Columnists

First of all, I want to say thank you, Santa, and all your helpers for fanning out across the globe in these weeks leading up to Christmas to help keep the magic alive. It’s not easy being in so many places at once while also making your list and checking it twice. All those decked-out halls can get pretty noisy when the squeals of excited children are fueled by candy canes and sugar cookies. It’s enough to drive anyone to distraction.

Looking through a box in the Star attic the other day, I noticed a narrow, cloth-bound ledger that looked interesting. A handwritten note tucked inside the front cover identified it as the Montauk Lighthouse visitors’ log from August 1908 to September 1910. Whoever had left the note indicated that the entries included an “auto run” in 1908, complete with the makes of the cars.

For some forgotten reason, I receive “1600Daily” emails, which come from the White House and offer a spin on the news that contrasts totally with that of the information sources I more regularly rely on.

O’en, our cream-colored golden retriever who doesn’t retrieve, but who is as handsome as all get-out, has taken great strides forward.

It happens so fast — the dark I mean. One day it’s a bright afternoon and you’re swimming. Then suddenly how silly it seems, the sandy towel still in the car.

There was a traffic jam on Tuesday morning on Main Street. A lone heron had found a happy roost on a Christmas tree stuck in the middle of Town Pond, and several drivers had stopped for a look.

Something’s going on with me. The other day I remembered there was a working, but unused, electrical outlet under the living room couch so the first thing I did was move a table and lamp from their perfectly appropriate place next to a wing chair to the couch and plug in the lamp. It didn’t look right, so I moved them back and went looking, in the bedrooms, for a small table that would fit nicely next to the couch.

Leaf sucker, leaf sucker, What do you say? Do me a boon, visit me soon, Suck them away, suck them away.

The only thing that breaks the predictability of Thanksgiving is watching the yearly metamorphosis of your offspring, from minor to major.

Fall turned, twisted, and curled on the stem and lingered in the air much longer than usual.

The first time I visited the house I live in now, the shelf at the bay window in the dining room was filled with great, big flowering Christmas cactuses on a painted, dark-green copper tray. They brought color into an otherwise dark wintertime room and, taken as an entirely natural holiday decoration, they were perfectly suited to my taste. Their brilliant red flowers and deep green foliage were enough to perk up any cold afternoon.

But what to say? Ah, it’s Thanksgiving, time to give thanks for Kitty’s torte, which I swear will be the death of me. The ingredients are not arcane, store-bought devil’s food cake mix, a box of Nilla wafers, two bags of walnuts, light brown sugar, butter, plenty of that, and whipped cream, yielding a crunchiness, creami­ness, sweetness, and softness that taken all together are nonpareil.

Approaching Indian Wells, I stopped my truck on the beach to look at a flock of small sparrow-like birds. It was about a week ago. I figured I would take a few last casts of the season into the ocean. Big bluefish and a few striped bass remained around, or so I had heard.

In my mind’s eye, Thanksgiving Day looks — as it probably does for many Americans of a certain age — like a famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom From Want,” that appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post during World War II.

It would be about now that the football season would be winding up, assuming we had a football team.

Sunday was one of those days, you know, the kind that get people saying that’s why we live here.

The time has come for us to get a dog. I’ve had many over the years, and a rescue dog is now in order. The problem is the difference between our perceptions of what would be a perfect pet and the perceptions of the highly meticulous staff at the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons as they size us up.

Recently, I listened for eight of 11 waking hours, sitting in on a Killer Bee reunion on a Friday night and, the following morning, attending an equally long Hall of Fame induction ceremony at East Hampton High School.

I only realized later what had happened. On my way to drop Ellis off at second grade, I decided to stop quickly to vote. Election District 12, where I was registered, never has all that much of a line, so I figured we would be in and out of the Amagansett Firehouse quickly.

Anyone who reads this column will have an idea of where I stand politically, but they haven’t heard much, if anything, from me about religion. My first husband and I used to say we had the same religion, by which we meant none. Our notion was that my Jewishness and his Protestantism were entirely secular. (It will remain for our children to say whether they missed a religious upbringing.)

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.