Columnists

Those of us who have been around awhile remember when there were no Hamptons. The South Fork was composed of towns and villages and hamlets that had singular characteristics — unique histories, unique environments (both natural and manmade), unique social characters.

Richard Barons was leading a historical tour group late in the afternoon on a recent day. I was inside The Star reading in The New Yorker about Joe Gould, whose oral history really did exist, waiting for some interviewees who were not to show, and invited them in, unlocking and drawing back the weighty door.

Few people know that I moonlight as a longshoreman, occasionally helping to unload lobster boats in Montauk, or, in the early morning, packing shipments of same, thousands of them boxed, iced, and trucked to restaurants and markets near and far.

A treasure as July slips into August is that the shorebirds arrive as suddenly as the calendar’s turn. Shorebirds, for those unfamiliar with the term, are the thin-legged birds that make their living along the water’s edge or on flats at low tide, at least around here.

“May you live in interesting times,” a familiar and ironic way of wishing bad news to descend on others, is not the ancient Chinese curse it has been purported to be, but more likely a 20th-century construction, whose popularity has sometimes been attributed to Robert Kennedy.

“The fields are alive with the sound of athletes,” I sang, in my best Julie Andrews imitation, to Mary, who was happy the other day to hear it.

I imagine few people end their summers in the Hamptons without at least a couple of good tales to tell. My own stories started in 1989 when I was 8 years old and my family began taking summer trips to the South Fork.

I like Jay Schneiderman. We go way back. I first met him when he was chairman of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals and I was assigned to the beat. We have kids roughly the same age. I figure his heart is in the right place. But if there is any other local politician now who slings as much jive, I don’t know who that is.

Call me a tree hugger. I like deer. I even like the deer who bed down in a hedgerow between our house and the library, or across the lane in a bushy area between two neighbors’ houses, or at the far, overgrown side of the property, beyond the barn. (Yes, even I admit, there have been too many deer in the village, too many for comfort and too many for traffic safety, too.)

Three of East Hampton’s most admired coaches of the past generation — Jim Nicoletti, Ellen Cooper, and Kathy McGeehan — appeared in wholehearted support of Lou Reale, the ousted championship and award-winning softball coach, at the school board’s organizational meeting on July 14 — Bastille Day.

Jayma Cardoso, the owner of the Surf Lodge bar and restaurant in Montauk, went online last week and disputed a photograph that appeared on The Star’s website that showed several men urinating into Fort Pond.

My husband and I have a domestic disease. Let’s call it recipe-itis. My personal collection of recipes goes back to having been a counselor at a camp where outdoor cooking was a daily routine. We made dishes with names that were often more appealing than the food.

Summertime, And the livin’ ain’t easy, Sirens are wailin’ And the prices are high

A longtime member the Star staff who had a moderately bad day on Monday asked rhetorically whether someone could really go through a day at this time of year here without running into some kind of annoyance or obstacle.

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.