It’s fishing season once again, but for one reason or another I have yet to give it a try. Such is the state of things in the spring; pre-high season work demands a lot of attention, and with a house renovation under way, weekends seem to be taken up with arguing about tile choices and the like. 

I have not even laid eyes on my boat yet this year, even though I have an indication that it has been put in the water because the first boatyard bill of 2016 arrived the other day.

Not being able to fish made for an especially grumpy Saturday morning, when I noticed that there were a bunch of boats in Cherry Harbor. About now, people anchor up and catch big porgies there, I know, and I was not happy that my living room window was as close as I was going to get. 

Friends are beginning to report back with their catches or stories of early morning bass busting water in an inlet here or there just out of reach. I can tell from the cormorants, gulls, and osprey that there is something interesting swimming around in the business end of the fish trap near our place. It would be maddening, if I were not so preoccupied with other things.

Such is the general problem with spring. I ran into East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. outside Goldberg’s Bagels on Pantigo Road the other day, and he asked how things were. I could tell he was ready to head back to Village Hall by the time I began pantomiming a wave about to crash on my head andcomplained that I didn’t have anywhere near enough time to get anything done.

The truth is that by about the Fourth of July, things always drop back to a low simmer — just about the time the fish begin their midsummer torpor and refuse to bite. So it goes. There’s always the fall.

Mine was called the Silent Generation. We probably didn’t have the collective energy of today’s millennials, but take a look at some of those, like me, born in the generation between the early 1920s and 1944: Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis Presley, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, Robert F. Kennedy, Ray Charles, Che Guevara, the Beatles, and, get this, Bernie Sanders. Maybe we weren’t so quiet after all.

As students at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., my friends and I campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. More to our credit, however, we desegregated the movie house by sitting, over strong management objection, in the balcony, to which African-Americans had been relegated.

Douglass is part of Rutgers University, so it was no surprise that I was interested in the commencement address President Obama made there on Sunday. Rutgers is a very old college, one of the nine established in the colonies before the American Revolution, and, according to the president, its student body “could be the most diverse” in the country.

It is evident that in the last year of his presidency, Mr. Obama has been more outspoken about politics. At Rutgers he took clear aim at Donald Trump. Maybe you have seen the video clips of the speech that have been making the rounds?

“Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science — these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy,” Mr. Obama said, adding, to roars of laughter: “In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.”

The president didn’t actually name Mr. Trump, but who else could he have been thinking about? 

The millions of voters who support and rally heartily on behalf of Mr. Trump do not seem to care that Mr. Trump rarely deals with facts or follows logic. They seem to think he’s great because he loudly tells us he is, and because his outrageous opinions somehow come across as bucking the system. He’s about as consistent as a toddler in describing his policies and his own past? So what.

  Of course, Donald Trump hasn’t been the only Republican candidate to distort the facts. Ted Cruz had a problem, too. And Mr. Trump, quick as a fox, had fun calling Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” after dealing Jeb Bush, who tried to stick to reasonable discourse, a powerful blow by calling him boring. Mr. Bush, although he is starting to look like a pillar of Republican common sense at this point, is boring.

Mr. Obama said Rutgers was precisely the kind of institution he wanted to celebrate and he told the graduates that “America is better and the world is better than it was 50 years ago or 30 years ago or even eight years ago.” Noting declines in crime, teenage pregnancy, and poverty, and, on the other hand, improvements in longevity, clean energy, and the status of blacks and Latinos, he said, “The good old days weren’t all that good.” That, obviously, was a tweak to the nose of the “Make America Great Again” candidate.

Many aspects of American society differ greatly from what they were like when I was an undergraduate — attitudes toward women at home and in the workplace, voting rights for minorities. . . . From the cheers and laughter, it sounded like the graduates enjoyed hearing the optimism in Mr. Obama’s commencement speech. I wish I’d been there.

We were having dinner at the home of friends when the conversation segued from the relatively safe subject of politics to the unfailingly dangerous one of cats. 

People who know me know to let their cats out before I come visiting, or, better yet, shut them up someplace so they don’t lurk about in the pitch dark waiting for me to trip over them as I’m leaving. A banished cat always knows who to blame.

My aversion to creatures of the feline persuasion is longstanding, traceable, maybe, to my mother’s fear and loathing of mice and everything associated with them, though I don’t recall her being afraid of cats. Not that anyone we knew ever had one. I was an only child and happy to be one; I used to end my nightly prayers with “and please, God, don’t let them get a brother or sister. Or a pet.” 

