Of course when I said, on my return from San Pancho, Mexico, “Let the games begin,” I didn’t know a blizzard was imminent, which caused the cancellation of just about everything over this past week, except for the skating at Buckskill and the Gin Rummy games which Mary seems to invariably win, even as she says I am an astute card player.

    An article on the winter club at Buckskill and an interview that arose from a serendipitous meeting with Paul and Frenee Frediani at the Polar Bear Plunge at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach allayed my anxiety somewhat, though a third story remained elusive until Mary reminded me, on awakening Saturday morning, that it was 25 years ago that East Hampton High’s boys basketball team won a state championship. 

    While Kathy, who makes me look good every week, said that putting a “25 Years Ago in Bonac Sports” column on the front sports page smacked of “desperation,” I, who had a photo of Kenny Wood to go with it, demurred.

    It’s all one to me, inasmuch as my sports writing style remains as convoluted as it ever was. I can’t go quite as far as Janis Joplin, but at times it almost seems as if it’s all the same fuckin’ day, man.

    Which, of course, is delightful inasmuch as I am a great devotee of my meandering prose, a self-love that’s probably more inherited than merited.

    Terminal alliteration may, indeed, be my fate. I fear it as much as Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, full speed ahead, and damn the peccadillos.

    Mary has lately been saying — after I’ve performed a service that in more able men would go unremarked upon, such as closing the chimney flue — that I’m “a god.”

    Though — again, as with Kathy — I demur. “I’m not a god,” I say, in all seriousness. “Just a demigod.”

    “Or a dummy-god,” she says.

    Anyway, it all came together this week, as it always seems to do. Kathy held back my 30 inches of nostalgia in favor of a piece Rusty Drumm did on Johnny Rade, a savvy commercial fisherman who’s no less avid in discussing things avian.

    So, I can look forward to looking back next week. By which time, I hope, the games really will have begun.

    There was a near-sell-out crowd at the East Hampton movie theater on Saturday night for the 6:30 p.m. screening of “American Hustle,” and a buzz was in the air that had as much to do with the scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as any Academy Awards nominations.

    “American Hustle” is a period piece of sorts, all mid-1970s fashions amid the loose framework of what is called the Abscam corruption scandal. Sure, the top-billed stars, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Lawrence, are fine, but contemporary events rang loudly because Jeremy Renner plays a well-meaning populist mayor who is caught up in a federal sting.

    Less a few score pounds, Mr. Renner’s Carmine Polito is a stand-in for Mr. Christie. The character is based on a real-life Camden, N.J., mayor, Angelo Errichetti, who was caught taking a bribe, as were a United States senator and six members of the House, among others.

    No one is saying that Mr. Christie is on the take. Rather, the two biggest allegations are that he must have known about the plot by top aides to bog down Fort Lee traffic as political payback and that he and his family improperly appeared in a federally funded video promoting New Jersey tourism following Hurricane Sandy.

    By the look of it, Saturday’s audience here was heavy with New Yorkers and probably some number of New Jersey residents out for the weekend. Lisa and I could feel the “aha” sense of identification with the story of officials on the wrong side of the law.

    Governor Christie’s stumbles are sad. I was looking forward to a great Republican primary with him in the race for the presidential nomination — and maybe later battling Hillary Clinton for the whole enchilada.

    If anything, “American Hustle” makes the New Jersey debacle more believable. Its images of politicians in their slick suits reaching for briefcases of money left us thinking, “Sure. Of course. Of course, Christie knew. It makes sense.”

    I think the crowd was feeling exactly that way as we walked out of the theater.   

    I had thought I’d been sleeping unduly long — 9 to 11 hours at times if I can get away with it — until I read a report in the weekly science section of The New York Times on the so-called glymphatic system, which takes out the trash, as it were, from the brain while one is in Never-Never Land.

    “So what is removed from our brains as we sleep?” I asked Mary, who is as much of an insomniac as I am a narcoleptic, this morning.

    “I don’t know,” she said. “Read the article. I’ve saved it. It’s in the computer room.”

