Columnists

A phrase came to my mind last week. I have not thought of this phrase in the six years since I moved back here to the East End, and yet there it was, quite unexpectedly. Before I tell you the phrase I need to give you a bit of background.

The Hampton Jitney is a great leveler. Other than the media moguls and Russian oligarchs who come and go on private jets or noisy helicopters, most of us 99 percenters — when we eschew our own automobiles — are apt to find ourselves crowded into a true cross-section of East End residents and weekenders on the Jitney. And something crazy is always happening there, isn’t it?

Hughie King corrected me the other day, as he should have, after I’d retrofitted John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home” with more modern lyrics.

Thing was, said our village historian, Payne’s grandfather never lived in Home, Sweet Home, as Wikipedia (it will be my downfall yet) had reported, and that while it was a fact John Howard had visited East Hampton as a child — he wrote of having been afraid of the geese around Goose (now Town) Pond — no one knows exactly where he stayed.

Anyway, wherever it was, there was no place like it.

I heard it happen, but I didn’t know what it was. I was driving down North Main Street in Southampton, and as I passed the Clam Man I heard a click click click coming in the slightly open window. My random thought was that I had picked up a pebble.

Ever wonder why there are no carnivals in East Hampton Town other than the one each summer at Havens Beach in Sag Harbor? Well, the answer is that they were banned long ago over concerns that have echoes today.

It’s been a big week. No, I’m not actually talking about the big week in the halls of government, but about the week here at home. I’ve surprised myself by adopting a dog, I’ve sung with the Choral Society of the Hamptons in a superlative concert (if I say so myself), and been host to five young men. 

A husband and wife were run down on Sag Harbor’s Division Street at about 7 p.m. on Saturday, June 20.

I’m a fast driver and my husband can predict the weather. I should have been a racecar driver, and he could have chosen to be a meteorologist had he known it was a profession.

I had the honor, and I don’t use that word lightly, of being asked to read at the May wedding of close friends in California. Mike and John had begun dating something on the order of 11 years ago, back when marriage equality was not even on the horizon.

We all know that the 21st century is different than any era that preceded it. We agree that the technological revolution is creating change that is at least as profound, in terms of human experience, as the industrial revolution. Even more profound, perhaps.

Steep slated parapets with sheer drops into penumbral darkness, cars speeding in reverse downhill that I cannot stop, paddling up a creek on a skinny oar, and running through rooms in other people’s houses or apartments have been the stuff of my dreams of late.

I threw my dad’s golf clubs out the other day. I pulled his old golf bag, with the red and white umbrella strapped to the side and a couple of wooden tees rattling around in the bottom, out the broken-down side wall of the shed, where it has been moldering.

High season in East Hampton is nothing like it was even five years ago. There are too many people, too many cars on the roads, too few places to park, too many lines, and not enough peace and quiet.

Shall I tell you about the day my cellphone had a bath? What happened was that I put a bottle of Honest Tea into my handbag without making sure that the top was screwed on tight. Picking up the bag again hours later, after my yoga class, I found everything inside completely soaked.

And so it was! On June 9, in the year of our Lord 1791, in New York City. His grandfather’s house, where he spent his early years, has been preserved as Home, Sweet Home, a landmark down the street from this one.

It is no longer a secret. Nicknamed Lip, he’s involved. Man knows some moneyed types. The mayor and town supervisor won’t say — they have guaranteed use of the old rescue boats stashed at undisclosed locations.

By chance, my son, Ellis, and I became East Hampton 7-on-7 soccer fans last week.

The menorah on the lawn of Chabad Lubavitch in East Hampton looks like a Han­uk­kah menorah because it has eight rather than seven branches.

“He’s going to Little League?” our daughter asked somewhat incredulously, as if, I suppose, there were more important things to write about and photograph than that.

In the spring of 2012, desperate for a change of scene, I lined up a bartending job in East Hampton and place to stay, but as moving day drew near I had still not addressed transportation. Money was tight, and I wondered if a scooter would do.

BookHampton sent around an email this week asking if anyone knew of any smart college students who might enjoy working in a bookstore for the summer. The Main Street stalwart is hardly alone in looking for seasonal staff.

To listen to some, men in fedoras in the Town of East Hampton are a sure sign that civilization as we know it has come to an end.

Perhaps you have wondered while making your way around why there appears to be next to no poison ivy in our fair village. That is not likely to be an accident, as this marks the 68th anniversary of the first annual Poison Ivy Eradication Week.

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor.

What to do with the sunny Sunday of a long holiday weekend?  Well, for starters, I had to coordinate with the workers who arrived bright and early to fix our dilapidated old picket fence and plant some privet to hide the back neighbors’ pool from view.

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

About two years after my mother died, at the unfair age of 58, my dad, who was in his early 60s, found himself pursued by a phalanx of age-appropriate widows.

Post-Memorial Day, it is a little difficult to decide what to write about. There are so many choices: traffic, noise, events missed, yard work.

My cousin Harriet tries to keep her father’s side of the family together even though she lives in Dallas and most of the relatives live on the East Coast.

It is time to talk of the outdoor shower, that blessed sanctuary among the trees and birds and light in which one can revel six months long before driven inside to the fire, a pleasure of a different kind.