Fast forward a few decades and Sidney and I have bought the Amagansett house we’re still living in many years later, and are having a dinner party of our own. From outside comes a faint sound. Meow? Meow.

“Your cat’s wanting to come in,” someone says.

“It’s not our cat. We have no cats. I don’t even like cats.”

But my husband, Mr. Tenderheart, gets up, goes to the kitchen, and comes back with a bowl of tuna fish (solid white albacore) and a dish of milk.

“Aaaack. What are you doing? They say if you feed a cat it never goes away. Aaack!”

Too late. On the porch now, a starved-looking creature is already halfway through its first good meal in heaven knows how long. And what the old wives say turns out, of course, to be true. The cat adopts us. 

It could have been worse. It happened on a Memorial Day weekend, with a whole long hot summer ahead, which meant the cat could live outside and I wouldn’t have to look at it. Much. It was a head-turning cat, though; surely one of the ugliest specimens on God’s green earth, a black-and-white pipestem of a body on four stovepipe legs. The kids wanted to call it something cuddly, I forget what, but no, I said, we’ll call it Puss. With any luck, I was thinking, the cat will walk down the street and some kind soul will say, casually, “Here, puss, here, puss,” and it will follow them home. End of story.

It never happened. And too soon, Labor Day was on the horizon. There was no such thing as year-round weekending back then; you closed the house, drained the pipes, put big wooden shutters on the windows, and went back to the city until spring. No way was I taking the cat, but nor did I have the heart, much though I loathed it, to leave it to fend for itself. What to do?

The answer arrived disguised as a bicycle.

That summer, Sidney had won a case for a client who manufactured bicycles. Short on cash, the man offered to give him five of his top-of-the-line bikes instead, one for each member of the family, one to spare. It was that bonus bike that solved the Puss predicament.

We put an ad in The Star: “We will give a brand-new bicycle to whomever will give our cat a good home.”

A lot of people came to the house, every one of them eager to see the bike. We took all their numbers and promised to call. Finally, toward the end of the day, a woman arrived looking worried. Had anyone taken the cat, she asked. “No, not yet.” Could she see it? “There he is.” 

She held her hand out. “Here, puss. Here, puss.” And Puss got up and stretched and went right to her.

“I’d like to take him now,” she said. “I live in Sag Harbor. Is that okay?”

Okay? It was glorious. “But wait,” I said. “What about the bicycle?”

“The bicycle? Oh yes, the bicycle. Well, I don’t really want a bicycle. Only a cat.”

And away they went. Goodbye, Puss. You were one lucky feline.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Memorial Day weekend is when the seals abandon the South Fork beaches, turning them over to the summer crowd. But, well-fed and happy, they remain in the area, just slinking off to remote places to relax. Kind of like the locals.

Seals were thick like ticks this winter on the ocean beach. We know this because police were called with surprising frequency by people alarmed that something might be wrong. Most times, there was not. Seals, like people, enjoy stretching out on the sand from time to time. Bobbing around in the waves all day eating all that herring must get tiring.

Cops would go have a look and call the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Conservation with a report if an animal looked unwell. The foundation is equipped to rehabilitate ill seals in a spa-like setting at Atlantis Marine World in Riverhead, where visitors can peer at the patients as they regain their strength while circling in large plastic pools and dining on the finest fish. There’s even a web cam, and one can look, voyeuristically, at their doings, if one wishes.

The foundation’s staff answers a stranding hotline, 631-369-9829, and can usually tell from a caller’s description if a seal needs help or is just napping. They are also happy to get photos or video of possibly stranded seals, sea turtles, and whales at [email protected].

The seal population here seems to be rising, which is probably why the number of sightings phoned in to police and the foundation is increasing. I think it also is because it is quite puzzling to see one of them on the beach, just lying there, making no attempt to escape as a person or dog gets close. A wild creature should rush away, we think, so we assume it is sick when it does not, and, filled with pity, we go into action.

Seals have big, dog-like dark eyes, which are just on the edge of expressive. We take their doleful looks as their cry for help; rather, it is curiosity. People who are on the water a lot know well the way seals pop their heads out of the water and stare, almost rudely. Sitting on our surfboards in our black wetsuits, surfers could be forgiven for mistaking their directness for amorous intent. It can be disconcerting. 

A former East Hampton Star reporter, on the other hand, said he took their staring as an invitation to fight. He announced that every time he saw a seal in the water he was filled with the urge to wrestle. Myself, I think seals are hilarious and have suggested to Peter Spacek, The Star’s cartoonist, that he do seal gags. So far, he has not taken me up on it.

