Guestwords

When I first came to the Hamptons in the summer of 1981, Tina Fredericks, who died in May at age 93, was the pooh-bah of East End real estate agents. “Realtor to the Stars”: So she anointed herself in her business ads, and so she was. The impression, widely held and not discouraged by Tina, was that she was the Queen Bee, and the rest were drones. It was more or less true.

This June we were appalled to read about fish kills in the Peconic Estuary, turtle kills, and harmful algal blooms in the Peconics and Shinnecock Bay. This was especially shocking to me since for many years I used these waters as clean “reference” sites for studies on effects of pollution in fish, crabs, and shrimp living in the waters of northern New Jersey.

Generations of summer residents have expressed abhorrence about the changing demographics and mores of East Hampton. They revile the crowds of strangers in odd dress on Newtown Lane (this year’s crop seems to sport a return to formality, with women appearing in high heels and dresses in the middle of a summer afternoon), while forgetting that they themselves were once neophytes.

David Sedaris has gotten me through some pretty tough times. Whether it’s divorce, death, or disaster, I read “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and know that everything’s going to be okay.

Real estate agents serving the Hamptons number in the thousands. This occupation represents one of the largest sources of employment in the area. Based on 2014 figures, agents in the Hamptons achieved income totaling approximately $167 million.

“This is not who we are,” blinked the message from a white friend who lives in Charleston, put up a few days after the brutal murder of nine people in a church not far from his home.

Mallet Man (MM) can be found at Indian Wells Beach when the summer sun is ablaze and you probably shouldn’t even be out in it. “But Ma, you promised. There’s surf to ride, pails to fill, holes to dig.”

When I was younger East Hampton felt so alive. Local businesses made up the majority of Main Street and Newtown Lane, and for someone in their preteenage years, there was plenty to do in every season. As I got older, however, more and more of what made this place feel like home disappeared.

I didn’t understand what was happening until years later, but the realization will remain with me always. It was 1982 and all my husband and I thought about was how we were going to raise our two young children and pay our newly acquired home mortgage with its 17-percent interest rate.

Sunday night, Labor Day weekend, 2014: So here we find ourselves in the bedroom of Cabin #3 at Devon’s Fancy on the very, very last night, the end of an era. We fell in love here, so it’s with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our secret hideaway in the woods.

Some of you, I’m sure, will assume that by the Great Satan of Energy I must mean nuclear power, but I don’t. The Great Satan of energy is coal. Whether nuclear power is a lesser demon or a good angel is beyond the scope of this article.

Alive. So says the title of Stephen King’s 2011 short story. What with a personal trainer popping in twice a week, a yoga teacher swinging by another two days, and his banging out books, I’d say Herman Wouk is very much alive.

When my first daughter was born in Rome, my wife, a nonpracticing but (it became apparent) believing Catholic, arranged for her baptism. At a distance of 47 years, I can’t be certain of anything about the arrangements, not even the location.

South Africa and I parted company 40 years ago. A while back, I started making annual visits to Cape Town, not simply to avoid our Hamptons winter. I wanted to measure the changes taking place in what I still consider to be my “beloved country.”

We’d have cracked up laughing had we known of the “greatest generation” con that would define us 50 years later. The greatest generation was our parents who saw us through the Depression. Our children, we were sure, would be an even greater generation. We were clearing evil from the earth so that could be.

Remember game shows? “Concentration,” “The Big Payoff” (with a former Miss America, the late Bess Myerson, in a pre-feminist mink coat)? Remember “What’s My Line?” and “I’ve Got a Secret”? “Queen for a Day”? “You Bet Your Life”? I do.

Guestwords by Megan Collins Ganga

I flew on the first direct flight from J.F.K. to Havana, March 17, 2015. My six companions were members of several South Fork Presbyterian churches, traveling in mission partnership with the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Cuba.

Every few months I drive to Sagaponack from the Berkshires, where I live. I come to stay in my childhood home on Daniel’s Lane and visit with family. Each time I arrive, as I round the corner of Sagaponack Road and Main Street, I look over and see my 6-year-old self, pale and skinny with lank hair, sitting on one of the swings in the narrow patch of grass running along the side of the Little Red Schoolhouse (where a swing set still stands), getting an under-push from Sally Kinkade or Cookie Dombkowski.

