I was once a member of a women’s Ping-Pong league. I played for about 10 years, say, from when I was 60 to 70. I’d been baby-sitting my 10-year-old grandson and took him to the local pool hall, where I knew they had a couple of Ping-Pong tables. We could bond as we knocked ourselves out.

Four women alongside us, playing like gangbusters, were taking a lesson. “Why the lesson when you play so well?” I asked.

“My league wouldn’t let me play if I didn’t improve,” came a response. “You can join. Here, Sundays, 2 to 5.”

There’s such a thing as a Ping-Pong league? Just two blocks from where I live? Who knew?

Sunday 2 to 5 rolled around and I showed up. I saw about 30 women, some playing, some observing. I observed this: These women were all gay. I wasn’t. I became panicky, but so electrifying was the ping and pong from the tables, I ignored my anxiety. I decided on a reverse “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach.

Most of the players had short hair; wore mannish trousers; no makeup. My M.O., purple nail polish and bright red lipstick, was a definite no-no, so the following week I showed up plain. I was desperate to blend in. It took time. I kept to myself, spoke when spoken to, played fair; went overboard favoring my opponent when there was a score dispute. I suffered in silence.

Down the pike sparks of friendship came my way. Dinner was planned for one Sunday, and Patricia asked would I mind going to a lesbian restaurant?

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Do they have food?”

They knew! They didn’t tell me they knew, but they did, obviously just by the look of me. Now I could breathe again! I could be me! When Bev asked if I ever slow-danced with another woman, I simply took it as girl talk. Sexy. No offense taken.

“Not since high school,” I said.

After I assumed my place as one-of-the-gang-almost, I exemplified team spirit like there was no tomorrow. I hosted the end-of-season parties in the big loft I lived in (which I don’t anymore due to financial upset). I returned my hard-won trophies (after removing my name and accomplishment, which were merely taped to the underside) so they could be recirculated, saving the league a couple of dollars as they (we) were also in financial upset, and anyway I had nowhere to display them in my new closet of an apartment.

Another time at a “regular” restaurant I overheard a nasty crack about the lesbians from the next table and gave the bastard hell. Nobody’s going to talk about my gang like that.

One of the women pulled me away. “Hinda, we always get that. Ignore it.”

At about the same time I was outed as a straight woman the league moved to Chinatown. With the outsider pressure off, my game soared. So did my reputation. None of my friends or relatives ever actually saw me play, but the buzz was over the top: “You play Ping-Pong?” “Chinatown?” “You must be good.” I loved to tell it. I was on fire over there.

Then I wasn’t. The fire went out. My back went bad. I took time out to heal and eventually did, but I was never good as new. It wasn’t easy for me to stoop over and pick up the ball. I feared some might think I couldn’t handle it because of my age. I didn’t mind being an old lady, but I did mind being seen as one.

When I recovered, I emailed the league announcing my wish to return. A bill for membership arrived. While I usually pay when due, here I paid no attention. I got several follow-up emails instructing me to pay up, yet I resisted. Why? I had the money. A final email brought the firing squad: “We’ve dropped you from the roster for nonpayment.”

I tried to explain myself. You know me, you know I’m good for the money. But no. The treasurer was adamant. Bye!

As is my habit, I gave thought to my behavior. Maybe I just didn’t want to play anymore. Some things have a life of their own and then it’s over. Ten years was enough. Maybe my back would cave in from a bad reach and then I’d be good for nothing. Still, I didn’t quit the league. They quit me.

I stewed over the banishment. It definitely outweighed the crime — too harsh after all I’d done (the parties, the trophies, let alone persevering through the not belonging segment of the early years).

How long could I stew? I got a couple of emails from some of the women offering condolences, which touched my heart. I faced up to my portion of the blame, which I could now see was just about 95 percent (the other 5 percent was on them because I knew I would pay eventually, why didn’t they?). So I caused my own downfall; fired myself, so to speak.

During my run, I got to know these women as no different from myself. I was an outsider because I didn’t allow myself to be known. I don’t know if it was my own bigotry or my own innocence that caused me to be scared of a group of women who were only out on Sundays 2 to 5 to play Ping-Pong. The afternoon was not about me, or about gender identification. It was only about keeping your eye on the ball.

Hinda Gonchor lives in East Hampton and New York City. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Self magazine, and other publications.

Late in the fall of 2008, Dorothy King told my wife, Carol, and me how to access East Hampton Star archive microfilm through interlibrary loan. This tip greatly aided our research on Jud Banister, a former East Hampton Village mayor and great-uncle of Carol’s. By early spring I had logged 100 hours or more on Amherst College’s microfilm reader when the analogy struck me.

Over a decade earlier, when I was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, my brother-in-law spent a long, ultimately unsuccessful day panning for gold near our home in Alaska. He found one small flake the previous day at a nearby state historic site. His gold fascination had surely been stimulated by stories of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island he’d heard during his summertime visits to Jud’s Three Mile Harbor camp in the 1950s.

I was relieved that I had to go to work, knowing I didn’t have the patience to search for those small flakes hours on end. Now, 15 years later, through eyes strained from having spent hours scanning microfilm, I realized I was doing the same thing — searching for those precious nuggets mentioning Jud, other family members, and friends during his lifetime in East Hampton. The rewards were worth the effort, thanks to the helping hand from Dorothy, or Dotty, as she was known by her many friends.

A series of emails followed, with Dorothy, who ran the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection for more than 30 years, providing more family stories of Jud, Aunt Hat, and her own family. By now my microfilm scanning antennae were attuned to more names, including that of Dorothy’s father, Clarence, especially his time in the East Hampton Fire Department, and her Aunt Mayme and Uncle Joe Burns, whom she lived with on McGuirk Street. Others with stories of Jud surfaced as nuggets, with historical names such as Barnes and Mulford, thanks to contacts from Mary Lou Barnes Mayo and David Mulford. As with Dorothy they all had tales about Jud when they were merely kids in the late 1930s and ’40s.

Dorothy lived for much of her youth with her aunt and uncle after the tragic death of her father when she was only 7 — a little girl old enough to have known love, admiration, and respect for him, but young enough to absorb a lifetime of memories that would crowd out some from those youthful years.

She told of how the Burnses’ McGuirk Street home had a backyard adjoining that of another aunt on Cooper Lane. “There was a path from my house to her house,” she wrote. “Sometimes I would go in the backdoor and out the front door on my way to school. I crossed the street, walked up ‘Uncle Jud’s’ driveway and crossed his cow pasture to Conklin Terrace, and walked on to school. Sometimes I went this way three times a day. I never heard Aunt Hat or Uncle Jud complain about the school kids using the cow lot for a shortcut.”

She said that Jud was a good friend of Mayme and Joe Burns. “They liked to play six-handed pinochle. As Aunt Hat did not play cards they needed another player. I was always thrilled when I was asked to play with them. Much fun.”

