A recent visitor to this office remarked on my books. “There’s everything you should read,” he said as I preened.

Actually, it’s everything I should have read long ago, in my bright college years, but forwent in favor of playing sports each season — soccer, squash, ice hockey, lacrosse — and serving up greasy hamburgers at my snack bar, known as “Gravy’s,” in the basement of Saybrook College.

In one of my ads, posted outside the college’s paneled dining room, I drew myself as Jesus feeding the 5,000, and urged the masses to “Go Gravy’s.”

I was a callow and feckless youth, and, as I saw yesterday in thumbing through an old photo album upstairs, which we are to have painted this week, an unsmiling infant with an odd, uncomprehending look. In all the photos of babies I see these days — my grandchildren among them — all are smiling, smiling broadly. My mother said I ran at 9 months, and that fact, the fact that I was often on the go, may have had something to do with it. Once, she said, she found me at the bottom of the hill atop which our house sat, sitting in the middle of Bennington’s Main Street. Presumably there wasn’t much traffic, it being wartime.

These photos, taken with a Brownie, I suppose, are fading now, and in some cases vanishing. There we are at McGuffy’s nursery school, the pugnacious Georgie Turner eyeing me sideways as I’m looking placidly straight ahead. My father assured me I’d put an end to his bullying about which I complained if once, just once, I’d hit him in the nose with all the force I could muster. 

“Papa! Papa! I did what you said: I hit Georgie Turner as hard as I could in the nose and he’s not bothering me anymore!” I wonder, Georgie, if you’re still alive, and, if so, how life has treated you. . . .

There we are in front of 25 Claremont Avenue in New York City bundled up in the blizzard of ’47. I’m holding Peter Puppy across my chest. He’s snow-covered and sighing, but putting up with it. There’s Puddy, Willie Dobbie, Ingrid. . . . I’ve begun to smile. . . . 

My cousin Margot is sitting regally in a chair, age 3 or so. Her mother, my aunt Mary, used to call her “Madam Queen,” and you can see why. She never had a problem smiling, and she, a breeder of black Labs on the Eastern Shore, and a motorcyclist and sailor as well, is still smiling. And laughing. And very loudly too. 

Which is the best, the absolutely best thing you can do.

If you happen to come across a key chain with a medallion from East Hampton’s sesquarcentennial — that is, 350th — anniversary hanging alongside an ordinary brass door key and a Honda Civic ignition key, give me a call. For some reason, among all the items in my little old Coach shoulder bag when it went missing, the key chain’s loss is the most regrettable. It was a symbol of belonging, I guess. (And it’s not like you celebrate sesquarcentennials every day.)

The bag itself isn’t valuable. It is about 30 years old, judging from similar models on eBay, and it had long since been amortized, so to speak. I never much liked the wallet in the bag, which I bought recently from a catalog, so its disappearance wasn’t troubling, except, as might be expected, for all it contained: four credit cards, a debit card, medical insurance and prescription cards, a free Regency movie ticket, and my driver’s license. And then there was my hand mirror, a lipstick or two, a comb, at least three of the favorite lead pencils I use for marking music, and . . . what else? Only the person who took my bag knows the answer.

I’ve lived here for 56 years and never worried about thievery, but there seems to be no other explanation. It beggars belief that someone in a relatively small audience at an afternoon program in the quiet John Drew Theater at Guild Hall would make off with someone else’s purse — even if they did find it lying, unattended, on the floor or in an empty seat, as seems likely — but, unfortunately, after repeated searches by me and by helpful Guild Hall staffers, I can come upwith no other explanation.

One of the problems with unexpected losses and minor mishaps when you get to be a certain age is that some folks will “Uh, huh!” you — that is, assume you are in some way culpable for whatever has gone awry or amiss. But I really don’t think this was what they call a “senior moment.”

Okay, here is how the caper went down, for the sleuths among you: I had parked the car between the East Hampton Library and the Star office, gotten out, put the car keys in the bag, put the bag on my shoulder, and walked across Main Street to Guild Hall. I’m quite sure all this happened, because as I put it on my shoulder I noticed a smear of milk chocolate (my grandchildren’s sticky handiwork with leftover Easter candy) on the bag, and stood beside the car for a moment to clean it off. Once across Main Street, I walked straight into the theater and took a seat in a back row that was otherwise empty. When my husband caught up with me, we walked together down the aisle to sit in a row close to the stage. 

Did I put down the bag on the first seat? Probably. Or did I carry it with me from one row to the other? Probably not. I didn’t notice it was no longer with me until after the show had ended and we got up to leave. (I didn’t pass Go, if you know what I mean.)

