Columnists

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 . . .

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

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

It’s a welcome change that TV has of late become a unifier of families — at least for Marvel fans.

In light of the generous pandemic aid bill passed this week, legislation designed to lighten burdens, perhaps this country can be said at last to have seen the light.

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.