More followed in subsequent emails, including one that seemed typical for Jud. “Did I mention that Uncle Jud loaned his car to my brother when he got married? Gas rationing also, I think at that time our car was a pickup truck.”

Dorothy hosted Carol and me at her house on Gerard Drive in Springs the following spring and introduced us to Mary Eckey, her cousin, and Betty Cobb, a friend, both of whom, as young girls like Dorothy, knew Jud. Mary Lou Barnes Mayo also joined us as we shared a great afternoon reminiscing about Jud and the East Hampton of their youth. An unexpected connection that likely explains why Jud came to East Hampton emerged from that fun day of stories enhanced by coffee, tea, and pastries.

We had always credited Carol’s grandmother Edith Banister, Jud’s older sister, with having convinced him that a good life was possible for an ambitious young man in turn-of-the-20th-century East Hampton. We explained that Edith came in 1901 as a graduate of the Potsdam Normal School to take a position in the six-year-old public school here. Betty mentioned that her aunt, Mrs. Stephen J. Lynch, the former Effa Silver, was a Potsdam Normal School graduate of a year earlier, having given her commencement oration on “The Influence of Women.” Star archives list her as a new teacher that fall, 1900, a year before Edith. We now believe Edith was encouraged to come to here by Effa, launching the Banister ties to East Hampton.

Dorothy, Mary, Betty, Carol, and I always tried to share a meal during our subsequent visits. I still recall smiling as I saw Dorothy, long coat and floppy hat protecting a warm smile and heart, walking across the Reutershan parking lot to meet the rest of us at John Papas Cafe. We gathered at the big round table in the back, enjoying both lunch and one another’s company. Combining several hundred years of memories, we were grateful that we were never made to feel we should leave before our stories were done and we had the good sense to make a discreet exit on our own.

Dorothy was helpful to us in so many ways, and I was happy to convey several Star news notes not only about the Burns family, but also many about her father’s time and influence with the Fire Department. At the time of his death, Clarence had been re-elected as first assistant engineer, the second in command to Chief Steve Marley. Earlier he had replaced Jud as the captain of Hook and Ladder Company 1 when Jud became chief in 1930. I told Dorothy that his record made a strong case that he might have succeeded Marley as chief had he lived.

“I was amazed at all the info you have about my father in the Fire Department,” she said. As she pointed out, her brother was a charter member of the Springs Fire Department, and his two sons also joined. Fire Department service is in the King family DNA.

We last visited Dorothy at her Gerard Drive home in late October 2013. Though the visit was brief, we thanked her for the pictures she had found of Jud taken in Florida a month before he died. She had earlier passed on family notes from the time he first arrived to stay with them, and finally found the pictures that she gave us. Carol instantly recognized Jud, in his high-waisted, high-water pants, enjoying some Florida warmth in March with friends. They are important memorabilia for us.

Mary Eckey and Betty Cobb remain good friends whom we cherish spending time with during our spring and fall visits. We may not have met them if not for Dorothy. A July 21, 2014, email from Mary apprised us of Dorothy’s passing a couple of days earlier. The Star published a fitting tribute obituary that week that made us appreciate even more the friend we had known. Her niece Deanna Tikkanen sent us a thoughtful note including the Star obituary and enclosed the note repeating the story of Jud’s loaning his car to her parents on their wedding day to drive from church.

Dorothy King was special to family and a treasure to the community. And thanks to her tip on Star archives through interlibrary loan and her willingness to share her memories and bountiful information, we truly realize what a gem she was to us.

Steve Rideout, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Shutesbury, Mass.

I’m single. There, I’ve said it, the dreaded S word. The D label fits, but it’s irrelevant.

Not many years ago, in the ’60s, marriage itself was on the brink of obsolescence for some people. Free love, sex, and rock ’n’ roll ruled the day for the young and restless like me. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, threesomes and groups cohabitated, guiltless and smug.

Nowadays, it seems that everyone has marriage in mind. There are countless websites devoted to folks eager to find a soul mate, prime-time sitcoms are touting the virtues of married life, and reality hookup shows are super-hits. I find this odd when at least 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce court.

Anyway, “Three’s Company” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” are ancient history. Even numbers are in, along with babies, snugglies, and “Modern Family.” Vast numbers of couples are cocooning with their mates of choice, cuddling up, and rooting for a “Bachelor” or “Bachelorette” to pop the question.

For couples, everything’s rosy, comfy cozy. A new dialect has even sprung forth from the mouths of those in bonded bliss. I call it couple-talk. Familiar phrases are uttered, but laden with hidden meanings, or I.O.W.s (“in other words”).

Here are a few examples:

“Can you join us for drinks? Bring so-and-so.” I.O.W.: Solo, you’re a threat.

“Come visit for the weekend.” I.O.W.: With a partner you get the guest room; alone — the sofa.

“Can you be a sixth at dinner?” I.O.W.: We know you’d hate to be a fifth wheel.

“We both [fill in the blank].” I.O.W.: Together we share much more than a name and address.

“Did you hear he’s single?” I.O.W.: Perhaps you two will hit it off.

“Any plans to marry?” I.O.W.: When can we put you on our A-list?

“We’ve heard all about you.” I.O.W.: You’re smart, attractive, witty, so what’s your problem?

“So how was your trip?” I.O.W.: Did you meet a man?

“I know a great guy.” I.O.W.: Please, let me play matchmaker.

“We met through Match.com.” I.O.W.: Try it, you might get lucky.

“She’s single, too.” I.O.W.: Sure glad I’m not her.

“I’ve vetted this guy for you.” I.O.W.: He’s definite partner material.

“My neighbor has a friend.” I.O.W.: It’s time you get serious.

“We’ve heard ballroom dancing is fun.” I.O.W.: You’ve got to keep looking.

“Have you tried a bereavement group?” I.O.W.: We’ve reached the desperation point.

“You’re not getting any younger.” I.O.W.: You need reality therapy.

“My husband . . .” or “My family [fill in the blank].” I.O.W.: Since you’re not part of this homey clan, we’ve got to distance ourselves.

“So how come you’re still single?” I.O.W.: What’s the ghastly skeleton hiding in your closet?

Frankly, all this we-ness nauseates me. Oh, I have nothing against couples. Some of my best friends are still connubial. But I don’t care a bit for couple-talk. Should I tie the knot again someday, I won’t indulge in this lousy lingua.

Yes, I’m single. Did I mention I’m the one you wanted to fix up with your tennis partner’s brother-in-law?

Dianne Moritz’s latest children’s book, “1, 2, 3 . . . by the Sea,” published by Kane Miller, was named a Bank Street Center for Children’s Literature Best Book of 2014. A contributor of “Guestwords” for many years, she lives in North Sea.

