Columnists

   My ex-husband came to Shelter Island to deliver the remainder of boxes I had stored in his basement, my former residence on the North Fork. “You have a lot of love letters in there,” he said. “Really?” I asked, surprised both by the information and the fact that he had apparently read the letters, which were not from him. I had been wondering what might be contained in the delivery that might be interesting, useful, or exciting, but did not consider love letters. Life is rarely anything similar to what I expect these days.

   Shellfish fans in the Town of East Hampton got a reminder this week of just how lucky we are — for now. The State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered a huge swath of Shinnecock Bay closed on Tuesday until further notice after the detection of a powerful biotoxin there.

    What’s called a captain’s chair has been in the kitchen of the Rattray house in Amagansett since the 1960s. I’m not sure of the exact date it arrived, but I have never forgotten how it got there. My first husband and I had sailed over to Gardiner’s Island one summer’s day and gone ashore for a wander without being detected. The chair was in a small, tumbled-down building, exposed to the elements. I guess I must admit we pilfered it, yes, but at the time it seemed only right to save it from ruin.

   What a long strange trip it’s been.  

   I’m talking, of course, about Mary’s uncanny success in The Press’s N.C.A.A. tournament pool.

    Although this is written before the final outcome is known, I think she’s already merited accolades. I told Cailin Riley, The Press’s sports editor, the other day that it was “the sports story of the week.”

   If you were told you only had one day left to live on this earth how would you spend it? It’s a question a friend of mine is writing a documentary about, and it got me thinking.

    I would have a helluva day and gather my favorite people around me to max out my credit cards doings all the fun things I haven’t been able to do for lack of money. I might even buy a few new outfits from my favorite expensive store in Montauk to wear for the last day, which I’m assuming would be a hot summer day.

   The girls were sick this week with one of those things that were going around, and so I got to spend a fair amount of time at home. With one child throwing up and another confined to bed, I stayed close, but that did not keep me from paying attention to the wildlife in this early spring.

   Looking at the official Web site of East Hampton Town recently, I was taken aback when I  learned that town government has sanctioned 11 appointed boards, 13 advisory boards, and 19 free-standing committees, in other words those not exclusive to town board members. For some reason, the list did not include the village and hamlet citizens advisory committees that have been in a hot spot with Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson lately (although they may have been listed somewhere else on the site that I missed).    

   There was a time when he walked me; now, I walk him. I’m speaking of Henry, our dog, who has, his legs giving out, vaulted beyond me.

    He’s 84. How fast it’s all gone. Just the other day I couldn’t hit him enough tennis balls. He was insatiable in that regard, as insatiable as he’s always been when it comes to eating.

   I’m going to take the long way around to laud Kindle and the other e-book platforms as a few of the purest advances born of the digital revolution. But first:

   You know the summer season is approaching when the national media stories start appearing about places like East Hampton. This week it was a brief ripple in the Internet blogosphere that the village’s 2012 nonresident  permits for beach parking were selling out earlier than usual.

    A senior editor at CNBC.com wrote that the fact that the maximum number, 2,900, sold quickly this year could be a positive indicator for the housing market.

   For me, it is St. Patrick’s Day when the Montauk Friends of Erin hold their parade, as they will on Sunday. It has always been a big day, from the very beginning of our family life. In my memory the weather back in the ’70s was always perfect, the floats lively and sometimes hilarious, and the crowds well behaved. My first husband, Everett, promoted the parade in the days when it wasn’t yet as well known up the Island as it is today, and he made sure the kids had a good spot for viewing.

   We were marveling the other night at how the ancient Greeks knew every­thing when it occurred to me that they had nothing else to deflect their inquiries, no video games, no televised debates or movies to make demands on their time. No wonder they were so smart, they — and the Egyptians too! — had a lot of time to think and observe the heavens.

   One of my first assignments for The East Hampton Star was to collect recipes from Montauk locals for a St. Patrick’s Day supplement. I, being the very eager little cub reporter, approached every Irish person I knew for recipes and turned in about 20 of them. The Star used one.

    It was for colcannon, basically a mash-up of potatoes and cabbage, given to me by Peggy Joyce, the longtime kindergarten teacher at the Montauk School, who taught me more about nature on my children’s field trips than I learned from all my years of schooling in the Bronx.

   The spring peepers had started their annual chorus by the time the family got home from a vacation on March 13. We had been away for the preceding week, so if the frogs had started singing before that, I was not around to hear it. This bothered me a bit, since I have been recording the date on which I first hear them every year since 1998. As it is, however, March 13 ties for the earliest I have heard the peepers since I started taking note.

   The  campaigns of those who hope to become the Republican presidential nominee keep reminding me of the Democratic primary in 2008, when I almost lost a friend or two. I had expressed a personal preference for Hillary Clinton as the nominee, and gone to an event in her honor. I admired Ms. Clinton, thought she was brilliant, and found the idea of a woman as president exciting . . . but I had a change of heart and let it be known.