The other thing about seals is that they are food — for sharks, big sharks, like the 3,400-pound radio-tagged great white known as Mary Lee, which prowled close to Wiborg’s Beach in East Hampton Village earlier this month, according to her satellite tracking data. It’s a safe bet that she had zero interest in calling the cops.

East Hamptoners revere the heritage of this place and are proud that so many ancient objects have been preserved. The house that has remained in continuous use as a residence the longest dates to 1680 (and The Star is pleased to provide a look at it in today’s Habitat section). That certainly sounds like a very long time . . . but as historically significant as our treasures may seem, an exhibition now at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church puts them in perspective. 

The chapels at the south and north sides of St. Luke’s became ad hoc museums on May 7 when “Sacred Threads,” a magnificent display of ecclesiastical vestments and objects from the 14th through the 18th century, opened as a benefit for the charities the church supports.

The exhibition is just a glimpse, a selection, of the 3,000 pieces owned by Jill Lasersohn, a parishioner who has made the acquisition and preservation of ecclesiastical vestments her life’s work. Charles Keller and Glenn Purcell, East Hampton residents who are experts on East Hampton Dominy family furniture, as well, created the meticulous display. 

Ms. Lasersohn’s library contains some 600 books, and the St. Luke’s show, an aesthetic pleasure, is informed by a catalog and guide that contain the kind of information usually known only to scholars. It is simply astonishing that she and Mr. Keller and Mr. Purcell were able to locate paintings that show similar, and in some cases nearly exact, examples of fabrics in historic context.

For the most part, the materials come from Italy, France, Spain, and England, with some pieces from as far away as Turkey. Some of the patterns are influenced by the decorative arts of the Far East, and most of the cloths were woven in Asia, shipped west, and then painstakingly encrusted with gold, silver, and silk embroideries. Even Michelangelo and Pisanello are said to have created designs (or “cartoons”) for velvets that would become “the robes of kings and popes.” 

Gold and silver embroidery on some of the garments shows the wear that is evidence of churchgoers’ hands reaching out to snatch a bit of precious metal. Dragons, pomegranates and wheat, doves and cocks, lions and crowns appear as symbols of faith in incredibly delicate and intricate patterns. The fabrics become more vibrant and three-dimensional in the 18th century, with one piece showing flowers in 10 different colors. The catalog notes that the least expensive gilded cloth in the exhibition would cost nearly $8,000 a yard today.

The show also includes elaborate gloves and hats, simple linen towels of pretty blue and white (one with a hunter riding a unicorn), and some golden wax balls. These were, it is explained, used to select a new doge in Venice, where they governed for 1,000 years.

In the guide, Ms. Lasersohn is quoted saying, “Textiles are so tactile, it is like holding a piece of history in your hand. When you have a rare fragment from the 1300s that’s managed to survive, you begin to ponder: Who wore this? A bishop? A priest? What do the symbols stand for? What was it used for: Was it sat on? Slept in? Prayed over? How many people have touched it?” 

You can’t actually hold a piece of history in your hand if you visit the exhibition, but you will have a chance to see the march of Western civilization in an unusual and enlightening way.

Everything in the exhibition is exceedingly rare, and so too are shows like this one. Only a few opportunities to see it remain: The church will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today, tomorrow, and Saturday, and on Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. Then, wearing white gloves, Ms. Lasersohn and a few parishioners will put it all away.

Knowing that my brother-in-law was going to the Kentucky Derby this year, thus forgoing his annual party where he persuades attendees to part with significant sums of money as he, as auctioneer, hypes the virtues of seeming — and, in the end, certifiable — also-rans, I said to Mary, “The good news is we’ll save $300 this week.”

His wife, Linda (ankle), who’s been on the injured reserve list for a while now, invited us to one of our favorite restaurants for dinner on Derby night, her treat, and as far as tables went we copped the post position.

Before the food arrived, we were asked if we wanted to take part in a $10 pool, and after feeling around a bit in the hat, I came up with a small slip of folded yellow paper that had “Nyquist” printed on it.

I had read that morning that many thought Nyquist, the odds-on favorite, could be had at the distance, a mile and a quarter, so it was with a pounding heart that I, standing at attention now, watched the field burst from the gate, thinking that if Nyquist won I’d rake in $2,000 — failing to realize, distracted as I was momentarily by greed, that the decimal point should be moved one zero to the left.

Still, it was great to win. Mary and Linda were elated too. We were all winners, and in the spirit of the evening, I decided to share — something that does not always come naturally to me. Sixty for Linda, 60 for Mary, 60 for me, and 20 for the passer of the hat.