    “Is the brain’s janitorial service getting rid of my thoughts?” I called after her. (She was hastily getting ready to drive to work.) “But no, that couldn’t be, for I usually let you do my thinking for me. . . . As for the rest, maybe I’m being brain-washed.”

    Indeed. That’s what the article (which, deprived of Mary’s customary sustenance, I did actually read) says, to wit, that the interstitial spaces within the brains of laboratory mice swelled with cerebrospinal fluid that removed toxic proteins (some of which have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia) while the mice slept or were anaesthetized.

    This “glymphatic” system is said to be similar to the lymphatic system, which removes toxins from the rest of the body after physical exercise.

    Since one apparently needs uninterrupted periods of the kind of sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care for the janitorial glial cells to remove the brain’s waste, and thus, presumably, to obviate, or at least forestall, the onset of . . . of . . . yes, yes, Alzheimer’s . . . those who are sleep deprived (as the article says 80 percent of Americans are) would seem to be at risk.

    The brain studies — two were cited in The Times article — presage, perhaps, two avenues pharmacological companies may take in the future — one that would “make certain that our brain’s sleeping metabolism is as efficient as it can possibly be,” and one that would “promote the enhanced cleaning power of the sleeping brain in a brain that is fully awake,” a noxious possibility to my somnambulant mind, one that could well cause this idler — who would have, as a result, even more time on his hands! — to lose a lot of sleep.   

    On Sunday nights, our entire street goes dark. We used to be among the weekend families, the ones who packed up their lives and returned to the city midday Sunday afternoon.

    Having children changes everything.

    A year before my husband and I married, we bought a house, nestled in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton, about a five minutes’ drive from the center of town. At the time, it was our weekend retreat, where we would arrive late Friday night, each having battled long workweeks, and where we rested our weary bones and summoned enough stamina to do it again the following week.

    Flash forward to May 2012, when we moved out for an extended summer, this time with our 6-week-old son in tow. Never having spent more than an entire week in our house, we planned on staying until Labor Day. I distinctly remember leaving behind my sweaters and coats. Not only would they have found an impossible time fitting over my new, ample-sized body, it was simply inconceivable that we wouldn’t be returning to the lives and the seasons where such items were worn.

    But by Labor Day, we hadn’t really made much progress in our return to the city. And with a semester-long parental leave for my husband, and occasional side projects as a freelance writer, there wasn’t any particular rush to return to our former lives. By late October, though, friends had grown worried and the call of the world ultimately felt too great.

    So, we moved back for the months of November and December to our two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. We were quickly and quite surprisingly miserable. After long walks on the beach every evening near dusk, our apartment felt tiny and claustrophobic by comparison. City life with a baby, and later a toddler, proved worse. My friends in Williamsburg might as well have occupied another city given how little I saw of them. Between nap times and limited child care, we started to live our lives in a span of 30 city blocks — and often far less.

    A year ago, we moved out to the house, with the intention of giving it a full calendar year. There were more than a few occasions last winter when I felt like a modern-day pioneer woman, tasked with keeping the elements at bay. My husband experimented with what it meant to commute two full days a week into the city, and I started working at The Star part time, an alternative that allowed me more time with my son, while also keeping a vital toehold in the working world.

    All this time, we’ve kept our apartment. But those days, we’re finding, are numbered. Each trip feels like visiting a former life. The bedroom where I first kissed my husband and the shower where I labored are still there. Our plates and utensils, too. But I firmly believe this next stretch of our lives is about committing to one place, about our family, now the three of us, deciding where to make our home.

    Nevertheless, the decision of where to be has proven an agonizing one.

    Sometimes, it feels strange to have chosen to make your life in such a desolate part of the earth. I like to joke with my mother, who lives in California, that there really wasn’t much farther east we could have gone.

    I moved to New York after college, as a lot of young and ambitious people do, to live out their dreams. Those 10 years, filled with equal parts magic and heartbreak, they went by in a flash.

    A few weeks ago, my husband and I drove back into the city for a long weekend, our son fast asleep in the back seat. It was one of those stark Manhattan nights, when the lights of the city seemed to appear out of nowhere, stretching on as far as the eye could see. The city seemed massive in a way that I couldn’t fully penetrate. In those moments, I felt as though I had barely scratched the surface.