   About this time 25 years ago, in a fit of pique prompted by what I thought was an untimely weekend invasion of city folk seeking summer rentals, I wrote a column whose envoi, “go home scumbags,” sparked a six-week firestorm of reproval, each letter writer apparently thinking I’d been referring to him, when, in fact, I had been more enamored of the delightful rhythm of the phrase than put out by anyone in particular.

   Yesterday marked the 14th birthday of our Jack Russell, Petie.

    Fourteen is pretty old for a Jack, and Petie is showing his age. Those formerly fiercely brilliant brain cells, which once allowed him the wherewithal to actually climb a chicken-wire fence to obtain the delicious decomposing deer leg on the other side (but not, unfortunately, to climb back and therefore Not Get Caught), have been all but extinguished.

   Traveling with children, as my wife and I did last week, is, for those of you who have not experienced it, anything but relaxing. A man in the San Juan Airport departure terminal Tuesday, noticing Lisa chasing after our 2-year-old, Ellis, remarked out of the blue that she looked tired. I am sure I am looking tired, too, as I write this on a Delta flight back to J.F.K. After we land, we have at least two more hours on the road.

   We preach to the choir at our house, and when, following her excellent exegesis the other night of the world situation in which I could only nod in assent as each point was hammered home, Mary asked me what I thought, I said I thought it was about time to go to bed.

I do not know if you can ever understand loss, no matter how many times you experience it. In most things in life, repeated experience is a teacher, but each time you experience true loss, the circumstances are always unique, so the lessons are limited in use.  

    The second time in my life I experienced loss was in 1963 when I was 7 years old.

   This week’s cold snap notwithstanding, spring has come early this year. Bruce Collins, who lives in East Hampton Village, phoned recently to say he had seen red-wing blackbirds in his yard more than a week ago, something he did not recall before the middle of March.

    Out where we live on the southeastern reach of Gardiner’s Bay, things are a week or so behind the village. I noticed the rusty-wire call of my first red-wing on Saturday though, which is early enough. There have been no spring peeper frogs yet; their trills are at least another 10 days off.

   Three big does are concentrating on tufts of early grass at the left side of the front yard this evening. They, or their sisters and brothers, have already dined on the snowdrops in the backyard, although they haven’t eaten up the small daffodils that are just budding, at least not yet.

    Sitting at my computer at the front of the house, I can see what they are up to. I spy on them as they come and go, mingling among what remains of the many-decades-old rosebushes they decimated last summer.

   After getting my new hearing aid, and phoning Mary, I told her she didn’t need to shout.

    “But that’s the way I always speak when I’m talking to you,” she said.

    “Well, just tone it down a bit, I’m not deaf.”

    And then it occurred to me that, indeed, I am no longer deaf. The technology — though pricey — has finally caught up with me, and I can no longer plead hearing impairment when it serves my purposes to do so.

   “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never worn,” was a six-word short story composed by Ernest Hemingway to win a bet. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when placing a classified ad to sell two bass guitars and an amplifier.

    Since my husband, Phil, died of cancer almost five years ago, I had been confronted with the instruments during my weekly laundry chores. After a death, there is an immediate culling and distribution of the possessions of the deceased, but often a holding back of things that have more complicated emotional ties.

   There were flowers, balloons, hugs, and a wind-up jumping plastic frog Friday at Bucket’s. Friday was the day when Everett Griffiths’s 33 years of running the place came to an end and the still youthful-looking deli man and his wife, Angela, got ready to take life a little easier.

    At lunchtime friends hung around the door to Everett’s tiny kitchen waiting to wish him and Angela well. It was from here that he had served up thousands of egg sandwiches, made the salads, and provided a willing ear to those who had something to say.

   It’s winter. The summer people are gone. But I still go around town expecting to recognize faces in the crowd. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way anymore.

    Let me give you an example.

   Tonight we’re going to see Alec Bawdlin try to lin the mayoralty of New York City on “30 Rock,” and after that we’ll dial in one of Mary’s c-lin-ical shows, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

    This, of course, after The PBS News Hour has delineated for us ma-lin-gerers the appalling failings of the de-lin-quent.

    You could have knocked me over with a shuttlecock when the night before at the badlinton Lynn Baldwin asked me who Jeremy Lin was. “He’s only the linchpin of the New York Knicks, the lingua franca of the world, in fact,” I said, blinking.

   It’s impossible for me to think about the Academy Awards without remembering the night that I was lucky enough to attend.

    1976. That year was full of celebration for our country’s founding, fireworks, and tall ships, but no fete was more exciting to me than accompanying my father to the 48th annual Academy Awards to see my gramps, Mervyn LeRoy, receive the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award.

   In the weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which I wrote about on Feb. 9, East Hampton Town was considerably better represented than in 2011. My own participation was less than I had hoped, however, as I was laid low with a stomach virus that is going around — the less said about that the better.

   Making room for a better desk for my husband, shifting and sifting through towering stacks of papers, rearranging upstairs bedrooms where grandchildren sleep when they visit — and doing something about the heaps of toys, books, and games, which are clogging what is called the playroom — isn’t a bad way to begin a new year.