Columnists

   When Rick Santorum called President Obama an “elitist snob” for saying “every child in this country should go to college,” I found myself wondering how the Republican presidential candidates themselves stack up, education-wise. The former senator from Pennsylvania noted that he had seven children and, he said, “If one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him.”

    I happen to agree with that sentiment, but for one quibble: Who said being an auto mechanic was incompatible with having some sort of post-secondary education?

   For someone like me who has a home chicken flock, being caught at the Amagansett I.G.A. placing a dozen eggs on the checkout conveyor by a fellow poultry-keeper was highly embarrassing.

    The truth is that our hens, like many at this time of the year, take a break from producing. Egg-laying is somehow tied to the length of the day, and without artificial illumination of some sort or other, you either have to go to the store or go without for a few months.

   In recent months, life on the farm has included some activities that I never envisioned myself doing. The trash situation was slightly out of control, and since most of it was mine after a pointless juice fast, I used a wheelbarrow to load the soggy mess into the back of my pickup truck.

   I forgot when writing of my resolutions last week, resolutions for the irresolute, to say that there were two things I especially wanted to do in the new year, first to be able to print out what I’d written on the laptop computer Mary recently gave me, and second, to avail myself of the latitude this might confer, enabled as I would then be to write of nothing in particular from wherever I found myself, whether scaling El Capitan without a rope, sipping absinthe in Montmartre, or twisting the night away in Moscow.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

   You can’t even really call it a January thaw, since December was mild, and, save for a 15-degree night a week ago yesterday, 2012 has had above-average temperatures. This has been a very good thing where the Amagansett Rattrays’ gardening, outdoor chores, and playtime are concerned, as we (read: your humble correspondent) let things slide this fall.

   Although I constantly see art that I am moved to talk or write about that falls outside of my usual geographical constraints at The Star, few exhibits have challenged my actual perception of art, and particularly sculpture, as much as the current installation “Maurizio Cattlelan: All” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

   It being the New Year, I suppose I should make some resolutions — resolutions for the irresolute. My first one is not to write, at least for the moment, about politics or the state of the economy, dreary subjects that have nothing much to do with the hope that should attend a new beginning.

    Instead, I will write about my imminent colonoscopy, and how everyone’s been ingesting flavorsome food here at the office as, drearily, I sip from a bottle of Gatorade whose contents look very much like Pres­tone.

    Who knew that so many homicidal maniacs were running around loose in the Swedish countryside? Before Stieg Larsson’s revelations of murderous Nazi enclaves, before Henning Mankell’s dramatic decapitations, I had viewed Sweden as a liberal template for humanistic advancement. Now, though, it has to be acknowledged that Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is a touch unconventional, and that Mankell’s police inspector, Kurt Wallander, is serially depressed. Can this be chalked up to the effect of Swedish winters on the human psyche?

   The price of The New Yorker magazine if you buy it on a newsstand is $5.99, so it came as a surprise when I received a notice at the end of December telling me that if I renewed the subscription I get in the mail, I could send a second — free — subscription to anyone I chose.

There was a morning low tide on the last day of 2011. After tending to my household chores, feeding the dogs and chickens, and before the rest of the family was awake, I slipped out in the truck to go clamming. With little traffic on the roads before 8 a.m., I rolled easily up to East Hampton Village to buy $40 worth of gasoline and grab a clam rake from the barn.

On July 5 The New York Times had two articles datelined Clear Lake, Iowa, noting that Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich had marched in the Fourth of July parade. I was there and saw both of them. Ms. Bachmann wore heels. How impractical, I thought, for walking in a parade.

Perhaps it has always been so, but it struck me last week that so many of the sports stories I wrote in the past year had to do with people who had surprised themselves. In brief, they had not known it — whatever that might be, a faster time, a stronger performance, a more chiseled body — was in them.

    Ed Petrie, the East Hampton High School boys basketball coach who recently retired after a Hall of Fame career, was said to have gotten the best from each of his players, presumably not only surprising themselves but others — perhaps even him!

My parents died at 94 and 96, so I never expected my brother, Martin Men­del Seldon, to go at a younger age. He was 83 when he died on Dec. 28, after an unexpected, massive heart attack.

