“You need to put the sound of a Ferrari, a Porsche, or a McLaren engine in the sound system. When the driver starts the car, he turns a dial and can pick out whatever engine noise he wants that day.” Accosting a board member of a European car maker in a Florida post office, my husband was half-jokingly pitching his brainchild with, atypical for him, enthusiasm.

Two weeks earlier, we had witnessed the celebrated Formula One Grand Prix in Monaco, which may have been the genesis of the thinking behind the creativity sparking his automotive must-have, the pick-your-engine sounds. (If my husband had tried to hustle his “gizmo” to the Russian oligarch who shared our table at the Ferrari Club, he might have had better luck. More on that.)

We were seasoned Grand Prix attendees, I a little grudgingly. In any long-term marriage there are deals: He gets the Formula One; I get the south of France. Although the Ferrari Club tent looked out on the Monaco marina, jam-packed with extraordinary mega-yachts that had cruised in for the race days, my husband couldn’t help but ogle the Rivas, the Ferraris of power boats, lining the marina’s docks.

This year, the timing of the Grand Prix coincided with the Cannes Film Festival, which may explain the surprise drop-in by Antonio Banderas and his entourage to the Ferrari tent. For the GQ set, the actor was wearing a fitted navy sport coat, a tie-dyed dark crewneck T-shirt, and slim-legged ripped jeans, from which the toes of spotless camel-colored boots peeked. His handler, in her Ferrari signature-colored red jumpsuit, reported when questioned that Antonio did not own a Ferrari, but she quickly added, “He is thinking about it.”

The waitstaff served the three-course meal with its “gastronomic” aspirations, nearly tripping over themselves in servicing the special requests of the attendees as if we were all Monegasque members of the Grimaldi family. No water glass was ever empty. But try as the caterer might, the food could never be the high point, not when Fernando Alonso, the movie-star handsome, dark-haired Spaniard and Formula One champion driver, took the stage during the dessert course. Responding to questions about the car’s tires, fuel, the engine, and his pole position, Alonso was unnaturally calm, especially considering that in less than an hour he was about to drive the twists and turns of the 78 laps, clocking an average speed of over 140 miles per hour while weaving among the 19 other drivers, all hell-bent on winning.

A half-dozen or so well-placed wide-screen televisions were scattered throughout the tent, but the best viewing of the race was in the grandstand seats that faced the race road and the pits where teams of deadly serious technicians changed sets of tires in what seemed like milliseconds. This year, the engine noise abated somewhat as Formula One officials tried to “go green,” leaving some “can’t get enough of the engine noise” fans to grumble accordingly. The cars flashed by.

So who was there? At our table, randomly assigned, we sat with a heavily tattooed Finnish couple, celebrating his 40th birthday and Christmas. The rest of the table was made up of a Russian group — husband, wife, his son, and either staff or family members. The wife who sat next to me spoke perfect English, which always frustrates me, with my failure to acquire language skills. Old enough to be her mother, I struck up enough of a rapport with her that on the final day Olga and her husband invited us to a post-race celebration at which they had taken a table. Since the party began at midnight — we’re not that hip — we declined. Yes, I know. Still kicking selves.

And on that perfect Sunday in late May, Alonso finished fourth. And much to my surprise, I am becoming, of all things, a fan.

Stateside again, my husband, no sentimentalist, drapes our Grand Prix badges over a glass he won in a car show for his 1958 Jaguar in what he jokingly refers to as his “trophy room.” He now has a growing collection of Grand Prix badges.

Carole O’Malley Gaunt is the author of “Hungry Hill,” a memoir. She lives part time in Sag Harbor.

I discovered the eminent economist William Vickrey, a 1996 Nobel laureate, in an odd way. Although I’ve written about Wall Street and money for many years, my academic background was not in economics, but in American literature. So when I was looking for a pungent epigraph for “Up From Gold,” my 2012 book on the development of our modern dollar-based economy, I thought of a quip by Gertrude Stein (the doyenne of American writers in 1920s Paris, famous for “a rose is a rose is a rose”). As I remembered it, she said, “Economics is simple. First there is money in someone’s pocket, and when you look again, the money is in someone else’s pocket. That’s economics.”

When I Googled the quote to test my memory, up popped William Vickrey’s 1992 presidential address to the American Economic Association, in which he offered a snappier version: “As Gertrude Stein remarked, ‘The money is always there, it’s the pockets that keep changing.’ ”

When he died in 1996 at the age of 82, Vickrey was promptly forgotten by most of the economics profession; a small following keeps his memory and his ideas alive. A maverick all his life — a Quaker and conscientious objector — he often disagreed vehemently with what he described in his 1992 address as “the great bulk [of economists] close to the seats of power.” His Gertrude Stein quote came as he was denouncing a “callous tolerance for unemployment” within both the government and the economics profession. He blasted the “monetary authorities” for their “remoteness from the grim realities of unemployment,” and he derided the theory of a “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment,” or NAIRU, which assumes a trade-off between unemployment and inflation.

At the time, most economists believed that 5 to 6-percent unemployment was “necessary” to restrain inflation. Some of them even referred to a “natural rate of unemployment,” a phrase that Vickrey called “one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined.” In words that still reverberate, he told his colleagues, “It is high time we gave human values a deserved priority instead of staying mesmerized by figures on balance sheets. . . . What is urgently needed is to bring the economy rapidly to a point of genuine full employment and keep it there.”

Most Americans instinctively agree with Vickrey and can’t understand why, seven years after the economy collapsed, despite Federal Reserve efforts (the “QE2” quantitative easing, etc.), and despite assurances from policy makers that their focus is on jobs and jobs, unemployment remains a drag on economic growth. Is there an explanation for this? There is, and Gertrude Stein’s imagery helps us find it.

The money that moves through the economy is, for all Americans, dollars, whether in paper or bank deposit form. This is true for all individuals, including economists, and for all corporations or other business entities. Buyers of, for example, Bitcoins measure their gains or losses in dollars. Owners of gold value their holdings in dollars. All players in the economy use their dollars to buy goods and services, and “the economy” is nothing more than the sum total of all the movements of dollars from one pocket to another in exchange for something else.

