Columnists

I just know that this so-called tax reform plan, if what’s been intimated comes to be, will gore my ox, and probably will gore the oxen of numerous other members of the middle class here, this being a high-tax state where middle classers itemize.

Paul Manafort has a nice pool. I should know, I swam in it once at a children’s birthday party. The water was fine.

Thirty-eight members of the Cory family, if you count spouses who may or may not use that surname, arrived at a Pennsylvania resort at different times from different places in the country for a reunion last weekend — and what an event it was.

Fifty-one years ago this column began to be written. No, no need to genuflect. No, no, please. . . .

There were no deer fences in sight on the farmland in Northern Delaware, where I was visiting one of the kids at school last weekend. I noticed this as I drove along back roads near Middletown and miles of corn and soybeans. There were no ticks, either, according to several people I talked with.

The admonition that before you judge a man you should “walk a mile in his shoes” was, clearly, quite sorely lacking in Donald J. Trump’s upbringing. Does our president have even a shred of real empathy?

So (cough, cough) we are encouraging more burning of coal, while China, they say, is about to take the lead in the manufacture of electric cars.

There was no reason to doubt the caller, even though he would give only his first name. I had heard a story second-hand on Tuesday that a whale had become tangled in a gill net off the Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett and hoped to get someone on the record who had seen what happened.

You may have been pleasantly surprised, as I was, on Friday when the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Doing so in effect recognized its 468 member organizations in 101 countries around the world.

They say that half of life (maybe more than half) is showing up. Well, I have been showing up, but the teams I’ve expected to cover have not.

As of two months ago, I live on an island on an island off an island. Deep in the Mashomack Preserve, our house is separated from the rest of Shelter Island by a two-and-a-half-mile driveway, making it one of the most remote spots you could live in these parts. The quiet is quieter than anything I’m used to, the nights darker, the sunrises and sunsets more remarkable.

I popped Facebook open this morning and was surprised to see a video advertisement featuring Jeff Bragman, who is running for a place on the East Hampton Town Board.

Forty-eight curious people went to Block Island on Monday to learn about Deep­water Wind’s turbine installation there. Hearing about this expedition, and learning that the group also had gotten to tour the island and stand on the bluffs high above the site where the electricity comes ashore in a cable, I was, I admit, rather jealous. And it made me wax nostalgic.

I read that Francis Bellamy, the Baptist minister, and socialist, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which first was recited in 1892, had wanted it to read “. . . one nation, indivisible, with equality and fraternity for all” before thinking better of it, given the weight of anti-woman and anti-black sentiment at the time.

At the end of the season in 1909, Frank B. Wiborg had a $261 balance due to Strong Bros. Livery Stable. This I learned from a tattered, cloth-covered ledger that was in the office attic.

A longtime reader of The Star has given me a copy of pages from an 1839 diary kept by a Long Island woman named Maria Willets, which describes a seven-and-a-half-day tour she and her husband, Stephen Willets, took in August that year, more than 175 years ago, from Westbury to Montauk and back.

“Don’t play it again, ’Nam,” I said to Mary as we agreed we weren’t up to watching what I’m sure is a very well done, years in the making Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

A group of us were on the beach Sunday night watching the sunset over the hills across the bay as a sound like thunder rolled across the water. Because it was not quite dark, our assumption was that it could not be fireworks, and no distant sparks could be seen on the horizon, and some among our group of picnickers assumed the end was nigh.

Because Helen Harrison is an expert on 20th-century Ame­rican art and has written about it, her latest book should not have come as a surprise. On the other hand, what would your reaction have been upon first encountering her first work of fiction, a paperback novel called “An Exquisite Corpse,” with a cover drawing of a figure wearing a dark mask with a chicken foot on one leg, a boot on one hand, and an umbrella in the other? Surprise!

So there we were in Pittsburgh, my eldest daughter and I, and she said why not go by the old house I had told her my mother and I had lived in, when I was 10 and she was 34, beginning again after a painfully sad divorce.

I think of the 24 years since I moved full time to the South Fork as a coming home of sorts . . . the first one in 1993, the second one more recent.

A week ago Sunday at Accabonac Harbor for a picnic, I announced to a friend that I was going to set off to search the shoreline for Native American stone tools. I had gotten excited about the prospect looking at images from the Montauk Indian Museum of arrowheads and other things picked up on the beach here and there. “I’ll be back shortly,” I said.

East Hamptoners, both full and part time, are in a heightened political frame of mind these days, which doesn’t seem to be quite so true in Southampton. This may be due to the Democratic primary that took place on Tuesday, while there was none next door.

“What is truth,” Lisa’s father asked me at East magazine’s party at the Golden Eagle the other day.

We all have those special places. Places we go for respite or rejuvenation, where we relax and unwind. Places where we seek refuge from a storm. St. Thomas is that for me, but last week a storm found the island and wreaked havoc.

That’s just what it costs, or so I was told when I got through venting to someone on the Star staff this week about a plumber’s bill that I thought was highway robbery. I’d identify the plumber, but, if what the office wisdom says is true is, in fact, true, everyone is doing it.

It’s the day after Labor Day, perfect for tallying up what was best and what will be most missed about summer. That’s certainly true for me, because I went around saying this summer wasn’t anything much, at least for me. But the night of Labor Day changed all that. This was the summer of grandchildren — and that’s where happiness lies.

Reading about the lawsuit former East Hampton Village Police Chief Jerry Larsen has brought against Mayor Paul Rickenbach, a village force retiree, and Richard Lawler, a village board member, I kept saying to myself, “Wait a minute — none of these guys ought to have been doing these things to begin with.”

Lots of people went to Southampton over Labor Day weekend to do lots of things, but I went to cross over from “the Hamptons” into the Shinnecock Nation, which was hosting peoples of many tribes, and all kinds of visitors, for its annual powwow.

Among the mountain of depressing news surrounding President Trump’s decision to end the program that protected from deportation some 800,000 young people brought illegally as children to this country was the observation in The New York Times that when Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals began, some immigrant advocates and lawyers warned against participation.