Columnists

The movies are my lexicon.

Casting an early ballot in the old Southampton College gym brings on the hoop dreams.

A number of people I’ve run into in the past couple of weeks have asked about my sailboat and what the status of its motor retrofit is. Perhaps it was because of the unseasonably mild weather that some minds turned to sailing.

Many, many years — and many shattered illusions — ago, during the presidential election year of 2004, when I was a magazine editor in Manhattan, I volunteered during the Republican National Convention as an “election observer.”

Paging George Costanza? My college-age son has a wallet beyond his years.

I have a problem with genius jerks who have a great idea in a garage somewhere and then see themselves as gods.

I am overawed by previous generations of Rattray women who managed to file their weekly Star columns without a break over the span of four and five decades.

The National Warplane Museum in Geneseo triggers (in a good way) one non-pilot.

Deer are rapidly adapting to their new reality and doing things they never did before.

I’m a believer in the veil of distraction. It seems to me blatantly obvious that Karl Marx was correct on that score, anyway.

That’s funny, he doesn’t seem like a Nobel winner. (A trip to John Steinbeck’s water-encircled Sag Harbor compound.)

The phrase “fifth column” came into common use during the Spanish Civil War.

Is the vocabulary of the average American contracting?

Adventures in scrap metal.

Thoughts on the popularity of e-bikes.

I’ve never owned a car I truly loved.

A straight father of three sings the praises of Judy Garland.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of what looked like little tropical fish-tank fish were swimming near the surface.

Emails from colleges drift in and pile up in my daughter’s email inbox — and my own email inbox — like the falling leaves of the sugar maple and the red oak.

Feeding the beast: On the 800-pound gorilla that is the National Football League.

An office goldfish heads to the great fish pond in the sky.

My mother, Helen Selden Rattray, has the longevity genes of the Greenland shark. She will be turning 90 years old on Sunday.

Rediscovering the pleasures of AM radio.

There is a certain kind of camaraderie that occurs at the counter of the beer store that I believe happens nowhere else.

I learned from a cheap book I read once on dream decoding, back when we read books, that if you dream of swimming or of the sea that what you are really dreaming about is your subconscious.

Someone who grew up in Bridgehampton (this columnist, for one) might think all there was to Leonard Riggio was Minden, his vast and venerable Ocean Road estate. But his passing calls up more.

As the recreational boating season hurries to a close here in the Northeast, my ideas of a summer spent at least part of the time afloat on Cerberus slip away.

One of the indignities of getting older is having hair that will no longer express your personality in a way that adequately represents who you think you are, deep down. Our hair betrays us with age.

When a county investigator instantly “gets,” and appreciates, a just-deceased family member.

We get a lot of questions from readers here. It is, after all, a local newspaper.