Columnists

    At about midday on Monday, I took a walk into the East Hampton Village business district just to get a little air before changing gears at the office. There was the beginning of an east wind, a bit of chill in the air. The elms lining Main Street were almost entirely denuded of their leaves.

    Downstreet, as the old-timers call the downtown area, was bare in spots as well. As everyone knows, many shops are closed and the ones that remain open, with only a handful of exceptions, seem to be selling things of no particular interest or usefulness to ordinary people.

    My memory for numbers has always been good. I know the phone number at the house we lived in for most of my childhood. Just now, I discovered that it is a working number in the 631 area code. I rang up to see who would answer, but the call was “forwarded to an automatic voice message system” and the number was “not available.”

    It wasn’t long ago that my old friend Kitty Monell came up to visit me in our old family blockhouse in Indian Field. “Daniel,” she said as she sat down on the living room couch, “we’ve gotten old.”

My eldest daughter, Emily, who is a 10, celebrated her 11-11-11 birthday this weekend with a dinner in D.C. where we were dressed to the nines, slapped high-fives, and thanked our GPS systems that we weren’t at sixes and sevens.

    Champagne flowed, and all of that, which is by way of saying that this resurrected column — of 11 years ago! — will have to do this week:

    This is the time of year when many of us who live around here can actually get things done. Just why summer and early fall seem so jam-packed that little things like paying bills, keeping up with repairs around the house, and socializing with friends become so difficult is hard to say. But when the clocks change and the days get dark before 5 p.m., once again we find a chance for dealing with it all. It is a paradox that the shorter the days, the more time we seem to have for what needs to be done.

Everybody loses things, right? And we all misplace objects only to have them reappear when we stop looking for them. As you get older, you begin to wonder if such commonplace occurrences are due to age. But last weekend, when my pocketbook went missing, it seemed to be a different story.

    A magical name — Zihuatanejo. The one-word message left in a hiding place at the end of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” creating an image of Mexican fishing boats, palm trees, turquoise water, and tropical weather.

    Given the snowstorms and frigid temperatures last winter in East Hampton, Zihuatanejo seemed a paradise found — sunshine, sandy beaches, sea breezes, fish dinners of just-caught dorado, sailfish, mahimahi, and tuna.

    When I read what people occupying Zuccotti Park are saying I tend to nod my head in agreement, except when it comes to those who would — with the help of dei ex machina, presumably — overthrow the entire system, which, I’m afraid, we’re stuck with.  

    No doubt, capitalism can be exploitative, which is why, though not in a union myself, I’ve always supported them. If there had been no unions — and thus no middle class — this country would have seemed like a third world one insofar as income inequality is concerned far, far sooner.

    A couple of weeks ago, I scheduled an appointment for an eye exam, my first in about 10 years. A decade ago an optometrist told me that there really wasn’t any need for me to get a prescription. This year, after plowing through the mountain of letters to the editor, staring at a computer screen for days on end, I thought the outcome would be different.

    Though last week I wrote that the number of letters we ran in last week’s Star was a record, what I meant to say was a record for the time that I have been responsible for sifting through them each week.

I recently flew to Fort Worth, Tex., to attend a dinner in honor of Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science.

    My sister said the other night that she was feeling a bit low, and attributed the feeling to “the changing seasons.”

    I commiserated, saying I too felt a certain sadness this time of year, what with everything that had once been green and flourishing falling into the sere, the yellow leaf. And then, adding to the atmospherics, I began to hum a few bars of “Autumn Leaves.”

    There are 78 letters to the editor in this week’s edition of The Star, which is a record as far as I know. Who says print is dead?

    The occasion for the verbosity is, of course, Tuesday’s election in East Hampton, in which control of the town board is in play. A digest of the letters might go as follows.

    Even if Larry Penny, The Star’s resident expert on flora and fauna, hadn’t said so last week, I had already noticed that, as he put it, “In deer culture, learning to avoid cars and trucks is a trend that is gathering momentum.”

    My own observation does not come from data, of the police or wildlife-society sort, but from my interaction with the family of four-footed ungulates that hang out in my neighborhood.

    On a crisp October day in the 1960s, with the sky azure and Kennedy’s New Frontier just emerging, Dad said to us, “It’s Columbus Day weekend, where’ll we go? Amagansett — remember there’s no heat in the house — or the mountains of Vermont?” We’d never been to the mountains . . .

    The following morning we headed for foliage country in our dependable silver ’61 Rambler — brisk golden leaves flying, purple heather, maple trees, and ski slopes, albeit green ones.

    Putting my money where my mouth was I redistributed a chunk of my wealth this past weekend in the city, living large, as it were, and tipping lavishly, though remaining all the while humble and thankful for my good fortune — a pluralist despite exceptionalist tendencies.

