Columnists

   Now, I like Brian Williams. I usually watch his nightly news report at 6:30 p.m. But I have to take strong exception to the way he reported the emergence of millions of 17-year locusts expected in the next few weeks along the East Coast.

    Preaching to the choir, he was, full of anxious anticipation, brow furrowed with the threat of the looming plague. What’s next, he asked. First we are forced to endure mega storms, and droughts, and on and on. Oh the racket! Oh the horror we will now have to endure!

Eighty years ago last month, a boy was born in Eisenach, Germany, in a country already being torn apart as the Nazi Party rose to power. That boy was Karl Egon Heilbrunn, my father-in-law, and the story of his coming into the world, his defiant father, and what happened next is one of the millions of small tales of that terrible time that should not be forgotten.

   When Hillary Clinton, in an intense primary battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, said she was ready to lead the country from day one, she started an avalanche of everyday people using day one. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says the use of these words to indicate the start or the beginning of something dates back to 1971, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t really common in the popular vernacular until an estimated 2.5 million people watched the candidates debate in 2008.

   The viewing choice the other night was between “Berkeley Square” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

    “I guess it’s ‘Berkeley Square,’ ” I said to Mary, “because you don’t like sushi.”

    “Penny [Wright, her boss at Rogers Memorial Library] says you don’t have to like sushi to like it,” she said.

    “The sushi one then.”

    I’m glad I chose “Jiro” because it’s about a man who does one thing well, so well in fact (he’s considered by many to be the best sushi chef in the world) that at 85 he’s still working every day and still trying to improve.

   One of my assignments last month was to take pictures at an East Hampton Village Board meeting on the issue of solidifying a more modern approach to the vastly important international issue of Dogs on the Beach.

    One man spoke at length concerning forming a 2,000-strong organization directed toward “education” and “behavior” of both dogs and dog owners on the beach. He seemed to view it as a social activity, socializing with other dog owners at the beach, like in Central Park, but the beaches of this far-flung village are not Central Park.

   Just this week we received a message via Facebook from a reader in California who expressed what sounded like disbelief that The East Hampton Star had begun to ask frequent visitors to its Web site to buy an online subscription.

    This occasional reader said he lived on the West Coast and picked up a copy of the paper when he visited here in the summer. “I like to keep up with the local news,” he wrote. “Is it really true that you now want me to pay for an on-line subscription?”

    It is a good question. Here is an answer.

   My 5-year-old granddaughter, Nettie, is good at wishful thinking. I doubt that an adult gave her the idea that if you told the Easter Bunny, like Santa, what you wanted, you probably would get it. I am sure the bunny left her and her 3-year-old brother, Teddy, baskets with appropriate goodies on Easter morning, but leaving the bunny a note about what she wanted for (ahem) Easter must have been her own idea. And it was a two-sided note at that.

   I was surprised when, on arising this morning, I was cheery. There was no reason to be, but perhaps I am programmed to be so, particularly when things aren’t going well.

    There is spring, of course. Where it is I don’t know, but everyone’s saying they can sense it; there seems to be general agreement as to its inevitability. And then, of course, summer, which I inveighed against recently, perhaps unfairly, but it had it coming. “Ou sont les etes d’autant?”

   It’s really been a long time since I observed Easter in any meaningful way — or in any way at all. Tradition lived on this year, with an afternoon drive to Brooklyn and a late dinner, alone in my near-empty apartment, of Indian takeout and a couple Heinekens.

   In the early East Hampton Town records accounts are frequent about the initial apportionment of land by the trustees, who were the only governing body. Though it is not stated in an obvious fashion, it appears that the grants of acreage were conditional in that recipients were obligated to abide by certain obligations, some spelled out, others apparently assumed.

   “Childrens’ Garden — No Ball Games, Cycling, Dogs” reads a sign published with a recent story in The Guardian, an English daily newspaper, informing readers that “the sometimes vexing question of where and when to add an apostrophe appears to have been solved in one corner of Devon: The local authority is planning to do away with them altogether.”

   Whatever happened to the laughter boat? Which was to visit countries around the world and laugh, the idea being presumably that laughter would be catching.

    Sometimes I think our only hope lies, rather than in buggering priests or in cardinals with shadowy pasts, with the world’s comedians, those who have keen intellects and can hold a mirror up to the horrors and hatreds that individuals and groups somehow rationalize.

   I don’t buy Easter outfits anymore. I don’t wear them. It’s not because Montauk doesn’t have an Easter parade — even though we don’t, that’s what church services are for — it’s just that I’ve outgrown the whole new outfit thing. And forget the bonnet. I’ve always hated hats; I don’t have the head for them.

   “Have you seen a white skateboard?” the woman asked me, a hint of desperation in her voice.

    I had noticed her a short time earlier at the Abraham’s Path kids park run by the town in Amagansett. We were on the basketball court, and she and a young girl were taking shots, talking in Spanish and English interchangeably, while my son, Ellis, and I passed a ball back and forth.

     Across the park, two boys, the woman’s sons, I assumed, took turns on a skateboard on the ramps, while several other girls who were under her charge rode bikes.