This process seems obvious today, but, as I related in “Up From Gold,” it took 500 years to create our modern banking system and complete the extraordinary conversion from a gold-based economy to a dollar-based economy. In fact, the conversion was not fully accomplished until the 1960s, yet understanding the implications of so fundamental a change is crucial to understanding our economy.

The difference between using dollars and using gold is that you can dig more gold from the earth, or ship it from overseas mines, but you can’t create dollars in the same way. The German Treasury in the 1920s literally printed marks and paid government employees with them, thereby destroying both the currency and the economy. The U.S. Treasury is prohibited by law from printing money or selling bonds directly to (that is, borrowing dollars directly from) the Federal Reserve. All paper dollars printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are distributed to banks, at their request, to have on hand when existing depositors want to withdraw “cash.”

Nonetheless, there is clearly more wealth, and more dollars, in the nation today than there was 50 years ago. So how does the total number of dollars grow?

The answer is that dollars increase when an economic player, whether an individual, a business, or a corporation, borrows from a bank. This process is rarely explained in official publications, but think of it this way. You and all other economic players know how much money you have; you can envisage a pile of physical dollars that represents your total wealth today. If you borrow a dollar from my pile, yours is a dollar higher and mine a dollar lower, but the economy’s total number of dollars hasn’t changed. If you borrow a dollar from a bank, however, you have not diminished my pile or any other player’s, yet your pile is higher. The total number of dollars in the economy has increased.

It is also true that when you repay that dollar to a bank, the number of dollars in the economy shrinks. Again, this process becomes clear when we ask where you find the dollars to repay your loan. You can only get them by selling goods or services to other players in the economy, who transfer dollars from their pockets to yours. You then return those dollars to the bank that created them, the bank tears up the note you signed, and the created dollars disappear. The economy has grown, but the number of dollars has not.

Dollars do increase over time, but only through additional borrowing by a growing population, in a growing economy. The wealth of the nation, in the form of useable and productive assets, increases through the economic activities that borrowing makes possible, and with that increased wealth, and the larger economy, additional borrowing is possible. The absolute amount of borrowing can increase as long as the economy grows as well.

What I’ve described represents the whole economy, including the U.S. government (that is, the Treasury), which, like all players, borrows from other players, or taxes them, without increasing the total dollars in the economy. The difference lies in the relation of the Treasury to the Federal Reserve.

In the first place, the Fed is a bank — or more precisely a national system of banks. It is not, however, like the familiar banking corporations we all keep our money in. The Fed has just one main customer, the U.S. Treasury. The Fed receives taxes and borrowed money for the Treasury and maintains its accounts. All the checks the Treasury issues are written on its accounts at the Fed, just as your checks are written on your banking corporation.

I’ve said that the Treasury cannot borrow directly from the Federal Reserve, and when it borrows from you or me, the total amount of dollars in the economy does not change. However, the Fed can buy Treasury bonds from economic players who lent money to the Treasury and received the bonds. As a bank, the Fed creates the dollars it puts into the pockets of bond owners when it buys bonds from them. The dollars the Treasury previously received when it sold the bonds went into the pockets of players providing goods or services to the government, and those dollars continue to exist in those pockets. Now the Fed creates new dollars to put back into the pockets of the original bond buyers.

In other words, when the Federal Reserve buys Treasury bonds from players in the real economy, total dollars in the economy do increase. This is the full meaning of QE2 and other phrases. It is the action that commentators are in fact describing when they speak of the Fed “pumping money into the economy.”

The answer to our original question — why Fed actions have not restored the economy and significantly reduced unemployment — now becomes clear. The economic players from whom the Fed buys Treasury bonds haven’t spent the increased dollars on goods or services, because they bought the Treasury bonds in the first place as investments, and they count the bonds or the dollars in their assets. The vast majority of government bonds that are traded are exchanged among those investors — including pension funds, hedge funds, etc. — with dollars changing pockets among them constantly. When the Fed steps in and buys government bonds, it is simply acting as another trader among all the asset traders — and not the largest one. The Fed’s major announcement last year that it would buy up to $100 billion of Treasury bonds per month should be seen in the context of the whole market. Outstanding Treasury bonds now total over $17 trillion, of which some $300 billion to $400 billion trade daily.

In essence, through its purchases of Treasury bonds, the Fed creates more dollars to circulate among asset traders. To reduce unemployment, the government will have to put more dollars into the hands of those who will spend them on goods and services. Their additional buying will encourage more business borrowing and an expansion of the nation’s productive capacity.

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

Though the wages are low, man, I don’t get the willies actually starting a new and vastly different career at the overripe age of 66. A part-time summer salesman job in Amagansett, to help out during the busy season.

I came to this decision out of sheer boredom. What to do now that I was doing nothing? So I agreed to sell antiques and tabletop accessories and beach bags and candles and whatnot in a lovely “lifestyle” store, as I adapt to my new lifestyle of retirement-slash-unemployment.

Truth be told, I may have always been a sort of salesman. At 15, I helped my dad out in his shoe store in Rockville Centre. But, being a shy kid, I really wasn’t much of a salesman; I had no idea how to close a sale. For example, if an older woman wanted to know if the pointy-toed, multicolored patchwork pump was too “young” for her, I would sit at her feet, dumbfounded for an answer, head tilted, fingernails at my mouth.

My lack of gift of gab often led to a lack of shoes in bag. I was just too tongue-tied, and besides, being paid $15 a week, what I would have gotten anyway as an allowance, I didn’t particularly feel I had to sell. Nor could I — this did not seem to be my calling, nor did I have any interest in someday running the store when my dad chose to retire, as my older brother did.

He was more of a charmer than I was. At the time.

