Columnists

   Transitions are difficult. It is still summer, but the Canada geese are back in the fields. I already find myself concerned that it will soon be too late to make the most of the season. Suppose, I say to myself, you were on vacation here for only the last two weeks of August: What would you make sure to do?

   Mary’s favorite show at the moment is “Newsroom,” but they speak so fast it takes me about half the hour to find out what it’s about.

    Don’t get me wrong, it is very good, but I think they’re all on speed. Either that, or I’m as dumb as I’ve always thought.

    “It reminds me why I didn’t stay in New York,” I told her the other night. “I would have been ground up and spit out long before now and sleeping under my Saks Fifth Avenue flannel-lined overcoat on the benches of Penn Station.”

   Reading The New York Times on Sundays is one of the best parts of the day that my family calls Sacred Sunday. We try not to work or socialize on Sacred Sunday and devote our time to each other when we can. But lately, reading The Times has made me feel wholly inadequate, especially the wedding announcements in the Styles section. There’s not a chance in hell that I would ever measure up to brides of today.

   By one measure, 2012 has already been a notable year for tropical storms, though the Northeast wouldn’t know it. The ninth “named” storm of the season has developed and may grow into a hurricane as it passes just south of Puerto Rico.

   Houses are just about all I’ve thought about this week, as we put the final touches on the second Home Book of the season. It will be a supplement to next week’s Star and distributed free to shops and gathering places.

   Irene Silverman, knowing of the quietly desperate lives columnists live — even weekly ones, whom Jimmy Breslin once referred to as “retired” — gave me as she was walking up the back stairs the Wednesday before last a long essay from The New York Times on the “the power and glory of sportswriting.”

   John Lennon, I miss you. 

   This thought drifted through my mind last week as I swung the car around the Plaza in Montauk where, 36 years earlier, I watched as a long black limousine eased to the curb. Out stepped a skinny guy, hair cropped close, clad casually in orange T-shirt, blue jeans, and sandals; and his companion, tiny, long black hair flowing down and around a white kimono that billowed in the April breeze.

   It was fortuitous that the sky cleared late Sunday just as the last of the Perseid meteor shower tickled the upper atmosphere. With a college friend who was in town while one of his daughters was an intern at The Star, I was pleased to have been invited to watch a movie on a deck overlooking the ocean, then to stay on to see what stars would fall.

   Did you know that all 400-some-odd members of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years? (Okay, the number is 435, not including the non-voting members who represent the United States territories and the District of Columbia.)

    I am willing to admit my own ignorance on this quite simple fact. Apparently I’m not alone: I’ve gotten consistent responses in the negative over the last few days, when I asked friends if they realized elections in the House aren’t staggered, as they are in the Senate.

   By the time I’d finished reading John Cheever’s short story “Goodbye, My Brother,” to Mary, we were both in tears, and, for a time at least, thrown back upon ourselves as beautiful writing will do to you.

    We’d been thinking of the day — a day free of care, a day of no obligations, a day largely free of traffic, which every summer becomes worse — when, all of a sudden, we were impelled to reflect upon life, not just on its joys, which, of course, we try to do as often as we can, but also on its sorrows, not to mention its horrors.

   I write in praise of the ugly golf shirt.     

   Oh, I’ve got a beauty. It’s not loud, no. It would be better if it were loud. It is, rather, a mottled mix of black and gray specks — inexplicably or inadvertently designed by someone in the employ of Bert Pulitzer to look like the ghostly nothingness of an old antenna television after the programming ends and the final bars of the national anthem fade.

   Among the subtle markers of the inevitable turn of the year is the arrival here of shorebirds from their northern breeding grounds. For a couple of weeks now, their numbers have grown along the Gardiner’s Bay beach as they fatten on the shoreline’s rich supply of food.

   “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.” If that musical ditty doesn’t immediately ring a bell, I’ll tell you it is, or perhaps more properly used to be, a familiar (and jocular) ending for songs, particularly in bluegrass. I hadn’t thought of it for years, but I couldn’t get it out of my head for a couple of days recently, after making an amusing bungle of an attempt to make a simple appointment to have my hair cut.

    Read a letter recently in The East Hampton Press the writer of which was outraged that a successful psychiatrist, who’d had “one glass of wine” at dinner, and who was driving his 86-year-old mother home, had been caught up in the police dragnet of a few weeks back.

    That fatal glass of wine had resulted in the “guilty-before-proven-innocent” psychiatrist spending the night in jail “along with 20-plus others.” The cops, she concluded, had acted out of spite, envious of the successful. Something “right out of Nazi Germany [had] occurred.”

   Summer is over. For me, anyway. I’ve been at The Star for June and July as an intern from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I don’t have to tell you that The Star is a terrific publication — you’ve probably been reading it for years.

    The stories are well researched by dedicated journalists who are serious about their craft. The newspaper that comes out each week is the beautiful result of a few dozen people and their pursuit of excellence. It’s been an honor to be a small part of that unit this summer.

