Columnists

It had been such a long time since I was on a chartered bus with a pack of friends, or travelers with common interests, that I was surprised when it turned out to be fun. The bus was taking some 40 of us back to the South Fork Saturday night after a concert at St. Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan, where we joined the Greenwich Village Chamber Singers in a performance of the Brahms Requiem.

Well, I can cross “Ulysses” off the bucket list, butgeeitwasawfullylong. Much of it is funny, though, and Molly Bloom’s 10,000-plus-word sentence at the end is wonderful.

I became an author in 2015. For those who weren’t around when I was tooting my horn: I became an author of a coloring book for grown-ups. Because it was totally my illustrations — my book didn’t have any words — it was easy for it to be “translated” into foreign editions. A Russian edition (Hello, Mr. Putin?), a Portuguese edition (Hello, Brazil), a Polish edition, and a Czech edition. (Yes, I have them all.)

Every year at about this time, people get to saying that they have never seen it so bad. What they mean mostly is that the number of cars on the road and people on the beaches seem greater than ever.

Because I am not much of a TV news viewer, my opinion about whether Megyn Kelly should have interviewed Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist, on NBC is neither here nor there. But the nonsense he sprouts is, to me, personally, not only outrageous but also obscene, and how to judge obscenity is something we have confronted from time to time even here on our letters-to-the-editor pages.

“What’s your favorite organ?” I asked Mary the other day, and she looked at me strangely, as she well might since I’d been reading Chuang Tzu.

Manhattan, after the midday downpour that caught me ill prepared and quickly sodden on Saturday, was again humid by midnight, and in Times Square the tourists gaped and the panhandlers pitched and the bridge-and-tunnel roisterers swaggered in roughly equal measure as I made my way back to the hotel from the Port Authority terminal, where M. had boarded a bus for the hours-long journey home. Five years after leaving the big city, it can be a bit disorienting to experience it anew.

They say the first thing readers of The Star open to when they are young is the police news to see who got arrested. When they are older, readers turn to the obituaries to see who has died. I like to think they also turn to the obits for a good read and to learn a bit about lives well lived. At least that’s our goal.

What was it like to be inducted into the Long Island Press Club Hall of Fame? At the Woodbury Country Club last Thursday for dinner and the announcement of many awards, I felt like an elder stateswoman visiting another country. Who were these 200 reporters and newscasters and graphic artists and videographers? When the prizes were given out, I began to find out. About 200 first, second, and third-place awards were presented, one for perhaps every person there, the club’s president told me afterward.

In rehearsing a speech to give on Helen Rattray’s behalf at her induction into the Long Island Press Club’s Hall of Fame, my nerves got the best of me and I began hamming it up. Actually, it was my inner imp that was getting in the way — I was upstaging myself.

The message on the iPhone was from my son-in-law, a wildlife biologist who spends his days worrying about biodiversity, habitat, and endangered creatures in the farther reaches of Washington State, and rarely if ever emails or texts unless I’ve written first, which I had.

On early, still mornings at this time of the year I often hear the sound of a helicopter near where I live. It is a small chopper, and from its repeated passes, I can tell that it is spreading a mosquito-control pesticide on the salt marshes at Napeague Harbor or at Accabonac.

There we were, seven of us, in a circle with prosecco in stemmed glasses and lovely hors d’oeuvres on a table at center. Like-minded people, we were talking about Trump. What else?

Ever trying to reconcile good and evil, I came across in Joseph Campbell’s book on Oriental mythology what Chuang Tzu said when his friends found him drumming and singing after his wife had died.

If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across “Painting Number 2” by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors wearing an expression that is best interpreted as “I could have done that.”

A dark shape flitted past as I headed toward the house after parking my car in the driveway Tuesday night. In the near distance, a whippoorwill was calling, and I assumed the stocky black bird that moved across my vision from left to right was one of them.

So what was everybody talking about last weekend? People. Too many of them!

“It’s all the same fuckin’ mall, man,” I said to Mary as we headed west from Pittsburgh last week on Route 80 in search of greener pastures, which we were to find in Perrysburg, Ohio, whose historic district reminds one of Sag Harbor on a river.

By chance Saturday night around suppertime, I had nowhere to be and nothing I had to do and ended up at Indian Wells Beach sitting in my truck in the parking lot having a bite to eat.

It’s not often that The Star reviews student productions, but having seen — and having highly praised — East Hampton High School’s recent staging of “In the Heights,” I decided to follow suit with “Thoroughly Modern Millie” at the Ross Upper School last weekend.

“It’s so green, O’en, so green!” I said as we walked down Main Street recently. “See the dark green, the yellow green, the gnarly roots. . . .”

Those returning to East Hampton after a time away will be sure to notice that the green near the flagpole does not look quite the same. Where until this year it was unbroken grass, a winding ribbon of plants and low shrubs now extends to the little bridge on Mill Lane. This, we are told, is a bioswale, which is, as I told a group of Ladies Village Improvement Society members in a recent talk, a fancy word for swamp. This brought a laugh, as one of the next speaker’s topics was to be the Village Green and how it recently came to look different.

In June it will be 50 years since Israel and its Arab neighbors, Syria, Egypt, and Jordon, fought what is known as the Six Day War, a conflict in which Israel secured a military victory, though, to put it mildly, hardly a lasting one.

My son-in-law and I were treated to a squash lesson by the young Egyptian pro, Mohamed Nabil, at the Southampton Recreation Center recently. He was kind, kept feeding the ball back to us so that we could smash it crosscourt or down the rail, and it was a lot of fun, especially for one whom the game has long passed by.

So I was down at Town Hall the other day, picking up my dump, ahem, recycling permit, and a clam, uh, shellfish license. As I waited for the next available assistant clerk, I noticed a Latino man taking care of some complicated business at the next assistant clerk’s station. A moment later, a tall man with a long beard wearing a white crocheted cap came in, seeking town taxi paperwork.

The funniest thing about Donald Trump is his taste — not just in gold-plated toilet-paper holders, but in food. He may be plunging the world into dangerous waters, with aggressive talk aimed at North Korea and threats to take the United States out of the Paris accords on climate change, but he also is setting a terrible example for bad health, particularly among low-income Americans, by what he eats.

I had been asked to make O’en’s dinner and had not — at least by the appointed time — and heard about it, concluding that it had not just been the dog’s dinner, but the last 32 years.

One of the things that sets East Hampton apart from so many other American communities is respect for its own history. Up here around our office, Main Street looks much the same as it did 100 years ago. Some of the houses here date much further back still, as much as a century before the Declaration of Independence.

We visited Winterthur, the Henry Francis du Pont estate in Delaware, last weekend at the invitation of Charles F. Hummel, the curator and scholar whose 1968 book, “With Hammer in Hand” (reprinted in 1973), describes three generations of Dominy craftsmen in East Hampton and the objects they made — clocks, chairs, case pieces, looking glasses, tables — as well as the conservative rural culture here from the early 18th century to the mid-19th.

“We can get sick now!” I said to Mary, as she enthused over the pain-free coverage we’ll receive as a result of enrolling in our AARP supplemental plans.