I flew on the first direct flight from J.F.K. to Havana, March 17, 2015. My six companions were members of several South Fork Presbyterian churches, traveling in mission partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba. Our destination was the country town of Guines, 50 kilometers southeast of Havana.

Traveling that day were Barbara and Dennis D’Andrea, Zanetta Classens, and Karen McCaffrey, of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, John Loper and myself, also from East Hampton, though as pastor emeritus I represent the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, and John White of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.

Anyone traveling in Cuba or going to meetings while there knows that Cuba time is not corporate America time. Sunday worship in the Guines church may be scheduled to start at 10 a.m., but it actually starts whenever everyone gets there and when the leadership and the musicians get their act together. Never mind getting out in time for whatever else someone may have planned on a Sunday. In Guines, with Bible study, a children’s choir in performance, prayers, announcements, then worship with a gospel rock band, preaching, and prayers, plus a break for refreshments between the Bible study and worship, Sunday morning moves along at its own internal pace. It is worship in Cuba time.

I enjoy the leisurely pace. On weekday mornings I rise early and sit on the church porch with a café and watch the neighborhood wake up to the new day. In March it is still dark at 7 a.m., but with a streak of dawning light and on this day a crescent moon just above the one-story rooftops of houses across the street. Children emerge, dressed in colors by school grade, and some of them are taken to school by a parent on a bicycle. Men and women walk to work, with “Buenos dias” said between us as they pass by, or the shortened form, “Buenos.” There are cars and trucks, too, and tractors and motorbikes, and horse-drawn taxis or pedibikes for transport.

One woman sits with straight back, dressed in a yellow skirt and white blouse. Her posture suggests royalty. But there are no royals in Cuba, or corporate officers or lawyers with briefcases, or media entertainers with an entourage. Not in Guines. These are “the people” of the socialist revolution now 56 years on, a revolution that is running itself out in experiments with market economics. Change is in the air, and the question is, what will become of Cuba time when corporate time gets planted on those island shores? It is a prospect both anticipated and worrisome.

Our flight from J.F.K. was on a Sun Country Airlines 737. Because this was the first direct flight there was more than the usual check-in and security. There was a long line taking three hours to get to the first of several check-in desks for passports, baggage, payment for excess weight, and then security. The plane was due to leave at 3 p.m. but left closer to 5:30. It was as if Cuba time had reached up to affect the efficiency of airline punctuality touting “on time.”

About 95 percent of the passengers were Cuban-Americans. When we landed at José Marti Airport and it was announced, “Welcome to Havana, Cuba,” there were shouts and cheers and loud applause. In previous years our mission group has traveled through either Nassau or Miami. Now there are also daily flights for Cubans and Cuban-Americans between Miami and Havana, travel restrictions having been relaxed by both countries. The direct flight on Sun Country at present flies only on Tuesdays, one flight down, one back.

When in Guines, our group visits people in their homes. These are members of the church, some of whom may be infirm or ill, but on this trip we also visited some newer church members. Pastor Abel Mirabel is doing very well in his leadership. The church is thriving, as are other churches in Cuba, all as a result of 20 years of rapprochement between the government and religious communities. There were 200 in worship the Sunday we were there, with 40 in the Sunday school and a dozen in a youth class.

The church rocks, and it is also a social center the way churches were in our country in the 1950s, going by my recollection of the Midwest. Indeed, there is this sense that Cuba time is a variant 1950s warp, visually augmented by all the American cars of that era that have been kept going by clever maintenance.

But of course it is not the 1950s, it is revolutionary Cuba time moving into an unknown transition period. I saw a government sign that said something like, Individual opportunity is the new socialism. Will there be a postrevolutionary time? If there is, it probably will be gradual, or that seems to be the hope. There is a reluctance — shared with us in anecdotal conversation — that too rapid a change with a heavy influx of American capital would be disruptive. Nonetheless there is a clear desire to ease relations between the countries, certainly to get rid of the embargo, which the Cuban government calls a blockade.

Each year, I visit a family in Guines who are not church members. I met them through their son who is now 19 and doing his obligatory military service. When I first met him he was 11 playing ball with friends in the street. He was home for a few days. Sitting in their living room, I told them of our flight from New York and how the Cuban-Americans had cheered when landing in Havana. I noticed a certain expression on the mother’s face suggesting displeasure, though being respectful she said nothing.

Her expression reminded me that Cubans in Cuba have mixed feelings about Cubans in America. There are many lines of personal history, but among them is the knowledge that thousands of Cubans fled Cuba or have defected, and among those there is a political base that is hostile to Cuba. Cuban families have also been split by a son or a daughter leaving the parents behind or older Cubans joining married children in Miami, perhaps to find it’s not the paradise they thought it might be. What I saw in a flicker of expression on this woman’s face was a sense of herself as a Cuban who does not easily identify with Cuban-Americans, if at all.

That same afternoon conversation included the young man’s grandparents. The grandfather spoke with skeptical hope about talks that have opened up between our counties. With the people, he said, speaking in Spanish, there is not a problem. He gestured with an open hand, leaving unstated the suggestion that it will be challenging for the governments to work things out.

It is these conversations multiplied a thousand times over for many years that help build amistad, friendship, between our countries. Indeed, the many mission partnerships that congregations and religious groups in the United States have had with Cuban churches for over 20 years have created words of understanding that percolate through the church’s social fabric. The political initiative between President Obama and President Raul Castro might be seen therefore as a conversation that has been happening all along at a local level. Cuba time and corporate America time are now engaged in a dance as intricate as the salsa.

Those of us who travel to Cuba on religious visas are often asked, “But what do you do there?” The inference is that we might engage in hands-on projects, like building or painting or repairing structures. But that isn’t what we do. We are there in friendship, where conversations and home visits and worship are integral to our purpose. As Barbara D’Andrea, our mission group leader, once quipped, when we invite friends to visit our homes here we aren’t asking them to build a room or paint the house. What we do, though, is give money collected from our churches, which the Cuban churches use for their needs and programs. One new outreach in the Guines church is to provide a free lunch once a week for senior citizens.

There is one hands-on project, however, that we have been involved in. Two years ago a water-filtration system was installed at the Guines church. The same has been done at several other churches in Cuba by way of Living Waters for the World, a mission project through the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. For the installation in Guines, money for the project came through the mission budget of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, with the actual installation done by a trained team from the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.

The Guines church distributes clean water to people in town without charge. They come three days a week, 900 people who are allowed up to four gallons of water each visit for their households. The results of drinking clean water are immediate and dramatic. Chronic gastrointestinal problems clear up.

The people walk to the church for the water, each one carrying large clean bottles to be filled. It is still Cuba time, measured by walking, and by talking, sharing the gossip of the neighborhood, the complaints of the day and the good will. People dress for the 80-plus-degree weather — which our group welcomed with exaltation, having come from a severe winter.

