Columnists

   While everyone in America is celebrating the Fourth of July on Wednesday, I will take a moment to celebrate my dog, Brodie, an incredible golden doodle who looks like a platinum blond, purebred golden retriever. Sounds silly, I know, but read on nonetheless and you too might celebrate him. He is my hero.

   I’m full of beans this week, having made enchiladas — the third meal I’ve cooked, I think, in the past 27 years.

    My mother-in-law still remembers fondly the flounder in orange sauce I did in ’85 or so, and then there was “the green meal” for one of Mary’s birthdays — artichokes, asparagus with hollandaise, pistachio ice cream, brandy Alexanders. . . . After which I, a self-described “wokaholic” as a bachelor, dropped the ball big time cuisine-wise as Mary began to hit the ball repeatedly out of the gastronomic park.

   As dusk came Friday night, a group of parents and children gathered on the ocean beach to mark the end of the school year. The children were sent off to gather wood. Someone went up to a friend’s house to get paper and some matches.

   It’s been a long time since I’ve been single and in the market, but having a contractor do some work around the house this year kind of took me back to the thrills and insecurities of my dating days.

   When one of my tennis partners the other morning asked what I did, I told him I wrote sports for The Star, and had worked at the paper for such a long time, going on 45 years now, that I was probably fit to be embalmed.

    “But first,” I said, “I’m to be enshrined!”

   East Hampton had a major development boom in the 1980s. At least in developers’ dreams: A 400-unit subdivision was planned for Montauk’s Hither Woods, 64 oceanfront house lots were to be carved from Shadmoor in Montauk, the 845-acre Grace Estate in Northwest was to become a community modeled on Hilton Head, S.C., with clustered and single-family houses and a nine-hole golf course, and Barcelona Neck, between Northwest Woods and Sag Harbor, was on the block.

   Leilani was blessed on Sunday. For over 20 years, I took photographs from the deck of the Montauk-based cutter Ridley, and the Point Wells before it, as the harbor’s fleet of fishing boats, yachts, sailboats, and a kayak or two, many of them well supplied with water balloons, paraded by during the annual blessing.

   On reading Gavin Menu and Cailin Riley’s pieces on me in The East Hampton Press last week, my ears were burning, my heart was soaring, and my cheek was sticking out when I told my co-workers that it must have been a slow news week.

   What is going on when 314 lookalike members of a gigantic crowd, and 235 of their spouses or partners, gather under a huge tent and do things like wave big white handkerchiefs around while singing? It’s an Ivy League reunion, of course — at a men’s college.

   The North Carolina Legislature earned no small degree of derision recently in attempting to tell scientists there how to predict sea level rise. A bill pending in the Southern state would constrain how its coastal commission calculates the rate of increase, requiring that numbers be based on trends only since 1900. This would leave out exponential shifts that may follow unforeseen changes, such as accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.

   Like most of us, I get a lot of spam — from politicians I do approve of, from organizations I don’t approve of, and from merchandisers of everything from country-style window treatments to sketchy-sounding laser-hair treatments. They really were annoying this week, however, when I got back from three days out of town.

   Monday night was the occasion of the annual East Hampton Star All-Star Awards in which we give recognition — and an dinner out with family or friends — to local high school juniors whose academic and extracurricular performance has been noted by their respective schools’ administrators. This year, as I drove to the dinner at East Hampton Point restaurant, I was thinking about what the world that these young men and women were inheriting would be like.

   The other day Apple iTunes, after years of meekly opening when clicked upon, inexplicably balked, demanding that I put in my password and username before it would let me give it 99 cents to hear Petula Clark singing “Downtown.”

    Aaargh. Am I the only fool alive who can hardly ever come up with the right combination of those two maddening computer evils?

   If you believe that a multimillionaire who did well for a small group of wealthy investors by putting money creation ahead of job creation actually is a champion of the middle class, I’ve got a fridge I’d like to sell you — one whose vertical freezer section we can’t get into.

   Nights for parents of young and getting-to-be-not-so-young children can be complicated, and by the standards of those without progeny at home, the things we celebrate must seem a little weird. Take, for example, the case of one editorial staff member here who was positively giddy on Tuesday morning because both her toddlers slept all the way through to 6:30 a.m.

   My British cousin, Jamie Gosney, recently decided to put together a compact disc — he calls it a family album — featuring the clan’s favorite songs as a tribute to his mum, my aunt Jen-Jen, who turns 80 in August.