By Tuesday, the theater had been searched four or five times. A friendly village police officer had visited my house so that the required form could be completed without my having to go to headquarters (thank you, officer). All of the credit cards had been put on hold. I had ordered a new car key and was ready to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Riverhead for a new license. Instead I sat down to write this column.

Now here’s where perhaps I am showing my age: When the police officer asked if there had been money in the wallet and, if so, how much, I didn’t have a clue.

Despite the howler monkeys in the trees and 84-degree ocean, Playa Guiones, Costa Rica, seems a whole lot like a tropical version of Montauk. This thought struck Lisa and me early during our vacation at this up-and-coming Pacific Coast resort town.

The similarities are both superficial and serious. There are surfers and a yoga crowd in Playa Guiones who have made a commitment to spending months upon months chasing their dreams. There are short-term visitors like us, grabbing hotel rooms for a week or two. And, to longer-lasting effect, the area has resident expats and an active investor and developer scene. Indeed, it seems that every other conversation I have heard in our week here has been about real estate or the opening of some new business.

The only locals a visitor generally encounters work in the visitor trade, the beach town itself appearing to be almost entirely a gringo creation. Which is not to say that Playa Guiones is bad — nor Montauk — but that the idealized version of the place presented through its creature comfort-centric commerce can be misleading.

There is an English-language newspaper here and its recent coverage has included stories about the region’s water supplies. As new businesses open and vacation houses, most with swimming pools, are built, demand has increased rapidly. Between an extra-dry dry season and extra consumption, Playa Guiones and the neighboring villages have had to endure nightly water interruptions to allow the system to refill. At a recent community meeting a mostly expat audience debated whether and how to add a new public well to improve the supply.

Bolinas, a Northern California surf town I visited not long ago, responded to a similar challenge decades ago by permanently capping the number of water meters. Long Island, where all the drinking water comes out of the ground, probably should have done something similar, but policymakers have tended to act as if the supply were infinite. A new state study, announced by the governor last month, might clarify the situation — if we’re lucky.

It’s hard to say whether Playa Guiones is overrun with visitors the way Montauk can be on certain summer weekends. Yet all the real estate signs, Airbnb rentals, surfing lessons, overpriced food, and various other for-profit schemes seem the same, and they are on a worrisome trajectory. Too much really can be too much, and I hope that whatever passes for a power structure here at least takes it slow.

I have my doubts, though. The Times Travel section did one of its breathless takes on Playa Guiones on Sunday, which can only mean one thing: More is ahead, and it’s not necessarily going to be good.

Amid the serious implications of this week’s terror attacks in Brussels, the pronounced lack of seriousness that the Republican presidential front-runner has brought to the race became all the more glaring.

Donald Trump is not normally a name that would turn up in The Star, though he has been on my mind a lot lately. What has been puzzling me is how a number of people around the South Fork whom I know and respect, and think of as reasonable, can like him.

From all appearances there is little to merit his wide support other than that the other candidates in the Republican nomination hunt have been uninspiring. Mr. Trump’s negatives are many, and in a foreign policy context made urgent after the Brussels horror, his ignorance is clear. And yet his poll numbers continue to be solid.

Among all the analyses of this phenomenon — that a hate-filled, misogynistic, and woefully underprepared narcissist could be the Grand Old Party’s nominee — something I read on Vox.com about political authoritarianism has rung true. Citing the work of several academics, Amanda Taub reported that a tendency to favor authoritarian leaders among Republicans polled was the best single predictor of Mr. Trump’s support.

The voters cited by the researchers in Ms. Taub’s article were individuals who express dislike of minorities coupled with a desire for a strongman leader. This is perhaps why those voters who have not lost their jobs, or otherwise do not fit into the dubious narrative about so-called dispossessed voters, might find Mr. Trump appealing.

Forceful action against perceived threats is attractive to those with hard-edged leanings. As Ms. Taub put it, “If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.”

Maybe that explains it.

East Hampton has 1,000 tons of compost it can’t get rid of.   A couple of weeks back, officials sent out a notice announcing the town had a large amount unscreened compost to unload. The stuff had accumulated at the recycling center, the end product of all the lawn clippings, leaves, and brush that flow into the place, which are run through a giant grinder and left to mulch. Visitors to the so-called dump can see it for themselves — a long, tall mound of steaming dark-brown, almost black soil. 