The highlight of my summer on the East End last year was exploring Plum Island.

I could’ve driven the handful of miles to the auto dealer on Old Country Road in Riverhead to buy my new pearl white Honda CRV with the rearview camera and cool-looking dorsal fin-like antenna on its roof, but the thought of returning to a town I called home for 17 years and haven’t visited in six made me smile, so I jumped in my four-door gray Civic, threw on Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” pressed repeat, repeat, repeat, and danced by myself the 85-mile trip west to Levittown, never imagining my sojourn would hurl me back to 1964, when an innocent, very blond-haired boy known as Frankie daydre

I was once a member of a women’s Ping-Pong league. I played for about 10 years, say, from when I was 60 to 70. I’d been baby-sitting my 10-year-old grandson and took him to the local pool hall, where I knew they had a couple of Ping-Pong tables. We could bond as we knocked ourselves out.

Four women alongside us, playing like gangbusters, were taking a lesson. “Why the lesson when you play so well?” I asked.

“My league wouldn’t let me play if I didn’t improve,” came a response. “You can join. Here, Sundays, 2 to 5.”

The sign with upside-down letters hangs like an alien landmark on the corner of Shinnecock Road and Foster Avenue, and I know something’s up. When I reach the top of the Ponquogue Bridge I can see a helicopter on the right side of the parking lot and a tented area on the left. At the beach pavilion, people are clumped together on the deck.

“What’s going on?”

“They’re filming a New York State lottery commercial. See that sports car by the tent? Some guy’s gonna drive it across the bridge.”

“How cool.”

Late in the fall of 2008, Dorothy King told my wife, Carol, and me how to access East Hampton Star archive microfilm through interlibrary loan. This tip greatly aided our research on Jud Banister, a former East Hampton Village mayor and great-uncle of Carol’s. By early spring I had logged 100 hours or more on Amherst College’s microfilm reader when the analogy struck me.

Kris Talmage cleans my house and food-shops for me. Every Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, she is here, scanning my face for signs of deterioration and warning me to take care of myself or else, that she’s a tough Bonacker and I’d better not mess with her. I respond that I am a stubborn old Jew, a match for tough Bonackers. She snorts disbelief and then smiles hugely when I tell her I’d just been to Louse Point to see the winter sunrise.

“It was gold dust,” I tell her, “in a frame of deep black clouds.”

I’m single. There, I’ve said it, the dreaded S word. The D label fits, but it’s irrelevant.

Not many years ago, in the ’60s, marriage itself was on the brink of obsolescence for some people. Free love, sex, and rock ’n’ roll ruled the day for the young and restless like me. Boys and girls, girls and girls, boys and boys, threesomes and groups cohabitated, guiltless and smug.

Even if her life depended on it, my wife cannot tell a joke. In all other ways, she’s brilliant. (Beautiful too.) In fact, the way she ruins a joke is in and of itself amusing and (if I may say so) adorable.

She starts off with the premise of the joke (what professional comics call the setup), then she starts to crack up. You can see by the quirky look on her face that she’s thinking of the punch line (what comics call the payoff). Anticipation clouds her story line. Then she starts laughing, giggling, and breaking up . . . until she can continue telling the joke no longer.

We knew, Alice and I, a bit about Ninevah Beach — that it was founded as a community for well-to-do African-American vacationers, especially families escaping New York City for the summer.

It is special, more upscale by reputation than similar black enclaves such as Val Verde Park, Calif., in the Los Angeles area, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Idlewild, Mich., Highland Beach, Md., and Atlantic Beach, S.C.

It’s that time of year, folks, the holidays are over. We spent too much, ate too much, and drank too much. The season of toomuchness has gutted us and is gone. Time now to buckle down and stop having so much fun. Resolutions, anyone?

I was scribbling “Goya painted with a spoon”

when I heard Jane died (Saturn gnawed

his children without a place setting),

I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.

I never got over

the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage,

when she screamed, “I bargained too much” —

for her murdered son’s life.

The actress wore a wooden spoon as a broach.

So tongue tied, I kept “spoon.”

It is not a kind of decoration.

Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon —

potato fields, Water Mill, pink mallow,