Having redistributed my income, I asked if the Derby’s winner were named for “Grover Nyquist,” an interesting error (it was Grover Norquist I’d been thinking of, I learned later, the anti-taxer) given my expansive, share-the-wealth mood.

And it was interesting too that even as I was preening like a peacock, delighted to be thought of by two beautiful women as a can-do bettor, I was reminded that, as Bernie Sanders says, we can do better.

We took delivery of a Ping-Pong table the other evening, and it is sitting handsomely in the newly painted, well-lit basement. 

But even as it was being put together, Mary was icing the small of her back, which had become severely knotted after having engaged in a Herculean spring cleanup that included laudable defenses against the legions of ever-advancing pachysandra, armed only with an edger, and several frontal assaults upon the dandelions that reappear every spring in our backyard.

Larry Penny said in a recent column that you’ll never fully excise dandelions in a lifetime, but Mary was, as I say, undaunted.

“Who are you going to play with?” Geary Gubbins, from whom I’d bought the all-weather table, and who was, thankfully, putting it together, asked. “With my wife,” I said, “as soon as she is able.”

I fear, however, I’m like the man who loved Dickens when it comes to Ping-Pong. I’ll humor you at first, only to tell you there’s no means of escape once you begin to tire of the endless rallies. “Just one more game, just one more game. . . . We’ll have food sent down. . . .”

Speaking of obsessions (and Mary is still number one, after which come tennis, crosswords, and Ping-Pong), I have become somewhat intrigued lately by golf, even as I continue to say I hate the game. Why then do I find myself every now and then addressing a nonexistent ball with hips facing forward, shoulders tilted just so, and right knee slightly flexed? It’s what I gleaned from a recent lesson my brother-in-law took and I wrote about. After he’d left the practice room, I asked the pro if I could try one, and, clasping a pitching wedge lightly, lofted a ball from the carpet up into a screen about 12 feet away, straight as a die!

I don’t know . . . it’s not content, it’s form. Form is content. Which is to say that, in the end I suspect I don’t care so much how I do, whether it be in tennis or in golf, but how I look. 

How do I look? That is the question. And, in fact, the one I posed to my eldest daughter when, on her wedding day, she descended the stairs in all her radiance. In my defense, I was wearing a silken tie that she’d picked out for me, so I thought it wasn’t untoward to ask how I looked. And I’m sure I said that she looked great too.

I told Rob Balnis, our physical therapist-trainer, recently that I hoped he’d soon clear Mary, who I said had been on injured reserve lately, to play Ping-Pong. He smiled at the pro sports allusion, but I gathered, knowing as he does how obsessed I can get, he wouldn’t bring her back too soon. Which is good. I can wait. A few more days anyway.

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. 

It’s Friday and it’s almost as if a show’s begun: There were 12 instead of the usual five or six servers behind the counter at Starbucks this morning. Main Street traffic was very, very slow. Noses were pressed up against the doors at BookHampton, which was to reopen the next afternoon. 

My pent-up demand includes Jim Harrison’s “Songs of Unreason,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and the recently published book of essays by Annie Dillard, whose memoir, “An American Childhood,” served me well during a recent visit to my sister, who lives down the river from Pittsburgh and who listened with interest to the passages I read from it about dancing school — where we all wore white gloves — and Roberto Clemente and the blizzard of 1950 and societal herding of the young and the urge to leave all that.

And yet, the suburban town from which I fled, and to which she’s returning after having lived for a time in Virginia, and more recently across the river, in Moon, seems to me to hold more promise — beginning with the leafy, thick dark-trunked trees — than I once thought it did. 

A doggy parade, a benefit for the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, that closed the village down the Saturday I was there was also persuasive. 

I cased it out beforehand inasmuch as my sister has difficulty walking at the moment because of persistent back pain, and I needed to get her to a park bench at the corner of Beaver and Broad Streets by 10:30, when the parade was to start.

Thanks to an amenable policeman, who let me do a U-turn in front of the paraders just moments before they set forth, I was able to provide her with a ringside seat to joy. 

And off they went, tails wagging, eager, eyes lit up, mingling with the spectators — bulldogs, pugs, Labs in bandanas, hectoring little ones, gentle big ones . . . there was a Great Dane as high as your waist . . . Rottweilers, Berneses, even foxhounds with huntsmen and huntswomen in pink coats. . . .

It was . . . endearing. That’s the word. 

And there are good restaurants there now, at least four, some with tables on the sidewalks. There’s life there, communal, out of doors. Sewickley, what I used to think of as strait-laced Sewickley, is unleashed! 

As for East Hampton, it goes without saying.

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.