Homeowners and landscapers know all about the town’s compost. Though it is thought not to be all that good for growing edible crops, it is terrific for sweetening up portions of a tired lawn or ornamental plantings. For a modest fee, workers at the recycling center will put a load in the back of a pickup truck for commercial landscapers or gardeners; permit-holders with a few bins to fill can do so at no charge, as I understand it.

However, when the supply reaches the hundreds or thousands of tons, the town has a problem. No one responded to its request for bids to buy the stuff, and earlier this month the Purchasing Department had the matter tabled during a town board meeting.

Compost is not the town’s only recycling headache. Because market prices for the products it collects have gone up and down over the years, it sometimes costs more for the town to deal with the material than it can receive from buyers.

That said, it is better in dollar terms for the town to hold down the volume of solid waste of any sort that it collects and has to haul away. Yard waste and tree trimmings ground into compost represent that much less that has to be sent to a distant landfill or incinerator.

Even if difficult to get rid of when the supply piles up, the composting program is a net benefit for taxpayers. And while we might not be able to take care of that 1,000 tons all on our own, a bucket-load here and there that any of us can take and use at home helps out.

Oh man, that was fun. Though it went by in a flash, as I’ve been telling people since Sunday, it was well worth it. Well worth the 57-mile after-work drive to and from the rehearsal studio in Bohemia. Well worth the hours holed up in the tiny and cluttered studio/writing room at home, learning new songs. And well worth all of Saturday’s downtime as the hours ticked away and the butterflies took flight. 

It had been exactly one year since anything resembling a formal performance — a short-lived band that gave exactly one performance before falling apart, as these ventures usually do — and in the ensuing months I’d wavered between a mild enthusiasm to soldier on and, more often, fervent cynicism and negativity. When time allowed, I’d hole up in that tiny room in what seems a futile effort to attain even passable dexterity on the piano. The guitars weren’t played at all, silently gathering dust as they hung from the walls. 

Is anyone even listening? Does anyone care? In my observation, live music is received as background noise. Don’t the kids prefer a D.J. these days?

Maybe, but the audience that packed Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday, at least, showed a pronounced preference for the real thing. The crowd definitely skewed older, shall we say, and when queried at the top of the show, many testified to personal experience with the Fillmore East, a downtown Manhattan rock ’n’ roll venue that closed when I was 4 and to which this event paid tribute. 

A few months ago, Randolph Hudson III, a guitarist and wonderful guy, asked if I owned a 12-string guitar. As it happened, I had bought one, on a whim, just a few months earlier when an offer I thought insultingly low was unexpectedly accepted. Randy kindly referred me to Joe Lauro, of the HooDoo Loungers and the Historic Films archive, who has helped to conceive and organize many similar musical events at Bay Street in the last few years. 

Joe and I had a short conversation, and I was invited to play with a group that would perform music of Jefferson Airplane, a group I’d always liked yet wasn’t especially familiar with beyond a spellbinding scene in “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers’ document of a 1969 festival at which a young man was stabbed and kicked to death by members of the Hells Angels as the Rolling Stones played on. 

Paul Kantner, who died in January, played the 12-string, an integral component of the psychedelic band’s sound. The “Airplane” would play between groups performing music of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two other icons of rock ’n’ roll’s long-ago golden age. 

In Bohemia — what a suitable name for these hippie revivalists’ rehearsal site — it was immediately apparent that Joe had assembled a fantastic crew, perhaps none more than the vocalists, George Feaster and Carolyn Droscoski, who would be our Marty Balin and Grace Slick. George, I later learned, is also an accomplished actor; as a frontman he is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When Carolyn belts out “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” it is, as Joe said, as though Ms. Slick is standing before you. 

Time and logistics allowed for just two group rehearsals before the big day, and by Saturday we just about knew what we were doing. When it was time, we proceeded to the stage in darkness, the last minutes of the original “King Kong” playing on the screen overhead, as Jefferson Airplane had done at a Fillmore East concert. 

“Well, Denham,” the police lieutenant said, “the airplanes got him.”

“Oh no,” Denham replied, the orchestral score swelling to its climax. “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” 

And then we were off, “3/5 Mile in 10 Seconds” and “The Other Side of This Life” and “White Rabbit” and more, ending with our own climactic “Volunteers” (“Got a revolution, got to revolution!”). It went by in a flash. 

I hope those veterans of the Fillmore East were able to relive a moment in their lives, and I wish I could relive the moment I hope they relived, if that makes any sense. Can we all do that again? 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

“Estoy feliz que Mexico no ha construido un muro contra noso­tros!” I said to the taxi driver as we arrived at the Las Brisas hotel outside Zihuatenejo.