    I hope for these next 10 years, wherever it is they take us — possibly here, possibly not — that at the end of it we arrive at a place that feels more like home. A place where we can say there was a deeply felt sense of community, of purpose, where we came away with an abiding sense of being known.

    Maybe more than I want it for my child, I want it for myself, too.

    Amanda M. Fairbanks is a reporter at The Star.   

    “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a book, “Where Do We Go From Here — Chaos or Community?” that was written in 1967, and into which I dip every year around this time.

    He said that almost 50 years ago, when there were three social classes in this country. Now, it’s pretty much fair to say there are two, the gap between them continuing relentlessly to widen.

    Those who’ve been left behind have yet to raise their voices sufficiently, and those with power, closeted as they are behind gated communities and cosseted as they are by policies over-friendly to wealth, haven’t felt the need to raise theirs except when periodic mention is made — as is happening more and more frequently nowadays — of this festering social wound and their role in it.

    Brandeis, Keynes, the pope (in his ringing “apostolic exhortation”), President Obama, and now Oxfam have been quoted in stories on the subject recently, nor should the economist James Henry’s finding in a report in The Guardian a year and a half ago that tax-haven wealth — estimated then at about $21 trillion — would be more than enough to pay off developing countries’ debts to the rest of the world be forgotten.

    The Oxfam report says, among other things:

    That “the wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion — 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.”

    That “seven out of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.”

    That “the richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.”

    That “in the U.S., the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.”

    And that “this dangerous trend can be reversed . . .  to the benefit of all, through more progressive taxation, public services, social protection, and decent work — all of which can be possible, the report says, should the majority make its voice heard in political forums.

    Perhaps the time for a more equable world, and a more equable society here, has come.

    Dr. King, whose birthday we celebrated this past week, had reason to hope that “a people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself.”

    Will we become more just? Or will it for us just be more?

    I want to thank Mr. Ira Rennert. Really. 

    Years ago when he began work on his compound in Sagaponack many were outraged. How could he take that lovely unbroken vista, Fairfield, and build something on it?

    Rumors swirled as more and more work was done in this huge ex-farm field overlooking the ocean. People tried to get a look at it. They flew over it and crept up from the beach to try see what was going on.

    There were stories: a garage for 100 cars, a footprint the size of Grand Central Station, hundreds of windows, tens of thousands of square feet! It would be a hotel, a hostel, a yeshiva, a corporate retreat, a university. Who needs a house that big, the neighbors wondered.

    People talked and whispered, and the traffic slowed to a crawl on the nearest roads. The work continued and continued.

    The fences went up and the sets of security gates. It was taking years to complete.

    Technology finally caught up with the project and satellites photographing every inch of the coastline enabled the curious to finally see the outlines of the parterres and allées and courtyards and driveways and accessory buildings. It was, in fact, huge, very sedate, very formal, with zillions of trees and acres of sod.

    Passers-by were positive this project would ruin the look of the area. They huffed and they puffed and they sort of hoped they could blow the whole thing down.

    And yet, it turns out the visual impact on the landscape is basically nil.

    The huge expanse of sand colored buildings are nestled snugly into the property and while the volumes are astounding when viewed from the air (or diagonally from a side road) the structures aren’t really any taller than the allées of trees. The Rennerts do not have any ungainly towers, swooping porches, portcullises, porte cochers, assorted mismatched rooflines, or encyclopedic variations on window sizes and shapes that can be found elsewhere locally.

    Folks, the Rennert house is subdued in its hugeness.

    I thank the Rennerts for buying the property and preventing the predatory developers (you know who you are) from making clusters of generic faux Shingle Style trophy houses for the nouveau, nouveau nouveaux.

    Across the street from Rennert-land, the sky is pierced by a combination of gambrel/mansard/pyramidal/hipped and semi-hipped, and simultaneously cross-gabled rooves sprouting more chimneys per structure than trees in the yards.

