Columnists

"Houston, we have arugula!” Mary cried after hanging up with One Stop Market, which has been wonderful, providing curb service during these trying times.     

Whether you qualify it as “social” or “physical,” dis­tancing is not how any of us anticipated spending the spring of 2020. This week, the actual and psychological distances we have to travel to get through this thing just seemed to keep growing.     

Amid the coronavirus crisis, many thoughts around the East End have turned to gardening. There is both time now, what with movement more limited than usual, and a sense that supplementing one’s own food supply with homegrown fruit and vegetables is a reasonable precaution.

So, there I was, on Wednesday last, with a stuffy head, and a very, very occasional cough, rheumy eyes — as usual — but wondering.

The admonition from health and government officials that everyone stay in place in order to curb the spread of Covid-19 suits my husband and me just fine.

The Indian Wells tennis tournament was canceled the other day, then came the Coachella music festival, and then came us. Postponing a trip to Palm Desert, Calif., where one of our daughters lives, seemed the rational thing to do, and JetBlue, wonderful to tell, came through.

Among the positive impacts of our coronavirus isolation has been what you might call found time: hours and hours each day for the books I intended to read, television programs I wanted to watch, and operas I didn’t want to miss.

My grandmother on my father’s side told me to always wash my hands — and I have tried to as often as possible ever since.

The E.M.S. and fire community has indeed come together to support Randy Hoffman, a critical care tech from East Hampton who in December underwent a routine spinal procedure and came out paralyzed due to unexpected complications.

I’m beginning to get it — “it” being how Puritanism, with its disdain for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, equality, et cetera, led to the Declaration of Independence — but my essential question as to how we got from Cotton Mather to Thomas Paine remains.

You might almost feel bad for Mike Pence. You could almost see the color drain from his cheeks when he was tapped by the boss to lead the United States coronavirus response.

The possibility of housebound quarantine to avoid Covid-19, the coronavirus, took me back to my childhood in Bayonne, N.J., where my family belonged to an orthodox synagogue. Each autumn at Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish observance, the observant fast between breakfast and dinner. My family did do that when I was very young; and then, after World War II, did not.

‘What was the book where the bookcase fell over and killed the guy?” I asked Mary one day recently after having banged nails somewhat haphazardly into the shelves of our living room one that had become bowed out, thus rendering precarious one of our stores of knowledge, much of it having to do with cookery.

Is Michael Bloomberg is taking cues from the Trumpian style of public speaking? Departing from prepared remarks last Thursday, he briefly riffed on his negative view of the Shinnecock Reservation, which is near his Southampton vacation house, calling it a disaster and a bunch of other things better not repeated.

As choruses go, the Choral Society of the Hamptons, which forwent a spring concert this year in order to allow enough rehearsal time for its concert of the Bach B Minor Mass on June 27, has gotten better and better. Now, under the heartfelt leadership of its longtime music director, Mark Mangini, and with its ranks expanded by the members of his New York City Greenwich Village Chamber Singers, it’s ready for Bach.

I’m living a life of quiet desperation at the moment, for nothing is hoving into view on the sportive horizon. I have, as Georgie and her peers say, reached out, though no one thus far has reached out to me. I guess I’ll go on reaching out. Surely something (or someone) will turn up. . . .

There is nothing like a good, old-fashioned global panic to get people moving on an important issue like climate change.

Long ago and far away, back when I was an eighth-grader at Horace Mann Elementary school in Bayonne, N.J., I was given an aptitude evaluation and tested high for “persuasion.” I don’t remember what methods they used to determine what our defining character traits were — traits that might indicate what lines of work we were best suited for. But I do remember that my own defining characteristic was this one, slightly poetic, word.

“Without some understanding of Puritanism, and that at its source, there is no understanding of America,” Perry Miller said in the foreword to “The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry,” a little book I’ve long had around, but have, until now, never read.

For the third week, I have had an article in the paper about East Hampton’s history of slavery. This is part of a much larger project started about three years ago to identify every enslaved person who ever lived in the town.

My close friend Lisa sobbed in the doorway of her apartment last Wednesday night, and the only sustenance I could offer her was a warm embrace and some of my mother-in-law’s homemade chili. Even so, it felt inadequate and I started to cry, too. The chili was hot and hearty, but we, distraught over the death of a friend, could barely taste it.

Almost everyone paying attention knows the Lehman family went from rags (in their case raw cotton) to riches and then collapsed into bankruptcy in 2008, dragging the national economy with it. 

There is something special about splitting wood. You get a likely billet somewhere, stand it on end, and bring a wedge-shaped maul down hard into the end grain. The force pushes the log fibers apart, as a crack hisses away from the impact. One or two more swings, and the log falls in two.

If cultural archetypes were as unkind to men as they are to women, I would be considered a spinster. Unmarried? Check. Getting up there in age? Just turned 55. Cat owner? As of last month, yes!

I was the age some of my grandchildren are today when “Cover Girl” won the 1944 Academy Award for best music scoring in a musical picture. The film was in Technicolor, which was new and exciting. Given the plethora of distinctions by which Hollywood awards are given out, I suppose it wasn’t surprising that a different film won best musical picture that year and that although the cinematography was nominated for an Academy Award it did not win that one, either. Today, aficionados consider “Cover Girl” one of the most lavish and successful Hollywood musicals ever.

It’s taken a while, 70 or so years, but I’ve finally achieved a version of Nirvana when it comes to tennis, and the answer, the answer for me at any rate, is to play deaf.

I am an old enough fogey that I can remember the days when The Star was printed on an old flatbed press on the ground floor of the office building. Everyone on the staff had to physically drag the 1,700-pound rolls of newsprint out of storage in the family barn, from up the lane behind the office. How archaic those rolls seem today — positively Victorian. But I was there to see it.

I’ve been asked what I would like our daughter to cook for me on the occasion of my fast-approaching birthday, and whether it’s cailles en sarcophage or mac and cheese, it will be wonderful, given the company we’ll keep.

Ken Brown stopped by the office on Monday with an old snapshot that he thought we would like a look at. During the winter of 1966 it was so cold that the edge of the ocean froze. Ken had been going through some old things and found the photograph, taken at East Hampton Main Beach toward low tide late in the day.

Visiting Quogue recently with friends who had summered there from childhood was eye-opening.