Columnists

The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household. 

Were victory and defeat becoming the imposters they are, I wondered the other morning as I told Mary how I’d perhaps arrived at long last at the threshold of wisdom, to wit, that being calm was the key to winning tennis, if not to life itself.

“That’s why meditation’s so big, why yoga’s so big — everyone wants to be calm — mental toughness is simply to be calm,” I said, recalling that I had been cast out of the only meditation session I’d ever attended because I couldn’t sit still.

Fall weather is perfect for a yard sale. People aren’t hot or cranky and really seem to enjoy the smell of leaves dying and the crunch they make under one’s feet. I’m joining a few other women this weekend to have a yard sale in Montauk and am not sure if I should be looking forward to it or dreading it. Obviously, I have done this before.

One might wonder what I could possibly be thinking, as those who have held yard sales know that the insults to your personal stuff fly freely. I just hope to wake in a good mood on Saturday morning.

Our kids are sick of hearing about my car already. And what kid wouldn’t be? Parents are, almost by definition, annoying when you are between, say, 10 and 17 years old, especially if they ramble on and on. But, hey, I just got my first electric vehicle after thinking about it for years, and I’m not ready to shut up yet.

Clichés are usually based on matters of common knowledge, so there has got to be at least some truth in the often heard idea that people revert to childhood as they age. Right? I’m sure this doesn’t pertain to me — at least not yet — but I’m keeping watch.

I celebrated one of those birthdays this week that people consider a milestone, and I am afraid there’s no hiding my age anymore. Besides, I’ve decided, if people don’t know my age, how can they tell me I don’t look it?

“Let it rain!” I said to the guys who were putting up new seamless gutters whose downspouts and discharge pipes were arranged under our deck in such a way as to inspire hope that the annoyance of periodic basement floods would once and for all be ended.

Haz llover! Let it rain! Open the floodgates of heaven. Well, perhaps not quite so wide, but I do want to see if the new system works, if we’re on our way to, if not bone-dryness, less dankness. Yes, less dankness, fewer spiders, less mold, a little less of the entropy against which we are struggling.

It has become a tradition, six years running, for my family to meet up with a crew of other families from nearby and spend a September weekend camping at Hither Hills in Montauk. When the weather cooperates, and even when it doesn’t, these are my favorite days of the year.

There are simply too many animals in our house, and, to be honest, there were too many a month ago before we brought a new pug puppy home. But a surprising, if unlikely, relationship between two of them gives me hope.

By the numbers, Luna the pug did not really skew things all that much. We had promised Evvy, our 10-year-old middle child, that she would be next in line for a dog of her own when our ancient pug, Yum, died. So, when Yum Yom’s time was up, the ticker started toward Evvy’s big day.

It was the early 1980s and everyone at The Star was fed up with the pigeons that perched and nested and chattered on the ledge that runs above the plate-glass windows at the front of the building. The pigeons made a lot of noise and left droppings all over the sidewalk (and, sometimes, all over the heads of customers). They were such a nuisance that we wanted to rid ourselves of them about as much as some people, these days, want to be rid of deer. 

Our lineup is being depleted, as Steve Marley’s death this past week reminded me.

Much was made this summer about the crowds, “the biggest ever,” our way of life lost, “trouble right here in River City.” It got crowded, yes, and Labor Day weekend topped it all, but why the surprise?

They really have the cleanup thing down pat in Port Jefferson, where I was for two days last week for a newspaper conference. Early Saturday, when I was out looking for a cup of coffee and something to eat instead of the hotel buffet, I noticed that the main route through the business district was littered with castoffs from the previous night. Plastic cups, waxed-paper remnants of late-night pizzas, cigarette butts, empty soda bottles, napkins, and other garbage spread over a two-block stretch.

Suppose you’re a kid in one of the East Hampton School District’s three schools on a particular day this fall. Suppose you don’t usually get breakfast at home, and you’re hungry when you get on line for lunch. Friends on line are opting for whatever the main offering is, maybe spaghetti or pizza, and some also ask for and get a cookie or other snack.

What with the Jewish High Holy Days coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about God. But the Days of Awe, that 10-day period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the time for introspection and repentance, have given me pause. Prayers will be offered, pleas and propositions will go up to the heavens. To God. The Almighty, the Munificent, all-knowing yet unknowable God.

It’s hard to imagine that participating in sectarian slaughters fraught with possibilities that we’ll be played for suckers perhaps by all the combatants will lead to any good, and yet it seems we have no choice given the likelihood of a greater evil emerging insofar as Americans are concerned from a jihadist triumph.

I am still angry, from 3,000 miles away, at an old man whom I do not know and will never meet, but who unnerved my daughter Julia to the point where she went on Facebook to tell the story to her friends and ask for their take. This happened in Portland, Ore., but it could have been anywhere.

