeper water. I had been watching the boats from the living room window but had been unable to join them for one reason or another that  seemed so important but that I have since forgotten.

Strawberries, though, I think I can get to. All it will take is a couple of quarts, some sugar, pectin, and an hour at the stove. 

Last year, I was pretty good at canning, getting a fair number of beach-plum jelly and blackberry preserves jarred. Rummaging around on one of the kitchen shelves this morning, I noticed the last remaining summer of 2015 pickled okra behind the chocolate chips that were about to go in a child’s pancakes.

There are, in fact, so many jars of this and that tucked away that it is time to pass on a few. I proposed the general idea of a swap to my friend Jameson Ellis, in which I might bring extras and hope to exchange them for the extras of others that I do not have in my own stash. Turns out I have quite a lot, more than is reasonable for the family. But there is no strawberry. 

After a winter of eating the same two kinds of preserves, I am itching for a change. The problem is that in the run-up to July Fourth there is just too little time. Slow August days, when the beach plums are ripe, are much more suited to jelly making. Still, if I can sneak in just four jars’ worth, the effort will be worthwhile.

I’ve been accommodating myself to death for a while now, but today I was actually wishing for it when I read that they’re not only to play the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 2018, but also in 2026.

“Surely, I’ll be dead by then,” I said as I reached for the calculator. “In 2026 I’ll be . . . 136! Dead for sure. Whew. No, no, wait . . . no, 1940 from 2026 is . . . ah, 86. Oh God. And of course I’ll still be working at The Star, and the U.S.G.A. probably still won’t let me inside the ropes. I’ll have to hobble along, peering over the legions with a periscope.”

My son-in-law wonders why we write about the Open anyway, given the fact that by the time we do it’s old news. Of course, that’s never stopped us — me, anyway — in the past. 

Though this time, I told him, I’ll watch it on TV in the media tent. You get a much better view that way, though my hearing will probably be even worse by then, and the announcers are always whispering. Better yet, I’ll check in periodically with Mark Herrmann, Newsday’s golf writer, to find out what’s going on. 

(I just Googled him to make sure I spelled his last name correctly and saw under Mark’s photo the following: “A former American college and professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League during the 1980s and 1990s. . . .” Look to it, Mark, look to it.)

Meanwhile, I am trying to acclimate myself by reading, at Orson Cummings’s suggestion, Harvey Penick’s “Little Red Book.” I told him I hated golf, but Orson — a very good tennis player — said I should read it anyway, and so I am. At one point, Harvey says, “The motion you make lopping off dandelions with your weed cutter is the perfect action of swinging a golf club through the hitting area.” 

So, I may go out and buy one, thus satisfying my curiosity even as Mary marvels at how helpful I’ve become. 

The fact is that, contrary to what I know is my natural bent toward excitability, I am intrigued by the calm, attentive approach the “Little Red Book” prescribes. 

Take dead aim . . . always play within yourself . . . left foot-right elbow. . . . Okay, okay. So much to learn, so much to forget.

Three generations of Rattrays have enjoyed the old house I live in, which, as you might guess, is both awfully nice and, at least on occasion, headache-inducing. I like to say that this or that treasure “came with the house” when someone asks about a vase or a chair, but I also find myself worrying about who has saved what and whose responsibility it is to do something about repairs and storage and suchlike. 

This week, though, as summer arrived, I realized we also have left our mark on our outdoor spaces. Goodness knows, the South Fork must have hundreds of extraordinary gardens created personally or professionally, as the Parrish Art Museum’s Landscape Pleasures and Guild Hall’s the Garden as Art programs attest. There’s Madoo, the unique conservancy garden in Sagaponack originated by the late painter and writer Robert Dash. And the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days are an inexpensive way for some of us to see how others have embellished their landscapes.

 Our very humble garden is absolutely nothing like those! But we have something else going for us in the backyard: a sort of homey, old-fashioned feeling of being in an outdoor room, the result of decades of only moderate tending and a fair helping of benign neglect.

  The maples on a neighbor’s property have grown so tall that they shade what had been (back in the 1960s and 1970s) my mother-in-law’s thriving garden of roses, poppies, and tiger lilies. Our yard is no longer suitable for growing tomatoes, but we have heaps of ferns, which took over after the deer ate all the tiger lilies. These lush mounds of greenery are a pleasant respite from a boring lawn.

