Columnists

I am tired of receiving your calls on my cellphone number. Practically once a day, sometimes twice, I get calls for you, mainly from solicitors offering a mortgage or some kind of green energy solution for the house you may or may not have. It’s getting old.

Not only is the body politic askew as we head toward the presidential election in November, so, too, do the tenets of ethical journalism seem to have gone haywire.

Lori King, the intrepid long-distance swimmer, was a little surprised the other day that I’d never heard the saying, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas.”

I have lived by the beach in Amagansett long enough to be able to tell summer’s changes from the sound of the birds. Now that it is August, spring’s crazy pre-dawn ringing of songbirds in the brush is replaced by the feeding calls of terns hunting baitfish in the shallows. The wind from the north has kicked up small waves, providing an impossible-to-describe background as a few gulls make their lazy yawps.

Jasper’s bare feet pounding the ground as he runs through the fields at Quail Hill seem to turn the earth hollow beneath him, a sound felt as much as heard.

Taking a swim in the bay on Sunday, I was once again struck by how incredibly beautiful the waters of Gardiner’s Bay are and how lucky our family has been to have a slot on the sands facing them.

At the beach the other day there were beautiful sights — one of Amanda Calabrese, who was to have been named this week to the United States’ competitive lifesaving team, whirling through the waves in a long, sleek lifesaving craft of which she was obviously the master, and the other of the back of my wife’s head as it and her body rose and fell gently with the water in the late afternoon.

It was Thursday evening, I think, and, eager to get away from the bear attacks of a long week, I drove to the beach at Atlantic Drive on Napeague. There was one other person there when I arrived around 6:30, and he or she was wrapped in a towel and sitting on a chair some distance away from the road end. About a mile to the west through the haze I saw two trucks parked on the state park beach, though at that distance, I could not even really be sure what they were.

“Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” Dylan Thomas said, and so I’m playing tennis this evening with the Wednesday group — 16, sometimes 20 of us doing battle in the waning light.

The osprey are not the first birds to wake up and start carrying on. Near Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett in the minutes before dawn, when there is only a scattering of light in the east, birds I cannot name by their voices alone twitter from the scrub oak.

I was stuck in traffic, going west — on that part of Montauk Highway that slows down after Stephen Hand’s Path and before the way off the highway to take the back road.

A recently married couple I know moved from their apartment in Queens into their first house last week, and what a house it is!

It turns out that sea robin are fine to eat. Very fine, in fact, which is good, since my son, Ellis, has suddenly become a fishing fanatic. Sea robin have taken over the shallows near our house on Gardiner’s Bay, and for a kid just learning to cast a rod, they hit the lure with satisfying dependability and put up just enough fight to be interesting. There also seems to be an inexhaustible supply.

So, I did it. With help from a kind, generous friend in Montauk, I got another car. Not a 240, but a Subaru, 2001 Forester. Had about 80,000 miles on it. Nice.

How was it possible to have attended all my high school’s football games and learned nothing about the game? As you might surmise, I was simply interested in other things — boys, for example. I was more attracted to the ones who played basketball. Besides, the only reason I went to all those football games was not because I was a fan but because I was a drum majorette.

Mary’s been transforming our house lately, at least transforming it to the extent that it can be transformed.

The back of the hardcover of “Christine” that my 13-year-old daughter is reading is taken up entirely by a photo from 1982 showing Stephen King sitting on the hood of a vintage Plymouth in the mouth of what looks like a service bay.

My Uncle Herman, the baby among my mother’s siblings who is well into his 90s now, took me to Lindy’s, the midtown Manhattan restaurant, when I was about 13 for a lobster.

I just read in one of the local papers that there was a U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1996.

The East Hampton Town Police Department’s official Twitter account reported Monday night that traffic was tied up and creeping westbound out of downtown Montauk following the Fourth of July fireworks. No surprise — people tend to get up and go right after the show ends, no matter that their hurry gains them only a place in a slow queue.

I’ve been accommodating myself to death for a while now, but today I was actually wishing for it when I read that they’re not only to play the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 2018, but also in 2026.

A recipe in The New York Times for shrimp broiled with honey and hot pepper caught my eye the other day, and as I read it, it occurred to me that the approach would be worth trying on sea robin. Yes, sea robin.

It wasn’t a hairpiece. Or a toupee. It was a full-blown wig, a helmet of synthetic hair that I kept on a Styrofoam wig stand in a corner of my loft where nobody but my wife would see it.

Shotaro Mori, a bassoonist who joined the South Fork Chamber Orchestra for the Choral Society of the Hamptons concert at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor last weekend, was among the freelance musicians for whom choristers played host. Mr. Shotaro and a young cellist spent two nights with us between rehearsals, and he became an overwhelmingly welcome guest.

It is strawberry time again, which means time to think about putting up some preserves from the local crop. But the way things go, South Fork strawberries are usually gone by the time I get around to pulling out the canning kettle.

I’ll admit it: I enjoy show tunes. Listening gives me great joy, and I particularly like breaking out into song with a selection from a favorite musical. Be it Broadway hits like “Rent,” “Chicago,” or “Wicked,” I’ve been known to belt out a number or two. But only when appropriate, for instance when I’m alone, like in my car or in the shower, or when it’s clearly okay to make a ridiculous spectacle of yourself, like at a karaoke night at a bar. Since when is that a crime?

Three generations of Rattrays have enjoyed the old house I live in, which, as you might guess, is both awfully nice and, at least on occasion, headache-inducing. I like to say that this or that treasure “came with the house” when someone asks about a vase or a chair, but I also find myself worrying about who has saved what and whose responsibility it is to do something about repairs and storage and suchlike.

I told our eldest daughter that she was living in northwestern Ohio the Suburban Dream, which she knows.

Louise W. Knight, a historian who is the author of two books on Jane Addams — the 19th-century activist and founder of one of the country’s first settlement houses, in Chicago — keeps in touch with my husband, whom she has known for many years. After the heinous massacre in Orlando this week, she sent him an email in which she took issue with the media’s calling it “the worst mass killing” in United States history.

I had finished reading of the last linotype machine operator at The New York Times, who’d quietly taken his leave last week at the age of 78, declining to be interviewed on his way out, and dreamed of the days when unions held some sway.