Columnists

    Mary Ellen Hannibal talked about her new book, “The Spine of the Continent,” in a Star interview in September. In it, she describes the effort by some 30 nonprofit organizations to recreate a 5,000-mile corridor for wildlife from Alaska through the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains in Mexico. She called it “the most ambitious wildlife project ever undertaken.”

    Two weeks later, in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, she wrote about biodiversity and the interconnectedness of living things.

    Recently I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Frank Tuma Jr., now 88 years old, at his home alongside the Montauk Downs golf course. We talked about Frank’s young years in Montauk and his varied life experiences.

    Frank’s dad, Frank Sr., first came to Montauk in 1919 with the Coast Guard. His mom, a Baker from “under the bridge” in East Hampton, was from a large family who helped to settle much of what is now Springs. Frank Jr.’s middle name, Nathaniel, comes from the Baker side of the family.

    I guess we are all aware of breast cancer, thanks to a month filled with dyed pink ribbons, T-shirts, and even the cleats on the feet of the New York Jets. We are aware that it is a prevalent disease, especially on the Island on which we live, but is that enough?

    Our community has the best of intentions, with a strong desire to support those who suffer from the disease, as was apparent at a fund-raiser last weekend in Amagansett, and we all hope for a cure, but that is not enough. What about prevention?

    The house is quieter now that the storm windows have gone up, an annual task that I was able to complete on Sunday. Not that there are really all that many windows with removable storms to take care of. There are five full-size panels to put in and two screen-door inserts.

   Do you remember “The Piano,” a film starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, and a girl named Anna Paquin? Described by Jane Campion, the filmmaker, as a “Gothic exploration of the romantic impulse,” it was a hit at the first Hamptons International Film Festival in 1993, and, as they say, the rest is history. A part of that history is Ms. Paquin, 11 at the time, winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

   When I think of what I’d like this country to be, I think, as probably many others here do, of Bonac.

   My unbroken streak of roughly 30 years’ driving without running into a deer came to an end Sunday night. I was at the wheel with a full load of family a couple of hours after dark, heading east on Pantigo Road. I noticed a vehicle, which was coming the opposite way near the Hildreth’s department store, suddenly slow, then a moment later a crashing thud came from my side of the car. Our middle child, who was seated behind me, started to weep; she said she thought someone was trying to kill her.

   Standing impatiently on a line that snakes toward a check-in counter or security area at an airport, you have no doubt seen people like us: one passenger in a wheelchair; one traveling companion trotting alongside, like a dog chasing a car; and one airport employee pushing that wheelchair — unhooking the cordons and sweeping his or her charges ahead of everyone who waits.

   When it came time to take a photo following a recent interview with Patch’s Oliver Peterson, I struggled to fit around my neck the myriad press passes I’d accumulated over the years, along with the chain I once wore as Jacob Marley’s Ghost in a Christmas parade, and wondered at how ironic it would be were I to be strangled in the process.

    More likely even, I told him, was that I’d wind up buried under stacks of back issues (my ever-encroaching filing system) as in an Ionesco play, staring fixedly at my 1953 UNIVAC.

   Since I’m not really in the fashion game, I’m just going to put this out there. This fall’s fashion, designed mostly by men, is horrible. I believe there is a conspiracy theory to take us back to the days of women’s suffrage and the deposition of the petticoats from 1776.

   Our electric coffee grinder started giving off blue smoke and sparks on Tuesday morning, putting a punctuation mark on what was shaping up to be a difficult week. A friend in Seattle came to the end of his relatively short road, taken by prostate cancer, then came the death of David Hernandez.

   I changed my voice mail message this morning, announcing my return from “cloud nine” and my intent to attend once again to all things sporting.

    When Debbie Salmon asked on my penultimate blissful day where I’d gone on my two-week vacation, I said, “Here.”

    “Ah,” she said, “you took a staycation.”

   “For India’s Children, Philanthropy Isn’t Enough.” The article in The Times caught my eye, and dozens of memories leapt to mind, each a vivid snapshot from one of five visits to that faraway land.

    The article described the crushing poverty that still afflicts many Indians, and the “endemic corruption, from the very top down to the ground level,” that will prolong it, perhaps forever.

   People don’t throw things along the side of the road the way they used to. This is a good thing; nobody really likes to look at litter.

    That wasn’t quite the case when I was a kid growing up on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett. In those days, my cousin Cleo, who lived just down the road a piece, and I would walk the grassy margins hunting for discarded matchbook covers.

   I was thoroughly puzzled when my husband, Chris, came home one night recently carrying a gigantic bag full of lima beans. He launched into a story about how his father had brought home unshucked limas once a year, and how — in homage to a neighbor’s family name, Lyman — they jokingly called them “Lyman beans” around the dinner table.

    “So what?” I wanted to know.

    Did he and his siblings actually like them?

    He said they all loved them, and that it was fun work getting them out of the shell, too.

