Columnists

Using the word “resource” to describe the East Hampton Library doesn’t do it justice.

Worn out, the worse for wear, working for The Star and longshoring on the side in the sweet summertime, it has really, finally become apparent: I’m not a young man.

There used to be a bumper sticker you’d see around here that urged everyone to “strive for excellence,” not a bad admonition, though I’d prefer “strive for beauty.”

The East Hampton Town Democratic Party faced a significant primary in June, proving that intraparty differences of opinion were alive and well even though Democrats fill nearly all the town’s elected positions. It also marked a turning point for me.

There would have been agave-hibiscus margaritas at the beach party, but someone lost the bag of ingredients in the sand.

A Star editor tries out a surprisingly injury-free exercise regimen: no warm-up, no cooldown, no stretching, no preparation whatsoever.

‘We all have issues . . .” a fellow player said as he surveyed us, the three of us being well along in life, following a recent tennis doubles match. Heads nodded.

At the risk of self-aggrandizing, let me tell you what I did early Monday morning.

The distance between East Hampton and Southold is about 21 miles, and I am happy to say that despite the proximity, the latter has not been Hamptonized. Of course, even if you are traveling by ferry, it can take more than an hour to reach one town from the other.

Sometime after 10 p.m. on the Fourth of July, the brake lights from stopped cars on Montauk Highway curved west from where we stood on the sidewalk outside Pizza Village. Like thousands of other spectators, we had come to Montauk for the fireworks, and now everyone it seemed wanted to go home.

It’s a cliché around here to say, “I’ve never seen so many people in town!” but everyone agrees there really never were so many people in East Hampton than on the July Fourth weekend just past, and the days leading up to it.

I had just written about a “rite of summer,” namely the first day of the 2019 junior lifeguarding season, and was inspired, therefore, to take part in another, namely the opening for the season of our outdoor shower.

This has been a fine week to be a bird. Judging from the noise outside the window before dawn, they are fat and happy — especially those that eat insects. This has also been a fine week, or year actually, to be a mosquito.

Brown-headed cowbirds and guinea hens were pecking at the ground this morning where seeds had fallen from the bird feeder. I am splitting my time these days between Greenport and East Hampton and have noticed with interest that, aside from the shore birds you see along the beach on the ocean side, avian visitors on the North Fork are much the same as those on the South Fork. (Although the guinea hens, of course, are not native or migratory; they have been imported to feast on ticks.)

On a day that I thought I should stay in bed — dragged down temporarily by a cough that came hand in hand with the fecund delights of spring — I went instead with Mary on a bus trip to the New York Botanical Garden, returning, if not cured, enlivened by what I’d seen.

Having been out of town all last week, I felt as if I needed some updates getting back to the East Coast. Joanie McDonell, who lives just up the beach from me, has been a faithful correspondent since I wrote in mid-spring about how it had been ages since I saw any toads or snakes around.

Getting up early is always a good idea, but it was especially enjoyable this week after I spent a night in the family house in the village with my daughter and her kids and Sweet Pea, our little, red-haired ARFan dog. 

Gino says the new racket won’t make any difference, that no matter how well-engineered the tool, the flaws of its wielder remain, unchanged.

‘Driscoll’s.” That was Ad­elia’s one-word answer in a blind taste test of strawberries bought locally on Sunday. By then, I had already had three quarts of them boiling in the preserving kettle. The cliché about commerce is you get what you pay for. This weekend, I learned that lesson yet again. 

Twenty-six letters to the editor were published in last week’s Star, on June 13, and as of this writing we were still counting those that will be in this week’s edition; I think it will be 31. 

‘It gets worse,” Mary said as I lay stunned in my recliner after having winced and writhed in sympathetic pain throughout yet another episode of “Outlander.”

Time travel. It’s one of the great, impossible things we sci-fi nerds dream about doing. And I recently figured out how to do it.

Hook Pond is jammed with carp. The other evening one of the kids and I pulled over near the Dunemere Lane bridge to watch groups of the nearly leg-long fish breaking the surface of the water. 

The logo of the Eastville Community Historical Society, a longtime nonprofit based in Sag Harbor, has three profiles, one black, one white, and one red.  When the society sponsored musical and dramatic performances at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Sunday, however, 99 percent of the people in the audience were people of color. 

I’ve been looking a little longingly lately at accounts in Newsday of playoff games, in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, and softball, wondering if the day will come when East Hampton teams will be in them again. Baseball used to be, boys lacrosse used to be, girls lacrosse too, and softball, of course, used to be.

Some of my friends already know that my daughter and her family are moving this week from a winter rental in Sag Harbor to the Rattray family house here in East Hampton Village, while my husband and I pack up and head, gulp, to Greenport and the North Fork, where a spiffy cottage awaits us at Peconic Landing.

The other day, having almost given up, none of the clothes in the stores having caught my eye, I saw something, a light blue shirt, extra small, with a collar and partly-rolled sleeves, that I thought might look very well on her, her eyes being dark blue and her hair dark brown and as long as I can persuade her to keep it. 

Up with the dogs at my house means stirring before sunrise. Not that I mind as I sit upstairs with my first cup of coffee, looking at the bay and listening for the birds between the dogs’ various post-breakfast snorts and grumbles.

In this digital age in which even someone like me, who thinks of herself as a stickler for grammar and punctuation and has made the English language her lifetime work, uses linguistic shortcuts — IMHO, for example — it seems pretty antiquated to complain about other writers’ prose stylings.

I never claimed excellence in grammar, but there was a time when I boasted of a proclivity for spelling.

As you franticly dash around this Memorial Day weekend, or hide out away from the crowd, you might take a moment to reflect on the longest-term visitors to the East End — horseshoe crabs.