Columnists

    My family had a chance to see the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in existence, at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut last weekend. We had been to New Hampshire to pick up Adelia, our oldest child, at camp, and made our way back to the New London ferry by way of a water park, a visit to the college I went to, an amusement park, the Mystic Aquarium, and the Seaport.

    Our house has been full of kids this summer, or at least it feels full when, say, three grandchildren are around.

    “Three?” a friend asked with what sounded almost like a snicker. “All 11 grandchildren were here,” she said. “We’ve got a big house, but you have no idea what shopping for food, which we did every day, was like.”

    “Welcome. You have reached the customer assistance center for National Grid. . . . The estimated wait time to speak to a representative is 10 minutes or less. . . . At the end of this call, your representative may ask you to provide the answers to two short questions about the service we provided you.”

    Seven minutes, 15 seconds later:

    “Can I have your account number?”

    “I don’t have my account number with me. I’m returning your call.”

    “Without your account number, I cannot talk to you about your account.”

    Having taken a peek at Geoff Gehman’s memoir before it went to press, before it went to print last week, I ran through the office saying I had been canonized.

    But, as Geoff later correctly said in an e-mail, in order to be canonized you’ve got to be dead.

    I had to go to the post office two Tuesdays ago to get the mail for the office. Russell Bennett usually goes but had no car, so I offered. I opened our box, extracted all of the mail, and was headed to the mail counter to pay for some postage-due receipts. The gentleman who was also headed to the counter held the door open for me. It was Eli Wallach!

    When the thought crossed my mind well before my family headed out to the Sag Harbor carnival last week to get a fishbowl ready, I should have acted on the impulse. Instead, we returned with a bag of three goldfish from one of the games of chance and had no place to put them.

    My wife got up to take communion at Tom Bergmann’s funeral at Most Holy Trinity Church the other day, and I must admit I, unshriven as usual, was a bit surprised.

    But she reminded me later that she thought of the rite differently, that it had to do for her with bounteous nature and our humble place in it rather than with any pastoral proscriptions or learned behavior.

One of the surprises in growing older, at least for me, is that you have trouble recognizing people you’ve known for ages. It’s not that you start forgetting who your friends are — again, at least in my case — but that they no longer look like the person who is lodged in your visual memory. Only after a double take do you realize who it is, and only after the encounter is over does it occur to you to wonder if you have become unrecognizable, too.

    On a brilliant afternoon at Mecox Bay, while one of our friends made lunch, the other offered to take my husband and me for a spin in their Boston Whaler. We three walked barefoot to the end of the dock for a short, unserious outing.

    Feeling like 12-year-olds on the lake at camp, we shed our septuagenarian identities. We were practically singing, we were so happy. For about 15 minutes, we followed a flotilla of swans — equal in elegance to the estates along the bay.

Birthdays come but once a year, which is a drag because on that one day I’m treated like a queen and even get away with not having to cook dinner. Mine was yesterday, and I’m sure by the time this is published I will be basking in the afterglow of a wonderful day. Do not fret, however, if you missed it, because in my house we have birthday week, which allows me to get away with a lot for the week, except preparing dinner. I will graciously continue to accept gifts, and if you need a hint, I’m still waiting for my Rolex watch, preferably in rose gold.

    With no preliminaries or even a “How do you do,” a man walked up to me as I was looking at the surf on Sunday afternoon and asked, “Can anyone be here?”

    I knew what he was trying to say, but being in somewhat of an ill temper at the time, I played dumb. “What do you mean?” I said.

    This summer will go down, in my opinion, as the one in which the affluent finally burst the South Fork’s seams — and maybe the North Fork’s, too.

    By the end of 1940, in America or New York or Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan or maybe just in Washington Heights — an Upper Manhattan neighborhood running approximately east to west from the Harlem River to the Hudson River and north to south from 190th street to 160th Street — someone decided the children of Washington Heights needed a Brotherhood Week celebration.

