I was more than confident, I was cocky.
It was the first week of October. I was sitting at the weekly East Hampton Star editorial meeting. I had already talked about what I anticipated the next few days would bring me on my beat, which is cops and robbers, plus the town’s zoning and planning boards. (Sometimes the last two are confused for the first two, but they are different, I swear.)
I was finishing up, and, almost as an aside, I said, “I have jury duty on Tuesday.”
Bedtime comes early this time of the year, or at least we try. I’m up an hour before the kids have to be out of bed to get a couple of ounces of coffee down before trying to cajole them into their clothes, to brush their teeth, to eat breakfast. If they make the bus, the older two are gone by 7:30. Then it’s time to stuff the youngest one into his car seat for his ride to school.
That the South Fork is part of the greater metropolitan area rather than the rural place we used to think it was has become almost impossible to deny. You get the message from conspicuous consumption, both in the size and shape of many new houses and in the boutiques that have turned East Hampton’s Main Street into Madison Avenue East. But you also get the message by simply taking note of all the millions of special events you can participate in on any given jam-packed weekend.
Take Saturday, for example.
BookHampton has a daily quiz now, and so I thought why oughtn’t I to have one too.
Which Shakespearean characters said:
1. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
2. “For in a minute there are many days.”
3. “It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.”
4. “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t is I know how to curse.”
5. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
“Tashi delek.”
The words, mumbled while fishing for coins in my pocket, surprise me, though it was I that had uttered them.
New London, Thanksgiving Day, 11:30 a.m. I’ve allowed so much time to drive to Orient Point that I catch an earlier ferry and arrive an hour sooner than anticipated. I’m famished and everything is closed. Finally, not far from the Amtrak station, a small grocery, open.
A middle-aged couple sits inside. Finally, I’ve chosen a few items, and stand at the counter. On the wall, pictures of the Dalai Lama.
Sharp criticism greeted the New York Post editors’ decision this week to put a photograph of a man about to be struck and killed by a subway train on the cover of the Tuesday edition. The image presented the Post with a dilemma its editors are likely to face a lot more than we do at The Star: when to run or not run photographs that could cross a moral or ethical line. I’m not saying the Post made the right choice, but the question is more nuanced than the critics make out.
More than 43 million Americans are said to have traveled at least 50 miles to celebrate Thanksgiving, and among them were four members of our family, including two grandchildren, who live in Nova Scotia. Two other grandkids were in Tennessee visiting other relatives for the long weekend, but it was a grandmother’s dream come true, nevertheless, having so many gathered here at one time. The feast at our house, with 14 adults and seven kids — from 2 to 11 — was all that it’s supposed to be (at least according to Norman Rockwell).
Mary had been after me to change my voice mail message, which, she said, aside from being boring, was way too long.
Allen, our neighbor, said, in a message he left, that it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. And so, opinion being deeply divided, I tried to be more succinct. Now when you call, you’ll hear me say, “I’m either jumping to conclusions, hurdling obstacles, or running a fever. Please leave a message.”
We were stopped in traffic on the way to Sag Harbor a few weeks ago when a car pulled up alongside.
“Hey,” the driver shouted. “Do you want to sell that car?”
“I might,” I said, startled. Actually I’d been thinking on and off for a year or so of selling my much-loved little Recreational Action Vehicle (longspeak for the Toyota RAV4).
“What year is it?” he wanted to know.
“It’s a ’97. Listen, we’re late for a movie, and I really can’t . . .” He broke in. “What’s your phone number?”
Life on the beach is a temporary proposition. This I learned from my father, who was old enough in 1938 to remember the hurricane that ripped across Long Island and became the one by which all others here are measured.
My gal pal and I spent almost the whole hour it takes us to walk from the Star office to Main Beach and back on Monday talking about — what else — food. Not food in general, of course, but specific to our Thanksgiving tables.
When our lights went out the second time, during the northeaster, Mary said if Obama hadn’t won she really would have been depressed.
The story goes that when I was a little girl of about 4 or 5 I went next door to a neighbor’s house and asked if she would sell me two pieces of bread for a nickel. The woman of the house was worried that we had no food and my mother was mortified. I think I was just practicing my future yard sale skills. Although I would never insult anyone by asking them if they would take a nickel for Grandma’s old serving dish.
Among the rewards of small-town newspapering are the little tidbits you learn about things that are not really news but are fascinating or amusing or heartbreaking nonetheless.
On the serious side of the ledger, there are the ambulance calls we hear on the office emergency-frequency radio. Sometimes the call is from the home of someone we know; other times, they are strangers. On Monday, I listened with increasing anxiety as a request for transportation to the hospital for a badly dehydrated elderly woman in Springs initially went unanswered.
How can any of us go about our daily lives as if nothing had happened? We learn to look away from, if not entirely ignore, human suffering in other parts of the world, but it ought not to be possible to act inured to disaster closer to home.
