Columnists

The only person I know who says they don’t gossip and holds true to that word is a friend who is autistic.

Pot? Hey, kids, maybe not before your brain has fully developed.

“I don’t want to let him go,” our eldest daughter said of her elder son, who in the not-too-distant future is to go to college, a normal progression you’ll agree, but she can’t bear the thought of him leaving.

Early December would usually be when we got the iceboats ready. A letter writer this week recalled a time, not really all that long ago, when Mecox Bay froze solid enough to race on. Not anymore.

One of the most stirring moments of my youth was the April evening in 1985 when, as part of a marching mass of college-student protesters, I danced up Amsterdam Avenue to the joyful rhythm of the song “Free Nelson Mandela” by the Specials.

A daughter’s streaming of Netflix’s “Wednesday” calls to mind the 1960s reruns of a columnist’s youth.

Subconsciously, as has long been the case with Christmas, I may want Thanksgiving to just go away.

Like many men, Ron, a pack-a-day smoker, had gone years without visiting a doctor.

A failed home repair has a columnist fondly recalling life without running water.

Evidently, there is “a more brotherly mood” abroad in the nation than I had thought.

I have a visual memory of the recipe for oysters Rattray in my mother’s handwriting on a piece of paper tucked into a cookbook.

And now you will be treated, reader, to the boring column in which I describe the circumstances in which I finally caught Covid-19.

It was one all-stater and a strong finish for the Pierson girls cross-country team at the New York State championship meet in Vernon.

People, it seems, have been voting against their best interests for years, since Reagan proselytized on behalf of trickle-down economics, which turned out not to raise all boats, just yachts.

Cerberus came out of the water last week, formally ending my sailing season.

Notes from a five-night film festival at sea, sponsored by the Turner Classic Movies channel.

A charming upstate downtown can get a guy thinking.

They say it’s “the beautiful game,” and yet some teams that play soccer in a less beautiful, even ugly fashion, can win as often as not — as Half Hollow Hills West did here on Halloween — through untrammeled will.

Out of seemingly nowhere, on Monday my 12-year-old told me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to vote for anyone who was not “a minority.”

One of my great pleasures is perusing old cookbooks to see how people ate and entertained in other eras.

This would be a good Hallowe’en to be visited by ghouls and ghosts because the Mohs surgery I’ve had lately has prompted Mary to sing “My Funny Frankenstein” from time to time.

There is, as you may know, homelessness in East Hampton Town.

A friend called a single flower that emerged from a thin cosmos plant on my office window this week the “miracle on Main Street.”

On Sunday at dinner time, the evening before All Hallows Eve, my son, who just turned 13, decided he wanted to wear a costume for the first time since he was small.

Any trip I make west, at some point past the cultural demarcation of the Shirley-Mastic area, I head back to the future with 90.7 FM, WFUV out of Fordham.

“You’re wondering why no honking, where are the a-holes? Why is it so peaceful?”

My father leased the Sail Inn for about a decade in the last century, and in doing so drove himself to an early death for ignoring Rule #1 of bar ownership: You can’t be the best customer in your own saloon.

On Main Street in East Hampton Village, it never stops.

Once more unto the gravel trails of Van Cortlandt Park.

That compound-fractured tennis racket I have had as a reminder in my office may actually be a thing of the past.