Columnists

The panel at Sunday’s fifth annual Black History Month program at Bay Street Theater on the history of slavery on the East End was illuminating.

At sea in the Mexico City airport the other day, following a nine-day idyll in Zihuatanejo, I was reminded of the Bonacker, who, in Penn Station, said that he certainly knew New York City was big but he hadn’t known it had a roof over it.

The feel-good movie “Green Book” winning the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday night drew immediate protest. Most notable, perhaps, was the filmmaker Spike Lee’s comments and fast walk out of the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. But more measured, if no less passionate, responses came from all corners. 

I’ve been living without kitchen appliances — really, without a kitchen at all — while our walls and shelves undergo their first thorough sanding and painting in, well, decades.

Presidents Day was celebrated earlier this week, and, of course, we at The Star were working rather than reflecting on how far the country has come, or regressed, since George Washington and Abraham Lincoln led it.

Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

Leaving the hospital for rehabilitation was anything but simple. We do not have a plethora of “acute rehab” options here on eastern Long Island, so it was evident quite soon after we began our search that Chris would be extending his stay in the greater Boston area, and that I would be clocking a lot of time on the Cross Sound Ferry.

“Have you noticed we’ve been watching a lot of movies about old people?” Mary said as we were viewing “The Last Laugh” with Chevy Chase and Richard Dreyfuss on TV. She paused a moment. “How did they get so old?!”

We all know it’s been cold, and we all know how to procrastinate. What do I avoid doing? Paying bills, sorting through the junk drawer(s), going through old papers and magazines. You know the drill.

The wind has been out of character this winter here by the beach. Normally, by now we would have had a couple of classic northeasters; instead, there have been just a few easterly blows followed by hard wind from the west or northwest.

To get an idea about what team spirit means, all you have to do is go to the greater Boston area at Super Bowl time. I was there last week because my husband was a patient at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, and everyone seemed to be wearing New England Patriots T-shirts emblazoned with the number 12 all weekend long. It was patriotism in two senses of the word.

I am to turn 79 on Monday, by which time I expect to be lying on a beach in Zihuatanejo reading a good book, or, given my tendency to interrupt, making Mary look up from hers. 

That, my tendency to interrupt, may be the sole sticking point in our otherwise blissful coupling. Why I do it, I don’t know, though it may have something to do with being an only child for most of my youth, untempered by siblings shouting, “Will you shut up, Jackie, will you just shut up for once?” And so, uninterrupted, I continued interrupting.

A high-tech washing machine gives out, and the whining about over-engineering starts.

Lots of books and other things arrive unannounced at The Star, as they do at newspapers and media outlets. Some are worthwhile. Some are not. Others lead into unexpected territory.

The dog belonging to me and my husband is a lazy, plump, foxlike creature with a red coat and a stubborn nature.

It was the day before I, perhaps the only “company man” left in America, was to be interviewed, and I was trying to think of clever things to say.

It always feels strange to walk around the old neighborhood again. Williamsburg is scarcely more recognizable to me than Montauk is, and sorry if that makes me a hipster or whatever.

A 160-yard-long black plastic pipe washed out of the ocean at Georgica last week. When I finally got around to looking for it on Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed that it had already been cut into shorter lengths and dragged away.

The teacher I found in New York was revered among some of the city’s up-and-coming young professionals in the opera world, so I was honored to be at her piano’s side

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen.

It doesn’t freeze up the way it used to. That was what a guy I went to high school with but whose name I cannot recall at the moment agreed on at the counter of Goldberg’s Bagels the other day.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass.

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column — midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

The fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, “government by the worst men.”

I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street, but I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

The day before New Year’s, I found myself wondering if there were resolutions I should make. Perhaps I could come up with something simple, promise myself not to go to bed with dishes in the kitchen sink or lights on in the living room. My husband makes sure the pots and pans are scrubbed before he calls it a day, and as a morning person, I am up and at it early the next day to put them away.

We saw a horror movie the other night as an antidote as it were for the reality that surrounds us. Can it get any worse? Yes, yes it can, but don’t tell, don’t want to give anyone ideas.

Empty but for the two of us on the top deck of the Cross Sound Ferry bound for New London on New Year’s Day, my middle child and I watched the waves. Evvy, named after my late father, takes after him in many ways, though they never met. It was her idea to explore the boat, and he, like us, would have been outside on the deck while the rest of the passengers sat quietly inside, away from the wind.