At 20, I entered another form of salesmanship, but I don’t really count writing advertising as selling. In my early years, in the hotshot 1970s, I didn’t give a hoot if my Volkswagen ads sold a single car, or if anybody bought the Sony TV sets or tape recorders I cleverly strung headlines for. I just wanted to win awards, build a career, and make some real dough.

Selling Perdue chickens at my next ad agency job was never attributed to me, even as I worked on that account writing a handful of ads. That gift of selling belonged to my edgy boss, a small man with a big talent. He thought Frank Perdue looked like a chicken and made him the TV spokesman. The fact that there had really never been a branded chicken doing smart advertising before Perdue put Perdue on the map. And sold plenty of poultry.

I wrote some forgettable ads; all ads were forgettable when pitted against the genius copywriter who created the campaign: “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” Remember?

Barney’s next. I wrote newspaper ads but they were nothing more than touting the fact that Barney’s had moved into the world of high fashion from being a bar mitzvah suit specialist. I never knew if any of my work sold so much as a pair of socks.

It’s not really a salesman’s job, being an advertising copywriter, no matter how good I was at it, and I was good enough at it to work at it for almost 45 years.

And then, it ended. With a thud. And a day to clear out my desk, at the time in a shared office, where other art directors and copywriters 45 years younger than me sat outside at communal tables, headsets on heads, baseball caps on heads. Backward.

I didn’t think any of those kids thought of themselves as salesmen. Unless they were selling pot to supplement their incomes, one-tenth of what mine had become.

But enough about me. Well, not really. But now it’s time to get to the point of that title up top.

To pass the time — retirement is a bitch if you don’t play golf or tennis (or sell pot) — I volunteered to help a friend out with her Amagansett Main Street shop. It was a lark for me, at first, something to keep me out of Rowdy Hall at lunch to save a few calories and stop me from getting too early a buzz, which often led to long, snoring afternoon naps.

The hours were 11 to 5, and occasionally weekends. And the place is a potpourri of everything — lots of things that are perfect as hostess gifts or dinner guest gifts. My problem? I had a hard time gift-wrapping. As it happens, her “gift wrap” is nothing more than the sheerest sheets of chic, antique-patterned tissue paper that tears easily and fights you. Ribbons are strips of unforgiving raffia, thin as dental floss. I would break into a sweat whenever anyone said, “It’s a gift.” Wrapping is not one of my gifts. And, frankly, neither does the owner of the store possess that gift, so together, wrapping, we were like some version of the Keystone Kops.

I was relieved and less dripping wet when a buyer said, “Take your time, I’ll go next door for a manicure,” as it took forever to wrap with this filmy, flimsy paper. And I was horrified when people lined up three and four at the cash register, holding bulky salad bowls with servers, an oblong tray that fits in no box, or a set of six wineglasses. Gifts.

Gulp.

Everything looks like a gift to me in that store. Even a $25,000 armoire, French and from the early 19th century, weighing a ton. Wrapping that could take me into the 22nd century.

But gift-wrapping aside, the job had its high points, although the owner hated air-conditioning, and it often felt to me, with hair everywhere except the soles of my feet, that I was working in a sauna. Or a hot yoga studio. Even the stone Buddhas for sale had a film of sweat above their lips.

But, on the plus side, most of the customers were nice. Pleasant. (Most.) One exception was on the day that I heard a crash in the next room, clearly a broken something, and a woman called out: “Oh, my. The frame just slipped off the shelf!”

Again, gift-wrapping aside, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of stress except for the time a lovely customer from Ohio bought and requested shipping of $350 worth of vases and artificial flowers that were ultimately lost by U.P.S. Tracking, that totally dependable way of locating stuff, sent out no record of the transaction, and there were no duplicates of what she bought, and paid for, in stock. I still shiver over that one, as it was me who delivered the packages in person to the U.P.S. store in East Hampton. Did I do something wrong with the labeling?

Still, I did get to work my advertising headline chops by creating signs like “Tray chic!” around a grouping of trays. Or “These gifts will bowl them over!” among, you guessed it, a grouping of bowls. But the next day, the placards disappeared. “Not my thing,” the owner said. And it’s her candy store, although no candy is sold, but there is a pretty good fake cake that sits atop a real cake stand.

Best of all, I have found I actually do have a personality. Fifty years on from the days of sitting on the floor surrounded by a stockroom full of shoe boxes that no one actually bought in the end due to my lack of conviction, my lack of salesmanship, I found, with confidence and genuine (ish) enthusiasm, a smile on my face as wide as a berth, and I would say: “This alabaster bowl with its sparkling silver rim goes with any decor!” Or, “This beach bag with a print replicating Missoni is an absolute steal at $22!” Or, “Have you ever seen champagne glasses with this particular pearlized patina of pink?”

The responses were generally as blank-stared as I was in the shoe store. Or, “Just looking,” they’d say. “Thanks.” Or, “We’ll be back. Oh, look! The sun is coming back out!”

Amazingly, though, I did sell a $7,500 grandfather clock! The owner did a jig after that particular transaction, and I thought, well, I did have what it takes, but frankly, the buyer told the owner that she had been eyeing the clock for three years and today was the day she finally decided to buy it. The day being my very first day on the job.

“It’s a nice clock,” I managed, shrugging, smugly, settling into my salesman personality.

Tick-tock. Summer’s over. And so, it seems, is my salesman career.

Tennis, anyone?

Hy Abady, a frequent “Guestwords” contributor, is putting together a sequel to his 2010 “Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End.” “Back in The Star Again, AGAIN!” is due out in early 2015.

My 11-year-old self is sitting in a chair from Ebbets Field, drinking from a bottle of Pepsi, checking out the charms of the August 1969 Playboy Playmate. I stop staring into Debbie Hooper’s siren eyes when I hear a shout from John F. Murray Jr. — owner of this deck in Wainscott’s Westwoods, forever Brooklyn Dodger fan, supplier of Pepsis and Playboys to hemi-hormoned boys like me, my honorary uncle, and author of the new novel “The Devil Walks on Water,” my current number-one book. Jake knows I’m curious about writing for a living and he thinks it’s high time for a few tips, Ms. Hooper’s charms be damned.