    A crew from Town and Country magazine was here a couple of weeks ago, and, at the end of the day, the young reporter appeared at my door.

    My sweet little Volvo is so lucky. It has an odometer that measures how far it has gone since it was made, like all cars. And then it has two “trip” odometers. If I press the odometer button twice, I can get two other readings: for example, how many miles we have driven since God knows when, and how many miles it is to Riverhead.

    But the great thing is, if I hold the button down on the trip odometers, the car will reset them to zero.

    With the calendar flipping from July to August, changes come to the beach. Even before sunrise I can hear the difference in the wind, now coming from the north. It is a light wind, though, only a hint of what is to come as summer gives way to fall and then to winter.

    In the house, our oldest child was packed off to sleep-away camp for the very first time this week, another sign of time’s passing. Skittering hordes of sandpipers and plovers have been back for several weeks now, their numbers increasing each day as they arrive from breeding places in the far north.

    Having grown up in the metropolitan area and spent childhood vacations in the Catskill Mountains, it comes as a surprise to me that I have enjoyed being on the water sailing more than other summertime pleasures here.

    Now that New York has given the legal go-ahead to same-sex marriages, I should be busy this fall. As a Universal Life Church minister and authorized marriage officiant in the state, I’ll be officiating at weddings of gay and lesbian friends eager to tie the knot.

    I bought two books at the recent Amagansett Library book fair — a nice clean copy of Bartlett’s for my office, which I will proceed to mark up, and “Rapid Italian for Students and Tourists,” which better provide pretty rapid results indeed, for my wife and I are talking about going to Italy in September, even though the dollar’s worth about 70 cents over there.

    “Maybe Little Italy would be better,” I said the other night, “or Sam’s.”

    Sometimes I feel like a short-order cook in my own house. According to my wife, Lisa, it’s my own fault, and she is probably right. We are in one of those stereotypical situations with a household of young and fussy eaters, each of whom has strong likes and dislikes.

    Ellis, who is 11/2, is by a mile the easiest to feed, if the messiest. Half of anything he’s given will end up in his mouth eventually, though sometimes via a trip to the floor or a hand-art session followed by his snuffling it off his tray like a pig onto truffles.    

     Because one of my friends wants to lose a lot of weight and recently asked whether I had any recommendations about how he should go about it, I’ve been thinking about diets.  We had discussed counting calories and the Weight Watchers system of food points, but I had seen a new documentary called “Page One: Inside The New York Times” and knew that Brian Stelter, a reporter, had lost 90 pounds in a relatively short time. The question was, how had he done it? The answer was easy to find.

It really was a steam laundry. Of course you already knew that if you were a Laundry restaurant patron during its 25-year run on Race Lane dating from 1980. The large industrial washing machine on the patio was a good clue.

    On entering the office one recent deadline morning, I was told that the electricity had gone out and would be out for the next six hours.

    Since I had one more story to write, not of much moment, but nevertheless a story that needed to be done to fill out the page, I thought, for the first time in a very long time, of manual typewriters and how they would — for me at any rate, because I don’t have a laptop — save the day.

    The transition from urban dwelling to small-town living has been anything but easy.

    A good friend called during work hours early this week and said he had something important to discuss. Immediately, I thought that he was calling to say he was engaged now that New York is about to allow same-sex marriages.

    As it turned out, he was calling about an idea he had for something entirely unrelated and of a less thrilling nature. I love a good wedding, and my friend, if and when he decides to marry his long-term partner, would probably throw one hell of a party.

Somewhere in the archives here at The Star are stories about how the Atlantic sturgeon was caught here and made into caviar.

After the divorce, I had to rent my house each summer in order to keep up with expenses and somehow get myself through college

Back to school catalogs have begun to arrive, and summer, the season that when you’re young you think will never end, has barely begun..

Not even the Kona, that magical coffee bean, could rouse the sleeper, and by the time he did wake up, the external shell of me was ready for bed.

Trouble on the beach of one sort or another is inevitable once the days get hot and the water reaches a swimmable temperature.