    Many of these faux-architectural specimens sport very tall stonework turrets at the corners of the shingled starter castles, with eyebrow windows breaking the hundreds of square feet of cedar shingles or terra-cotta tiles or both. MelangeHampton. Neighborhoods of flat ex-farm fields sprout tight groupings of spec houses spaced like suburbia — the Hamptons version of Levittown. Is this preferable? If you build it, they will come, and they have, and they will, as the land fills up with ticky-tacky.

    And then there is the previously scorned Rennert property with its low-slung European-style villa, formal gardens, and amazingly nonaggressive presence. Yes, the Rennert place is huge, but the compound is nowhere near as dense as those clumps of developer houses, or the watchcase factory mini-village in Sag Harbor.

    So thank you, Rennert family, for not letting that little piece of heaven sprout at least 480 English-style brick chimneys on at least 60 shiny new bad reinterpretations of the Shingle Style. Thank you for only having one tennis court and one pool, and not overstressing the land. (Each mini-castle in those developments has a pool and tennis and a septic and multiple dishwashers and triple machine laundry rooms.)

    Thank you for leaving room around your buildings for trees and grass. Thank you for keeping your house low so you don’t block the sunrise.

    Yes, dear reader, it’s big. But the alternative to the Rennert big is lots and lots of big. The farm fields will be growing more and more of those very big, generic houses they call McMansions, filling up the vistas with massive rooflines and hedges.

    The Rennerts have finished their building project, and what they have is better than what we imagined it would be and preferable by far to what it could have been.

    Thank you, Rennerts, and by the way, could I come over and borrow a cup of sugar some time? Maybe you could give me a little tour?

     Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, has photographed dozens, possibly even 100 or more, houses and gardens for the paper and its special sections.

    In fewer than the allotted 140 characters, someone  took to Twitter to make note of an obituary that appeared in The Star last week, but it was a first. Social media has become ubiquitous, but somehow, to my knowledge, no one had tweeted before on what we had written about a loved one who had gone.

    For those of us in local news there is the knowledge that we have far more readers now than we ever had before, thanks to the Internet. What we write now has a long reach and an extraordinary degree of persistence.

    The comment about the late Yolanda Gross came from a nephew who recalled her as a lovely person. He directed his Twitter followers to our website. Two others responded to the obiturary with tweets of their own, spreading word a little further.

    I took particular interest in this, as I guess I am The Star’s web-geek-in-chief, something I can trace back to a beginning computer class at East Hampton Middle School around 1976. John Ryan Sr., I believe, supervised a small group of us as we took turns phoning in to a remote computer, storing little programs we wrote on yellow paper punch-tape.

    Equally, though, I had taken note of Ms. Gross as information about her life had come into the office the previous week. A retired teacher, sometime Springs School librarian, accomplished cook, and classical pianist, she was the kind of person we would have liked to profile in the paper while she was alive. Hers was the best kind of obituary, one that leaves us wishing we had met.

    It is funny to contemplate how far technology has come from those days in the mid-’70s when remote users could connect to distant time-sharing computers, but not to one another. Not that many years ago, it might have been weeks before Ms. Gross’s relatives and friends elsewhere saw her obituary in a clipping sent by mail. Today, word of a death can be instantaneous once it is published online.

    We now realize we are not just writing for a local audience, but that the whole world can look in. Or, as with Yolanda Gross, a wide and affectionate circle of family and friends.

    I saw a film the other night, “Riding the Rails,” and, on re-reading some of my old interviews this weekend, I came serendipitously upon one with Alex F. Dzieman, whom many of you, I hope, may remember as “The Lone Defender” on our letters pages years ago, whose letters were signed “From the Mountaintop.”

    “. . . Mr. Dzieman, who was born in Sag Harbor, reared in Southampton, and who left school at 14 to go to work, said that he and two friends, Joe Arnister and Johnny Miller, ventured forth in 1937 from the Secaucus, N.J., railroad yards, and journeyed to just about all but the New England states and Georgia on top of, within, and in between box cars.”