 Going outside on a nice morning this week, I thought about the few old roses that have been around longer than I have. They aren’t the most beautiful, but they add touches of pink and magenta to the borders. The person who put in these dainty rose bushes many years ago would no doubt be pleased to see them surviving. We also have two rose bushes descended from those that arrived by shipwreck years ago, given to us recently by a friend.

  I have no idea if earlier householders are responsible for the white and yellow irises, or if I am, but they are out of control this summer. A butterfly bush seems to have seeded itself in the wrong place, pushing out bleeding heart, but I have to say it is attractive, and not overwhelming, at least not yet. I admit that I am responsible for two peonies, however, but one has never flowered while the other made a big-whoop first effort this year with three blooms. As for the yellow yarrow, I wouldn’t have planted it in a place where it is too bold and too close to nicer plants, would I? Someone else must have put it there.

Forsythia aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (I’ve even heard them referred to as “the vomit of spring,” which gives an indication of the disdain in which they’re held in some quarters), but our oversized forsythia brightened things up in early spring. That burst was followed by an explosion of old-time snowball viburnums, in full white dress, and then by the sweet white flowers of a mock orange. 

Out front, we used to be able to rely on an everlasting crop of giant-puffball white hydrangeas; they’re gamely attempting to make a comeback after the deer almost did them in. A few daisies and what look to me like bachelor buttons have cropped up by its rather sad-looking side, and I have no idea where they came from.

We are surrounded on the South Fork by the most privileged, expensive, high-maintenance household environments, but I am happy to bask in a pretty little garden that has come, somehow, to require little attention. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence: Without half trying, I can find something blooming in the yard that is lovely and ready to be brought inside. And how nice it is to be able to say the bouquet “came with the house.”

The back of the hardcover of “Christine” that my 13-year-old daughter is reading is taken up entirely by a photo from 1982 showing Stephen King sitting on the hood of a vintage Plymouth in the mouth of what looks like a service bay. His spread collar is indeed spread, his sleeves are manfully rolled up, his zip-up leather boots, prominently displayed, are well traveled. Despite the rabbity Down East grin, was the weirdo ever cooler? 

Also that year, another writer with a jet-black Dan Rather hair helmet, truncated sideburns, and fashion-backward glasses, Paul Theroux, could be seen kicking back in the Cape Cod beach grass on every square inch of the flip side of “The Mosquito Coast,” which sits half-read on my shelf. The son of a bitch is even smiling for once in his life. And all, as they say, in glorious black and white.

These photos needn’t have been taken by Jill Krementz or Nancy Crampton — any old longhair with a Leica would do. They reveal something about the authors. They’re art. 

Instead today we have blurbs. So this is where we are. Publicists make the world go round. Every cover must be marred. But what to do about it? One answer readers of the late, lamented Spy magazine might recall was a feature called “Logrolling in Our Time,” which plainly laid out the credibility-compromising back-scratching appearing regularly on the dust jackets of the nation.

On the other hand, the way Iris Smyles went with the marketing flow and embraced the schlock with her National Blurb Contest was fun. From the publicity material that actually crossed my desk, here’s my favorite, courtesy of Andrea Martin: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those without peanut allergies and those who cannot tolerate peanuts or any food produced or packaged in a facility that processes peanuts. Both will love this book.”

(Favorite, that is, if fuddy-duddy nostalgia isn’t taking over, as I harbor happy memories of struggling to stay awake after Johnny Carson on Friday nights in high school in the ’80s to catch those 90-minute, thematically linked SCTV episodes Martin starred in — the best television comedy ever made.) 

But enough of book covers. What about reading what’s between them? I was thrilled to pluck Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” from the carts of community discards at the back of the East Hampton Library the other day. It’s been like nourishment to a shipwrecked man subsisting on rainwater and tree bark. The story of — 

Wait a minute, in one corner on the front of the paperback, above a photo of Eisenhower-era parents and child walking away from the camera, superlatives appear stacked like cordwood: “powerful . . . moving, generous and ambitious . . . fiercely affecting.” They greet me every time I pick it up, thanks to Michiko Kakutani of The Times in a review that in proper context simply could not have been that thuddingly bad.

Time to just give up? Shrug my shoulders and move on? After all, as the saying goes, if advertising didn’t work, people wouldn’t keep paying for it. It can burrow its way into an associative mind. Why, here I think of Roth and his nearly exact contemporary, an equal in productivity, stature, and breadth of red-blooded American subject matter, one recently dead, the other, Roth, having reached a kind of working death, a self-imposed cessation of output, and — 

I’m sorry, the blurbs have got the better of me: Hey Michiko! You were wrong about Updike! Always.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

I just read in one of the local papers that there was a U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1996. 