To fly to Cuba, even now by a direct flight, is in some respects to fly back in time. But then again it is to fly forward in time because of pending changes. My hope is that Cuba will not be pressed into a model of corporate America “on time.” Perhaps the tropical climate and Latin culture will prevail. We shall see.

The Rev. Robert Stuart, a longtime “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.

Every few months I drive to Sagaponack from the Berkshires, where I live. I come to stay in my childhood home on Daniel’s Lane and visit with family. Each time I arrive, as I round the corner of Sagaponack Road and Main Street, I look over and see my 6-year-old self, pale and skinny with lank hair, sitting on one of the swings in the narrow patch of grass running along the side of the Little Red Schoolhouse (where a swing set still stands), getting an under-push from Sally Kinkade or Cookie Dombkowski.

If I were to compose a timeline of my life, it would connect one school building to another. The first would be in Manhattan, where I attended preschool at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Nursery School (though I was a Jew). Miss Allen, my kind, composed, and elderly teacher, often oversaw the group of 3 and 4-year-olds from a rocking chair.

The next dot on the line would be a preschool in Springs, I think, run by Jackie Jackson. She danced and sang for us, and we made hats, which we decorated lavishly with balloons and brightly colored paper. From there the timeline leads to a kindergarten class at the elementary school in East Hampton, where all I can remember is that a group of 5-year-old boys staged an uprising when I tried to boss them around in the block corner. I cried not in sadness, but in outrage.

Then came Sagg School, where I was first introduced to finger painting, Dick and Jane, the pleasures of peeling open milkweed in the spring, and the confusing fact that there was an S in the printed version of Long Island. Silent letters. Unforgettable. I may have learned the word peninsula that year, as well.

From there the timeline leads right to the Hampton Day School, held, its first year, in the Mullers’ house on the corner of Ocean Road and Paul’s Lane in Bridgehampton. Our playground was one large tree in the backyard. I found out that bats would try to hide in your hair (and learned only recently that it wasn’t true). I acquired encyclopedic knowledge of the Greek myths (and wore my mother’s blond fall, bought for a party, the day I dressed as Aphrodite for our Festival of Greek Mythology). I learned from Tony Hitchcock how to use my five senses to make observations of the natural world.

In a slight detour from the sometimes weird but always riveting years at the Hampton Day School, I spent my sophomore year at East Hampton High School. There I first encountered something called a G.P.A. and the pleasures of walking up and down hallways as a form of socializing. I also learned how to ace an algebra test, though it’s fair to say I didn’t learn one single thing about mathematics. I returned to the Hampton Day School for one last year, where on my graduation night I performed with my friend Coco in a Pinter play about two strange old sisters.

All in all, a quirky educational history.

But I must have liked something about all those teachers, desks, assignments, friends, and foes, because in the ensuing 40 years, I’ve spent the bulk of my waking hours inside of a classroom, or thinking about one. I love school. But I’m beginning to dislike education. And it’s not just that too many schools aren’t good enough for the kids inside, or that standardized tests punish children and teachers without providing much of value, though I do think both of those things. It’s worse than that. Our basic idea about what kids should learn in school has slowly gone farther and farther offtrack, right into the ditch.

Somehow, instead of reasonable, achievable, and humane goals, ones that would actually help all kinds of children, from many backgrounds, become well educated, we’ve created a set of expectations and hurdles that would make the most eager young student want to crawl back into bed and pull the sheets over her head. In a misguided mission to make every child well trained, we insist they complete boring sentences, define words they’ve never used, do a kind of algebra that has little meaning to them, fill in blanks on test after test, sit up straighter and straighter at their desks, become skilled with a bewildering assortment of technology, memorize various chemical formulae, balance a checkbook, recite facts about other continents, speak a second language, pass more tests, and behave kindly and cheerfully even while sitting in dull classrooms with overworked, underappreciated adults.

Even if the current approach succeeded (which it doesn’t), we’d end up with a population of well-trained but undereducated (and possibly unhappy) citizens.

Right around the time of my last visit to Sagg, my younger sister, Jenno, sent me a photo of her son Ike and his friend Max, both 7 years old. In the picture, Ike and Max are standing on the street corner near Jenno’s house in Santa Monica. Next to them, on the ground, lies a red wagon filled with their wares: old toys that they are hoping to sell to passers-by. But these two entrepreneurs had a trick up their sleeves, an unbeatable retail strategy: In the photo, they are holding up a cardboard sign on which they have applied thick exuberant lettering, which reads, “Toy Sale! Toy Sale! Unless you have no money, then it’s free!”

When the picture first popped up on my iPhone, with my nephew’s crazy shock of red curls and asymmetrical grin, I gulped with laughter. But then it hit me. This was what we should see in schools. The boys had such energy for their work. They longed to be industrious, put their good ideas into action, and see the fruits of their labor. It’s hard to know whether their handmade sign reflected their generosity and good values (everyone, rich or poor, should get a toy) or their zeal for getting rid of inventory. Either way, what I saw in that picture was what I don’t see enough of in classrooms — interest, purpose, invention, and teamwork. And joy. They seemed so happy to be working hard and trying out their new idea.

When I revisit all those schools from my past, I can string together an educational story of skills (many of which were learned only to be forgotten), accomplishments, and grades (also of defeats, boredom, and uncertainties). Much more vivid than any of those, however, are specific memories of Aphrodite, kindergarten insurrections, and the surprise of using all five senses to observe a sugar cube.

Mostly though, it’s not what I remember that stayed with me. It’s the habits and inclinations I did or didn’t acquire (some for better and some for worse): the inclination to read everything all the time, to seek and stay in a conversation, to avoid math whenever possible, to savor the process of building an idea slowly and carefully, and, until I was in my 30s, a regrettable reluctance to be equally slow and careful in revising my work.

The dispositions we acquire in school are what last, and they are what really matter. Those dispositions have nothing to do with a mission statement on a wall or the curriculum written in a book. They come from the practices and orientations that are ingrained, day in and day out, while children fill out worksheets, worry about test scores, answer unimportant questions about correct though dull books, and master math skills that appear to have no intrinsic meaning — or, as the case may be, from launching a used toy sale where kids give away toys for free.

Susan Engel is a professor in the psychology department at Williams College and the author of two new books, “The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness (Not Money) Would Transform Our Schools” and “The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood.”

The highlight of my summer on the East End last year was exploring Plum Island.

I had always thought visitors were forbidden, and so did Tom Rawinski, the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service botanist I interviewed last winter about deer damage to forests. Like a growing cohort of scientists, he believes that overabundant deer cause more damage to Northeastern forests than does climate change. Since Tom works for the U.S.D.A., which operates the Plum Island research lab, I figured he knew the rules about Plum Island. But having told me that the island has no deer, and thus presents a unique case for what a Northeastern forest should look like, my curiosity was piqued.