Write what you know best, says Jake with the gentle growl that says he’s in a pretty good mood. Write what you want to read most. Make a difference. If you can’t make a difference, at least make a racket. And for !@#%&’s sake, don’t be a manic-depressive — writing is bipolar enough without being bipolar.

I thought a &%#@! hell of a lot about Jake’s commandments while I wrote “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons,” which SUNY Press released last summer. Guided by his advice, I made a racket about my first favorite era, 1967 to 1972, when I lived a block from Jake in Wainscott and found all my major passions — from writing to rock ’n’ roll, sexy cars to sexier women, Carl Yastrzemski to Truman Capote. Goaded by his spirit, I created a crazy-quilt, crazy-assed memoir: a Boomer coming-of-age tell-all; an elegy to my tribe, the South Fork’s comfortable middle class; a meditation on a special place at a special time teaching a kid to be special.

I wrote the book to discover why the East End became so special over such a short stretch. The whys came in every size of surprise. My love of nature, I realized, began in the Georgica Association, where I roamed mazes of meadows and slept under trees shaped by the ocean-whipped wind into witches’ fingers. My fascination with history started at Wainscott’s closed general store, a rusty, melancholy relic that buzzed like a beehive in its ’30s-’40s heyday. And my melancholy streak? Blame it on my unemployed, desperate father selling our house on Whitney Lane without my mother’s permission, ending my full-time time in my emotional home.

I wrote the book to honor the people who made the South Fork my emotional home. June and Harvey Morris treated me like a kid, an adult, and a king in their Penny Candy Shop in Water Mill, the East End’s sweetest pit stop for over 40 years. Generous and gracious, they let me wreck perfect rows of candy dots with my teeth, wave the dusty smoke off candy cigarettes, and celebrate every day as my birthday.

Mike Raffel was my baseball buddy, my rock ’n’ roll guru, my first best friend. He turned me, an outsider, into an insider the first day we met, teaching me the treats and tricks of Wainscott’s weedy, rocky, 38-steps-wide baseball field, the world’s only known rectangular diamond.

Jake Murray was my first writing teacher, my first sex coach, my first all-access adult. Charming and crazy, he helped me understand my crazy, charming dad, a fellow manic-depressive, alcoholic adman.

Each of these folks honored me in their way. Jake’s children thanked me for reminding them that their dad could bring out the best in kids even when he was near his worst. June thanked me by telling me the penny-candy chapter cheered her up, which helped her recover faster from a nasty infection. Mike thanked me during a reading in a bookstore by his home in Cambridge, N.Y. That Halloween night we broke out our old Huck Finn-and-Tom Sawyer act, recalling the days we played tennis by a deserted beach mansion to a tape of James Brown singing “Hot Pants” and “Sex Machine.”

I wrote the book to piece together my family’s fractured life on the South Fork, where we were happiest and unhappiest. For nearly 40 years my mother, Pat, has been my friend and hero; it took me nearly that many years to realize that she was my quiet caretaker in Wainscott. Her sacrifices gave my dad, Larry, the time to teach me to pitch, to sing barbershop harmony, to make the East End my kingdom. I pardoned him long ago for forcing me to leave Whitney Lane long before I was ready; it took me a book to know that he started the pilgrimage that the book ended.

I wrote the book to restore memories eroded or erased by divorce, alcoholism, and the neutralizing nature of a farming resort, where summers blur like watercolors. Now there’s a castle between covers where we can all remember Al Capone’s bullet-holed Pierce Silver Arrow at the Long Island Automotive Museum, Mark Donohue’s Camaro Z28 at the Bridgehampton Race Circuit, and Truman Capote’s cabin-cruiser Buick, which he drove recklessly on Saga­ponack’s dragstrips.

I wrote the book, finally, to get my largely secret life off my back. For decades I thought I was the only kid who idolized Capote and Carl Yastrzemski. Meeting other fans of this bizarre double-play team has been a thrilling relief. It’s made me feel more at home in my emotional home.

My comfort must be catchy, because longtime Wainscotteers keep asking me when I’m moving back. I tell them I couldn’t afford to live in my old kingdom even if I sold 100,000 copies of “Kingdom.” The only property I could afford is a plot in Wainscott Cemetery, where Jake Murray was laid to rest in June 1977, six months after he drowned intentionally in the East River. I’d be around the bend from my honorary, honorable uncle, which would be just jake with me.

Geoff Gehman, a journalist, lived two blocks from Sayre’s Path in Wainscott and lives two blocks from the Sayre Mansion Inn in Bethlehem, Pa. He will read from “The Kingdom of the Kid” on Aug. 17 at 3 p.m. at the Wainscott Chapel.

I am led by two extracts of wisdom, both acquired while sitting on porches. From Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” From Charles Baudelaire: “Genius is childhood recovered at will.”

My intention this summer is to spend as much time as I can on a porch recovering this genius and this nature. Depending on how you see it, I have an advantage for this — a new daughter born in June. A week after she emerged, we left the gathering hum of New York City air-conditioners and were here on this porch that wraps around our small cottage in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

The timing of this is fortunate: My teacher’s vacation nearly matches my wife’s maternity leave, which frames the entire summer. In the leafless days of still-windy March, we imagined what three months of time away would be like. I even thought of buying wind chimes to hang on the fire escape to up the anticipation.

But beyond this calendar coincidence, a deeper connection is growing. In our emergence from our respective wombs — my small, airless city apartment stuffed with emails, her viscous sac; in our afternoon sways in the hammock, and in our appreciation of being peacefully swaddled — we are emerging into the real world.

Every nap of hers offers a lesson. When I first take her onto my chest, she is all mouth, bobbing her little head and pecking at my sternum, slipping down the side of me, clenching, de-clenching, grunting, yawning, clenching, and wriggling dozens of new muscles to do it all again. Sometimes it takes walking a few lengths of the porch, sometimes singing, but then her 8 or 10 pounds (all of them!) settle into a puddle and the weight goes away, like sand that clings and dries into the whispers of the wind.

