Columnists

“I’m reading about the Puritans now,” I said to Mary, and a shadow passed across her face . . .

I am of two minds about confessing my near-addiction to the give-away pile next door to the Star office at the East Hampton Library.

Because I’ve been putting my head down lately in a small house at Peconic Landing, the retirement community in Green­port, the concept of “home” has been very much on my mind. If casual acquaintances were to ask, I would still say I live in East Hampton, despite the fact that it takes two ferries across Shelter Island and about an hour to get here from there.

I keep getting requests for money to help eliminate the Electoral College, which, of course, I would love to see happen, for, when you think about it, its reason for being had to do with the founders’ fear of a direct popular vote that a demagogue might manipulate to his advantage.

One of the pleasures of a home with older dogs, aside from surprising four-figure veterinary surgery bills, is when they get you up at the oddest hours of the night.

Usually around the time of his birthday, I quote Dr. Martin Luther King’s assertion that it’s abominable that poverty continues to exist in a country as rich as this, and there his words, lifted from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” written in 1967, lie, until I exhume them again a year hence.

It had been a while since it happened that I was mistaken for Breadzilla Brad.

What a thrill it was to attend a performance of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess” last week at the Metropolitan Opera. The tickets had been purchased a long time ago as a present from my husband, Chris Cory, but he was under the weather and unable to attend. Instead, his sister, Eleanor Cory, a composer and dear friend, attended with me.

A flip through my high school senior yearbook, and many yearbooks before mine, confirms what history already knew but what many people didn’t really talk about back then. Very few students from minority backgrounds had attended Island Trees High School in Levittown through the end of the 20th century.

Driving past the Amagansett School the other morning, I noticed a half-dozen or so seagulls standing on the ridge of the old slate roof. Gulls usually are up there, three stories above the schoolyard, minding their own business. But what their business is up there puzzles me.

We’re going soon to hear a soothsayer, and I hope what she says concerning the new year (being 2020, it should sharpen her foresight) will be as soothing as my mood is now, a fact that can be traced certainly in part to Dr. Langone’s orthotics, which seem to have angled me ever forward onto my toes, a good thing if you’re ready to rush the net in doubles.

Given that what has been called fourth-wave feminism has swept the country, as manifested by the #MeToo movement, it comes as a surprise, at least to me, that the only right guaranteed women as well as men in the Constitution is the right to vote. Can we still be second-class citizens? Yes, men, all of whom were white, wrote the Constitution.

Keeping our 9-year-old away from electronic devices has been a struggle since he first figured out how to work the track pad on his mother’s Mac laptop. His is a generation saturated in all things digital that finds playing a video game while listening to something on television and keeping up with friends on social media hardly distracting.

This time of year always reminds me of The Star’s origins: The paper hit East Hampton on the day after Christmas in 1885. The Star arrived on the doorsteps of East Hampton Village residents even before the Long Island Rail Road had an East Hampton stop. Think of that! In 2020, we will count 135 years of newspapering, and are proud to say so.

Every day during these holiday weeks seems to me like Sunday, which, I hasten to add, isn’t a particularly good thing for someone who likes to think of himself as purposeful if not actually useful.

My daughter Evvy and I went outside two hours before dawn on Monday to watch for shooting stars. It had been a relatively warm night, that is, just above freezing, and the sky was clear. A fraction of a yellow crescent moon could be seen in the trees to the east, just above the horizon. We stretched on the upper deck to wait.

Lights, moves around the western world’s solar calendar because it is based on the Hebrew calendar, which is an ancient, shorter, and lunar one. The years may be briefer, but since there are now 5,780 of them, there is plenty of reason to celebrate: Make of it what you will, a feeling of pride ensues if you accept thousands of years as part of your personal heritage.

While walking O’en one day not long ago, a woman, in approaching, said, “What a beautiful dog.”

Meg Gage stopped by with a rare artifact this week — a vintage metal license plate with the silhouette of a fisherman pulling a net from a small sharpie below the words “The Springs N.Y.” in two-inch-high, dark-green lettering.

Justin Gubbins, in recounting the reluctance of his daughter Megan’s Portuguese water dog, Geronimo, to run anymore — marking the end of a career whose highlight was a 42nd-place finish among more than 600 Montauk Turkey Trot entrants four years ago, said that food was pretty much Geronimo’s sole concern these days, sex apparently being out of the question.

December is crammed with holiday concerts, with performances at practically every school, church, and cultural institution. Someone else might get bored with holiday music, but not me. My interest in music doesn’t diminish, even when the music being performed gets a bit repetitive.

At the Choral Society of the Hamptons Christmas concert at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church last week, I found myself getting quite misty listening to the opening notes of the first carol. Aside from being transported by the music, by the familiar notes, I realized how many years it had been since I had first learned the carols.

Because I’ve been associated with The East Hampton Star for more than half a century, it is no surprise that friends at Peconic Landing ask whether The Star is thriving, and want to talk about how a community newspaper deals with the digital economy.

Being a dweeb, as I am, has its upside.

It has been a long time since a column of mine got as much reaction as last week’s. The subject was ordinary enough: My getting older as evidenced by my missing the last step on a stepladder on the Sunday a week before Thanksgiving.

There was a time when I frequently traveled from East Hampton to New London, Conn., to visit my husband-to-be, who lived and worked then at Connecticut College. My companion in those days was Mookie, a huge, black, shaggy dog — adopted by my daughter from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons — who not only had a charming personality but impeccable manners. As regular travelers on the Cross Sound Ferry, to and from New London, Mookie and I were befriended by the crew.

They were in Southampton and, frankly, the news was so good that I leaped from my bed, where I’d been napping, and rushed to the sink to trim my nose hairs. Ear hairs too, inasmuch as I am able.

Plenty of sources tell you about the risk of falls for the elderly. What they don’t tell you about are the dangers of the middle years — when the body isn’t what it used to be but the mind thinks everything is still A-Okay. Consider reading glasses.

I spent a sleepless night earlier this week trying to remember where I’d left a certain bright-purple file folder that I used to drag out every November, as party season approached. It was our party-planning folder, containing guests’ names and menus from celebrations in years gone by. In the morning, rather to my surprise, I actually managed to find said folder, in a bundle in a box among other folders containing favorite recipes.

If everyone who’s said they’ll come comes today there will be 21 in our house, of all ages, an infusion of spirit that ought to see Mary, me, and O’en, the house’s everyday occupants, through most of the winter.