Columnists

    Every professional writer who makes his or her career gathering other people’s stories should be on the opposite end of that equation at some point. Sure, we write about ourselves and our experiences from time to time, but it is very different when someone else decides to take on your story, whatever it may be.

    Most local after-school activities were canceled Tuesday as a light snowfall drifted through the air over the South Fork. Traffic on Main Street quieted down; the usual rumble of work trucks was thinner. The snow wasn’t sticking. The temperature was slightly too warm, but that did not stop the preparations.

    From my window, looking out toward the Town Pond green, I could see the occasional snowplow roll past, all geared up with nothing to do.

      Our family doesn’t like to throw anything away. This is a problem, given that I and one of my sons have inherited houses that were full of things to begin with, and given that my daughter used to haunt yard sales and the Ladies Village Improvement Society’s Bargain Box looking for interesting household implements and china and doodads.

“At a certain point you’re going to plan that gathering which you won’t be able to attend. You’re going to make your final arrangements.”  — from the blog The Screaming Pope

       Q. Dear Pope, as you know, I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and recently settled on Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, which I’ve been hoping to show you one day soon. Should I select a plot on higher land, so that drainage is good?

       We tried, but, as usual, failed to escape Thanksgiving.

       “Let’s go to Sam’s,” I said to Mary when the subject came up, “and have a large pizza with cranberry topping.”

       It’s not that we are antisocial — we do care for our relatives, but when they’re foregathered all at once it can be overwhelming, especially if you are — as Mary often is — the designated cook. (I, being the designated joyful one, have an equally arduous task.)

     There are Hamptoners who only use their houses here one week a year. I know this because two years ago I worked as a sous chef for such a family. Headed by one of the biggest Wall Street whales, they only inhabit their Water Mill House during Thanksgiving week, the rest of the year being spent in the city, Florida, England, France, and probably more places to which I’m not privy.

       When I was younger, my standing joke at this time of the year was that all I wanted for Christmas was socks. It was true then, and it is true now; socks are just fine, at least for me. For our three kids, however, gift-receiving is another matter altogether.

       And children’s presents are made complicated these days by the ubiquity of smartphones. While the younger ones may want those shiny and bright geegaws seen in the Sunday paper circulars, the truth is they will cast them down quickly to lose themselves in a tiny screen if given the chance.

    Thank goodness President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Congress to set Thanksgiving permanently on the fourth Thursday in November so that we can follow an annual routine. If Thanksgiving were allowed to fall pell-mell on any random day of the week — like Christmas does — I am not sure how we would get ourselves organized.

    I get so wrapped up in the winter holidays that everything else goes by the boards. Television, newspapers, Facebook? I have no idea what’s going on in the world, beyond the rounds of the Thanksgiving marathon.

    There are some days when you feel that you’re up to anything, at the top of your game.

    They say as a woman ages the first thing to go is her body. With me, though, it was my teeth; the body went second. For the past few years my teeth have been breaking down and falling out. But my smile, and it’s a big one, has been beautifully restored thanks to my new dentist in Southampton. I’ll be offering my thanks to him tomorrow when I chomp down on that traditional turkey dinner, celery and all.

    Cold weather has put an end to what perhaps was a fool’s errand on my part. Sometime in mid-fall on a balmy weekend afternoon, I decided to start restoring our distinctly mid-century, divided-light casement windows.

    The talk of Montauk last week was that Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News political commentator and best-selling author, had come to town. Not only was it news that he had bought a spectacular property on the oceanfront, but that he had torn down two small houses that longtime Montaukers considered part of the community’s heritage.

    The house at the end of the block, where Madeline Bastis, a Zen priest, once told me that when it came to reporting on the New York marathon, I should write about all the finishers from here, not just the top ones — to wit, that attention should be paid — is being torn down.

    At first I thought how sad, but now, having got out her file and reading through it a bit, I imagine her saying, in Zen fashion, “Let it go, Jack, let it go.”

    It is too late to stop: The top-secret project is under way. A group of East Hampton residents ages 11 to 17 are cloning the mayor of East Hampton Village located in the State of New York, United States of America.

    Forget about turkey, this is the time of the year that our thoughts turn to shellfish. That is, if you are inclined, as I am, toward such things and did not get quite enough of the fall striper run.

    Shellfish news from local waters has been mixed. Most disturbing was a report this week that the East Hampton Town Trustees’ scallop sanctuary in Napeague Harbor was illegally dredged and sustained considerable damage to its eelgrass beds. One of the trustees filed a police report; there is no word on suspects.

    Going to Buffalo, of all places, wasn’t my idea. But my husband’s notion of trying to see every house Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed is infectious. Chris had learned that Buffalo was the site of a number of Wright houses and other buildings, so going there had been in the cards for some time. It turned out to be a fascinating few days.

    I have sometimes cast a gimlet eye on pieces sent to The Star as “Guestwords” by travelers who write, as if with authority, about places with which they have only a nodding acquaintance. But, if you’ll excuse me, here I go.

