Point of View: Wait, Don’t Tell Me

“Why are the flags out?” I asked Russell Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, if you don’t know,” I said, “it must be John Howard Payne’s birthday.”

And so it was! On June 9, in the year of our Lord 1791, in New York City. His grandfather’s house, where he spent his early years, has been preserved as Home, Sweet Home, a landmark down the street from this one.

With no further ado then, the lyrics:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Home!

Sweet, sweet home!

There’s no place like home!

There’s no place like home!

And that’s the song — “that one touch of nature which makes the world kin,” as Harper’s magazine put it in 1883, when the actor-dramatist-lyricist-poet’s ashes were returned to America from Tunis for reinterment in Washington, D.C.

What would Payne think now. . . .

Mid ghettoes and famined lands though we may roam,

Be it ever so massive, there’s no place like (our second) home;

A charm from the market’s rise seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the suff’ring world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Second Home!

Tax-sheltered home!

There’s no McMansion like home.

There’s no McMansion like home!

There are not all that many be-they-ever-so-humble homes left here anymore, and in the not-too-distant future, presumably, with the exodus of more members of the middle class, either to a less expensive place or to what Sydney Carton called a far, far better one, they may be very rare indeed.

And that has just given me an idea, though perhaps it’s a little ahead of its time. Why not, instead of the usual upscale house tours of summer, give the well-heeled a chance to see how the other half lives, offering ticky-tacky treks, perhaps plumping ticket sales with the prospects of pest sightings. Who knows? You might even see a roach! “There! There! I’m sure that’s one, there, by the sink drain!”

And because they had become as rare as hen’s teeth, and thus by that time would have acquired a certain cachet, someone with foresight, someone with an interest in East Hampton history, would propose that a dedicated fund be established so that these few remaining rotted-shingle, lapstreak three-bedroom, two-bath flophouses of the fabled Hamptons — no more in number probably than you could count on the beringed fingers of your hand — be preserved, dustballs and all.