Columnists

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“Watch out now, take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers / Dancing down the sidewalks, as each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly / Beware of Maya.”

The old $50 lawn mower that I bought quite a few years ago from Harvey Bennett may have mowed its last lawn. At this point, I don’t remember if I had spotted it in the Star classifieds or if Harvey had mentioned that he had one to sell. But for $50, how bad could it be?

Perhaps you were among those who saw the feature about The Star in The New York Times on Memorial Day. Such positive publicity, and the subsequent rally of support from readers and the advertisers upon whom we depend, is no small thing. It’s not every day that reporters and publishers get a pat on the back and, for this, we are truly grateful.

I read a review of two sports books in The New Yorker recently and there was not once the mention of joy, though, admittedly, it was the business of sport — the money in it — that was the subject, not the headiness of play per se.

I should apologize at the outset to the man my kids and I call Wrong-Way Guy, but we’re kind of obsessed.

Trying to determine if the East End is medically underserved isn’t very hard to do, but it might have been foolish to try to answer the question the day after a crowded holiday weekend.

It’s Friday and it’s almost as if a show’s begun: There were 12 instead of the usual five or six servers behind the counter at Starbucks this morning. Main Street traffic was very, very slow. Noses were pressed up against the doors at BookHampton, which was to reopen the next afternoon.

Rain is fitting on Memorial Day, the solemnity of the occasion not totally forgotten amid sunny beach outings and start-of-summer barbecues.