Her sleep is so deep on that porch she can fit the whole outside into the rhythm of her breathing. A gust of wind that blows the sea grass back, a truck hauling a house-worth of lumber, the distant whine of a leaf blower — that halo of her head is in its own land. Still, I don’t want to risk the journey to the kitchen and disturb this downy newness, so I can do nothing but sit and stare, and go through a de-clenching of my own.

I look at the line the tree trunk makes against the telephone pole, follow this down to the salvia I’m also trying to bring into life, which leads to the bumblebee, and along its wing into the woods across the street, where it disappears into the thorny twines, and the world becomes edgeless and unbounded, a continuous realm of lines waiting to be connected.

Eventually, she opens her eyes. Right now (we are told), she can see faces and checkerboard contrasts, but quite literally the scope of her vision grows by the day. Even the color of her eyes will change, from dark gray to another surprise. Of course, I have watched this all evolve with her sister, who will soon turn 3 and suddenly seems like a giant. She is all eyes now, hoping each dusk to go out and look for deer.

And so I put her on my shoulders and we sneak into the meadow across the way to look for anything moving. She brings a focus to this that I sometimes forget can happen. Deer are probably the only thing she is thinking about. At her request one night to go farther into the field, I nearly walked into a wild turkey. It jolted up with a horrible squawk and wide and unfamiliar wings and took a couple of steps right at us, perhaps protecting babies of her own.

It was a terrifying shock to the senses; I’m certain the moment was as new to me as it was to her. This meadow became not just a place to perhaps see a deer, but a vital habitat for lives otherwise known only from storybooks. I felt as small as I do walking on the beach in February.

But the biggest surprise of this summer, so far, has been how much things have actually slowed down with this addition of another child. True, there are more diapers and there is less sleep, but there is also more porch time, where the “inward and outward senses still truly [adjust] to each other.” Vacations like this are an anomaly; the aim is always to re-treat “normal life” with as much relaxed vigor as can be sustained. But with the baby now, we have another source of discoveries.

Since coming here a few weeks ago, she has begun to look and sound less pterodactylian. Still, her face sometimes gets that drunken daze you see outside the Memory Motel, and her brow furrows at the shock of this new world, but over all, she shows the milk of human kindness. Her wrinkled flesh is smoothing over, her dry skin is flaking off, she has the suggestion of hair. Things are better for everyone on the porch.

Tim Donahue is a high school English teacher and writer from New York City who comes frequently to his house in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

The East Hampton Town Board recently proposed a rental registration law that has become the topic of much debate. Ostensibly it is designed to address the problem the town has long had in enforcing the existing laws prohibiting group and transit rentals. Unfortunately, the proposed law does not really solve this problem in a meaningful way, although with a few tweaks it could be a lot more effective.

As a matter of full disclosure: My wife and I have owned a home in the Amagansett Dunes for 35 years. We’ve never rented it nor do we intend to. A number of the homes around us, however, have been rented to groups and transients over the years.

The proposed law requires that an owner submit an affidavit attesting to the number of persons to occupy the property, the proposed rental period, that there is a valid certificate of occupancy, and that refuse will be removed in a timely manner. This is insufficient. The owner should be required to attest under penalty of perjury that the home will be occupied by one family (as required by the town zoning code) and that no shares have been sold giving rights to individuals to occupy individual bedrooms (also prohibited by the zoning code).

At present, there is no legal obligation for landlords to ensure that their rentals comply with the existing laws prohibiting group or transient rentals. They (and their real estate agents) just take the money and run, often involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is the neighbors who are left with the consequences of loud parties, scores of guests, tenants coming home drunk at 3 and 4 a.m., and illegally parked cars.

Indeed, I would propose that the law also require that in any lease the tenant also represent that only one family will occupy the premises and that no shares have been sold. There is already precedence for this in the section of the town code dealing with affordable accessory apartments; it specifies six provisions that must be included in the lease of such an apartment.

The proposed law is very unclear as to whether a landlord has to get a new permit every time he enters into a new lease. The way I read the current draft, all a landlord has to do is update the affidavit in terms of the number of persons occupying the premises and the term of the lease. I suggest that there will be wholesale violation of this provision, as all an owner has to do is publish his rental registration number in any ad. An owner should go through the certification process every time he or she enters into a new lease, as what could be a legal lease one year could be an illegal group rental the next.

People have to get beach parking permits every year; the same should be true of rental permits, which should only be valid for the term of the lease in question. In fact, the Southampton rental permit law has such a provision.

In addition to issuing a rental permit number, the town should also issue a rental permit decal (again, like the beach parking permit) that should be prominently displayed on the door of the premises and that sets forth the registration number and the period for which it is valid. Given East Hampton’s limited resources devoted to code enforcement, it is really the neighbors who are able to identify illegal group and transient rentals. Unlike Southampton, however, East Hampton does not (and probably in the near future will not) have a database of property permits readily accessible on the Internet. The display of a permit will enable neighbors to easily ascertain if the landlord of a rental property has complied with the law rather than having to do a manual search at the Building Department.

Over the years I’ve been told by various code enforcement officers that the problem with enforcing the group rental law is their inability under the law to obtain access to the premises. Once again, the existing town code governing affordable accessory apartments provides a solution. That law requires that the lease of any affordable accessory apartment contain the following clause:

“The tenant consents to an inspection upon reasonable notice by the building inspector, or his/her designee, for the purpose of determining whether the apartment and all other structures on the property are in compliance with the code of the Town of East Hampton, the New York State Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code, and/or the rules and regulations of any other agency having jurisdiction. The failure to schedule an inspection after due notice from the town or resisting, obstructing, and/or impeding the agents, servants, officers, and/or employees of the Town of East Hampton during an inspection of the premises is a violation of the East Hampton Town Code and subject to the fines and penalties provided herein.”

The proposed rental registration law should have a similar clause. It should provide that by applying for a rental permit the landlord consents to an inspection by the building inspector to ensure compliance with the law, and it should require that the lease of the premises contain an identical consent by the tenant.

