The Mast-Head: One Door Opens

Ellis, our 5-year-old, started kindergarten last week. And, since he attends school where, and in the same building, I did when I was about his age, a lot of memories are being stirred.

Most of what I remember has to do with my friends at the time. We were all at the Hampton Day School, which occupied a former potato farm on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton. Later, Hampton Day briefly became the Morris Center School, then was taken over by the Ross School as a campus for its lower grades. Ellis’s room this year is in the old four-square farmhouse, the same space where my friend Mike and I exchanged blows those many years ago.

We could not have been more than about 8 when it all went down. I was drawing a drag race car, and Mike strolled by to make a comment. “That’s not how you draw a car!” he said.

I responded that if he said that again I was going to hit him. He did, and I did, striking him alongside his perky little nose with my pencil. By way of reaction, Mike ran into the school kitchen and smashed a dish. But he got even, poking me with a pencil on my cheek a few days later.

To this day, we both have more or less matching graphite marks, which we inevitably point out to one and all when we are together and have had a few drinks.

Upstairs in the same old farmhouse is where Milo McFarland and I found a cache of marbles in a bathroom access panel. We divided the spoils between us. I still have my half in a metal box in the basement where I keep my tools. Mike and I have remained close; Milo died in 2002, and we had long lost touch by then.

The cycle of life and death is fresh in my mind this week. Mike’s mother, the late Deborah Ann Light, will be remembered in a gathering at Quail Hill in Amagansett, which was, if anything, my second home during the early ’70s. She was an imposing figure, tall, yes, but more so for her manner, a kind of knowing imperiousness with which she viewed the younger generation’s varied transgressions, of which there were plenty.

We weren’t bad kids exactly. It’s just that we chafed at the constraints of this place and found relief in various kinds of mischief. Later, when Deborah had moved to East Hampton Village and Mike and I were older, there were more shenanigans; we only found out much later that she found this stage of our youth amusing. If she imparted a lesson it was that it was okay to do one’s own thing, but, under no circumstances were we to be overly dumb about it.

We will celebrate Deborah’s life this weekend. Then, on Monday, I’ll take Ellis back to school, back to the room where, once, I was a child as well.