Columnists

We went recently to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, and afterward I said I could imagine his wife, Edith, saying, “Not one more polar bear rug, water buffalo head, or hippopotamus foot inkwell, Teddy, not one more.”

On my list of favorite things, right up there with shoulder rubs, Netflix comedy specials, and strawberries in June, is Christmas.

Reports of the scallops’ demise are premature, at least that was true in certain East Hampton Town harbors and select locations in Southampton Town.

Before my husband and I made our move to Greenport last spring, we undertook an epic clearing out of closets, pantry, and basement. It went on for weeks, and unearthed many an interesting relic of lives lived on Edwards Lane.

Time for gathering swallows to twitter in the skies, and yet all’s not melancholy; there’s a spring in my step even as winter, inevitably, is coming on.

I did not make it to Woodstock. I mean, I did not make it to Woodstock last weekend, not the music and art fair in August 1969, though it’s true that I didn’t make that Woodstock either.

Tuesday morning before voting I took advantage of a daylight low tide to pull a mooring from the bay. Fair weather in the month of November is difficult to come by. Though there were matters to take care of at the office, the tide and wind were to turn later in the week.

Friends met us for dinner at one of our favorite East Hampton restaurants last week, and handed us a surprising small gift: a copy of an outlandish million-dollar bill. The bill — faux, obviously — had skulls in the front upper corners and a red, yellow, and cream nuclear explosion where George Washington is supposed to be. On the other side, along with an image of some children, was the message: “Let us spend this money on a sustainable world for all of our kids.”

All Hallows’ Eve, and if the past is prologue nobody will show up at our door.

The village police closed North Main Street where it goes under the train trestle on Sunday during a heavy rain. Passing by on my way upstreet, I could see the brown water swirling in the dip beneath the bridge.

When I was a young (ish) bride (1982) and new to the South Fork, one of the things my new husband and I did on weekends was just drive around and look at stuff. He called it shoelacing; I called it zigzagging — we would wend up one road and down the next.

The pleasure of singing, for me, has been greatly magnified over the years by my involvement with choral groups. I sang with the chorus at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue after college, but when I married and moved to East Hampton back in the 1960s, I never imagined I would find a similarly excellent group here.

It’s occurred to me that I’ve met (and written about) one Kurd in my life, 23 years ago, and while the situation of his people, mountain livestock herders, was then dire, squeezed as he said they were by five powers, the United States being one, it could well be even more so now, now that Trump has hung them out to dry — the Kurds, as staunch an ally as one could hope for when it comes to fighting, who did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to defeating ISIS.

Tis the season, as the water cools rapidly, that many minds, around here anyway, turn to scallops. New York State will allow the start of harvesting from its waters on Nov. 4; town waters will open on Nov. 10, a Sunday. How good the take will be remains to be seen. I have my doubts.

The Hamptons International Film Festival got me thinking about the starring role the Rattray family’s Amagansett house played in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen’s 1977 movie starring Diane Keaton. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” in a long time, but much of it has stayed with me.

Somewhere in the Midwest, where if you’re anti-Trump you must speak in lowered tones, I had my hair cut — well, so to speak, inasmuch as there isn’t much left — and was at one point during my monologue — for I can’t hear without my hearing aids, and thus feel I must hold forth when in the chair — asked if I read.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah,” the barber said, “my polling’s holding up! You didn’t vote for Trump, then?”

“For public enemy number-one. . ??”

I have a friend who knows the names of the stars. A few of them, anyway, she says. I do not know what the stars are called; a few constellations, maybe, yes, but individual stars, no.

The Yiddish-German words “shoen vergessen” are the punch line of the only joke I’ve ever been able to remember, and remember it I did when I read Rabbi Josh Franklin’s essay “Rethinking God” in The Star on Sept. 26.

After reading the wonderful editorial on impeachment in The Times the other day, I was prompted to seek out the Federalist Papers, but our library didn’t have a copy, nor did BookHampton, so I reached for Tocqueville. And here’s what he has to say on the subject, comparing European and American constitutions.

My surname is not common, but it is notorious. One of the real-life mobsters portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “The Irishman,” is named Russell Bufalino.

Left on a vast plain, we humans instinctively look, at a minimum, for the horizon to place ourselves relative to the sun’s path. The slab sides of mountains are immaterial as our eyes trace the ridges, which are but lines where the ground and the sky meet.

As far as I’m concerned, the trouble with our congressman, Lee Zeldin, is that he doesn’t come up for re-election again until 2020.

My father found grace in Sister Marie Joseph’s smile, a smile that told him everything was all right, that he was loved, no matter what, that he did not have to atone, and thus a heavy burden was removed.

Once upon a time I dreamt of a career singing and dancing in Broadway shows. Journalism was not center stage for me — yet. I trained as a triple-threat for a while and even joined a cabaret company, but never really got anywhere beyond the New Jersey dinner theater scene.

Four pints of Roma tomatoes and Laura Donnelly shamed me into getting the preserving kettle out early Monday morning. I had picked up the smallish, hard tomatoes a week or more earlier with the intention of canning them sooner, but instead they had just been shunted and shifted from one place to another around the kitchen as the clock of ripeness ticked. One day they were on the windowsill, the next the mantelpiece, then the next on a different, now north-facing windowsill.

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.