So one day last spring I found the Plum Island Animal Disease Center website, which surprisingly lists names and email addresses of key employees. I wrote a short email to the administrative officer to ask if I could interview someone on the staff who might be familiar with the island’s forests. My theory was that someone at the research labs might spend his or her lunch break exploring the outdoors.

I was a bit taken aback when I received a response a week later from the Department of Homeland Security, not the U.S.D.A. employee to whom I had written. He wanted to know why I was asking questions about Plum Island. Uh-oh.

But what did I have to fear? I’m no Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan carrying notes listing Plum Island as a possible site for a “mass casualty attack.” (She’s now serving an 86-year prison term in Fort Worth, Tex., by the way.) So I calmly wrote back saying I’d be interested in any botanical or conservation surveys done on Plum Island that might address the health of its forests, and in particular would like to interview anyone familiar with the island’s forests. And then I crossed my fingers.

For the next nine days I checked my email regularly, wondering how the department would respond. When they figured out I was a 58-year-old mother of four and member of the Garden Club of East Hampton, wouldn’t they immediately conclude I was safe? On the other hand, perhaps they wouldn’t even bother to answer.

It was a total shock, then, when Tom Dwyer, environmental protection specialist for D.H.S., wrote back extending an invitation to my “colleagues” and me to visit in order to “tour the island and learn about our mission.” Google-stalking Tom, I learned that he is the environmental resources manager for Plum Island, responsible for environmental compliance and waste management, including wastewater and emissions. This was definitely reassuring and intriguing.

Frankly, I was so relieved I wasn’t in hot water that I quickly wrote back to say yes. I also tuned out my husband’s persistent questions about whether I’d return with dreadful germs and require decontamination. After all, Tom Dwyer was on the case!

The next step was to recruit some colleagues. Having spent three months researching deer and forests, I wanted to go to Plum Island with the experts I had interviewed to see firsthand what they had described to me over the phone and in emails. And as Tom Rawinski had triggered this whole episode, he was at the top of my list.

Once assembled, our group included Tom; Mike Scheibel from the Masho­mack Preserve on Shelter Island; Todd Forrest from the New York Botanical Garden; John Rasweiler, a retired medical school professor and researcher of zoonotic diseases; my daughter Anna, who had just earned a master’s degree in environmental science, and other friends from the community.

The D.H.S. and Plum Island staff members who welcomed us to the island were uniformly hospitable. Jason Golden, a public affairs officer, met us at the Plum Island dock next door to the Cross Sound Ferry early in the morning and escorted us throughout the day. Dr. Luis Rodriguez, research leader, who was lively, dedicated, and eloquent, spent over an hour discussing the work done at Plum Island diagnosing and researching foreign animal diseases. Finally, after a brown-bag lunch in a conference room, we headed out with Jason to survey the island.

Plum Island is indeed a remarkable sanctuary for our native flora and fauna. It also hosts many invasive species in what Tom Rawinski dubbed a “free-for-all for plant life.” The fact that the island has no deer means that there is a healthy understory throughout the forested areas of its 834 acres, and I got to see what a healthy understory should look like: a nearly impenetrable riot of varied species of tree saplings, vines, forest shrubs, and herbaceous plants. The forest was cool, shady, and humid throughout.

On a hillside above a large bed of ferns in a depression in the landscape, we found a beautiful specimen of Solomon’s seal, a plant that deer have almost eliminated from wild and unprotected forests on Long Island. We saw osprey, towhees (increasingly rare on the East End), bank swallows, seals, and other wildlife as we toured the island’s beaches and forests, its old lighthouse and derelict military barracks.

But perhaps most remarkable of all, after three or four hours of hiking around the island and through its undergrowth, we found only one innocuous dog tick. No lone star or deer ticks at all.

I’m happy to report I didn’t bring back any dreadful germs or require decontamination. I’m also having fun trying out recipes from the Plum Island Cookbook, available in the gift shop at the main research lab. (Yes, there is even a gift shop!)

But most important, and even sadly, I now know what East Hampton’s forests should look like, and very often don’t, the result of overbrowsing by a deer population that is decimating the forests and destroying the habitat of so many other wild creatures with whom they share space.

Julie Sakellariadis is co-chairwoman of the botanical science committee and chairwoman of strategic planning on the board of the New York Botanical Garden. She has a house in Amagansett.

Remember game shows? “Concentration,” “The Big Payoff” (with a former Miss America, the late Bess Myerson, in a pre-feminist mink coat)? Remember “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret”? “Queen for a Day”? “You Bet Your Life”? I do.

And quiz shows like “The G.E. College Bowl” or “Twenty-One”? Game shows, quiz shows — you and your family can feud over the distinction and which falls under which genre. But, for the most part, they have given way to reality shows that aren’t really reality.

I mean, how real was Bruce Jenner all those years with all those Kardashians, when, out of the blue, he declares he’s about to undergo a gender reassignment? That we never had a clue? Frankly, with his Peggy Fleming kind of hair back in his reality days as an Olympian, in his short shorts a la Richard Simmons, we should have guessed. But that’s another story left for Diane Sawyer to gather and uncover.

Of course, there is still “Jeopardy!” and the annoying “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Price Is Right,” but that last one is just not the same without Bob Barker, or, prior to him, Bill Cullen. “Let’s Make a Deal” is dull without Monty Hall. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”? I’d rather watch “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

And then there was “Password.” Allen Ludden, the host, dead a century, and his wife, as a contestant, Betty White, living approaching a century, with the odd way the off-camera announcer would tell, no, whisper the password to the studio audience and those of us viewing at home: “Sh-h-h. The password is . . . ubiquitous.” (Try that one on for size — Soupy Sales, a contestant on the offshoot “Password All-Stars,” would have a struggle, as anyone would, with that.)

The password is ubiquitous. And this is where I shift gears and segue and transition to the real point of this piece: passwords!

In fairness, and with ease, the password to unlock my iPhone, when it was the 4 and the 5 and now the 6 Plus, has always been the same. Four measly digits. Just four. No symbols, no combinations of numbers and letters. Easy. Breezy. Memorable. In fact, the same four digits I use at a cash machine.

Beautiful.

But every other password I need — to get into my Chase account online, to sign onto Amazon, to log on for my 401 balances (which I do daily, and you would too if you were retired, as I am, as I have been for three years now) — requires, no, demands difficult combinations: no less than eight characters, no two letters in a row the same, a cap, some lowercase, a symbol, a number or two. Then, to make matters even more humiliating, they tell you (They? Who are they? Some little people inside the laptop, or even littler people inside the phone?), “Your password is weak.” Or “not strong enough.” I need criticism that I am inadequate from an inanimate object? Believe me, I get enough from my life partner.

Netflix, on my smart TV, makes me feel like an idiot. You have to use the remote to scroll up, down, and across to hit the precise password, which I never remember.

