Columnists

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.

    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.)

    A gentle breezed wafted — that’s what breezes, or rather, gentle breezes, do, don’t they — over the athletic fields at East Hampton High School last Thursday afternoon.

    Over the green expanses of the fields and the orange infields. No one was on them, however, all, however beautiful, was silent. I, for one, was ready for things to begin — the weather had finally come around. Yet the season was over.

    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!

    Thanks to a spring that has seemed somewhat cooler than usual, the grass, weeds, and fallen twigs that are our lawn have been slow to get going. This meant that I was able to put off taking the rusty old lawn mower out of storage until Sunday.

    The East End, or at least the South Fork half of it, is like a sponge filling up with more and more people and events every year. Sometime in the almost forgotten long ago, the sponge would begin expanding on Memorial Day and shrink again come Labor Day. Nowadays, the sponge gets heavier and heavier earlier and earlier in the season and, while it does begin to slim down in September, it doesn’t really resume its normal shape until after Thanksgiving.

    They say children are overscheduled in this day and age, but what about us?

    I’m sure our high school baseball team would rather be 13-1 now rather than 1-13, but I wonder, in light of this past week’s wonderful 3-2 win here over Mount Sinai by virtue of a flurry of hits in the bottom of the seventh, if it won’t become all the more memorable for those who played, and treasured all the more because of its singularity.

    It seems that everyone that Tony Duke met, or whose lives he touched, was personally touched, and with lasting effect. Because that’s what kind of man Tony was. The founder of the Boys Harbor camp on Three Mile Harbor, who died on April 30 at 95, was warm and genuine and courtly, sincerely interested in others, and a gentleman who exuded an infectious joie de vivre. You walked away from an encounter with him feeling just so much better about life, yourself, and the world. He was handsome and caring, and dedicated himself to doing good.

    A friend in the real estate business told me the other day that the secret to showing a house on a north-facing beach here was to do it in the summer. “Try to show it when the wind is blowing, and you’re stuck. Do it when it’s summer, and they’ll think it’s the most beautiful place on earth,” he said. In a way, he was summing up the whole winter-summer, hard-soft thing on the East End.

    A so-called big birthday is looming and, as it approaches, I can’t help but notice augurs of change. I’m not superstitious, honestly, but some days it feels like the gods are dropping hints about aging — or, at least, like there is a clock ticking rather too loudly over my head.

    I see there’s a casting call for “Hamlet.” I wonder if any septuagenarians have ever played the title role. It offers a chance for re­­demp­tion, though my main chance, I suppose, is Polonius.

    I still remember parts of the soliloquies that I mostly forgot in what was nevertheless a tediously long four-hour production at the Hill School on prom weekend in 1958.

    Captain Mike did not laugh when we saw a silver fox clear as day on the Napeague stretch, 6 a.m., early May 1982. He said there were two left out here: “Animal looks like a big wolf, easy to see.” His 1956 Willys Jeep barely had a front windshield, window wipers never worked. Must have been a clear morning.

    On Saturday morning, I accompanied our son, Ellis, to a soccer get-together at a house not all that far from ours in Amagansett. While he and the other 4-year-olds kicked the ball around, the parents relaxed on a screened porch, eating muffins, drinking espresso, and feeling for the world as if we were in a stadium skybox writ small.

    The hosts were a couple I had not met before, and, as things go around here, talk turned quickly to houses, architects, and how long it takes to get things done.

    Even though it has been a long time since I saw the Japanese film “Rashomon,” I can remember the profound impression it made. “Rashomon” introduced Japanese cinema to this country, and its director, Akira Kurosawa, went on to become one of the most influential in American filmmaking.

    So, they say Edward Snowden is a traitor and yet they give those who reported on his public service work the Pulitzer Prize.

    The Obama administration admits that it has overstepped when it comes to its spying on all of us, and yet if Snowden returns to this country, they will leap upon him and prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

    After I buried Pooh in Central Park, I wanted nothing more to do with felines, at least not for a while. I was in mourning for my little friend, and mourning takes time. My wife, however, had other ideas and a team of accomplices pitted against me.

    We lived on West 19th Street in Chelsea at the time, and a Dominican couple with four daughters had moved from the South Bronx into the building next door a few weeks earlier.

    As it happened the other day, I was in that recently relocated Amagansett store that sells little more than vinyl records, talking to my friend Carlos Lama, who works there, when a woman walked in with a surprised look on her face.

    “People still listen to these?” she asked with a wide grin.