Here is what she wrote, along with some of the many comments. I know the comments helped her get over it, and I’m betting that rehashing it in this way will do the same for me.

Elly, by the way, is 5 years old. Jeff is my son-in-law.

The next couple of days will spell the end of the remarkable beach plum crop of 2014. A mild, relatively dry summer made for good growing conditions, and the dunes from one end of town to the other were full of the tart purple fruit. A prodigious turnout of wild grapes in the understory was related to favorable weather as well.

A passel of college kids conjured the back-to-school spirit last weekend when they came to Bridgehampton to sing. Shere Khan, an a cappella ensemble of 12 Princeton students, performed for a group of friends at a private party, while the 45-member Howard University Gospel Choir, accompanied by electric bass, keyboard, and drums, raised the rafters of the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. 

As I walked to The Star’s kitchen the other day with Henry’s empty dish, not needing it anymore, I saw a piece of plywood barring the editor’s door, about baby gate-high, and looked in, and there was a puppy nibbling at his shoelaces. I wasn’t overly sad, for that’s the way it is: Life goes on.

It is a foregone conclusion that East Hampton went to the dogs long ago. Now it is the cats! East Hampton began its meandering path to going to the cats mostly in the modern historical sense of time.

Our family cats began, when I was a little boy, with Black Nose. He was a family pet, yet the only significant memory I have of this cat was wrapping him in a blanket and putting him in the bathroom sink to rest. The cat was not well. Black Nose spent his last days resting in the bathroom sink comfy and dry, wrapped in his small blanket.

You hear from time to time how tight East Hampton Town is when it comes to handing out construction permits. “You can’t get anything approved around here,” the complaint goes. Well, that is not really the case. Although the paperwork may mound up and the review process be painfully slow, you can generally get what you want.

During a late-August getaway, I visited a California community that was really restrictive and puts East Hampton’s supposedly hard-nosed preservationism into sharp perspective.

A friend sent an email to me and a slew of others this week, using Gmail, that warned against opening any email that might arrive from her Hotmail account, which had been hacked. I don’t know what can happen if you open a hacked email, and I don’t plan to find out, but I do know something about my friend that she hadn’t intended: the email addresses — and many of the names — of her friends, acquaintances, and business connections, some 350 of them. 

Summer does not so much make a light escape here as a noisy one, so that we, the birds who stay, and who indeed will shiver, rejoice.

Thus the seasons are for us rearranged, and the waning of summer, what for many is a signal of decline, brings promise here.

“Christopher Walsh celebrated his eighth birthday with a party on Saturday at his Cleveland Road home.”

It’s right there in the Sept. 13, 1973, issue of The Star, there in the Montauk notes. You can look it up.

In truth, it was my seventh birthday, and I lived on Hudson Road, just off Cleveland. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to see my name in the newspaper. Imagine my delight, almost 40 years and a thousand or so bylines later, to see it in The Star again, this time as a reporter.

An erupting fight over the former East Deck Motel property in Montauk has pitted a wealthy new property owner against scores of residents and visitors who would like to see Ditch Plain Beach remain the way it was for so long. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition opposing J. Darius Bikoff’s plan to convert the iconic motel into a private surf club, of sorts.

After all these years I still don’t know the rules of anything really, and was somewhat tongue in cheek taken to task by a doubles opponent this past week for having served out of turn during a tiebreaker.

I pleaded ignorance, which is one of my strong suits. I’m always pleading ignorance and it’s served — ha-ha — me well by and large, though slowly, ever so slowly I am being led by the hand into the technological age, out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of clarity. Clarity is not one of my strong suits, though I do rather like claret. Maybe that explains it.

If tourists didn’t want to be picked on then they shouldn’t give us so much material to work with. This summer out here in Montauk was a horror, and I do not exaggerate!

We pulled the car into the driveway the other night, Lisa, two of the children, and I, coming back from picking up a takeout dinner in Montauk. It was a dark night, no moon, no haze to catch the reflected light from the ground. Lisa hustled the youngest one inside to get him ready for bed. But, looking up, I told the other child to stop. “There’s the Milky Way,” I said.

“Where? Oh, yeah,” she said.

A clear band of dusty white hung from above the horizon to the south, all the way to straight overhead.

“Is that our universe?” she asked.

It’s been at least 10 years since people started asking me if I had retired. Even habitual readers seem surprised when I tell them I work a whole lot, and that the boss, my son David, finds plenty of jobs to assign me. I guess my title of publisher doesn’t make that clear.

The Hamptons, as it were, have been described as a mighty unfriendly “city” in a recent Condé Nast poll, though I’d beg to differ. On the contrary, rather than brutish, I find people here, if not beatific, quite giving.

So much so that I think every now and then — when I’m not in traffic — that we’re an island of sanity in an insane world.