Columnists

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

“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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.