Columnists

July Fourth isn’t what it used to be. It’s been six years or so since the last Declaration of Independence party hereabouts, an annual ritual that lasted for some two decades. It was extraordinary and all-American, a coming together of like-minded individuals to recognize the best things about the United States, things from which we all have benefited. The Declaration was read, a brass band played marches, and the Union Jack was lowered. Guests were then invited to speak or read from pertinent material.

East Hampton, N.Y., July 1, 2014: Concern and discussion about a number of new vehicles that have taken to the East Hampton roads seem all the rage in local scuttlebutt. New white Ford F-150s have been spotted tailgating the cars of older East Hampton Village residents who pilot smaller automobiles. Most of the people being tailgated are elderly ladies.

Last week, I wrote about a newfound interest in sea gulls, birds that I had, like many others here, tended to overlook. It was perhaps by some Murphy’s Law that one of my brothers-in-law and I ended up rescuing one on the Fourth of July.

Soccer is king at East Hampton High School — the team, in the absence of a varsity football squad, will be featured at homecoming this fall as the result of a student vote — and it has been king here at the adult level for years, beginning with emigrants from Costa Rica in the mid-1960s, after which came Mexicans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians, mostly from Cuenca (not to mention the Irish).

Taking into consideration the way our visitors are driving this summer and the pedestrians darting in front of cars outside of marked crosswalks, it has given me ample opportunity to think about heaven, if I should be so lucky to land there someday.

On weekends when I have to drive to the downtown area in Montauk I never know if I’ll make it home alive or with my Jeep still intact. It’s been close on several occasions. And so I’ve been trying to grasp this whole idea of heaven. I’m also eating a lot of chocolate, as I hear it’s calming and easier to obtain than Xanax.

Do you know what the difference is between $212,614 and $230,726? I don’t mean the figure you get if you subtract the first dollar amount from the second. I refer to the difference between what the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education earns annually and the salary the Bridgehampton School District superintendent, Lois Favre, will make next year.

We watched “The Natural” the other night, for the umpteenth time. It never grows old. It is our fable.

At least the movie version is, with Roy Hobbs’s transcendent home run (“That’s how it feels, isn’t it, to come through like that in a game?” said Mary as the soaring music played and the sparks from the short-circuited stadium stanchions lit Roy’s way ’round the bases) and the father-and-son catch in the farm field in the golden light at the end.

It was late in the day, after a child’s birthday party had moved from the beach up to the house, that something I had never noticed before drew my attenton to a raft of black-backed gulls that had gathered near the shore for an evening hunt for crabs.

The Shelter Island 10K is, and was especially this year, a living symbol of all that is right with America, a country that is not without its faults, but which at its best remains as inspiring as it ever was.

Memo to South Fork businesses that raise prices before the arrival the summer hordes: We live here, too.

The tale is an infamous one, shared between my family and our oldest, best family friends, the Scrudatos. “The time Thea and Bella ran away at the beach” is what our parents call it; however, I remember the purpose of that unauthorized beach adventure to be something other than an attempted escape out from under our beach umbrellas.

White Boots, our 8-year-old cat, is 3 feet long. At least that’s how long he looked the other day when I picked him up from the living room floor to move him away from a visitor who is allergic to cats: Stretched out toe to toe, white boots and white belly presenting, he was practically the size of a porpoise.

White Boots is supposed to belong to one of my granddaughters. She fell in love with him on her 5th birthday, when she was taken for a visit to the shelter run by the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons.

Two things have greatly improved the way we eat at the Rattray house this spring. First, warmer weather brought the garden to life and helped encourage me to get out on the water to fish and clam. The other is that after talking for years about signing up for weekly produce with one of the community-supported agriculture ventures that have popped up here, we joined Amber Waves.

When I’m not busy working or cooking three different meals for the four different members of my family, I can usually be found folding laundry.

That sounds like such a stereotype, and it’s a lie, really, because I can never actually manage to fold all the clean laundry in the house before the next pile of dirty laundry creeps up on me. I am like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing my rock up the hill, only this rock is made of tangles of clean socks, wrinkled pants, crumpled shirts, and dishtowels.