    “Yes, they sure do,” the ever-polite Carlos replied. Then under his breath, and to me alone, he whispered, “They all say that.”

    Why is it so hard for me to give things away? My friend Myrna says it’s because, like her, I was a Depression baby. Our parents held on to worn-out, broken, or tattered things, believing they could never be replaced. Balls of string in her parents’  case, Myrna said; old screws and nails in mine. Who really needs a drawerful of cheesecloth and canning-jar wax that predates the Vietnam War?

    Is it possible that as we age, and become ever more aware of life’s horrors, that we are, perhaps in like manner, ever more stimulated by its beauties and wonders?

    I looked at the grass this morning, though it is not grass, it is an infinity of, to use Mary’s word, species (overlaid by crystallized snow this morning) that, even with Larry Penny at hand, would require endless study to catalog.

    It was Peter Matthiessen, I think, who said that we should consider ourselves lucky if we were awake five minutes a day. 

    Down the street from where we live is an arid wasteland of a building site, stripped bare not only of the modest house that was once home to a pair of gentleman gardeners but also of the profusion of flowers, shrubs, even trees (the ultimate insult) that they had so carefully tended. There is nothing left but 20-foot mountains of dirt, a broken-down shed off in a brambly corner, whose survival may have been an oversight, and a waiting construction trailer.  

    One of the biggest hurdles in running a newspaper these days comes from online searches and social media, sources that many in the industry should view as more of a threat than a ally.

    Ever since I joined the staff of The Star decades ago, I have adhered to the old-fashioned journalists’ prohibition against public expressions of support for one political position or another: I do not sign petitions, attend meetings to either advocate for or oppose matters of controversy, and I do not usually participate in polls. This week, however, I broke with the last of these standards.

    A flush bank account inspired me the other day to buy two new pairs of athletic socks, a spending spree that I hid from my wife until I thought the timing was right.

    She chose that moment to confess that she, too, had been prodigal, having taken to the cleaners a wool sweater that needed mending.

    Easter has always seemed to me to be a mystical holiday. We have the darkness of Good Friday, the quiet of Holy Saturday, and then the glorious brightness of Easter. Growing up, my whole family would attend the 9 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s, Star of the Sea, in City Island. Even my father, who normally went to 6:30 a.m. Mass by himself on Sunday mornings, or so we thought.

    The house we live in, built for my parents more than 50 years ago, is a little tight for a family of five that includes a 4-year-old with an ample supply of Legos and dinosaur toys, as well as two dogs and a pet pig. We need more closet space. The upstairs wood floors are due to be redone. The kitchen cabinets haven’t been painted in 20 years.

    The East Hampton Star has offered, and helped pay for, its employees’ health insurance for as long as anyone can remember. As premiums have soared, what it has cost to do so has increased every year, as has the amount employees pay toward their coverage. Nevertheless, I am proud that, as a small company in an industry undergoing its own changes, The Star’s contributions to employees’ health insurance have stayed at the same level since 2007.

    Mary, unlike me, who because I’m a journalist knows better, immerses herself in the depressing news that Henry dutifully brings to our door every morning.

    Immediately, I reach for the sports, which are to be found within the business section, whose contradictory reports on the economy often can be found on facing pages: The economy, according to the latest jobs report, looks as if it’s on the upswing . . . Yellen Mutters, Market Tanks. . . . That kind of thing. So you buy and hold . . . on for dear life.

    When my cat Nelson went missing the other night I was beside myself. I knew in my bones that he was gone for good. Why else would he disappear for hours on end?

    I got Nelson a year ago, when he was a teenager, I suppose, about 9 months old. He had been found as a kitten by a friend in an abandoned gopher hole in her yard in Hoboken, N.J. After fostering him for a while it became clear her cat was never going to accept him, so to East Hampton Village he came, where he happily became an indoor-outdoor critter, coming and going at will through cat doors.

    A friend sent me a text message Tuesday night that the spring peepers had begun to sing near her house. Down here by the beach, the diminutive frogs had started their chorus exactly a week earlier. They were late, according to a rough record I keep penciled on our basement wall; last year, their ringing love calls began before the middle of March.

    A single batch of daffodils, in a tight cluster near the sun porch in my backyard, is almost in bloom. They seem to be saying “thank goodness” for this week’s sun and warmth. Before long, I will see which other plants survived the long, cold winter (and survived the ravages of the famished deer).

    The daffodils were planted by my friend Victor one fall day many years ago. He had ordered too many bulbs and, without so much as a how-de-do, came over to put the extras in the ground as a gift. I looked out the window one morning to see him digging away.