Sometimes all you want in life is a tiny little something that makes you happy: the Andes Mint that comes with your check at John Papas Cafe, a valentine from a small child in February, the first backyard daffodil of spring. And sometimes, when you live in a small town, these small gifts that you crave take the form of tiny tweaks to public spaces that — if only someone would listen — you just know would make your life better. Micro-improvements that would cost the government very little but that would have an outsize impact.
Around the Star office, we make a sport of chit-chatting about ways we’d improve our world, if only we held the reins of power at the State Highway Department or Department of Public Works. Perhaps some of our civic wish-list items will strike a chord.
That concrete curb, for example, on the traffic island at the intersection of Three Mile Harbor Road and Abraham’s Path in Springs: Could someone paint it, please, in a bright, reflective white? We can’t be the only drivers who miss that turn on a dark winter’s night. Or what about the mysterious dearth of garbage cans on Main Street, East Hampton, between the entrance to the Reutershan Parking Lot and Main Beach, a mile and a half away? Dazed dog walkers have been lost in blizzards, trying to find a place to dispose of the plastic pooper-scooper bags clutched in their frozen hands. There are two exterior trash cans belonging to the East Hampton Library that bear the weight of many a Shih Tzu, but why should the library shoulder this filthy responsibility alone?
Or what about the faded directional arrows in the aforementioned Reutershan lot? Navigation of the lot, sometimes, feels like that drag-race scene from “Rebel Without a Cause” in which hot-rod drivers speed head-on toward each other until one chickens out. And could we somehow enforce a ban on delivery trucks double-parking to disgorge goods at the Sag Harbor end of Route 114, near the corner of Bay Street and Division? Catapulting that shoot feels like being buffeted through a pinball machine, and you’re the ball — pretty treacherous.
Topping the wish list of mini-improvements that would add sunshine to our day would be an off-season adjustment to the accursed traffic light at Wainscott Northwest Road and Montauk Highway. During peak trade-parade rush hours, in the morning and at the end of the workday, wouldn’t it be better if it simply flashed yellow, in winter, rather than going red and backing up traffic along the highway to the east and west? That’s all we really want for Christmas.