He laughed, as had been my intention in saying I was glad Mexico had not built a wall to keep us tourists out. On that note, we began a week’s stay at the closest thing we’ve come to paradise on this earth, there being nothing to do there but read and swim and speak bad Spanish to the unfailingly pleasant staff, a wonderfully captive audience. 

And yet, even though I felt more at ease than ever with the language, to the extent that I was able to frequently get orange juice mixed in with my margaritas, and to make some headway in proposing that the name of Isaias Ochoa Hernandez, a former Las Brisas lifeguard who began protecting baby sea turtles there years ago, be added to the hotel’s history of the project, a history proudly affixed to a stone wall near the beach, it’s Mary who always received the compliments — heeding apparently the advice of my father that all one needed to say in French was thank you and goodbye, “merci” and “au revoir.”

In her case it’s “gracias” and “lo siento,” to which she adds, apologetically, “Mi espanol es muy mal,” invariably prompting her interlocutor to declaim, “No, no, senora, you speak very well! You speak very well!”

“I’m better than her in tennis, she’s better than me in swimming, and we’re tied in Ping-Pong,” I said to a waiter who had noted we were sporty. I forgot to add that she killed me in backgammon — thankful that I wasn’t that fluent.

For exercise, though, you needn’t do anything more than climb up and down Las Brisas’s steep stone stairs that lead through jungly growth to the pools, the tennis courts, the beach, and, if you’re of a mind, to the lobby, about as high up on the cliff into which the hotel is built as a sacrificial Aztec or Mayan altar. 

“It was like Syphilis,” I said, panting, to Mary following one of my steep ascents. “Sisyphus, rather. . . . You know, Robert Graves [no relation] says he was known as the worst knave on earth for promoting only Corinthian commerce and navigation.”

That reminded me of a certain knave on the earth now, though I held my tongue, not wanting our bliss to go amiss.

It would be going too far to say that my husband and I are cutthroat when it comes to the online challenge called Trivia Today. Intense would be more like it. 

Okay, maybe just a little . . . bloodthirsty.

Every morning and afternoon we check our computers for the day’s two questions. Before the sun goes down, one of us is sure to ask the other — always off-handedly, though a smirk or a scowl is riding on the answer — “So, how’d you do on Trivia Today?”

We’ve been competing in this maddening game — which is sort of like “Jeopardy,” only you get four possible answers to choose from — for about two years now. The enigmatic scoring chart, with 100 tops, has had us since January at 62 and 65, which is better than it sounds; the average score out there in virtual gameland is 49. Sidney had a long string of right answers recently, but it takes forever to gain a point and his number never budged, which has not improved dinnertime. “I don’t understand it,” he grouses. “Why aren’t I moving up?”

Most of the relationships of the long-married couples I know, and we are talking golden anniversary-plus here, seem to me to tilt almost soppily solicitous or — not so much. I met one woman in Florida this winter who was playing this same trivia game with her husband and confided that she was deliberately giving the wrong dumb answers to make him happy, and another who cuts the Times crossword puzzle out of the paper every morning and makes a copy of it for her husband before he wakes up. Then they have a battle over coffee to see who finishes first. They’ve been keeping score forever.

“Who’s ahead?” I asked her.

“Oh, I am. And you can tell him I told you.”

The best thing about Trivia Today is that you learn a lot of stuff that seems useless at the moment but that might come in handy sometime. The first job I ever had, as assistant humor editor of a long-defunct magazine called Coronet, was like that. Coronet was the Avis of the day to the Reader’s Digest’s Hertz. We ran a column like the Digest’s “Life in These United States” where people would write in with funny things that had really happened, only we paid $25 and they paid $100.

Nine out of 10 submissions were handwritten, often in pencil. My job was mainly to decipher the chicken scratches, but also to pick out candidates for publication, and then the humor editor (a beyond-crabby woman who never cracked a smile) would decide who’d win.

Within a few months of starting work, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to plow through the whole letter, just skip to the punchline at the end. “No, 40 children are enough.” Yup, we’ve run that one already. It was as if there were only a finite number of comical things happening in America. By 11 a.m. the day’s work was done. 

Pretty soon I had hundreds of funny stories by heart, and oh boy, what that job did for me. “That reminds me of a joke,” I’d say. All of a sudden I was the life of the party.

But I digress. You know what I’ve really learned from playing Trivia Today? That a lot of us never listened to anything we were told in school. 