Facebook is another killer in the random way it asks for a password. Generally, you just go to the app, but occasionally, and for no good reason other than Mark Zuckerberg is a genius and we are all morons and he constantly throws it in our faces, they ask for a password. “Your login has expired.” Why? How come? Don’t f**k with us, Zuckerberg. We are not as clever or as brilliant as you. I barely know how to work the electric can opener! (Full disclosure: That last line was stolen from a Woody Allen movie.)

But it gets even worse. Yes, it does. If you want to order something online, or respond to a friend’s article, or comment on how despicable technology has become, you are required to type a code of letters and numbers that run together, smash into each other, to prove you are not a robot or a monkey. Believe me, monkeys would be more adept as deciphering those indecipherable collections of numbers and letters. Uppercase? Lowercase? I wind up, after half an hour of ordering this watch or that pair of jeans, frustrated and canceling my cart. I just can’t make out the strung together, no, squashed together, code. Plus, my fingertips are too fat.

How many times have you wanted to toss a device out a window when you are told that after three attempts and failures you need to reset the password? And then you get a series of numbers as a temporary password, brief seconds to find a pencil, write it down, and make the effort to change.

The Notes app on my iPhone has a tab titled Passwords. It currently has 28 passwords listed, most already obsolete.

Pandora and iTunes and PayPal and Ticketmaster and Skype. There are also accompanying pins attached to a bunch of them. Twitter and Cargo and J. Crew and God Knows. That last password number never works. Because God, nor anyone else for that matter, knows how or why the universe of passwords has become so . . . hellish.

There should be a new quiz show or game show, a la “Name That Tune.” “I can name that password in four numbers combined with letters and symbols.”

Oh, @#!+*%& it. I can’t.

Hy Abady is just out with a new book, “Back in The Star Again, Again!” — a sequel to his 2010 collection of “Guestwords” and “True Stories From the East End.”

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. A while back, I started making annual visits to Cape Town, not simply to avoid our Hamptons winter. I wanted to measure the changes taking place in what I still consider to be my “beloved country.”

When Mandela was freed, hope surged, as I know it did for all South Africans, and the world. So is that hope being fulfilled? How much has changed?

Let me start with what has not changed. Two elements stand out: one, the staggering beauty of the country, and two, the warmth of its people. In a heartbeat, I would exchange the relaxed “Howzit?” of a white South African or the friendliness of an African for many of their U.S. equivalents. There’s something about the South African joie de vivre that lifts the heart. There are good people at work. Here are a few of them:

I met a farming family that has diversified into making cheeses; their products bring home international awards. I know of an Englishwoman who came here a few years ago, adopted two African children, and heads a charity that delivers health and educational resources to the children of vineyard workers. A young American, Amagansett’s own Mark Crandall, visits Cape Town for months at a time; in crime-infested Crossroads Township, Mark teaches young black kids the skills of basketball.

All these entrepreneurs add vitality and hope to the local scene. Are they fearful of the future? They are realists. One family, recently returned from “sanitized” Australia, summed up their feelings this way: “We only have one life, so you may as well feel the marrow in your bone and not just the wash of multiple shades of vanilla.”

Sadly, the beauty of the land, the energy of most people, and the successes of a few entrepreneurs are the only positive features I discovered on this most recent visit to the sun-splashed country I love.

In the shadows, I detected widespread disappointment. There’s dismay — even resentment — among people of every color at the inability of the government to deliver on its promises. There’s a sense, as Archbishop Tutu is said to have said some years ago, that “the gravy train only stopped to change passengers.”

I found that incompetence and corruption seem to be the defining features of South African governance. Yet, paradoxically, the ruling African National Congress party still pulls 62 percent of the vote. So, what causes this cognitive dissonance? Why do dissatisfied people vote for the source of dissatisfaction? I detected a number of issues at play, all of them a reaction to various forms of what could be called social engineering.

The A.N.C. runs provincial governments in all nine provinces (what we might call states) except the high-performing Western Cape. The governing party is desperate to win control of the Cape’s white-dominated administration at the next local elections. With this goal in view, one of the strategies has been to encourage compliant media ownership. The target is the local morning newspaper, the Cape Times.

The Cape Times was founded in 1876 and has always had a liberal slant. In recent years, though, it seems to have become in thrall to the government’s party line. This loss of editorial independence has had a drastic effect on circulation: Wikipedia reports a drop from 267,000 in 2012 to 31,930 in the fourth quarter of 2014.

A topic of more national import is — as someone described it to me — “affirmative action on steroids” or “reverse discrimination.” A recent newspaper headline, “Half Bok team must be black,” referred to the Springboks, the hallowed national rugby team. The national rugby chief believes “we have got to do our duty in terms of transformation” and implied that coaches are selecting heavier white players over lighter black players. Talent, speed, and ability, the usual yardsticks of potential, seem now to be less important than being of light weight. Many South Africans see this as a policy to make game-winning potential secondary to racial ideology.

Local people speak testily about what they call “reverse discrimination.” Whites agree when I point out that, after three centuries of discrimination, some balancing of the books is bound to occur. But they add, “If only the people who get the jobs were competent.” It is true that many public services are in disarray: the post office, telecommunications, power supplies, national pensions, and passport applications.

What seems inescapable to me is that these examples of sputtering public “service delivery” are a direct consequence of the apartheid era. How so? Because the previous Afrikaner government failed to train Africans for anything other than menial (domestic servants, cleaners) or manual labor (construction, diamond and gold mining) jobs. That karma is now back to disrupt everyone’s daily life.

Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd (1901-1966), Afrikaner prime minister and apar­theid’s architect, once said that he preferred to call apartheid “good neighborliness.” Yet he also believed that his African neighbors would forever be, as his Bible verse (Joshua 9:21) put it, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” So his government decreed where people should live (Group Areas Act), which jobs they would be allowed to have (Job Reservation legislation), and with whom they could — to put it politely — fraternize (Immorality Act). It is, indeed, payback time for such “good neighborliness.”

This embedded incompetence, however much justified by the past, saps the spirit of many South Africans, regardless of color. A mixed-race engineer was told that his job application was rejected because he was “not black enough.” Some African garage attendants laughed when I asked them what they thought of their president: “He’s always smiling because he steals from us and we can’t catch him!”

In a country village in the dusty Karoo, a white health worker put it to me this way: “When I visited America to see my daughter — all my children have left here — I got a fantastic sense of how proud Americans are about their country. Yet here, our national motto of ‘Proudly South African’ is a joke; how can you be proud when President Zuma is stealing from taxpayers to build a 250 million rand [$21 million] retirement home? How can you be proud when we have power failures and our national airline is bust, and broadcasting chiefs plus dozens of other government officials are under suspicion of malpractice? How can you be proud when, after 20 years in power, our politicians are still blaming our failures on the legacy of apartheid?”