Thanks to guys from Woburn, Mass., we got our power back on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 4. As for our own utility, I sighted my first LIPA trucks on Nov. 7 (the first day of the northeaster) heading up Three Mile Harbor Road — 10 days after the superstorm hit and two hours after we’d been rendered powerless again.
Survival. . . . It is not a light subject. Not everybody likes when I bring it up or when I want to put the Weather Channel on during happy hour.
It’s a toss-up whether the most astonishing thing about the post-Sandy gas lines here was that they happened at all or that they ended so abruptly when the state imposed odd-even rationing.
For those who were not in the New York-New Jersey region to see it, let me describe what happened. When word spread on the Thursday after the hurricane that supplies were going to run out, a collective freak-out quickly followed. Drivers immediately converged on the gas stations to top off their tanks.
Halloween will be celebrated on Saturday in Belmar, N.J. I suppose the Belmar kids will have a good time, regardless — better late than never, when it comes to kids and their candy. But it’s hard to imagine the grownups really putting their hearts into caramel apples or ghost lollipops, after all the losses suffered there.
Delis here, those that had power, were awash up to their hipboots in a flood tide of humanity the morning after Hurricane Sandy blew through. I told Artie Seekamp, of Brent’s, that he and his employees should get a prize — Bill Hall and One-Stop’s staff too — for having withstood the historic storm surge of egg sandwich orders.
Springs, where I live, got off relatively lightly, yet we’ll probably, if history serves as a guide, be the last to have power restored. First in school taxes, last on LIPA’s repair list. That’s just the way it is.
I met Elton John once. He had come to Quad Studios to play on a session for Mary J. Blige’s 1999 album, “Mary.”
The song “Deep Inside” is essentially the two-chord riff of Elton’s “Bennie and the Jets,” with Ms. Blige singing/rapping over it. In the penthouse studio high above Seventh Avenue, he recorded a piano overdub, playing hot licks from the “Bennie” riff with one hand as he adjusted the headphones that kept slipping off with the other.
For the kids, our six-day family evacuation to the grandparents’ house off Sag Harbor Road was an adventure. For me and my wife, Lisa, it was a chore. For our three dogs, it was deeply unsettling. The pig was indifferent.
How do you write a column when a bad hurricane is on its way . . . and your power is likely to go off before deadline time? You could try to write about something else, something light and humorous. (For instance, I’ve been planning to get a column out of my husband’s odd fascination with casseroles, and how he made one of his own creation that was so massive we had to freeze quarts of leftovers.) But with the tension in the air, and the gravity of what could possibly happen, such thoughts get blown away with the wind.
Could the great income inequality in this country have caused the Great Recession?
Apparently, recent economic studies are advancing this idea, to wit, that squeezed middle-class earners, beginning in the 1970s, increasingly borrowed to keep afloat, betting chiefly (and wrongly, as it turned out) that the value of their heavily mortgaged homes would forever rise.
Memories are embers that fade to ash if not tended. Last weekend I brought my father’s ashes to a cemetery south of Syracuse to reside beside my mother. It was his wish. The Ondondaga Valley Cemetery was cloaked in a gossamer fog pierced by the yellow tops of turning trees. Tall pines spread their bows evergreen above the stones.
A child’s bucket, full to the top, of mantis shrimp sits in the office refrigerator. I picked them up on the beach early Tuesday, just after sunrise, before the gulls could get to them.
There was a lobster, too, that I considered taking, but it was nearly snapped in two by the waves Hurricane Sandy pushed up, and it had already begun to smell. The mantis shrimp are destined for a cooking pot, provided I can get the sand off them.
Those of you who pay attention to what goes on over the East Hampton Town line have no doubt heard of Bridget Fleming, a Southampton Town councilwoman. Having now won a Democratic primary to run for the New York Senate, however, she has to think about name recognition.
“Did you see ‘Trouble With the Curve?’ ” I asked the nurse following my hernia operation at Southampton Hospital.
When she said she hadn’t, I said, “Well you wouldn’t quite get it, but the scene at the urinal, during which Clint Eastwood remonstrates with his reluctant-to-pee penis, was as nothing compared to what I’ve been going through.”
Last Thursday was perhaps the most beautiful day we’d had over the last several weeks, perfect for a midafternoon bike ride to Atlantic Avenue Beach.
As always, I pedaled down Miankoma Lane and, as always, slowed as I neared the house, just past the school where, now as then, children ran and played in the magnificent autumn sunshine.
The house looked different to me now, so many years on, but in the mind’s eye, the interior was just as it was in the countless hours I spent there.
There is still a surfcasting rod in the back of my truck, despite a sense, widely shared, that the striped bass fall run is fizzling out.
Mike Solomon, an artist I know who fishes nearly every day, says that despite his best efforts nothing has been going on on the beaches for him. The last decent fish I know about from up this way showed up on Oct. 11 when John Musnicki caught a 36-inch bass in East Hampton. Montauk has been slow, with a couple of exceptions, since before Columbus Day. You hardly see gulls along the shore, the picking has been so slim.