How else could you miss a question like the one we had on March 15: “Who was famously killed on the Ides of March?” 

Remember, you get four choices. Seventy percent of respondents got Julius Caesar. Four percent guessed John F. Kennedy. Thirteen percent picked Joan of Arc. 

Trumpists.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Talking to my sister-in-law Linda the other day the subject turned to trip-planning.

“I leave that to John,” she said.

“It’s just the opposite with us,” I said. “I leave it [and many other things] to Mary. As you know, I can’t hear very well, and I’m not very good with computers. My finger might slip and we’d find ourselves booked on a flight to Afghanistan.”

That had her in stitches, which is good because she’s recovering from a painful ankle injury, and so I continued. “Last night, I was looking over the itinerary for Georgie and Mary’s flight to Raleigh-Durham this weekend, and I found that they were going to stop first in. . . .”

“In Baltimore?”

“No, not Baltimore, in Orlando! Go figure. It was the first Mary’d heard of it. She was not pleased. ‘They told us we wouldn’t be changing planes,’ she said, retrieving the printouts from me. ‘I knew something was strange when it said the flight would take five hours and five minutes. Raleigh-Durham’s not that far away as the crow flies.’ ”

“Then I looked at the rental car details. And I saw that they were to pick up the car at Islip at 1 p.m. Friday and return it there at 7:30 p.m. Sunday! That didn’t sound right at all, and I told her so. She was incredulous, and, once she’d seen that it actually said what I said it said, nonplussed. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! After flying down to Orlando and back, there would have been no car for us in Raleigh-Durham! They would have put us on a bus. What is wrong with these people!’ ”

“ ‘You can’t trust anybody,’ I said. ‘Nobody.’ ”

“After she’d gotten the car rental details straightened out, she thanked me profusely (which of course raised my self-esteem) and, reasoning that obviously she was now among those legions not to be trusted, said she would entrust me with the planning of our next trip. Brimming with diffidence, I said I would rise to the occasion . . . once the puppy we’re to get soon were raised.”

I ought to be able to find a travel agent by then. I trust the species is not utterly extinct. I think I heard someone say one had been spotted the other day at the Morton Wildlife Refuge. And there’s a rumor that there’s a mating pair at Mashomack.

Maybe it’s a good thing that interest in the presidential election has been revved up by one candidate who denigrates so many people — targeting them by place of origin, religion, and sex — while another foments revolution (albeit a peaceful one). Everyone I know keeps talking about the primaries.

I cannot believe disrespect and name-calling are good for democracy, but if more of the electorate turns out in November as a result, we might be able to say that this cloud of national humiliation has had a silver lining.

A report on voter turnout in national elections between 2000 and 2012, from an organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center, showed it “dipped from 62.3 percent of eligible citizens voting in 2008 to an estimated 57.5 in 2012. That figure was also below the 60.4 level of the 2004 election but higher than the 54.2 percent turnout in the 2000 election.” So it seems that somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of voters were the decision-makers in those years. 

Of course, a simple majority hasn’t always assured national election. In 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president, lost in the Electoral College after Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to George W. Bush in a 5-to-4 Su­preme Court decision. That then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor voted with the majority was considered the deciding factor. Mr. Gore had won the popular vote, although by only a very small percentage; Ralph Nader had won almost 3 percent of the vote and was probably the spoiler rather than Justice O’Connor. In addition to talking about the primaries, friends and relatives who admit to being surprised by the size of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s support have found it amusing to take something called the Bubble Quiz. According to their score on 25 questions, they were able to find out if they lived “cloistered together . . . with little to no exposure to American culture at large.” 

The quiz was devised by Charles Murray, a well-known political scientist and author who describes himself as a libertarian. He was recently interviewed about it by Paul Solman on the PBS NewsHour.

The Bubble Quiz questions range from “Have you ever walked on a factory floor?” and “Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?” to whether you have seen certain popular movies or eaten in certain chain restaurants. If you are interested in finding out where you score, it’s easy to find on the NewsHour website.

I myself took the quiz earlier today, but didn’t find it particularly enlightening. I guess I’m already aware that I live in a bubble of privilege. Also, I am not entirely sure that Mr. Murray is an oracle on what constitutes “American culture at large.” Still, if those who took the quiz were a fair sample of the voting public, and if their answers were carefully analyzed, perhaps it might serve as a barometer of the next election.

What we all know for sure is that the electorate is deeply divided, and that the societal culture gap is real. Trump and Sanders are only making that division so obvious we cannot ignore it any longer.