My daughter, who is also an editor, is always chiming in from the peanut gallery to tell me that my column is best when I resist my natural inclination toward sententious themes of doom and gloom. She likes to warn me, only half-joshing, not to allow my column to become a “Whine of the Week,” and perhaps she is right. But today’s sky is awfully gray, and it looks like it’s going to rain for the next two or three days . . .

“I play like you work,” I said the other day to Mary, who works very hard, and has precious little time to play, though I am encouraging her to become more like me — minus the neuroses of course.

I am ashamed to admit that my work, by and large, is fun, so, while I would rather say to her, “I work like you play,” it is not so, at least at the moment, though she has been working out weekly with Rob Balnis at East End Physical Therapy, as I do, and we hit tennis balls whenever we both find ourselves free.

Have you heard the news about the 10-fold increase, since 2011, in the number of children coming illegally and by themselves into the United States? The Obama administration has called it a humanitarian crisis. Almost unbelievably, it is estimated that 60,000 children will be apprehended this year trying to get into the U.S. across our Southwestern borders. Many of these children — from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — are placed in the care of a federal agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Others, from Mexico, are routinely sent back home.

You wouldn’t think there was anything about the peaceful, shaded streets of Springs that calls to mind the architecture of Paris’s grand boulevards and bourgeois dwellings. And at first glance, there isn’t.

In Paris, the buildings (aside from those in Montmartre and the Marais, districts that survived the urban planning of the 1850s) for the most part all look the same. The walls are cream-colored stone and the roofs are slate blue; the balconies, always on the second and fifth floors, have black iron railings, and windows are in top floor dormers.

I had a column about my Scrabble complaints ready to go, but thought better of it inasmuch as it seemed, in reading it over, as opaque as a mud flat after a heavy rain.

In brief, it didn’t breathe. But I did think what I said about the mouse-eaten Webster’s New International Dictionary sagging forlornly at the edge of Irene’s desk was Chekovian, she and I being the only ones left in this office to do it reverence.

The annual onslaught of ticks is in full swing around here now, which has prompted talk of drastic measures. Each of the members of our human family on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett has pulled at least one of the horrifying little pests from his or her person recently, and our animals have been playing unwitting hosts as well.

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

A career-guidance test we took in high school that supposedly scientifically assessed students’ personal characteristics had me ranking high on what was called persuasiveness. The suggestion was that I would make a good lawyer.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, I think it’s a good thing I didn’t follow through on that career advice: What sort lawyer is too impatient to wade through fine print, as I’ve always been?

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

Spring agrees with Leo the pig. Regular readers of this column may recall that about two years ago, over my desperate protests, two of the women of our household insisted that we get a pet of the cloven-hoof variety.

We have Danny Walsh, the golfing partner of my brother-in-law, to thank for what I’ve called “the Taj Mahal of outdoor showers.”

I say “we,” but historically I’ve been the only one to use it, logging with Jeffersonian attention each year’s first and last days. The women generally have been wary inasmuch as the one I built some years ago, using remnants of the house’s original deck and a pair of purloined swinging saloon-style doors, wasn’t sufficiently high enough — a genuine concern, I’ll admit, when the tall house next door housed innumerable tenants.

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

You really have to see the Taj Mahal in person to appreciate it. I don’t know if that’s a cliché — it probably is, but then, I’m not much of a world traveler. Still, a few years back I did catch a morning train from Jaipur to visit Shah Jahan’s “ultimate monument to love,” the mausoleum and funerary garden honoring his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

    Jimmy Fallon of “The Tonight Show” got up on the stage at the Montauket on Saturday night to sing “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors with the Blue Collar Band. It was a great start to the season. And if it’s any indication of how the summer’s going to be, we’re going to have, according to Jimmy, a good time!

    Complaining to a colleague, as I am wont to do, about my difficulties hitting upon a subject for this column every week, she asked when I first began to write it. It turns out — and I had to pull out a folder from a crammed old filing cabinet to be sure — that the first “Connections” appeared in The East Hampton Star on April 28, 1977, which means it passed the 37-year mark a few weeks ago. (Even I, a hater of unnecessary exclamation points, want to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.)