Columnists

Two quote-unquote wo­men’s events took place here last weekend. The first was sponsored by the East End Women’s Alliance, which was active between 1971 and 1992 and staged annual Women’s Equality Day programs in August. The second was a fund-raiser for Eleanor’s Legacy, which encourages and helps, in its own words, “progressive, pro-choice women” to run for political office in New York State.

“Jack, you’ve got to see this,” Mary called out from her perch on the porch. “Yo vengo, yo vengo,” I said, moving sluggishly from the couch. And there, on the chimney, by the side of the little porch, it was.

Whenever I call my mom at our home in Portland, Ore., she always gives me the latest news happening on our block, which for the last several years has included a controversy after a permanent unisex bathroom (the cleverly designed “Portland Loo”) was installed in the neighboring public square.

About year ago, I am still embarrassed to admit, I missed a letter from Hillary Rodham Clinton. The thing is, I am not all that great about dealing with personal mail.

There are no political controversies that stir as much personal anguish than those that involve Israel, or perhaps to be more precise, those that are the result of that nation’s policies and actions.

We’re almost on the eve of our 30th anniversary, and I must say it’s gone fast.

What were they thinking when they sped by me on the Napeague stretch one Sunday morning this spring? What were they thinking when they honked but did not stop?

We first learned there was a problem with our home address earlier this year when a guest was noticeably late for one of our kids’ birthday parties.

It was with utter dismay that I was again made aware this week that the country to which I have pledged allegiance since childhood continues to engage in force-feeding, which is — quite rightly — considered torture by many in the medical profession.

“Cuidado,” I said to the guys who were digging holes for deer-eschewing perennials in our garden plot, a large arced one at the edge of our front yard that I’d abandoned years ago when the deer began to come, “Nuestro gato es enterrado alla.”

My parents met in New York City while working for the same accounting firm. I always thought theirs was a boring story: meeting at one of the most notoriously dull jobs, getting married six years later, having three kids, and living happily ever after.

Sky watchers say this week’s Perseid meteor shower will be a good one. This is the annual show of sparkling streaks that last year was obscured by the light of a full moon.

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.