Columnists

While it would be nice to write off all state income and property taxes, as we used to, I’m willing to stand the gaff if it means that President Biden’s broad spending plan will pass. The New York legislators who have said they won’t vote for the bill if our state income and property tax write-offs remain capped at $10,000, should abandon that stand in favor of the greater good.

I had a feeling that Tuesday morning was going to be weird. When Weasel, the Lab mix, rousted me around 4:30 to go outside, the peeper frogs in the swamp were especially worked up and a whippoorwill sang from a tree in the driveway so close that I could hear a clicking he made between choruses. Click. Whip-poor-will. Click. I went back upstairs and put my head down on a pillow.

My son, bless his cotton socks, is of a scientific mind.

A fellow tennis player said the other day that he assumed I’d not been very busy lately, though I assured him I had been inasmuch as the high school teams had been pretty much in full swing since the end of February.

Nothing screams “suburban streetscape!” quite so loudly as Belgian block.

A soaring vertical space broken up by horizontal catwalks, railings, and landings. This is what preservation can look like . . .

This may not be the best advertisement for the book of “Point of View” columns I intend to publish, a book to be known as “Essays From Eden,” but Mary nearly keeled over in proofreading them this past week.

A volcanic eruption on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent highlights the difficulty of living without electricity.

History runs deep on the South Fork, and well recorded is the spelling Noyack, not Noyac. With the all-important K.

The only good use for a fence, in my opinion, is for leaning on while watching your kid play team sports in the sunshine in a field behind a school.

Once more unto the darkened theater — for escape or togetherness?

Linguists and writers of a certain pompousness (ahem, me) like to debate the relative euphoniousness of words at dinner parties. Have you heard this thing about the most beautiful phrase in the English language being “cellar door”? What about "defenestration" or "lollygag," "twilight" or "jubilee"?

And so, we too have acceded — inevitably, it would seem — to the fact that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.”

The Montauk Hammerhead Building team trounced the Amagansett Fire Department in Little League action on Monday. I should know; I was among the spectators at Lions Field trying to keep warm as a chilly westerly wind blew in off the ocean. In an email to parents earlier in the day, the Amagansett coaches had told us to dress warmly. No one dressed warmly enough, especially on the visitors’ side of the field.

My rubber-band ball, made entirely from rubber bands, grew bigger every day. It was bigger than a softball, bigger than a  grapefruit. It was heavy and perfectly round. I liked to bounce it, like Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape,” off the wall of my first office at Vogue magazine, when I got my start in 1998. Everyone loved Steve McQueen, the 1970s tough guy with cruel lips, in the summer of 1998.

Bam. Pause. Bam.

People often ask me about what life was like at Vogue, back in the Gilded Age before the Millennium, before 9/11, before the collapse of print media.

Recently, I was asked to retrieve from The Star’s attic contacts and negatives of Troy Bowe, the former Killer Bees’ point guard, in action. The request set my head to spinning like a leptoquark, for, as I told Carl Johnson, who had made the request, “It’s a black hole up there, a bottomless pit from which it has been said nothing escapes.”

At the risk of offending my friends from Sag Harbor, what is up with those people? Most of the time that I run into someone I know in that village, the first thing they say is, “What are you doing over here?” with the emphasis on “you.”

“I wanted to go to Persan’s for a clam knife,” I protest. They tilt their head ever so slightly, suspicious

Some thoughts on the coming gentrification of Sag Harbor’s mini strip mall, the Water Street Shops.

I can remember quite clearly the conversation with a friend who knew a thing or two about town politics. At least a dozen years ago, he and I got into it about if anyone really wanted to close the East Hampton Airport. I said no; he said I was wrong. Cut to, as they say, today, and it is clear that my friend was onto something.

The dull warehouse has come in for reconsideration in light of Amazon’s exponential growth and the drive for unionization.

I’m never happier than when the power goes out, and all the humming machines, low-buzzing appliances, furnaces, and neighborhood pool heaters shut down, and the house goes quiet. Partly I feel this relief because, like Greta Garbo, I just want to be left alone . . .

Soon, I’m told, we’ll be able to grow six marijuana plants (or is it 12 per couple filing jointly?), which, as I said to Mary, may impel me to get back to gardening again.

I once was avid in that regard, my steering wheel turning of its own accord when I’d be driving by Hren’s (now Groundworks). But the deer feasted on just about everything I grew, and if it wasn’t the deer, it was the voles.

My mother, who wrote a column called “Connections” in this space for more than 40 years, has only made one remark on “The Shipwreck Rose” since I began my own column last July: “I see you are styling the dog’s name as one word, Sweetpea,” she says, with the sideways gaze and slightly arched eyebrows of a disdainful veteran copy editor, “rather than two.”

The Town Board ruled today that, once the coronavirus pandemic has run its course, all of our schools, aside from those for toddlers, be turned into affordable housing units, thus going far to solve that problem, and, further, that henceforth a new without-walls system of education be created wherein students, through visits to mentors living here, whether engaged in the trades, the professions, or arts, will participate in hands-on learning.

Regular readers of The Star’s editorial pages might have noticed that our official position with regard to the ecological importance of Hook Pond and its tributaries, notably the present mud bog known as Town Pond, is that it would be nice to restore them, but there are far higher priorities.

The commentary of Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith — the last vestiges of a watchable N.B.A.

I had to say I wasn’t breastfeeding in order for my CVS questionnaire to be accepted, but, what the hell, I’ll say anything to get a shot.

The one I’m to have Sunday, at Mattituck’s CVS, will be my second, and then, two weeks hence, I presume I’ll be home free. Mary is to have hers at the same place the day after mine. Why they couldn’t do us both at the same time I don’t know, but we consider ourselves lucky to get them.

We’ll continue to wear masks and to wash our hands more often than we would have in the past, of course, wanting, as ever, to be good citizens.

There are better ways to keep records than writing in pencil on an exposed two-by-four in the basement, yet it works. For almost 20 years I have been noting the date when the first spring peepers sing out from the swamps alongside Cranberry Hole Road. And, for almost as long, I have marked the arrival dates of the earliest osprey.

When a country lane becomes an infernal, rushing, nonstop artery.

In my salad days in Manhattan, my friends and I would play a barroom game in which we judged people by their footwear: a sort of reverse fortune telling in which you observed the sartorial selection and made a Gypsy-like pronouncement about who the wearer was. This was the 1990s. An adult male sporting unscuffed Top-Siders with no socks was judged to be a recent grad of Cornell or Duke — possibly Dartmouth — lately arrived on Wall Street, who still kept a poster of Pamela Anderson from “Baywatch” on his wall.