    And he offered up a method with which everyone is familiar: “If you were, indeed, shipwrecked on a desert island, this would be the one piece of music you just couldn’t live without,” he wrote in an email.

   Our daughter, who while she wasn’t particularly athletic has one of her own who shows every sign of being so, recalled the other evening that her girls softball coach had been a marvelous encourager and that, thus, she had grown, through his encouragement and through practice, to rather love the game and to play it well.

   When Whole Foods and the Red Horse Market both opened in time for Memorial Day, my theory that East Hampton has one too many of everything seemed borne out. I harrumphed when I noticed that Whole Foods, clearly not a farm stand, is calling itself one (I suppose because it does not intend to carry as many groceries as it does elsewhere). Still, I was impressed when word went out of a well-targeted marketing come-on: orchids for sale for $10 apiece.

    If truth be told, and I’ll not tell it slant, I am quite unorganized.

   Our photo files, which, I tell everyone, are a Black Hole, are a case in point. I dare you, for instance, to find 1982. It’s utterly disappeared. I never did like to file those contacts and negatives anyway, which is why it’s such a mess in The Star’s attic. And I’m no better at home, a failing that has become all the more glaring given the fact that Mary is now an archivist.

   Almost all the grandparents I know contradict themselves when they talk about their grandchildren. They love them dearly, of course, and say they don’t see them enough. But, almost as reliably, they complain to anyone who will listen about how absolutely the kids wear them out.

   East Hampton Main Street will be strangely silent Monday morning. For a brief hour the hissing rumble of a three-day weekend’s traffic will cease as a modest line of veterans assemble to parade north toward Hook Mill and the war memorial.

    If last weekend was any indication we’re going to have to set some ground rules here for the summer. The Montauk Music Festival brought a large crowd to the hamlet and it reminded me of summers past and the things that people do that I don’t like.

   This is the season in which the parents of grade-school children put entirely too many miles on their vehicles. There are year-end dance recitals, music and theater performances, sports league playoffs, and the like to ferry the younger set to and from. Lisa and I have been spending what seems like hours every afternoon tooling between Amagansett and points west with one or more children in the back seat.

   When I was a kid, I hated writing thank-you notes.

    Christmases and birthdays would come along with presents in the mail (always welcome) from my Alabama grandmother, my poet aunt and composer uncle in Pittsburgh, and my two sets of godparents in New Haven and Woodstock, N.Y.

   “Which one are you — the Tin Man, the Lion, or the Straw Man?” Mary asked as our granddaughter, Ella, sat transfixed in front of “The Wizard of Oz” at our house Sunday evening.

    “Well, I’ve got no heart,” I said, “so I’m not the Tin Man, I lack courage, and I haven’t a brain. . . . But,” I said, brightening, recalling my Kentucky Derby pick the day before, “I certainly am lucky.”

    The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.  I bet that’s a truly ancient proverb: People have been coveting what their neighbors have since the dawn of time. But when the phrase pops into my own mind, it’s usually because I’m looking not at grass but at pictures of gardens.

   I often wonder when people pass away if they can still hover a few days and get a closer look at what’s happening down below on earth. Like our creator, can they see all? My mom passed away in April, and if she can see that I’m not wearing lipstick, allowing my animals on the furniture, and not always styling my hair, then I’m in big troubles, as one of my children used to say.

   Michael Heller, who walk­ed away with pretty much every photography prize at the recent state press association contest, said in walking up to me at Herrick Park the other day that he’d seen only one other rugby game and therefore knew practically nothing about the sport.

   Perhaps more disturbing than the hazing death itself — on Nov. 19, of a 26-year-old Florida A&M University student who was a drum major in its marching band — is the knowledge that brutality is ingrained in the culture of certain collegiate activities and Greek letter societies . . . and accepted by adults who should know better. It turns out, according to press reports, that a gauntlet of punches and kicks, called Crossing Bus C, was routine among band members, and that they felt it proved their strength and instilled pride.  

   Readers of this column may remember that a few weeks back I wrote about our family’s ongoing scuffle over whether or not to buy an expensive pet pig. The battle lines had this columnist on the “no” side, Mom and one daughter on the “yes” side, our 7-year-old daughter on the “sounds okay to me” side, and the 2-year-old oblivious and looking for his finger paints.