   A friend of mine who has a friend in Vegas who’s a bookie told me an interesting story the other day.

    He said his bookie friend had said that if Romney and Ryan win, my friend should pay for his round of golf when they played there and take him and two of his friends out to dinner. Whereupon my friend said that, in the alternative, should Obama and Biden win, he expected his bookie friend, a devotee of Rush Limbaugh, to pay for his round of golf and to take him and two of his friends out to dinner.

   Many of my 1,214 Facebook friends have told me that they wish their lives were like mine, and I agree, I wish my life was like mine, too — as it appears on Facebook. Days are filled with beach walks, boating, and hula hoops, and nights with sunsets and live music.

    A recent event has led to the opposite effect, however, and now I wonder, “Should I stay or should I go?”

   My son, Ellis, and I spent a few minutes one afternoon this week gathering great handfuls of eelgrass and making a quick pile of it after Saturday’s hard northwest wind pushed long lines of the stuff on the bay beach near our house. My intent was to add it to the compost; Ellis, who will be 3 in February, thought it was a fine place to drop down for a rest and look at the sky.

   Amid all the acrimonious and confusing debate about health care as election rhetoric rises to a fever pitch, one fact is indisputable:

    Medicaid “is the only safety net for millions of middle-class people whose needs for long-term care, at home or in a nursing home, outlast their resources.”

   To the marriage of true minds I admitted an impediment on our 28th anniversary, unaccountably forgetting to give Mary a card, a failure of the heart rendered all the more stark when I saw, in her card, that she’d opened her heart to me.

    The setting was tranquil, fittingly so for such an occasion, mother-of-pearl colors refracting luminously off white clouds while the sun went down behind a lone clammer in the harbor.

   A black guy walks in to a high-end hair salon in the Hamptons. . . .

    That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my attempt to formulate a joke about my experience. But maybe it’s funny enough as it is.

   September comes, and like many others, I find myself almost subconsciously taking stock of the preceding months. The impulse may have roots in an agrarian past, idealized perhaps, in which we counted up the season’s harvests, what we squirreled away in the rafters, so to speak, for the coming barren months.

   On Friday morning as Labor Day weekend began, we were unfortunately — in Penn Station. Why had we done something so foolish, you may ask? We had a date in New York the night before and had somehow messed up the Jitney reservation for the trip back. By the time we called, all the morning buses were full, and so, anxious to get home as soon as possible, we decided to take the train.

   It’s high summer and I’m apologizing about once or twice a week to people whom I’ve slighted either by commission or omission.

    What was it a sports psychologist told me once? That the pros didn’t beat themselves up because, while they were confident, they knew at the same time that they weren’t perfect nor could they ever be. And so, in taking that extra pressure off themselves, they were able to get nearer to perfection than a perfectionist could.

   The other day, much to my astonishment, our two absolutely indoor cats fetched up with fleas.

    I know there was no winter last year, and I know that makes a difference, but in 12 years of indoor cats and human feet walking in and out, this is the very first time for fleas. Can this be climate change on a totally local level?

    A nice flea bath at the vet was in order for Dilly and Lois. Dilly stood still for the bath and the blowing out of her Maine coon cat fur. Lois was profoundly unwilling, and had to be sedated for her bath.

   On Monday evening at a picnic at Long Beach in that neither-here-nor-there world between North Haven and Noyac, there was a nearly constant rumble in the western sky. As the sun set, commercial helicopters, one after the other, raced in from Jessup’s Neck on trips to East Hampton Airport to pick up customers. An equal number, twice punctuated by departing seaplanes, went south to north.

   Now I know what these people have been writing about all summer.

    The other night, playing in a doubles league at the East Hampton Indoor-Tennis Club across the street from East Hampton Airport, there was an Armageddon-like roar such as I’d never heard before. I could only liken it to an A-bomb test.

    Living in Springs, I’m not used to hearing a lot of aircraft overhead, and thus, perhaps, have been less sympathetic than I am now with those who built houses in the airport’s environs, knowing, of course, that they knew an airport was there.

   As summer comes to an end (yeah!) a lot of people will look back with a fond memory of the summer concerts they saw. I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965 and still smile at the thought.

    It was especially cool for two reasons, the first being that George Harrison and I made eye contact and the second that our seats were so good that several members of the Lovin’ Spoonful sat in the same aisle as me and my fellow 12-year-old gal pals, one of whose father worked for The New York Times and got us the tickets at the last minute.

   If you happen to have been on The Star’s Web site during the past few days, you might have noticed that an Aug. 16 story about a satirical film about the Ditch Plain surf scene circa 2012 was lingering at the top of the most-commented list.

    “Kook Paradise,” the firmly tongue-in-cheek documentary, was made by two Ditch regulars, Tin Ojeda and Danny DiMauro, and was premised on the idea that for all the Montauk surf hype, the waves are not really all that good. It’s a bit of a “The Emperor’s New Clothes” message.