Columnists

Ketchup was a kitchen staple when I was growing up in the 1940s, as it still is in most American households. You know the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? I think we might better be able to chart the zeitgeist of the United States by keeping an eye not on auto production but on our national condiment.

I’m getting near the end of the Old Testament now, and it surely has been a test.

North Main Street was blocked this week as a crew hired by the Long Island Rail Road worked on raising two trestles about three feet above their current grade. The project had been a long time coming. For years, trucks too tall to make it through the underpass there and at Accabonac Road have done damage to the trestle. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the L.I.R.R., had had enough.

Months ago, when a friend and I realized we were the same age and our birthdays were only a day or two apart, we agreed to celebrate together this year. Now, however, with our natal days upon us, I say “fuhgeddaboudit.”

The summer of peace and love was also a summer of war and incendiary strife, from which East Hampton, a “backwater” then, in which every now and then ripples of the great national issues of the day were felt, was at one remove.

It may be too soon to crow, but the $13 home electric bill I received this week could be the start of a happy relationship between me and the new solar panel array on my Amagansett roof.

The names of mobile devices — not to mention the lingo used to describe the things they do — are Greek to me. Obviously, I know “app” is short for “application,” but will you think I am a nincompoop if I admit I still don’t know why we stopped calling them programs? Aren’t apps just software programs? I’m sure this marks me as a curmudgeon akin to those who refused to stop calling the fridge a “Frigidaire” or a suitcase a “valise” back in the last century, but I feel all right about feeling old-fashioned. I’m not dying to use WhatsApp or TikTok or whatever else my grandchildren are addicted to today.

Indeed it was a relief to drive in leisurely fashion around and around the roundabout on Tumbleweed Tuesday, reveling in the fact that “they” were gone, at least for a few days. I was run in on a charge of ADIEU, Aimless Driving in Euphoria Unparalleled, a violation, but was let off with time served after my employer testified in asking for leniency that I’d been here all summer.

I watched Monday’s sunset from the starboard deck of the ferry from New London to Orient. The Thames River shoreline was in silhouette, the sky mostly orange to the west.

Just when I thought I had seen every last obscenity the 2019 Hamptons summer scene had to offer, things took a turn for the strange. On an afternoon walk down Job’s Lane in Southampton on a recent afternoon, I was greeted by a number of “keep out” and “no trespassing” signs as I approached my favorite people-watching spot.

There was scarcely anyone else around when I fell asleep on the ocean beach late Labor Day afternoon. I had left my pickup truck in the parking lot and walked to the west to look for whales and meditate a bit. The town lifeguards, with no one to keep and eye on, lazed around under a plastic shelter and took turns in the stand, looking out at nothing much at all. Two people and a dog were in the distance.

I should probably have my head examined, for I still like to watch football — perhaps all the more so because, aside from wearing pads in the seventh grade (though I don’t think we played any games) and aside from some touch football (I always wanted to be an end, not a blocker), I never played it.

How awful it is to have to hold a collective breath this week as our children, and grandchildren, begin a new school year. How unnerving that gun violence has caused us to doubt the lyrics that our “country ’tis of thee” is still a “sweet land of liberty.”

Liam, age 9, stalked toward the meal lying completely still on the ground before him. His ears pointed straight to the sky while his head stayed low and his legs advanced with a deliberative rhythm. Step. Step. He reached his prey, but, taking mercy upon it, simply nudged it with his nose.

My mother’s baby brother, Herman Spivack, who lived in Los Angeles and thereabouts for many years, died on Aug. 21 at the age of 102. He was one of six siblings (a seventh died as a toddler) and 15 years younger than my mother, who died in December of 1995 and would be 117 were she alive today.

The frequency was very high as we walked out onto the street one sultry night recently with O’en, owing to the tree crickets, whose numbers in our otherwise comatose neighborhood seemed to be legion.

The other morning, looking out toward Gardiner’s Bay, I saw two white-tail bucks browsing among the beach plum scrub. They were spectacular from a distance, sleek buff coats and high antlers still in velvet. But I cursed their existence.

I should write about this while the effect still lasts. To be put on steroids was, I told the doctor, a wonderful thing for a golden-ager, though I know, at least have been told, that they’re not great for you in the long run.

Tuna or chicken? Salad, that is. I’ve got a mania for tuna salad and have been known to even eat it for breakfast — deli-style, with lettuce and mayo on a hard roll — when I am rushing to work and have no time to cook (which is usually all the time). Chicken salad makes a fine sandwich, too, especially when on good bread, pumpernickel perhaps, and at this time of year with a slice of fresh tomato. But I wouldn’t dream of chicken salad for breakfast. That would be bananas!

When my parents made me, I got the shape of my father’s face. I got his dark hair and unfortunate eyebrows. I got both his sweet tooth and his love of vegetables. I got his talent for eight-ball, too.

Was it so long ago that I wrote about the articulate students, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, who had come to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., to speak eloquently of their suffering?

Thirty-seven emails arrived over­night on Monday, but I wasn’t able to access them because I had mislaid my computer. Left it at work, actually.

After 20 or more years of faithful service, our overstuffed dryer gave a sad little grunt and wheezed to a stop, leaving many too many wet beach towels behind.

The men would walk from the trains after getting to the end of the line, pay for their beer, and walk back to get ready for the ride back to New York.

Over the years I had received those familiar email requests from people asking me to be the conduit for money to be deposited in my account and sent elsewhere, and those obvious scams were always deleted. Why not this one?

Over dinner on Sunday, the subject turned to sharks. Since it was the Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week blitz, this was not surprising.

It’s my late stepfather’s birthday today, and while we were at the antipodes, I think, when it came to societal questions, we were on the same page when it came to sports, to baseball, squash, and tennis in particular.

Like many of you, I have been glued to television-news debates about mass shootings and what can, or should be, done to stop them. Gun control is a frequent topic as the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination face the cameras. But my attention is drawn to my desk, where the focus is narrow and a book called “Semicolon” by Cecelia Watson sits alongside one I have mentioned before, Mary Morris’s amusing and astute “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

The woman’s wedding ring was out there, somewhere in the sand. Her husband thought he had a pretty good idea where, but it was not to be.

The presidential game is not over, many Americans being frightfully capable of being fooled twice. That the economy is rolling along is nice, though you do wonder how much people are making and how many jobs they are working.