    “ ‘It was very, very educational,’ Mr. Dzieman said of hoboism. ‘I think I learned more there than at any other time in my life. You learned to love thy neighbors, or get the hell knocked out of you. . . . I couldn’t say there was any meanness. Nobody carried knives or guns. There were so many decent people, so much you had to learn. One thing I learned from the road was to share, to help others out.’ ”

    “ . . . Returning here, at the age of 26, he caddied for a season at Montauk Downs, the former Montauk Beach Company golf course, and recalled fondly the fishing village at Fort Pond Bay: ‘It was beautiful. Their homes were shacks, but it was beautiful.’ ”

    “ ‘The goddam old-timers were nice people. They were Swedes and Norwegians mostly. The wives worked along with their husbands. They were beautiful girls. They could put a dory out to sea like the men, but they still had the human instinct. They were very lovable, even with their boots on,’ he said with a laugh.”

    “. . . ‘Nothing’s changed with the baymen, the clamdiggers, the scallopers, the Bonackers. These people never change. There’s no ostentation of wealth, no show-off. The snow might be blowing through the walls, but they share what they have. It’s a way of life.’ ”

    “Asked what he viewed as man’s worst failing, Mr. Dzieman, lighting up a cigarillo, said, ‘Worry about oneself too much . . . I think you never develop character unless you’re around poor people. Money is not the question — it’s not a life. . . . The worst Town is East Hampton. People there are very greedy and selfish. I call them foreigners. Brother Ev calls them second-home owners, I think.’ ”

    “As for his letter-writing, he said that he kept in his truck a pad for notes. On the Mountaintop he begins a letter to the editor, usually with a pen, works it over, sometimes for a few days, types it, and reads it aloud, memorizing it ‘word for word’ in the process. ‘It keeps me mentally occupied.’ ”

    “ ‘I must have ideas for 180 letters to the editor,’ he said, and confessed, ‘I started off long-winded. I try all the time now to condense. It’s trial-and-error with me. I have to do it the hard way. I try to develop my own way of writing. If I went to high school and college, I’d be what my professor taught me to be. I think it’s better this way.’ ”

    “. . . Asked why he called the Star’s editor Brother Ev, Mr. Dzieman replied, ‘If we treated everybody as a brother, we wouldn’t have this trouble. He gives me a chance to express my thoughts. He must be a nice guy. . . .’ ”  

    I can’t imagine anybody working at a newspaper suffering from the condition known as writer’s block. At a newspaper, you live by a simple creed: Write or die.

    Writing has always seemed natural to me. Whether I was writing copy for advertising or writing a poem or a play, it has always been about hearing the words, then writing them down. Hearing the words, and voicing them.

    Everyone has a voice.

    Today, we all write constantly, a waterfall of words. We tweet and instant-message and blog and email, using single letters and symbols for words and expressions of thought. But I wonder in this waterfall of words, if we don’t, at some point, drown out the sound of our own voices.

    The following letter came out of a large cigar box filled with papers from a Missouri family. How it got to East Hampton, I have no idea. It is a letter home from a Union soldier during the Civil War, Adam O. Branstetter, a private in the 49th Regiment of Missouri.

    I have dutifully researched the writer of this letter. He was born on May 19, 1834, in Pike County, Mo. Son of an innkeeper, he became a hatter. He married Carolyn Little in Wellsville, Mo., on April 1, 1862. On May 16, 1863, his wife gave birth to their only child, a girl, Stella A. Branstetter, whose father enlisted in the Union Army in August 1864.

He wrote this letter in a fairly neat script, but his spelling was hit-or-miss. I added punctuation and paragraph breaks, but left spelling as is.

    A couple of the words I couldn’t make out, but they are just words.

    March 17th 1865

    Dauphin Island Alabama

    Carrie Branstetter

    Wellsville, Mo

Dear Wife,

    I answer your letter dated March 2. I have bin sick for four weeks but am well at this time. I look as gaunt as a race horse, you would not know me. I had the leinil Diarear, it give me fits.

    I am sorry to hear that the baby is sick and father is blind. It grieves me to hear such news.

    We have done some hard marching since we left. Now we lay on the lake for three days in a storm. We have plenty of fresh oysters here by gathering them.

    This Island is about 12 miles long and one mile wide and covered with soldiers. I saw William Motley from Louisiana, he belongs to the Thirty Third Mo. Reg, and several others that I know.