    At the Oyster Bar, and having ordered six Blue Points and six round ones from Maine, I knew that while I was no Diamond Jim Brady, I was blessed — all the more so because Mary, who I had thought would be sharing, contented herself with shrimp.

    I have the perfect prop for Halloween — a black cat, made even scarier because she’s a smelly black cat. I’ll put her in my front window and pick her up whenever a large group of trick-or-treaters arrive so she’ll release what we delicately call a windy. That’ll teach them to threaten me with a trick or treat.

    You might think shopping for a new car would be fun. After all, you get to drive lots of them, maybe get a free hot dog, and spend the day tooling around showrooms peering at vehicles you might never consider actually calling your own.

    But after two trips to Riverhead, several hours of sales pitches, and winding up no closer to making a decision than when we started, my wife, Lisa, and I had had it. The two sessions we have had so far were not without their amusements, however.

    Voting-reform legislation, which  has been proposed in 34 states, brings me back to 2004, when John Kerry tried to unseat George W. Bush.

    Women hikers and campers are as common as men these days, or so it seems, but 100 years ago? My grandmother-in-law was one, a concept I could not imagine until I saw the evidence that didn’t fit my stereotype of Edith Banister Cordes — until someone dropped the notion in my lap. Ede, as she was known by her friends at the time, was the older sister of Jud Banister, the East Hampton Village mayor from 1936 to 1954.

    Here it is, the second installment of neurotic observations from an urbanite transplanted to a small town.

    Fall is here, and I’m not sure how that happened. Steeped in a new job and locale, my learning curve has kept me busy, but it feels like things are starting to slow down. Or maybe it’s that I’m finally gaining a better hold on the whirlwind of happenings out here.

    On Monday morning, all the pews in the Bridgehampton Catholic Church were filled for Jack Musnicki’s funeral. Jack was the father of a number of my friends, Bridgehampton kids whom I got to know only later in life, the divide between that hamlet and East Hampton being what it is.

    We’ve all heard of, and possibly heaped scorn upon, stage mothers who push their children into the theater or onto the TV screen. Of course, more recently, stage fathers have been in the news, too, pushing daughters onto the pop charts and tennis courts.  

    The tendency may be hard to control. Parents want to, and should, encourage their kids to do well, but it is sometimes difficult to separate children’s own interests and talents from what their parents wish them to be. Trying to get your children to fulfill your own dreams is an obvious mistake.

    With the economy hesitating to recover, is it time to think about finding or changing jobs? Normally, about one person in 10 changes occupations per year. Nowadays, about twice that number contemplate switching. What’s so good about saying goodbye to a job or career? What’s good about being fired?

    “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I said to Mary the other morning. “Nay, nay, thou art more lovely, e’en more pissed off at me. . . .”

    And with reason.

    Occasionally, I get a bee in my bonnet. Or ants in my pants. Whatever insectually-inclined idiom you use, I call it “hot-foot.” I need to fix something that isn’t broken, I try to change something that doesn’t need changing, I want to pack up my bindle and hit the road.

    Why? It could be genetic. Being a “matzo-pizza” I am the product of two famously nomadic tribes — the Jews, usually at the hands of some Cossack-induced pogrom, and the Sicilians . . . well, let’s just say mi famiglia had to move and change their names a lot.

    On Saturday afternoon we were invited to go crabbing as a family with friends at one of the local oceanside salt ponds. It was also to be a picnic. Some friends were bringing a brazier and a big pot; others would bring bread, wine, salads.

    I arrived first with Ellis, our toddler. The bed of my pickup truck was filled with buckets, a cooler, crab nets, and stakes to which our bait lines would be tied. It was early, not quite noon. Shorebirds lined the edge of the pond, disturbed only as my son ran near, rising and settling on a small sand island nearby.

    At dinner with friends not long ago, we got to cataloging all the terrible things abroad in the world, from natural disasters (tsunamis, floods, and earthquakes) to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to severe malnutrition among millions in the Horn of Africa.

    I was reminded of that old saw purported to be an old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

    There is no evidence that this phrase, which sounds a bit like a witch’s spell, is actually Chinese — much less ancient — but it seems particularly apt for our post-millennial days.

    On the eve of the 21st century, a new generation of professional women entered the work force. With them, a trend in feminist surnames was emerging: the taking of their husbands’ last names as their own. Is the trend a shift backward? Or does it indicate the completion of a circle?

    By the time I got home from the Hamptons Marathon I felt as if I’d run one. Standing for a long time trying to find recognizable faces from whom to cajole quotes in a crowd of 2,000 can make you feel like you’ve hit the wall.

    My time was four hours and change. Coffee stops at John Vassilaros’s stand in the parking lot got me through it.