Has the “transformation” to a black government affected the lifestyle of ordinary white people? I mentioned to another citizen that the status of white South Africans didn’t seem to have changed much. He smiled. “Sure, we’re still traveling first class, but now we’re on the Titanic.” But he asked me to remember that, in a country of 54 million, of which 4.5 million are white, the largest percentage of tax revenue comes from the white sector (white people earn about five times as much as black people). There are 17 million “indigent” blacks in South Africa, and the government gives them the equivalent of $95 U.S. per month in support. Although there are 13.7 million registered taxpayers, only 5 million submitted tax returns in 2013.

So, most whites feel that they are doing their bit for the country. “Essentially, we are carrying the unemployed and the unemployable,” said my source.

At street level, I did not see much improvement. What I did see: tramps sorting through rubbish bins, poor whites standing at traffic lights with begging notices, criminals living on hillsides and attacking unwary hikers on Table Mountain, the walls of every home spiked with barbed wire. What I missed was any sign of law enforcement. Vigorous but fair law enforcement is a symbol of good government; the lack of it is evidence of a failing state.

Yet tourists love the beloved country! Tourism is the chief growth engine in the Western Cape. It’s a beautiful region and with the rand so puny (an exchange rate of about 12/1), it’s cheap to visit. As they say in New York, “What’s not to like?”

Restaurants, many in fabulous settings, are plentiful and serve world-class food. Service, however, is glacially slow. I dined at 25 restaurants in nine weeks (like I said, it’s cheap on dollars) and only twice did a manager walk up to our table to ask if we were satisfied. So I never blame the servers; they’re victims of poor training and supervision.

The impression I took away this year is that South Africans are shrugging off their nation’s dysfunction. (And let’s not forget that only 9 percent of Americans think that their Congress is doing a decent job.) The majority of citizens in my beloved country — as in America, as in the world — treat their self-serving politicians with disdain. People just try to get on with their lives.

South Africans seem to have accepted that this is how Africa works. They’re all passengers in a stolen car that’s steered by a learner driver who seems to treat his incompetence as a bit of a laugh. But the countryside is vivid with sunshine and the sky is blue. Sure, the car breaks down a lot, but hey, that comes with the territory.

Brian Clewly Johnson is the author of “Deep Memory” and a forthcoming memoir, “A Cape Town Boy.” He lives in Amagansett.

We’d have cracked up laughing had we known of the “greatest generation” con that would define us 50 years later. The greatest generation was our parents who saw us through the Depression. Our children, we were sure, would be an even greater generation. We were clearing evil from the earth so that could be.

There was certainly much to praise in our conduct. We were kind and generous to the defeated population, especially to children. Several married men from my battalion took displaced children back to the States and adopted them. We were persevering, brave, loyal, brilliant improvisers with machinery. When the Allied command overlooked the big defensive advantage Normandy’s hedgerows gave the German defenders, it was the G.I.s who concocted solutions to cut through them and enable our 3rd Army’s breakout at St. Lo.

We also displayed greatness as a country. We invested much labor, money, and expertise in restoring the infrastructures of our allies and enemies alike. Yes, it was partly to create markets for our products and counter the appeal of communism, which was taking over Eastern Europe and threatening France, Greece, and Italy, but it was also an action that came from our hearts.

But then, we had a dark side. Many of us profited from Germany’s war-devastated economy and consumer shortages by selling our cigarettes and manipulating our dollars’ pay on the black market. We were intensely racist with Afro-American G.I.s, who were largely relegated to service functions and performed stunning feats of efficiency and endurance trucking supplies to our advancing armies.

And we looted and raped, not to the extent of our enemies, but we did this, and U.S. soldiers shot German prisoners. During the Battle of the Bulge, Wehrmacht soldiers wearing U.S. Army uniforms and fluent in American English infiltrated our lines and were misdirecting our reinforcement and supply convoys. If we believed captured German soldiers knew of the saboteurs’ whereabouts, we would give their top-ranking officer a few seconds to start disclosing it. If he didn’t, we would shoot him, then demand an answer from the next in rank. Either he or another captured soldier would then reveal it.

I have absolutely no criticism to offer on this. I would have done it myself if called upon, held my carbine to their heads and fired until we got the information we had to have and done so without a qualm. And though I have been registered as a conscientious objector since my discharge in 1946, I would probably in a similar situation shoot them today.

But, in addition, I might also shoot a surrendering soldier because I feared him, or coveted his Wehrmacht overcoat, which didn’t get waterlogged like ours did, or in revenge for their shooting G.I. prisoners en masse at Malmedy, or because my squad’s orders that day were not to take prisoners.

Which is to face the essential point. There is really very little room for greatness in war.

Indeed, a reason for us to avoid war is that we are lousy at it. During World War II, our leaders repeatedly made huge, inexcusable mistakes.

Gen. James Doolittle, commander of the U.S. 8th Air Force in England, flew combat missions over German-held territory despite his intimate knowledge of the Allies’ plans for the invasion of France. Had he been shot down and captured, German enhanced interrogation would probably have extracted these secrets from him, and they’d have been ready for us in Normandy.

Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. 5th Army in Italy, ignored a direct order from his superior, British Gen. Harold Alexander, to bypass Rome in order to surround the German 10th Army. Clark got the glory of entering Rome as a conqueror; the Germans got leave to fight in Italy for another year.

In the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a hero of World War II, defied President Truman’s order not to use American forces in his advance through North Korea to the Chinese border. As Truman feared, the Chinese entered the war, sent us reeling, and retook most of North Korea.

The Allies were lax in other crucial ways. We woefully underestimated the Japanese, in part because of our presumptions of racial superiority, and were late to recognize Germany’s ability to produce game-changing weapons, such as jet airplanes, which were 100 miles per hour faster than any warplane the Allies could put in the sky. If Hitler had not insisted most of his jets be bombers rather than fighters, for offense rather than defense, we would not have prevailed on D-Day or in our air campaign to disrupt Germany’s transportation system and war production.

My nomination for the most ruinous and ignorant act of all would go to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In August 1941, Hoover blew off evidence from a British MI5 double agent, Dusan Popov, that Japan was preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoover, a prude, detested Popov, a high-stakes gambler and womanizer. Popov’s most famous conquest was Simone Simon, a kittenish French movie star now renowned by cinema buffs for her performance in “Cat People” of a young woman cursed by her inner panther and also for providing her lovers with gold keys to her boudoir.

Rather than pass Popov’s information to the president and military chiefs, Hoover threatened to arrest him under a federal law, the Mann Act, for transporting a woman across state lines (New York to Florida) for “purposes of debauchery.” That Popov’s paramour was a consenting adult mattered not to Hoover. Four months later, Japan killed 2,400 Americans and crippled our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and proceeded to overrun most of the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.