“There was no U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1996,” I said, with finality, to Baylis Greene. “There was one in 1986. . . . I should know.” 

I rolled my eyes and smiled wanly as I said so, which, of course, elicited a wan smile from him. 

But then . . . but then I remembered that while I remembered there had been a U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1986, I had forgotten, until I remembered, that I didn’t go. 

Mary had won a free all-expenses-paid weeklong trip to London with a day’s side trip to anywhere in England that beckoned in the days leading up to the event. 

I recall her saying after having been vouchsafed the news on the telephone, “Can’t I just experience 30 seconds of joy before you say you can’t go because you have to cover the U.S. Open?”

Moments later, I made the case to Helen Rattray, who, bless her, agreed that it was a once-in-lifetime opportunity and that the staff (with Uri Berliner, now NPR’s business editor, in the lead role) could stand the gaff. 

(And she was right: We’ve never won a damn thing since. Except for a dinner-for-two to Zakura two years ago, which was pretty good, come to think of it.)

Frankly, I hit the lottery when I met Mary, but we’ll speak no more of that. (In fact those were her very words to me this morning after I’d suggested just one or two more things to think about when addressing a tennis ball.)

Anyway, it was a wonderful vacation. Everybody on the British Airways plane — we were all winners of The Times’s contest, from both coasts — was in a giddy mood, pretty much in agreement that — on this occasion at least — we’d all die happy if the plane went down.

My mother suggested we go to Bath. We went to Brighton instead, a busman’s holiday. I had clotted cream.

And the paper came out, in all its glory, as it always does.

The East Hampton Town Police Department’s official Twitter account reported Monday night that traffic was tied up and creeping westbound out of downtown Montauk following the Fourth of July fireworks. No surprise — people tend to get up and go right after the show ends, no matter that their hurry gains them only a place in a slow queue.

You see the same thing on airplanes when everyone gets up simultaneously just to stand awkwardly in the aisles. 

Same thing on the Long Island Rail Road. Pulling into the East Hampton station the other day on a ride from Manhattan, we were all out of our seats by the time we rolled through Wainscott. What aspect of human nature controls our get-up-and-go-no-place urge I have no idea.

Monday evening on the ocean, there was a landward breeze, a hint of the late-night thunderstorms that were to come. It might have made sense for the crowds in Montauk to get moving as soon as the last sparks faded to black. Still, it seems a shame to flee the beach quite so soon. 

I dislike waiting on lines, but being caught in a traffic jam for a couple of minutes doesn’t seem to bother other people. I’d rather sneak slowly around the back way then jockey for a place at the Bridgehampton traffic light at Ocean Road. It’s not that I care to watch all the credits at the movies, but that seems better than the alternative: the foot-dragging shuffle up to the exit doors.

There is an art to patience — and rewards. Following the Devon fireworks on Saturday, I sat with some friends at a picnic table watching the lights of the boats making their way east toward Montauk across the bay. I had an impulse to bustle about, wishing guests a good night, but instead I just sat and watched the view.

Nine American war veterans lie buried in a modest farm cemetery off Jericho Road in East Hampton. I had driven by their resting place from time to time on my way to Georgica Beach from the highway, but had never given it much thought until John Phillips, who lives next door, filled me in. 

The names of the veterans buried there ring of old East Hampton. Among them are Matthew Hedges, who fought in the Revolution and died in 1817 when he was 81. Isaac Dimon was 74 when he died in 1808. John Miller was buried there in 1791 and his son John Miller II in 1806. The most recent military man buried there was Wilmot Baker, who was born in 1891 and died in 1963.

Hedges was born in East Hampton and became a private in Capt. Josiah Lupton’s New York Company of Southold in 1775. The next year, his company fled to Connecticut as refugees when the British took Long Island. After the war, Hedges settled at the Jericho farm, where he would eventually be buried.

There are quite a number of small graveyards around town, and a color guard from the East Hampton Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion visit many of them the Sunday before Memorial Day every year. 

I met Mr. Phillips and his wife, Wendy, during an event at their house in connection with the Guild Hall artists-in-residence program earlier this year. 

