Columnists

Back when my reprobate buddies and I were in high school and had our first cars we would nervously drive past a place we called the Mafia House down near Two Mile Hollow Beach. Because there was a heavy metal gate across the twisting driveway we concluded that the residents had something to hide. It was the 1970s, and tales of the Cosa Nostra were in the air, you know.

What am I feeling thankful for this week?

I liked what the woman in one of our papers the other day said she was thankful for: the moon (I would say especially the moon the way it has been the past few nights), the stars, the sun, of course, and air, water, fire, and a roof over your head.

“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.”

I was driving though Bridgehampton the other day and passed the place on Montauk Highway where a vehicle struck Anna Pump as she tried to cross the road. Ms. Pump, who died of her injuries at Southampton Hospital later that day, had been in a crosswalk.

From time to time my West Coast niece and nephew post family photographs on Facebook, where I am surprised by a young version of myself. I am pleased the photos were saved and are retrievable, but am reminded that I still haven’t figured out how to print photographs that arrive these days via the Internet.

You need no further evidence as to the extent of global warming than the hot air given off in the Republican candidates’ “debates.”

I like my winter holidays cold. Though the weather we’ve had out here has been good for the thermostat, it just doesn’t feel like the holiday season. The warmer climate takes away from the essence of Thanksgiving.

Leo the pig will not be 4 until the spring, but he already weighs about 10 times as much as his Texas trailer park breeder-slash-con artist claimed he would.

Speaking for myself — as a mother, and perhaps for my generation —I am both horrified and perplexed by the dystopian worlds that young people immerse themselves in (I hesitate to say enjoy) these days on television, in young-adult novels, and in popular films.

I told Jen Landes, who’s conducting a survey as to whether males are more inclined than females to put flat lids on their coffee, and whether, conversely, females are more inclined than males to put on raised ones, that she could put me down as a raised-lidder.

“I tried to talk with the dead last night, but the dead, being dead, gave no reply.”

Evvy, our middle child, was delighted Monday after school when she learned that she was a winner in the East Hampton Town Trustees Largest Clam Contest. Her 12.3-ounce hard clam was big enough to claim the top spot among kids in the Accabonac division, and earned her a basket of prizes.

I remember the first Thanksgiving in Amagansett, long ago, after I was married but before our children were born, primarily because it was my first experience cooking a goose; I’ve still got a small scar on my right thumb testifying to inexperience where goose fat was concerned.

“I’ve got no one left to root for,” I said to Rob Balnis during a workout at East End Physical Therapy the other day. “First the Pirates, then the Mets, then the Steelers. . . .”

Then, knowing he’s an ardent Buckeye fan, I added, “Maybe I’ll root for Ohio State. . . .”

“No, no, please!” he said, figuring that given my track record I might well be the kiss of death.

Thursday mornings at The Star are a time to regroup. The prior week’s news and features have been neatly filed, edited, printed, and bundled. The slate is clean. And although the editorial meeting to discuss the following week is only minutes away, there is a sense of relief, ease, and release, a calm before the next approaching storm.

“You can’t make them read it,” or some variant thereof, has been an occasional phrase around The Star newsroom over the years. What it signifies is that even though reporters might have covered nearly every twitch of something that is happening, a portion of the local population is always going to be surprised when it finally gets their attention.

There is a tendency among writers and editors to get defensive, as some of us did in the past week or so as the Army Corps began its Montauk project and as objections spread, largely thanks to Instagram and Facebook.

A friend with a bad cold handed me a sheaf of papers the other day, and although I was pleased to receive them, I was secretly thrown into a panic. I wasn’t in a place where I could immediately wash my hands, although when I eventually did, I sang “Happy Birthday” to myself — twice.(That’s an old trick for figuring out how long you should wash for it to be effective in removing germs.)

I bought recently for our 6-year old granddaughter “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” and then started reading Robert Graves’s encyclopedic version of them, only to realize that while vastly imaginative they are bloody as hell too, to put it mildly.

This month marks a year since I last set foot in Manhattan. A lot has happened.

There haven’t been a lot of cranberries in the bog down our way in Amagansett lately, and there haven’t been all that many foxes either. It is probably related.

My husband and I live with tunes of the past. He’s worse than I am, or is it better? He wakes up almost every morning with a song and his repertoire is vast.

There is nothing new under the bun,” I said in my best Ecclesiastes manner as my sister, who’s rehabbing a back injury in Pittsburgh, and I peered down at the health care facility’s limp culinary offerings.

If a parking ticket in Southampton Town isn’t a first-world problem, then I don’t know what is.

This week, amid juggling pre-election stories, it has been project time in the Rattray household. Evvy, our sixth grader, volunteered to make one of the party games for a school Halloween party, and so, after spending Tuesday trying to make sense of campaign finance reports, I raced home with a slab of builder’s blue foam.

I ’ve been all a-twitter as the dismantling of the early-19th-century Hedges barn on our property — soon to be moved and reconstructed across Main Street, on the Mulford Farm — draws near.

A woman overtaking me as I walked up — or is it down? — Main Street the other day said in passing that it was a wonderful day.

Putter, a male cat who may not have made it, and Summer, Putter’s sister, a shy, small, not-much-of-a-cat’s cat, have both blossomed into Disney movie-like caricatures — possibly, someday, attaining cat-legend status in the Cats Hall of Fame, East Hampton, N.Y.

It had been some time since we last thought about the Montauk Monster around the office. But on Tuesday, our memories were refreshed by a query from a National Geographic television program producer looking for images for an upcoming program.

Trying to explain why I like the film festival so much, I came up with a backstory: The Star was among the first public voices to welcome its arrival in East Hampton in 1993. Many year-round residents were wary that first year, fearing the festival would bring traf- fic snarls and unwelcome crowds of gawkers, possibly even harming lo- cal businesses.