Columnists

I’ve been looking a little longingly lately at accounts in Newsday of playoff games, in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, and softball, wondering if the day will come when East Hampton teams will be in them again. Baseball used to be, boys lacrosse used to be, girls lacrosse too, and softball, of course, used to be.

Hook Pond is jammed with carp. The other evening one of the kids and I pulled over near the Dunemere Lane bridge to watch groups of the nearly leg-long fish breaking the surface of the water. 

The logo of the Eastville Community Historical Society, a longtime nonprofit based in Sag Harbor, has three profiles, one black, one white, and one red.  When the society sponsored musical and dramatic performances at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Sunday, however, 99 percent of the people in the audience were people of color. 

Up with the dogs at my house means stirring before sunrise. Not that I mind as I sit upstairs with my first cup of coffee, looking at the bay and listening for the birds between the dogs’ various post-breakfast snorts and grumbles.

Some of my friends already know that my daughter and her family are moving this week from a winter rental in Sag Harbor to the Rattray family house here in East Hampton Village, while my husband and I pack up and head, gulp, to Greenport and the North Fork, where a spiffy cottage awaits us at Peconic Landing.

The other day, having almost given up, none of the clothes in the stores having caught my eye, I saw something, a light blue shirt, extra small, with a collar and partly-rolled sleeves, that I thought might look very well on her, her eyes being dark blue and her hair dark brown and as long as I can persuade her to keep it. 

Do you ever dream of being in a car that’s heading backward at a great rate of speed as, with one hand on the wheel, you crane your neck around so you can steer correctly while madly pumping the brakes to no avail? 

You don’t? That’s good. I think it’s because I’m fretting too much about the direction this country’s heading in. Happily, I can weather such phantasms; they don’t keep me up long.

In this digital age in which even someone like me, who thinks of herself as a stickler for grammar and punctuation and has made the English language her lifetime work, uses linguistic shortcuts — IMHO, for example — it seems pretty antiquated to complain about other writers’ prose stylings.

I never claimed excellence in grammar, but there was a time when I boasted of a proclivity for spelling.

As you franticly dash around this Memorial Day weekend, or hide out away from the crowd, you might take a moment to reflect on the longest-term visitors to the East End — horseshoe crabs.

A month ago, I wrote in this space about having come within three steps of falling for a nasty scam involving our grandson, who was in jail (so he said, or so said his very own frightened voice on the landline) and needed $3,000 (“Please don’t tell my parents”) for bail.

“Physically, I’m in decent shape, it’s my mental condition that worries me,” I said to my doubles partner the other day, and she, concurring, said that tennis was indeed “a mental game.”

Although I have been known to carry on about how wonderful it is to live in a house that has been in the family for generations, and to answer proudly that “it came with the house” when someone asks about the provenance of some object or other, the other side of this seeming attachment to history and old things is, simply put, a deep-seated resistance to change.