Absentee landlords have been thumb­ing their noses at the laws relating to group and transient rentals for years. This has become a real quality-of-life issue in numerous areas of the town. If the town is serious about getting this under control, it needs to do more than what is currently being proposed.

Jack Hassid is a lawyer who practices commercial litigation in New York City.

In 1961 I was 8 years old and Sandy Koufax was the most dominant pitcher in baseball. He was also my favorite player. It wasn’t common in those days for girls to collect baseball cards, but I did. The only card I did not have was Sandy Koufax.

One day walking home from religious instruction at Our Lady of Lourdes in Massapequa Park, I felt something hit me in the head. I quickly looked around, thinking someone had thrown something at me, but there was no one around and I was in an open area. The only thing visible, lying at my foot, was a Sandy Koufax baseball card. I was duly flabbergasted at this stroke of luck, but of course immediately began to consider that since no one was around this must be divine intervention, having after all just come from religious instruction. Or it was just baseball magic.

Going into this last week of the regular season in baseball, I find myself hoping for more of that baseball magic. I find it hard to imagine that Derek Jeter, my favorite player these last 20 years, will play his last game in Fenway Park on Sunday, unless somehow not only do the Yankees miraculously play flawless baseball down the stretch, but all the teams in front of them in the wild card race collapse. As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over,” etc.

Whatever happens, baseball will not be the same next year — that is, New York baseball, and in particular Yankee baseball. And as rocky as this season has been, I’m glad Jeter announced his retirement early and shared it with baseball fans throughout the country. I grew up in an era when many baseball players were not very cordial to each other, to say the least, but Derek Jeter has brought a civility to the game that proves that the only things necessary are talent and sportsmanship.

In an era of performance-enhancing drugs, Jeter is the epitome of what a baseball player did not have to do to be great. In 20 years Derek Jeter never embarrassed himself or baseball. He understood that as the captain of the Yankees he was a leader and he had to set an example. He was respectful and therefore respected. He never kicked the dirt or argued with an ump. He played the game the way it was supposed to be played. He worked hard and he played hard. If he hit a ball deep he never stood and watched it. He ran out every hit. He fielded every ball as if he could make the play, and many times that meant going deep in the hole behind shortstop, fielding it bare-handed, and releasing it midair, accurately, to Tino or Teixeira at first base.

We remember those plays and hits: the 2001 “flip” play along the first-base line to Jorge Posada to tag out Jeremy Giambi at the plate, the dive into the stands along the left-field line in 2004 when he made the catch but came up bruised and bloody, the home run for his 3,000th hit, and the many playoff and World Series clutch hits and home runs. He wasn’t called Mr. November for nothing. Jeter has been thrilling to watch. We came to expect near perfection.

Watching as Jeter went from stadium to stadium this season has been a delight. This was not an easy season for the Yankees or Jeter, as both struggled, the Yankees with pitching and Jeter with hitting, although Jeter’s bat has gotten hot again, and he still managed to make some spectacular fielding plays throughout this final season. But to see fans in the stands all over the country wearing their home team’s hat and a Jeter T-shirt was great. To see opposing teams stand on the top step of their dugout while Jeter was paid tribute to. And to hear active and retired players pay tribute to him has been heartwarming. My favorite was young Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals, who said that Jeter was “not just the captain of the Yankees, but the captain of baseball.”

This is in no way to say that Derek Jeter is a hero or the greatest baseball player of all time. A hero is someone who cures cancer or saves someone’s life or sacrifices his or her own life. And I think Derek Jeter would be the first to agree with this statement. Jeter is someone who loves to play baseball and feels he owes it to the fans to play it the best he can.

So it would be selfish on my part to want more of that baseball magic after what he has given us for 20 years. What Derek Jeter deserves now is simply this: Thanks!

Diane Spina York, a retired social studies teacher, taught at East Hampton High School for 20 years. She lives in Springs.

With all of the iPhones, iPads, tablets, laptops, and other devices teens have access to these days, you would think textbooks would be a thing of the past . . . right? Guess again. Carrying around heavy backpacks all day can be very detrimental for growing students, causing stress fractures in the back, inflammation of growth cartilage, and nerve damage in the neck and shoulders. Even with the advancements in technology, the burden of the backpack has not been lifted, in fact it has only increased.

As a senior at East Hampton High School, I’ve had to put up with the discomfort of backpacks nearly my whole academic life. I decided someone needed to say something. So I asked a bunch of my friends and their younger siblings who attended schools within the district whether they, or anyone they knew, struggled with back problems related to backpacks.

An (un)surprising majority had experience with back problems ranging from regular chiropractor visits to severe cases of progressing scoliosis, some even resulting in spinal surgery. You don’t need to be a scientist or doctor to see the effect that lugging backpacks has on us. We slouch, shuffle our feet, are slow to class, and use our desks to crack our backs more than anything else (just ask any high school student to explain the technique). These characteristics shouldn’t be chalked up as typical sullen teenage behavior; instead they should be recognized as one of the side effects of years of dealing with overweight backpacks.

The standard high school course requires students to transport at least one textbook back and forth between home and class. This does not include all of the handouts, class work, binders, folders, calculators, books, homework, notes, tests, quizzes, portfolios, and so on. Keep in mind that most binders, once filled, can weigh as much as, if not more than, the books. Over time the “heavy workload” really piles up, figuratively and literally.

During my junior year I began researching reports of overweight backpacks and their prominence in school systems across the country. It was interesting to learn how in recent years backpacks seemed to be getting heavier, causing more and more complaints from the student body despite the influx of technology intended to alleviate such issues. There were articles by doctors and parents all over the Internet about the severe problems that accompany overweight backpacks, but I could hardly find any information on the average weight of a backpack nowadays.

I had so many questions: How early are children being forced to lug their backpacks each day? Exactly how heavy is the average backpack? What about in my school district? I was curious. So in February of this year, with the approval of my principal, Adam Fine, I held my first-ever “Backpack Weigh-In” at my high school.