He told me that shortly after buying the Jericho Road house, they were startled one morning by the sound of gunfire. Walking down their driveway to investigate, they discovered an assembly of about two dozen men in the uniforms of various branches of the military who were veterans of engagements of different eras giving tribute over the graves.

In the years since, the Phillipses have made the tribute a memorial observance of their own, inviting  friends and neighbors over for coffee, homemade muffins, and cut-up fruit before the bus from the V.F.W. arrives between 8 and 9 a.m. Would I like to attend, Mr. Phillips asked. Indeed, I would.

Coffees in hand, a group of about a dozen guests made their way to the cemetery at about 8:30 Sunday and walked among the graves, the oldest of which dates to 1790. It is unclear if any vacant plots remain, Mr. Phillips said.

Two winters’ hard freezes had tossed many of the stones, particularly the smaller footstones, out of line. Town workers maintain the cemetery, mowing it and cutting back a stand a bamboo that has crept under the fence from another neighbor’s property. Who might set the old stones to rights, Mr. Phillips said, is unknown.

Sunday morning’s ceremony was over quickly. Taps, a salute, and the men filed back onto the bus to make their way to the next burying ground. There were tears in the eyes of a few of the onlookers, who waved as the veterans drove on.

Rain is fitting on Memorial Day, the solemnity of the occasion not totally forgotten amid sunny beach outings and start-of-summer barbecues.

Memorial Day was enacted to honor Union soldiers of the Civil War. It was set on May 30, near the day of reunification. The day was expanded after World War I to include all American casualties of any war or military action.

The federal Memorial Day holiday is often not on the 30th itself, but almost always is celebrated on the last Monday of May for the convenience of a three-day weekend. This year, we remembered the nation’s fallen soldiers, as traditionalists intended, on May 30th, in the rain.

In 1861, the United States was knifed in two in a bitter struggle over slavery and the South’s demand to leave the Union. Eastern Long Islanders joined soldiers from across the land walking and riding south to fight to keep the Union together. Near Washington, D.C., they met soldiers marching north from the Southern states to fight for a separate Confederate government that would protect the right to have slaves.

America’s Civil War lasted four years. It destroyed the land and killed more Americans — some 620,000 — than any other war.

The stories of the war live on, but one song, a hymn really, forever evokes the spirit of the Union soldiers and the sadness and passion of the struggle. The words are religious, the song a praise to God. Julia Ward Howe, social reformer, anti-slavery activist, and poet, awoke one winter night in Washington, D.C., with the words in her head. The city was filled with soldiers, the hospitals full, the citizens in terror. The battles were just across the Potomac River.

Howe had come to Washington to visit the troops. According to published accounts, the words came to her that night in her hotel room. She was awakened by dreams of marching soldiers.

“I found to my surprise that the words were forming themselves in my head,” she later recalled. “I lay still until the last line had completed itself in my thoughts. Then I quickly got out of bed. I thought I would forget the words if I did not write them immediately. I looked for a piece of paper and a pen. Then I began to write the lines of a poem:

Mine eyes have seen the glory

of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the vintage

where the grapes of wrath are stored.

He hath loosed the fateful lightning

of His terrible swift sword.

His truth is marching on.

“I wrote until I was finished,” Howe said. “Then I lay down again and fell asleep. I felt something important had happened to me.”

The Atlantic Monthly magazine bought Howe’s poem. Paid her four dollars. She had written the poem to be sung to a soldier’s marching song about the abolitionist John Brown. Howe’s version had just the right words for the music and Union soldiers began to sing it as their official marching song.

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” like all great art, both captures that moment in history and transcends it for eternity.

World War I prompted the expansion of Memorial Day to honor all U.S. war dead. Another poem from that war has become one of the most memorable war poems. “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a doctor in the Canadian Army, after battles at Ypres, the site of some of the bloodiest fighting.

The last lines read:

. . . and now we lie in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw the torch;

be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

we shall not sleep,

though poppies grow in Flanders fields.”

It is an apt coincidence that Memorial Day falls in the middle of graduation season, with its commencement advice and its optimism. Life, McCrae is saying, is a gift — and a responsibility.

Who knows how many Americans might stop to consider the profound values and meaning of Memorial Day, even as American troops fight on in the nation’s two longest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither officially declared, neither officially over. How should our millions of war dead and the service of soldiers today inform the course of our nation, and our own lives? How do we show our thanks?

In the words of U.S. naval officer and former President John F. Kennedy: “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

Biddle Duke is the editor of The Star’s forthcoming magazine, East.