    I expect we will start to Mobile in a few days wher we will have some fighting to do.

    I see something new every day. After we left New Orleans we crossed the Lake Ponchertrain and Mobile Bay. We saw the Bubbles gun boats on picket and we passed Fort Powell.

    This Island is covered with pine. It is a beautiful place and very healthy. There is not a woman on this Island.

    We are only 28 miles from Mobile. We can here the cannon every day. It sounds beautiful.

    I sent a blanket and over coat and one pair of drawers and some other little things. I would like to know if you got them or not, and all the general news, and if the Ualilha has been called out. I never hear a word about Miram Louis’ Family.

    You must be saving of your money for I don’t expect to get any more till my time is up. That is along time. I do not know what you will do for money.

    Nelson is well, so is Peyton, Ben, and Tom is well also, and all the balance of the Boys.

    Give my love to Miram’s Family and Brother Andrew’s family. My love to Father and Mother and Sister Poly Tell  Moly and Bud to be good children, and kiss that sweet little Babe for me. Tell the Babe to kiss its Mother for me.

    You must excuse this bad writing for I am to week. I cant hardly write. I must close.

I Remain Your True and Affectionate Husband Till Death

A.O.  Branstetter

Direct your letters Co B 49th Reg Inft

Mo Vol. 16 Army Corps 3 Division

2 Brig

    Adam O. Branstetter died on May 30, 1865, in Montgomery, Ala. He was first buried at the Montgomery National Cemetery, then exhumed and reburied in Marietta, Ga., at the Marietta National Cemetery.

    On July 23, 1866, the Treasury Department’s second auditor awarded Carolyn Branstetter $145 as a war widow, “less clothing overdrawn, $1.67.”

    T.E. (Tom) McMorrow covers police and crime for The Star. 

    It was 17 degrees that morning, so maybe the reason the conversation turned to warm water sailing was to put our minds over matter. I had been coiling a heavy orange extension cord, which was no longer needed near my desk, and announced rather smugly to a co-worker who happened to be standing nearby that I knew how to coil lines correctly because I had spent a lot of time on boats.

    “You got all but two turns right,” he said rather seriously as he took the cord to put it away. That my score was only fair was embarrassing.

    For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, keeping the lines on boats stored without kinks or twists is one of the first things sailors learn. A line that doesn’t flow out when it’s needed to, say, tie up at a dock or throw to someone who’s fallen overboard can cause trouble, indeed.

    So I told Paul, my co-worker, a story that I had repeated to others over the years about how little I knew about boats before I came to live in East Hampton. “I was afraid of rowboats in Clove Lake,” I would tell people, referring to a park on Staten Island that my friends and I frequented as teenagers from nearby Bayonne, N.J.

    One of my first lessons in what real boating was all about occurred when my husband-to-be and I sailed to Greenport in an old wooden catboat he had just bought, the first of several we eventually were to own. As instructed, I jumped onto the dock at which we were about to tie up, holding a heavy coil of line. I then stood there befuddled as he yelled — twice — “Take a turn around it.” A seafaring man of considerable experience, he was able to get on the dock, grab the line from my hand, and wind it several times around a heavy piling before the boat crashed into anything.

    Our winter conversation then turned logically to tying boats up at moorings rather than docks, and the tension that might ensue. Paul laughed and told me how he and his partner had rented a boat that was bigger than they had experience with, and how difficult the necessary communication became when they had to pick up a mooring in a crowded anchorage. Nowadays, Paul’s boat is of a size they manage quite well. But even though it is usually moored in a cove near their house, he runs a pick-up line between the real buoy, anchored into the harbor bottom, and a second one, providing an easier way to hook on.

    Before we got back to work, I had another story to tell. One fall day in the 1980s, I, my daughter, and a Star reporter took out our family’s last cruising catboat, which we kept at a small marina on the cove near the entrance to Three Mile Harbor. We were coming into our slip under power when the engine conked out. My daughter sailed the boat in with ultimate grace, evoking approbation from a few people on shore. That she was good at sailing was almost genetic.

    The conversation was then about to veer to ice-boating, but we decided that subject was better left for a hot summer’s day.