I arrived at school early one morning with a few of my good friends and set up a table in the front lobby along with posters, fliers, doughnuts (to encourage participation), and, most important, scales. Then the buses pulled up, opened their doors, and immediately students were pouring into the foyer. My friends and I stood near the table calling over our peers to have their bags weighed and in return receive a doughnut. Needless to say, all of the doughnuts vanished within seconds.

Even after the treats were gone, students still came up to the table curious about my project and shocked at the weight they hadn’t realized they were carrying around with them all the time. In the end I had weighed 100 backpacks. The results were astonishing. Doctors say that you should never carry more than 10 percent of your body weight for long periods of time. On the low end of the spectrum, students’ backpacks weighed a minimum of 10 percent of their body weight. Fewer than 20 students were either under, or met, the recommended 10 percent. The average weight was 19 pounds — almost double the recommended percentage.

On the high end, some bags were clocking in at 24, 27, even 30 pounds. Let me say that none of these students weighed anywhere near enough to be within the 10-percent parameters. This meant that about one-quarter of the 100 students were hauling almost triple the recommended amount.

The heaviest bag I weighed was that of a senior girl. She was a petite thing, around 5-foot-2, and when I asked her if she was interested in seeing how much her bag weighed she shrugged and let it drop to the floor with a loud thud. Since the bag was too big to fit on one of my bathroom scales, I asked for the assistance of my health teacher, who hooked it onto one of my scales that works using suspension. My teacher’s eyes popped out of his head as he gave the tiny girl a once-over and then showed me the number.

I turned and asked if she would tell me how much she weighed. At this point she was a little nervous, seeing that something had really grabbed ahold of my attention, but she replied that when she weighed herself the week before she was roughly 113 pounds. Her bag was 34 pounds — just over 30 percent of her body weight. I asked if she suffered from any back problems, and she explained that at the age of 16, almost two years ago, she began seeing a chiropractor regularly.

Amazed at these results, I presented them to Mr. Fine, who was also blown away. After some discussion we both agreed it would be interesting to do the same experiment at the other schools within the district. So at the end of May I met with Charles Soriano, the principal of the East Hampton Middle School, and Dennis Sullivan, the assistant principal of the John M. Marshall Elementary School, and arranged another two weigh-in sessions. Although doughnuts weren’t allowed to aid us in attracting volunteers, we were still able to round up a good 50 bags at the middle school and another 100 at the elementary school.

Again the results left us all slack-jawed and wide-eyed. At the middle school the average backpack weighed 14 pounds, and at the elementary school the average was 7 pounds. Again, just by looking at the students, you could clearly tell that they were beyond the healthy 10 percent. This means by the time some kids graduate from elementary school they are at risk of suffering from back problems accumulated over vital growth periods throughout the years.

The principals were amazing. They immediately showed interest in my ideas, made the necessary accommodations for my experiments, and hopped on board with me to raise awareness within the district and around the town. Most of them admitted they hadn’t heard anything about overweight backpacks within at least the last five years, from either parents or students. They all agreed, however, that the number of children suffering from back pain, scoliosis, and growth problems must be correlated to the increase in backpack weight over the years. The resulting backpack averages from my experiments are enough on their own to show just how extensive the issue already is, and how as time goes by the matter only becomes worse.

Currently there are no backpack regulations for the student body, but starting with this article I plan to raise awareness through the student handbook, the East Hampton School District’s online page, parent emails, and health classes. In the meantime, I contacted Matt Vogel, a locally acclaimed physical therapist, for his advice on how to help ease and prevent back pain:

1. Always wear two backpack straps to evenly distribute the weight. 2. Use a back brace, Velcro, adjustable straps, and/or clips to secure the bag. 3. Stretch as often as you can to keep your muscles warm and flexible. 4. Good posture!

I believe the more that students, parents, faculty, and administrators are conscious of this issue, the less likely it will be for overweight backpacks to cause serious health problems later on in students’ lives. School can really weigh a kid down as it is, and this is one burden they can do without.

A year ago Hannah Vogel wrote a “Guestwords” about her mission trip to Cuba through the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

“What a great country we have here when it decides to be.” — John Updike

“We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In September 1932, Franklin Roosevelt crossed the country to San Francisco to give a speech that contributed mightily to his landslide election to the presidency six weeks later. I yearn to hear the likes of it today from Hillary Clinton.

The United States, F.D.R. said, needed a new social contract. Throughout most of our history, anyone willing to work could earn a good living. If a depression came along, all you had to do was climb into a covered wagon and head west, where free land and jobs were plentiful.

But, F.D.R. continued, by the start of the 20th century the free land was gone and our corporate and financial leaders had become “malefactors of great wealth” and “princes of profit” — exerting “uncontrolled and irresponsible powers” akin to “the feudal barons of old.” We were becoming an “economic oligarchy.” Equality of opportunity no longer existed. The government had to expand its role in the economy to facilitate creation of jobs and otherwise ease the burden on the great numbers of people who were suffering.

Backed by Congress and prodded by his determined wife, Eleanor, F.D.R. moved swiftly. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which recruited millions of unemployed young men to work on public land development and conservation. The Works Progress Administration constructed public buildings and oversaw the Federal Art Project, which paid a monthly stipend to struggling writers and artists, among them East Hampton’s de Kooning, Krasner, and Pollock.

The Tennessee Valley Authority provided low-cost electricity to poor rural areas. The Agricultural Adjustment Act firmed farm prices that had so thoroughly collapsed, tens of thousands of farm families abandoned their land and, impoverished, set off to find work. The National Labor Relations Act, at present under attack in Congress, reduced obstacles to workers forming unions and in doing so paved the way for the amazing mid-20th-century growth of our middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 thrives today as a source of economic stability for our elderly and disabled and for the country as a whole. And, until its repeal, led by Bill Clinton in 1999, the Glass-Steagall Banking Act stood as a bulwark against investment industry shenanigans that were to rock the country with the financial trauma of 2008.

