Columnists

   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.

   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.