   “It’s not fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” This Sir Walter Scott quotation provided Peter Matthiessen with the title of his book “Men’s Lives, “on the history and decline of the South Fork’s inshore fishery — and about the men whose lives depended on it. The quote has an ominous ring, and I wasn’t surprised that it kept coming to me when I was in Nova Scotia last week.

   Our spirits have been rising lately with the promise of spring, though spring, as anyone who’s lived in Bonac a while knows, can be a will-o’-the-wisp, heralding the year’s truly most depressing season — summer.

    It’s not “A-a-pril come she will,” it’s “Memorial Day, get ou — out of my way.”

   “I want your life,” said my Aunt Pat from California upon seeing me at my nephew’s wedding on Friday night. “I joined Facebook just to look at your pictures,” she said.

    “No, you don’t,” I assured her. I don’t post an update when I struggle to make the rent, I explained. I don’t share a picture of that. But yes, I live on an amazing island and I am blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful commute to East Hampton, by land and sea, and I enjoy capturing it when I can and sharing.

   Yesterday at 7:02 a.m. spring began in the Northern Hemisphere. With any luck the change of season will bring an end to the seemingly relentless string of coastal storms that began on Oct. 29, when Hurricane Sandy steamrolled the region.

    Sandy was just the biggest and single-most destructive of the 2012-13 assaults. A northeaster followed just over a week later. Then, after a number of ordinary blows, came the February blizzard and a couple more storms, including one on March 6 that echoed the great northeaster of that date in 1962.

   The flight from La Guardia to Halifax is a cinch: A small plane operated by Chautauqua Airlines for Delta gets you there in less than an hour and a half, and makes it hard to believe you are traveling to another country and have to bring along your passport. So it was with what you might call careless abandon that, in the air headed to Nova Scotia, I filled out a Canadian customs declaration. Too much abandon, as it turned out. Just exactly why I answered in the negative when ticking off the query that asks if you are bringing in food remains unclear even to me.

   Two Novembers ago I was set straight by Jane Callan, who tends the flowers in The Star’s windows, as I was bemoaning the season that was falling into “the sere, the yellow leaf.” Winter, she said, to the contrary, was not a sad time — not a sad time for a lover of flowers, at any rate — but a time of renewal, a time for gathering strength “so that they’ll come back even stronger and bigger than they were before.”

   It will be a good ole time in Montauk this weekend for the Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The fun starts tomorrow at a luncheon to honor this year’s grand marshal, Jack Perna. It’s also an opportunity for everyone to pull the green out of their closets.

   April showers bring May flowers, but March showers bring peepers. These tiny frogs are rarely seen but heard every evening from now until late summer. They begin as a thin chorus, gradually growing into a stunningly loud, high-pitched din by the peak of breeding season.

   The worst television commercials (IMHO) are those that hype drugs — those obnoxious, fast-talking “ask your doctor if” messages about panaceas for all kinds of ailments. They make me happy that I don’t watch much television.

    In the last two months or so, however, similar pitches (advertorials? infomercials?) have invaded my Mac’s inbox. I have clicked to request that the e-mail system filter them as junk, but so far it hasn’t worked.

   “I felt so environmentally impoverished,” I said to Rusty Drumm, a Montauker, “as I drove the other day out of Montauk toward scruffy Springs.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You can say that again.”

    “It’s God’s country,” he said.

    “You’re not kidding. I’ve never seen such a sky. Radiant with filtered silver light cascading down through tiers of mauve clouds . . . as if the heavens were opening to receive me. How could you doubt an afterlife after having been vouchsafed such a vision.”

   It was on a stormy Christmas Day, 1811, that field hands and members of the Gardiner family on the island that bore their name made their way to the shore where a French sailing vessel was founding in heavy seas.

   If you are like me and do not have many friends or family between the ages of 18 and 25, it is possible that you aren’t entirely aware of the Selective Service System, in which 20 million young men are now registered — and therefore signed up to be drafted should a draft be instated.

   I’ve written of love recently, and of death. Is anything left? Ah, yes, Downton Abbey!

    We were without it for 24 hours during the blizzard, our Cablevision wire having been downed by heavy limbs, and I’m telling you the wait was torturous. There’s only so much reading you can do.

   With birdsong starting to fill the air around my home and my gearing up for some heavy-duty spring cleaning, it has come to my attention that I need a wife. I almost found myself one in the fall, but after three dates I realized a divorce would be imminent. Besides, she had kids and I already have a few of my own, plus a grandson. I didn’t need any more children in my home.

   Complaining when it snows is strong evidence that you are growing older. What? You don’t look forward to how enchanting the landscape looks in fresh snow? What? You don’t get excited about a chance to watch kids, especially your grandchildren, sled down a hill? What? You’d rather sit by the fire than help make a snowman or a bowl of real snow dripping with chocolate syrup?

    I am beginning to understand why some folks, after they retire, become snowbirds or, even more drastically, actually move permanently to places like Florida.

   This day, with the sun glistening off the snow, is all the more beautiful because of the storm we’ve been through, a storm that was as punishing as the forecasters had said.