All of these gentlemen were extolled during the war and long afterward. President Truman awarded Doolittle a Silver Star for, among other things, his “personal example” during the very time his hubris was endangering our invasion of Europe. Clark was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, our second highest medal, by General Eisenhower. After Truman fired him for insubordination, MacArthur came home to a hero’s ticker tape parade in New York, an invitation to address a joint session of Congress, and beseeching from Republican leaders to run for president. Hoover led the F.B.I. until his death in 1972.

In tragic contrast, Alan Turing, the young English mathematician whose solving of Germany’s “ultra” code probably saved the war for us, was harassed by the British police because he was gay and in 1954 killed himself. The appropriate outcome was Popov’s, who became Ian Fleming’s model for James Bond.

If Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq mean anything, we are no better at war now than in World War II. The greatest generation will be the one that finds peace.

Seventy years ago today, May 7, 1945, Germany’s armed forces surrendered to the Allies.

Richard Rosenthal served in the 1251st Combat Engineer Battalion during the Battles of the Rhineland and Central Europe. He lives in East Hampton.

Saturday morning, 7 a.m. Look up the weather. Check. Organize the ads. Check. Comfortable shoes. Check. Wallet full of small bills. Check. GPS. Check. Okay, I’m ready!

With five years of serious yard-saling experience after I moved from a house to an apartment, I feel I have become somewhat of an aficionado of yard/tag/garage sales. So before the season begins in earnest, I would like to offer these tips to a) make your sale more profitable and b) make your visit to a sale more rewarding.

Sellers: Know your market! Someone else doesn’t need to pay the same amount for something used that you paid new. You must decide whether you really want to sell it and maybe do a little research to see what others will pay. That’s what eBay and Craigslist are for.

If you can’t price everything individually, then put items together that you want priced the same and mark the table. If you have a busy stream of people, you will be glad you did this, as buyers won’t have to ask about each item along with the myriad questions you will inevitably receive.

Some items should just be bulk-priced to sell more easily and more quickly. Like books, CDs, and kitchen utensils. Clothing especially falls into this category. Unless you have a special item, like a winter coat, or formalwear, most items can be sold in quantity. I keep a stash of I.G.A. bags for my sale, and you can fill a bag for $5 to $10 depending on the type of items. You can usually fit five to seven pieces in a bag, especially children’s clothing, although I have seen some crafty women stuff them to overflowing and still expect to pay $5. This gives buyers incentive to take more. The more you sell, the less you have to take to the recycling center.

A word about linens. They are a huge seller, but if they are not in good condition, point it out. Many people will still buy (my friend can get any stain out) even if they use it for a different purpose. Just be honest. Actually that goes for everything you are selling.

Many sales I have been to were special because the sellers went out of their way to be friendly and helpful without hounding people while they look. I have even seen coffee and bagels offered while you shop. If you have large items or furniture for sale, try to have a hand truck or other device to help get an item to a vehicle. A buyer may not have intended to purchase something so large, so it would be great to have help getting it to the car.

Layout. Beg, borrow, or steal any tables you can get. Looking at items at ground level is difficult, especially items you need to thumb through, like albums, books, and CDs. I see many people using large tarps on the ground, which is okay as long as you leave room for people to walk across it to reach items in the middle. If you do not have a rack for hanging clothing, a rope from tree to tree will work, but the items tend to slide down to the middle, making it hard to look through. And a full-length mirror ($5 at Kmart) is great to have also.

Tools are a brisk seller if they are in good working order. If you are selling power tools, have them near an outlet or extension cord so they can be tested by prospective buyers. If you have additional items that go with a power tool (think sanding disks for an orbital sander), make it a package deal and I’ll bet it all goes quickly.

If you have some items that really belong in the dump, please take them to the dump. No one wants your broken appliances, stained or torn clothing, or worn-out dirty toys with pieces missing. So save yourself the effort of putting them out and pricing them.

Personnel. It is very difficult to do a yard sale alone. You need at least two, better three, people just for the selling. Many more to help with setup and breakdown. Try to have someone at the entrance/exit of your sale to make sure people have paid for their items. Small items, like costume jewelry, have a tendency to disappear easily. I have unfortunately seen people who pick up items and just walk away with them. Just a heads up.

Have plenty of small bills on hand. It seems everyone carries twenties but will inevitably want to buy a book for a dollar. There go your singles and fives.

Advertising! You can’t sell if they don’t come. List in the paper and open the ad with the address, day, and time. I hate having to read through a long list of articles for sale to find the location while I’m driving or trying to map out a route. A very brief list of general items is good to have, and if you have a large, coveted item (think kayak), or something collectors may find interesting, do point it out in your ad.

As for signs on the road, they are very helpful but only if they can be read from a car. Use neon paper and a Sharpie. Give only the address, date, and time. Write big and clear. If your address is hard to find, then give a quick direction and make sure to put guidance signs at turns near your house. Too much information on a sign makes it hard to see the address, and then we’ve missed it — and you’ve lost a customer. And please remember where you post your signs and go back and take them down so people aren’t showing up at your house for weeks after.

Don’t forget social media. Facebook has multiple pages dedicated to selling individual items and you are welcome to post your yard sale info on those. Believe me, people read ’em.

Buyers: Know what you’re looking for and what you’re looking at. But also know how to judge value and condition so you are not disappointed.

Keep in mind, you are going to someone’s home and behave accordingly. Keep your children in check, or better yet, in the car, and do not take your pet onto someone’s property. I am sure a lot of people won’t agree with me on these two points, but use common sense. You have no idea if the seller or a family member has allergies or a fear of animals. And children have no interest in a yard sale unless there are toys, and then they will play with them and be in the way of other buyers.

Keep an eye out for unusual items. Retro is big these days, but keep in mind that what you buy is going to take up space in your house, so don’t let nostalgia run wild in your wallet. There have been times when I have regretted not buying something that I impulsively wanted, but much more frequently I regretted buying something I didn’t really need.

Don’t be an early bird! People who put that in their ads are serious. A sale listed for 9 a.m. is not going to be ready at 7, and no, you can’t help us set up. Come back when we are ready, you know, like the time we posted. Sometimes there is good reason for starting later, so respect the owner and be a good guest to his or her property.

Bargains and bargaining. Keep in mind that sellers are looking to make some money here. Don’t insult them by trying to get the price lower if it is already very low. Certainly give your best offer on big items, but if something is a dollar, just pay the dollar.

A word about tag sale companies. As a rule, I don’t go to them. Not worth the time, unless you are looking for antiques or furniture, and they are trying to make a profit so the prices aren’t great.

I could fill this article with stories of the treasures I have found over the years, but I would rather you take all of this advice and make your fortune or find your new favorite trinket. And let me know if you find a good sale!

Megan Collins Ganga is a business manager for a local landscape contractor. She lives in East Hampton.