Columnists

A beleaguered Norway maple in the Star office driveway was brought down this week. How it had survived where it was, surrounded by bluestone pavement, was a testament to these trees’ toughness. In recent years it had begun to shed large branches, which hung up ominously above parked cars. But it also shaded the south side of the building in the summer, providing a screen of green leaves between my office window and the rest of the world.

­ ‘Water, in some respects, is like the Gospel, free, but he who diverts it from its accustomed channels will, in the end, find it expensive.”

These words of excellent wisdom were penned in 1920 by a graybeard named Samuel H. Miller, who grew up in what is now the Baker House, and printed as a letter to the editor in the March 2 edition of this newspaper.

Economically, now is the time to prime the pump, as F.D.R. said. “Do something,” as he also said.

“So, what is your weakness?” my foot doctor asked. Aside from not being able to move, I couldn’t think of any.

Frost took the twitter from the dawn songbirds yesterday, which made me pay attention to something that had been at the back of my mind: When does spring start?

In my youth, the presence of rats — the four-legged kind — in the best zip codes was a source of high humor.

Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” does more than hold up well, its heel of a hero reflects a changing America.

I told O’en on our walk the other night that I thought winter was finally over, but he was too preoccupied with the evening’s effluvia to give the matter much thought.

Unlike us, it seems all the same to him whether the weather is fair or foul. He is just as happy to roll splayed out on the snow as he is upon the leaves or grass. He is the most temperate soul in our menage, an avatar of amity, a friend to all, regardless of race, class, creed, gender, age, or political affiliation. We who tend to compare and contrast would do well to learn from him.

It has been some years since I pulled the iceboats out of the barn. The last time there was enough ice to sail was an early March, the third, I think. Late in the day, a friend and I took the old batwing boat out as heavy clumps of snow came down. It was as if we were sailing among stars.

There is something humorous about having launched a newspaper column of personal musings during the doldrums of a pandemic: Shall I write about how I procured a can of dolmas (stuffed Greek grape leaves) without going inside the grocery store, or shall I thrill the reader with the antics of the lone-ranger raccoon who frequents my backdoor trash bin?

A February break doing nothing much at all can get you thinking . . .

A shovel brigade was summoned to East Hampton High last Saturday to clear snow from the track, the turf field, and from the baseball field and tennis courts, too, for the new sports season.

The America we live in today did not begin in 1776; it grew out of Anglo-European colonization in which the exclusion of the land’s indigenous people was from the start routine.

True confession: I am a flower thief. I know it’s wrong. I have no moral compass when it comes to flowers.

What to do with a troubled dog? Or should that be trouble-ing? A family pet who isn’t much of a pet or all that family-friendly?

In an ordinary year on the day of my birthday, I told Mary, who brought me coffee and the crossword in bed this morning, she would have already claimed two palapas for us on Las Brisas’s half-moon Pacific beach in Mexico.

Covid-19 test diagnoses have fallen to nearly none in East Hampton Town in the last week. Where two or more positive cases were found in each hamlet or village a day, now the figure might be zero for days at a time. I am closely aware of the figures, preparing the semi-daily reports The Star sends out by email.

My children do not speak like native eastern Long Islanders, or even like citizens of the old New York. Their pronunciation is the same as that of my Amagansett nieces and nephews: that is, generic mass-entertainment pronunciation. I don’t know if the received Netflix pronunciation is a Californian inflection or a Midwest thing, but they will persist in pronouncing orange (which to me is are-inge) as ore-inge; and avenue (aven-nyew to me) as aven-noo; pure (pyure) as pyer, and coupon (kyew-pon) as coop-on.

Memories of “Go for 0, Tampa Bay!” and thoughts on the vagaries of N.F.L. fandom.

The other day, when Brett, one of the pros at East Hampton Indoor Tennis, noted that Jon Diat, The Star’s fishing writer, and I, its sportswriter, were among the few who wore masks when playing there, I said we did so because “we’re tyrannized by our wives.”

In East Hampton, if you had a street named for you before the 20th century, odds were that you were an enslaver.

Peak movie-going, for me, came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when — a tangle-haired child of that unruly era — I was handed a 10-dollar bill and left to my own devices for entire weekends at a go.

A decent snowfall for a change brings thoughts of yesteryear’s less-than-safe outdoor activities.

An emailed letter from Southampton Hospital addressed to “Dear Friends” says, in part, that while the hospital is beginning to see a decline in Covid-19 admissions, “we urge you to remain vigilant. . . .”

This has been an extremely gratifying week for a team of us doing work to learn about the history of slavery on the East End and share our research with others.

I’m that person who cannot see the rare bird on the branch, no matter how hard someone points.

Families’ captive straits paired with their desperate hopes for their children had one professor comparing the cost of college to Big Pharma’s gouging of the ill.

The 1776 Commission’s “patriotic education” report apparently thinks we’ve been making too much of the country’s sins and too little of its virtues in our history courses.

A television news producer called the other day to ask about the Plain Sight Project, a joint effort to identify and document the enslaved people who lived on the East End from 1640 to 1830.

I think we need to talk about the depressing lack of a bar here in East Hampton.