    I’ve just been afforded a welcome opportunity to listen to a concerned, and perceptive, citizen regarding the recent election — he making a good case that one-party rule, whether Democrat or Republican, often doesn’t make for good governance.

    After he’d delivered himself of his considered opinions, I suggested he put himself up for office some day, but he, as I thought he would, demurred. He was retired, he said, and therefore doing only things he wanted to do. Being baited by the opposition at town board meetings, I gathered, wasn’t one of them.

    I have a nose, but it doesn’t work. Actually, my nose works; it’s my brain that doesn’t. Nine years ago, visiting my sister-in-law in rural Pennsylvania, I fell down a flight of stone steps to the cement floor of her basement. A six-pack of Rolling Rock cushioned my fall. When I picture how it must have looked, I see a hilarious pratfall. But to my wife, son, in-laws, and nephews looking on, it wasn’t funny.

    As I have admitted before in these pages, I have found it difficult to open my wallet for weekday lunch ever since Bucket’s Deli closed and the Griffiths moved away.

    My friend A.J. has a mission. As a leader of an organization called Solar Cookers International, which encourages the use of solar thermal cooking in sunny parts of the world, she has proposed that the United Nations make solar cooking — as a  “renewable, freely replaceable fuel for the daily preparation of food and safe water, without contaminating the environment” — a basic human right. “All people should have access to that right,” a document she recently submitted to the U.N. states.

    “I hadn’t known there were real people in Palm Springs,” I said to Mary after we’d seen the Hampton Theatre Company’s riveting production of “Other Desert Cities.”

    There’s still much to learn no matter how old you get.

    This time, despite not one but two unscheduled stops on the Expressway, the Jitney arrives right on time. I alight and walk in the sunshine toward the meeting place, just as on the previous Saturday.

    The November afternoon is surprisingly, wonderfully warm, and at Park Avenue I turn south. It was a good idea to leave the jacket behind, unburdened by the unnecessary, the better to roam freely.

    Back on my feet again / I’m back on the street again / I’m back on the top again.

    Shortly before last week’s issue went to press, something came in over the transom that transformed an ordinary pre-election week into a full-blown, viral Internet frenzy.

    A call came at about lunchtime on Oct. 30 about our placing something in the paper from Laurie Anderson about the death on the previous Sunday of her husband, the rock mold-breaker Lou Reed. Eventually, we received an e-mail, and I also fielded phone calls, one from Ms. Anderson, several more from a friend of hers, about whether we would put the statement in the paper.

    Let’s hear it for longevity. I’ve been at The Star for more than 50 years. Yikes. At least I haven’t been at the same desk or even in the same room in the building all these years. And, of course, we work differently now.

    In the old days stories were typed on yellow paper rolled into manual typewriters, and we edited with pencils, although they weren’t necessarily blue. We cut and pasted, and it meant exactly that. Blades were involved. I probably cut and pasted more than others, because I’ve always been the sort of editor that juggles thoughts — paragraphs, quotes.

   That some people find the evidence of tradesmen’s lives in the blue-collar section of town offensive is puzzling.

    We’ll never make Springs Saga­ponack no matter how hard we try, nor should we want to. Uniformity, whether in the form of grandiose mansions or too tidy half-acre lots, seems to me to be the real offense.

    Springs used to be celebrated for its diversity (for its admixture of farmers and clammers and artists). Now apparently it is not, conformity being ever on the march.

    With zombies in the movies, zombies on television, and zombies in print, I’m starting to think we should cool it.

    “If you build it, he will come‚” a voice told Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams.” And come they did, strolling out from fields of corn and straw. If we don’t stop being so hospitable toward the zombies, they too might come, and then we’re all goners.

    From where I sit, something interesting is happening here in terms of political involvement. This week, The Star ran some 74 letters to the editor — plenty but not quite the record. This is astonishing when you consider that there is no contest at the top of the ballot to gin up excitement and that one party’s majority is already assured.

    At first blush, it was hard to understand why Southampton Town officials would fight a lawsuit brought by a group of churchgoers who claimed their civil rights were violated when they went to Southampton Town Hall on July 26, 2011, to protest against same-sex marriages on the first day such marriages became legal in New York State.

    It has been widely reported that police refused to allow them to remain on the steps of Town Hall because the building had been declared a “Bias Free Zone” in 2008, with a sign posted to that effect.

    I’ve been through hell — as it was envisioned by Dante — and it doesn’t strike me as being too different from much of life as we know it (though there are many arresting phantasmagorical special effects).

    So, I am ready to move on — it seems everybody’s ready to “move on” these days, at least that’s what they say in the newspapers — through purgatory and from there into the light — just as the fly did this morning through the open window in The Star’s upstairs bathroom.

    If you had told me last month that I would be missing a 45-pound bundle of muscle and joy, a “hound mix,” according to ARF, I wouldn’t have believed you.