    I was in Nova Scotia on a wonderful Christmas holiday with my daughter and her family when the news came. Assuming that his funeral service would be held very quickly, I skipped coming home, as we’d planned, and headed out the next day to Sunnyvale, Calif., where he had lived for years.

I wrote the letter, sealed it with red wax and a kiss and sent it off to the North Pole. It goes like this:

Dear Santa,

    All I want for Christmas is a new knee. I’ve seen three specialists, my general practitioner, and have gotten five diagnoses: arthritis, a possible fracture, bursitis, edema, and a bruised tibia. Not one of them has offered me a fix, and I’ve been broken for over a year.

    Tonight is the third night of Hanukkah, a holiday —  in the month of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar — which lasts for eight days and often coincides with Christmas, but not always.

    Having inherited from my wife a laptop, the first I’ve ever owned, I realized in thumbing through some old columns that had not yet made their way to my archivist in Carlsbad, that for me the computer age began 23 years ago, in the summer of 1988. . . .

    Every year I ask my husband to get the Christmas decorations. He usually rubs his chin, sighs, and asks, “Now?” After an entire year of moving things in and out of the garage, the Christmas boxes have been shuffled and stacked and are usually in the farthest, most difficult areas to reach.

At some point at the end of this week, I’ll start my Christmas shopping. Being used to operating on a deadline, I am familiar with this sort of pressure. Moreover, buying gifts late reduces the chance that our children are going to discover them before they are wrapped.

    When you’re watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” this Christmas season I hope you’ll note how much this masterpiece by Frank Capra has to tell us about the way we live now — and the way we used to live then, in a more rational and humane time.

    Saturday, as I was on my way to run some errands, I saw a couple of estate-sale signs at an old place on Main Street in East Hampton Village. As it was before  the permitted 10 a.m. start time for such things, and the signs definitely did not meet code, I figured this was a renegade operation and that the police were going to show up soon.

    My father passed away last month at the age of 98. He was quite a guy, and I miss him. He lived in Amityville, and after he died I began cleaning out the house.

    There was a box in the attic that I’d seen there for years but never investigated. On the outside of the box was written “Letters 1943-1944.” They were letters my father had written to my late mother during that time. She was teaching in Poughkeepsie, and he was in the Marine Corps stationed on a small atoll in the Marshall Islands during some of the worst fighting in the Pacific theater.

    When an expert restorer of pianos and harpsichords said there was no point in saving the baby grand that had more or less decorated the living room in the family house in Amagansett for 30, maybe 40, years, the last thing I imagined was that in a week’s time I would buy another piano.

    Did you know that to beg a question is not to beg it, at least in our sense of the word? I learned that the other day from a 2010 “Common Errors in English Usage” calendar that has lain open to the May 15 entry on Baylis Greene’s desk for 19 months now, begging to be perused.

    Something fell from the ceiling in the Star building’s front office Tuesday morning, nearly striking Russell Bennett in the head.

    Things coming from above in the Star office take on more than a metaphorical significance when you consider that the first-floor lobby, if you will, has a ceiling made of glass panels held in place with a criss-crossing lattice of wooden slats. The ceiling presumably dates to when the building was put up by Everett J. Edwards, who was my great-grandfather. E.J., as he was known, opened the East Hampton Pharmacy here in 1901.

    In one sense, my basement flood couldn’t have happened at a better time. With Christmas approaching, the drive to accumulate (or should I say, more generously, “to give”) more worldly possessions grows ever stronger. The wanting is magnified. Consumerism calls. The pent-up demand begs for release.

    The bathroom scale started sending unusual messages as soon as the unusually pleasant and warm fall weather began to turn. I have a pretty small frame, and I’ve kept fairly slim in recent years due to a regular yoga practice, so when my weight varied by a whole 10  pounds on the digital screen one day a few weeks ago, I was more befuddled than alarmed.

    Was the scale broken? Or had I really been, unconsciously, fattening up for a cold winter like a prize goose?

    I counted the number of players who had their shirts off following American Samoa’s first-ever World Cup soccer win the other day, a singular victory reported on in The New York Times, and there were six. All happy fellows in good shape. Nothing to offend as far as I could tell, though if partial disrobing becomes the norm one shudders to think what will happen should it extend to boccie, bowling, shuffleboard, and bridge.

    Well, I’ve gone and done it — joined Facebook — though I have an eerie feeling it won’t end well.