Point of View: A Beautiful Place

At a gathering at Ashawagh Hall that followed a service in Green River Cemetery for Ralph Carpentier, who I always remember said the tranquillity of the terrain here informed our psyches, Elena Prohaska exclaimed that she hadn’t seen me in years.

“Then you don’t go to the dump,” I said.

But she did go to the dump, she said. How our paths haven’t crossed, then, I am at a loss to say, for that’s where I, a democratic socializer (a more viable label in these times, you may agree, than a democratic socialist), see people, given the facts that I don’t belong to a church, a fire department, or a service organization — albeit I think they all do wonderful things. 

When I set forth from my landlady’s some 33 years ago, she said, “Now I’ll never see you again.”

That hasn’t exactly been true, though East Hampton’s a strange — but beautiful — place. If only she went to the dump. 

I have actually seen her from time to time over the years, as it’s turned out — once, I’m happy to say, at a party where I was able to testify to her salvific generosity to me during a trying period in our lives, and most recently at East End Physical Therapy, where, under Rob Balnis’s care, we are trying to preserve what’s left. 

But even more than self-preservation we are reminded by Ralph Carpentier’s tranquil paintings of the sky and the land and the water of the need to preserve this beautiful place — a sentiment rendered all the more urgent even as our spirits have been diminished, eroded, if you will, by the recent deaths of those like him who felt called to preserve it.