Some of F.D.R.’s princes of profit called him a socialist and traitor to his class, the old wealth that then prevailed on Wall Street. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” he said while campaigning for re-election in 1936, “and I welcome their hatred.” He carried 46 of the 48 states and all but 8 of the 531 electoral votes.

I believe that in order to be elected president in 2016, Mrs. Clinton must commit to a new, similarly focused social contract that signals her independence from the magnetism and influence of great wealth. The country needs this, as it did in the 1930s, to recover from its economic and spiritual funk. And she needs it, personally, as a mission for a prospective presidency and to reinforce the Clintons’ legacy.

The similarities between now and 1932 are startling — the decline of equal opportunity and the morale of working families, the narcissistically applied power of the very rich, the deification of money and those who make mountains of it by fair or foul, while our leaders seem unable to provide a safe financial system and enough jobs offering opportunity and livable income. Now as then, this demands a strong, compassionate leader directing strong, compassionate policies who can stare down the 21st century’s malefactors of great wealth.

Such a social contract could also mend cracks that have appeared in the Clintons’ credibility, notably from perceptions of excessive closeness with the “.1 percent” and a preoccupation with attaining personal wealth. The routing of speaking fees — upward of $200,000 per speech for Hillary (and $700,000 for Bill) — to the Clinton Foundation rather than the Clintons personally, though apparently legal, diminishes trust in her statesmanship and provides a potent weapon for her opponents, which can best be countered by a potent program of her own.

F.D.R.’s site choice to unveil his social contract was inspired — San Francisco, a youthful city, symbol of optimism and vigor, traits the country needed to survive and that F.D.R. feared the Depression was crushing. Mrs. Clinton needs a similarly telling site to introduce her 21st-century social contract. That site is East Hampton, nexus of Clinton campaign money-raising and symbol of the country’s gaping economic apar­theid.

To highlight her focus, the presentation should be delivered north of the highway, a part of our town James Brady, author of “Further Lane,” called “the other Hamptons.” East Hampton High School would be a good place. So might Studio 3 at LTV, our local television station. The audience should be predominantly north of the highway — our parks and highways workers, farmers, traditional and organic, fishermen, nurses, waiters, engineers, chefs, the seniors and working families in our town’s affordable-housing homes and apartments.

Mrs. Clinton needs to show that to restore fairness, a healthy economy, and balanced budget she will risk, as F.D.R. did, being labeled a socialist and traitor, that she is not knitted to a coterie of superrich financiers. Rather, she is a potential leader of our democracy who, if we elect her, will make certain that the people who profit hugely from our financial casino are no longer pampered by our tax and regulatory codes and a presidency that frets at the prospect of their displeasure.

Richard Rosenthal is author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on class warfare in the Hamptons.

I get the feeling that some of our prosperous institutions and second-home owners here are engaged in a race to the bottom to see who can be top Scrooge.

A wealthy East End school announces it will cease paying salaried employees for their 30-minute lunch period. This amounts to a 6-percent pay cut. A country club in sound financial condition awards a 2-percent pay raise to its staff, then, pleading poverty, reduces its health insurance contribution by an amount that surpasses the salary increase.

Often, employers offer no health insurance. This is apparent during winter, when second homes are usually inactive and their immigrant employees, many of whom have become U.S. citizens, return to their homelands to get medical and dental treatment at about one-fifth the price for comparable care here. During work months they forbear treatment or resort to hospital emergency rooms. The Affordable Care Act will help, but with still-high premiums, coverage gaps, and absences of employer participation, health care in the Hamptons will remain very expensive.

Some of these health care travelers serve as domestics in the homes here of individuals on the Forbes 400 richest Americans list. While they are working — and perhaps enduring infected teeth or threatening coronary and pulmonary conditions — they might be taking care of a presidential-aspirant houseguest who has established a reputation as a supporter of universal health insurance and who is here amidst the Hamptons treasure trove to network for campaign contributions.

Do we, as East Hampton citizens, stay out of this? Do we believe that houseguest decorum prohibits guests from scrutinizing their hosts’ generosity to the hired help and, perhaps, that we mustn’t intrude anyway because the presence of wealth and fame here spins off into local jobs and business we need?

Or, as I prefer, do we decide a candidate must enquire — that there is rightful public concern about the conjoining of big money and high office and that aspirants to such things as our presidency should demand to know what their billionaire hosts are doing about their employee health benefits before blessing them with the kudos of their presence?

The town board, which I believe cares about all East Hampton residents and finds itself appropriating funds for services engendered by shortfalls of health care coverage, can get involved by urging the town’s wealthiest employers to examine and if need be recalibrate their stances on employee health benefits.

The board might induce such a reassessment via a nonbinding resolution, a step without legal effect but capable of exerting significant moral force. There would be devils in the details, but differences can be worked out, as they must be with any legislation. I would like to see the resolution cover all U.S. citizens and legal residents working on the books here for any school, business, or part-time or full-time East Hampton resident with a net worth of $20 million or more.

Such a resolution would be less rare and radical than it might seem. Municipal legislatures, both conservative and liberal, frequently employ them to exhort action by their citizenry or the state or federal government. In 2013 Mount Hope, N.Y., passed a resolution urging repeal of Governor Cuomo’s SAFE Act, which has expanded state control of assault weapons. In 2012, the New York City Council passed a resolution opposing corporate personhood.

What could be more appropriate than the Town of East Hampton, site of the second gilded age in full flower, urging its year-round and seasonal residents with 8 to 11-figure wealth to make sure their employees needn’t work months without access to needed health care?

The workers I spoke with for this article are my neighbors. They have each been on their job for years. They take great pride in providing for their families and giving their employers a good day’s work. We used to call them the backbone of the country. Now, we allow our political and financial leaders to nickel and dime them. It is demoralizing. It disrupts and destroys families. It shatters our nation’s unity. And it is vulgar.

Richard Rosenthal is a veteran of the Great Depression and World War II.