Columnists

    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.

    When fall arrives, people prepare by decorating their houses and businesses with colorful mums, Indian corn, and orange-tinted fairy lights. Children jump in piles of crunchy leaves, without a thought of the chiggers or ticks that are lying in wait, and smoke spills out of chimneys, filling the air with the wonderful scent of burning wood.

    Tuesday’s lunch was delayed by a stop at Egypt Beach, where I tried a little surfcasting. October’s early days are among the most enjoyable here, with their easy pace. The office phones ring far less often, the urgent calls of public relations people reduced to a trickle.

    Who is Shear Ozeri and why would I want to follow her on Twitter? The reason I ask is that Twitter thinks I would. Never mind, I can look her up on Google if I really want to know. The question arose when I got the following e-mail: “We’ve missed you on Twitter, Helen S. Rattray.”

    I had only been to Twitter once, so I was flattered. I clicked to find out what else it had to say. After all, Twitter has helped topple repressive governments, hasn’t it? Who was I to ignore it? That’s where Ms. Ozeri came in.

    God forbid that the super-rich should pay at the same rate as the middle class — a terrible thing for investment, never mind the fact that businesses are said to be flush with cash and that a slight hike in the upper rate in the Clinton years produced no slowdown at all.

    When I moved to the East End 30 years ago, I never intended to stay. In my post-high school hippie days, I had left Long Island’s suburbs behind, eventually headed west, and embraced a life different from the one my parents lived. Access to wilderness, an alternative culture, and a rural setting were key. But after two years in Washington State, following one in Maine, I got sick and somehow it made sense to return.

    With the clothes dryer failing to turn on, the kitchen wall phone delivering heavy static, and then the furnace shooting a stream of water onto the cellar floor, it was one hell of a weekend.

    I wasn’t complaining, exactly. Bad things come in threes, don’t they? So the siege was over, right?

    This year, with both of my boys now at the John M. Marshall Elementary School, one in kindergarten and one in the second grade, the back-to-school feeling I get every year — part of the meta schedule I carry around from my childhood, teen, and college years — is mixed with the sense of a milestone gained. Both kids in full days at the big kids’ school! Yippee!

After having drunk deep of some amazingly smooth White Lightning corn liquor that my wife’s cousin, who was visiting us for a few days last week, had brought along from Virginia, I managed after a while on the first night to attain to such a level of incoherence that he, suddenly fixing me with a quizzical gaze, asked what exactly my point was.

    “. . . Whaaa?”

    “What’s your point? What are you trying to say?”

    My daughter, Katie, went back to school on Aug. 30, her senior year at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Speaking to some of her high school friends’ parents the other day, we cannot believe how fast the college years flew by. It seems like they just graduated from East Hampton High School! Where did the time go?  

    Walking into the Seafood Shop in Wainscott, for a moderately obsessed recreational fisherman like me, brings to mind the fans of the New Orleans Saints in the bad old days, when the team stank so much people in the stands took to wearing paper bags over their heads to avoid embarrassment.

    The Suffolk County Legislature is getting in on the nationwide campaign to get consumers to take along reusable bags when they go shopping (which is even touted on posters in post offices). A hearing is to be held today on a proposal to impose a five-cent surcharge on every plastic or paper bag distributed by a retailer in the county.

    The story was supposed to begin here at an illegal poker hall in Hicksville called the River, but the River ran dry and I was left staring at a blackened door with a mailbox next to it that said Fish. It must have been a marker or tag for new players to locate the building. Fish swam in the river, right? More than likely, the River was flowing somewhere else, but I had no idea where to find it.