   A fuss broke out in the world of journalism earlier this month, when several leading news organizations admitted they had agreed to allow the Obama and Romney campaign staffs to review quotations before publication. A New York Times reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, broke the story about this devil’s bargain, which included his own paper among others.

   From time to time, you get to meet extraordinary people, people whose lives have made others better. Such was the case last weekend when Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian women’s rights and peace activist, came to East Hampton to participate at Guild Hall in what is called the Hampton Institute, a two-day series of talks and panels on topics of national concern.

    Ms. Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, a rights activist and journalist. The prize was deserved.

    Invited out the other day onto the water, where I hardly ever go, preferring to take in the views rather than hang over the rail, I ran to CVS to buy some Sea Bands, thinking they might help.

    I shouldn’t have worried, for the cruise to and from Coecles Harbor on a restored wooden prewar cabin cruiser was marvelously placid, the adults convivial, and the children beguiling.

   The full impact of where I was standing during the Great Bonac Fireworks show on Saturday night did not really hit me until I saw a photo taken by someone on the tugboat floating right behind us, looking toward the barge loaded with fireworks where, with hard hat and goggles on, earplugs stuffed into my ears, I tipped my head back at virtually a right angle to see the shells exploding right overhead.

   In the end, the catbird won the battle of the blueberries.

   For whatever unknown-to-me confluence of meteorological circumstances, 2012 has shaped up to be a great year for the native high-bush blueberry bushes that grow at the edge of the swamps near our house. I noticed the pale-green young ber­ries late last month, and watched closely as they neared ripeness.

    So too did a catbird or two, which I could hear unseen in the brush issuing warning cries when I lingered near the patch. The calls seemed to say, “Be gone. These are mine.”

   Having spent seven days on a 41-foot ketch this summer after a long hiatus doesn’t qualify me to judge the way boats of this kind now use electronic devices, but I know what I like when it comes to sailing: the taut feel at a tiller or wheel when a boat is in perfect balance as you tack to windward on a beautiful day in a breeze that is almost stiff. It’s that simple.

   When I solicited Sinead FitzGibbon’s advice as to a lower abdominal strain that’s annoyed me for a while and has kept me off the tennis courts, she, a long-distance athlete for all seasons, said, “Take up golf.”

    Taken aback, I said, with as much finality as a diffident sportswriter could muster, “Never.” Which reminded her of her 82-year-old father, who had said when she made the same suggestion to him, ‘I’ll play golf when I get old.’ ”

   I am often complimented on my ability to find the good in situations, and have even been told that my positive thoughts can be borderline annoying.

   Nancy Pelosi was on the South Fork last weekend, although hardly anyone noticed amid all the excitement about Mitt Romney’s fund-raisers hereabouts. Ms. Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, was here to promote the re-election of Tim Bishop, who is running for a fifth term as the representative from New York’s First Congressional District.

   “Hoy es El Dia de la Independencia en Los Estados Uni­dos,” I said to a woman, who, while an engineer in her native country, does what she can here. “Y yo lo celebré con una ducha afuera!”

    She laughed on hearing I had celebrated Independence Day by showering outdoors.

    There was no need, other than the fact that I like to try, for me to speak Spanish; her English is as good as mine, but she, whom I have enlisted as a sometime teacher (thus she will be building bridges of a different kind) is willing to humor me.

   It’s comforting to me how we scoot along each year marking the calendar by holidays. January is cold and dark, and after the enthusiasm of the New Year wears off, I feel a bit of a letdown. February gets more exciting with my birthday and Valentine’s Day — seeing hearts everywhere makes me smile.

    I’m a big fan of St. Patrick’s Day, even though my family has been in this country for five generations. As spring arrives, everything is a bit brighter and the dreariness of winter is forgotten as we celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. 

   Downtown East Hampton Village looked nice enough Tuesday afternoon when I walked through to get some salad and something to drink. The shop windows were full of expensive men’s and women’s clothes: colorful prints for her, blue-and-white checks for him.

   Concerts by the Choral Society of the Hamptons are sources of pleasure for our audiences, and they receive wonderful reviews. But for me, the Choral Society is more than that: It is a personal delight — and a good cause. I sometimes call myself a defrocked soprano, because I once had all those top notes, but now am an alto. No matter. I can head into a rehearsal feeling tired or out of sorts, and it falls away as I concentrate on the score in my hands and the collective sound of music-making. “Zen and the Art of Singing?”

   I ran into a close relative, my double in some respects, in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” this week.

    I picked up a copy of the play, which comes with “The Golden Age” and “What I Did Last Summer,” at BookHampton after seeing a beguiling Hampton Theatre Company production of his “Black Tie” at the Quogue Community House.

   There are no happy stories in this place, at least not for me.

    Sure, there are weddings. Weddings are happy. Brides are pretty, grooms dashing. I don’t cover weddings. Weddings don’t make the front page and they don’t sell newspapers, unless they’re marrying two super-size flavors of the month, or unless it involves local royalty.

    Me, I get the aftermath, the wives beaten, orders of protection violated. Wife stabs husband in self defense? That will sell newspapers.