Columnists

    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.

    On the same course as last week, I’d like to think that not thinking is the goal when it comes to doing something athletic, tennis in my case, which is why I thought a couple of months ago that it would be good to attend East Hampton Indoor’s weekly “stroke of the week” clinics, so I could think about what I was doing wrong and could take heedless satisfaction in what I was doing right.

    It almost always feels like spring will never come, that the daffodils or forsythia are late, that the osprey have missed their return date, that the robins surely should have started their nest-building and infernal crack-of-dawn window-striking already.

    Despite the chill in the air, the ice crystals on the ground, or the occasional snow stubbornly remaining in the forecast, my unscientific study of spring’s arrival tells me this: It’s the length of the day more than its temperature that forces the season to shift. I could Google that, but I don’t want to.

    In the coming weeks I hope to finally correct what I and a number of other local people see as the misidentification of a portion of Gardiner’s Bay, something I have been pursuing for nearly six years.

    It is not coincidence that I am interested in this; the house I grew up in and where I now live is on its southern shore, and as my father, who was descended from one of the town’s first colonists, always said, it was Gardiner’s Bay. Napeague Bay, as online maps and other Johnny-come-lately sources erroneously have it, was never even heard of when I was a child.

    That said, he hopes to grow the economy from day one. At the end of the day, it’s gaining traction and — going forward — some people will be pleased. Others? Not so much.

    The paragraph above contains seven of the many jargon-y turns of phrase that get my dander up. I’m proud of being a stick-in-the-mud where American English is concerned. I’m not entirely sure what my problem is, but I simply loathe trendy, overused words and phrases.

    Because the winter past was particularly dreary, any sign of respite has been welcome; a little sun is all I ask, that and the crack of a bat and a head-first slide into second, or a deft pass for a one-touch score from the corner of the crease.

    The inevitability of spring is enough to brighten one’s mood, but, for me, who must cover them, interesting teams further lighten the step. Last spring was dreary that way, though I sense this April and May will be different, that there will be more things to enthuse about than to commiserate over.

    “Word has been received from Mr. and Mrs. D.W. Johns, who are touring the world. They were in India and write that they think and speak of Amagansett every day.” So reported The Star on this day in 1914.

    Ninety-five years later, facing certain death on the road to Manali, I thought of Montauk and mumbled a prayer to Sri Krishna that I might swim in the mighty North Atlantic again.

    “Dead,” the Tibetan driver said, so matter-of-factly I was sure I’d misheard him.

    “Huh?”

    “Dead. The child died of exposure.”

    This week the South Fork experienced an abrupt return to bitter weather of the sort that characterized the winter just ended. A sharp downturn in the thermometer was often accompanied by snow and wind, followed by a brief warm-up, then cold again.

    A story in The New York Times on March 3 brought into more vivid focus all the news these days about the Affordable Care Act. At least for me, it reverberated more strongly than all the statistics about those who remain uninsured.

    When I go, I’d like to go, as Montaigne said, “planting my cabbages,” which is to say either swept away by the one I love or, that failing, by the sure knowledge that I have swept away the opposition in a last rally at East Hampton Indoor.