Guestwords

“What a great country we have here when it decides to be.” — John Updike

“We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In September 1932, Franklin Roosevelt crossed the country to San Francisco to give a speech that contributed mightily to his landslide election to the presidency six weeks later. I yearn to hear the likes of it today from Hillary Clinton.

The East Hampton Town Board recently proposed a rental registration law that has become the topic of much debate. Ostensibly it is designed to address the problem the town has long had in enforcing the existing laws prohibiting group and transit rentals. Unfortunately, the proposed law does not really solve this problem in a meaningful way, although with a few tweaks it could be a lot more effective.

In 1961 I was 8 years old and Sandy Koufax was the most dominant pitcher in baseball. He was also my favorite player. It wasn’t common in those days for girls to collect baseball cards, but I did. The only card I did not have was Sandy Koufax.

With all of the iPhones, iPads, tablets, laptops, and other devices teens have access to these days, you would think textbooks would be a thing of the past . . . right? Guess again. Carrying around heavy backpacks all day can be very detrimental for growing students, causing stress fractures in the back, inflammation of growth cartilage, and nerve damage in the neck and shoulders. Even with the advancements in technology, the burden of the backpack has not been lifted, in fact it has only increased.

I discovered the eminent economist William Vickrey, a 1996 Nobel laureate, in an odd way. Although I’ve written about Wall Street and money for many years, my academic background was not in economics, but in American literature. So when I was looking for a pungent epigraph for “Up From Gold,” my 2012 book on the development of our modern dollar-based economy, I thought of a quip by Gertrude Stein (the doyenne of American writers in 1920s Paris, famous for “a rose is a rose is a rose”). As I remembered it, she said, “Economics is simple.

Though the wages are low, man, I don’t get the willies actually starting a new and vastly different career at the overripe age of 66. A part-time summer salesman job in Amagansett, to help out during the busy season.

I came to this decision out of sheer boredom. What to do now that I was doing nothing? So I agreed to sell antiques and tabletop accessories and beach bags and candles and whatnot in a lovely “lifestyle” store, as I adapt to my new lifestyle of retirement-slash-unemployment.

“You need to put the sound of a Ferrari, a Porsche, or a McLaren engine in the sound system. When the driver starts the car, he turns a dial and can pick out whatever engine noise he wants that day.” Accosting a board member of a European car maker in a Florida post office, my husband was half-jokingly pitching his brainchild with, atypical for him, enthusiasm.

My 11-year-old self is sitting in a chair from Ebbets Field, drinking from a bottle of Pepsi, checking out the charms of the August 1969 Playboy Playmate. I stop staring into Debbie Hooper’s siren eyes when I hear a shout from John F. Murray Jr. — owner of this deck in Wainscott’s Westwoods, forever Brooklyn Dodger fan, supplier of Pepsis and Playboys to hemi-hormoned boys like me, my honorary uncle, and author of the new novel “The Devil Walks on Water,” my current number-one book. Jake knows I’m curious about writing for a living and he thinks it’s high time for a few tips, Ms.

Late last fall, I abandoned my signature close-cropped hair for a look that I thought would be less severe and more forgiving to a man of a certain age. Outgrowing the modest tonsorial skills of my partner, David, I retired the home clippers and sought the aid of a professional. And so that is how I found myself in Dustin’s chair.

The language of the ocean is vital to anyone who enters. A failure to recognize a rip current or a misreading of the imminent collapse of an approaching large wave can drag any swimmer down in seconds. Comforting thought, I know.

For bodysurfers, timing a wave can make all the difference between a great ride and eating sand the hard way. Before I head into the ocean I take a look around to see how the waves are breaking, and to see if there is a noticeable rip current.

I am led by two extracts of wisdom, both acquired while sitting on porches. From Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” From Charles Baudelaire: “Genius is childhood recovered at will.”

I used to own a home in Amagansett. It was a lovely home, with a pool. A block from the ocean! It was a lifetime ago that I bought it, and a year ago that I sold it.

I move on. Or try to.

I rent now. I rented before I owned — that was a couple of lifetimes ago, and also in Amagansett. A half share, a full share, a couple of thousand dollars, if even that.

Owning has its privileges, but also its expenses. Upkeep, pool maintenance, trees that wither and die. Hurricanes that come and destroy. The roof. The new roof. The new new roof.

It was 20 years ago, and I had just written “Visiting Mr. Green,” my first play. The title character is an 86-year-old. Someone introduced me to Eli Wallach, 78 at the time, who without seeing the script or knowing me agreed to do a reading of it.

I was thrilled, until I was told that Eli wouldn’t rehearse the play before the reading. I didn’t know whether this was a star trip, or some kind of Method approach to a new play, but I wasn’t happy about it.

“The wonderful thing about football,” the actor and satirist John Cleese says in a two-minute monologue on YouTube, “is how creative it is. And this is why it never caught on in America.”

By football, he means the game played with your feet and with a ball. In our parlance, soccer.

“You see,” he continues, referring to American football, “in America the action is deliberately kept short so that the sponsors can get in as many commercials as possible.”

As it has for the past 30-odd years, my White Dawn rose has blossomed the third week of June. I call it the Tuna Rose as the bloom coincides with the arrival of giant bluefin tuna into our local waters. Or so it was in the ’80s when I planted this young rose.

I get the feeling that some of our prosperous institutions and second-home owners here are engaged in a race to the bottom to see who can be top Scrooge.

A wealthy East End school announces it will cease paying salaried employees for their 30-minute lunch period. This amounts to a 6-percent pay cut. A country club in sound financial condition awards a 2-percent pay raise to its staff, then, pleading poverty, reduces its health insurance contribution by an amount that surpasses the salary increase.

Nothing new here. I ride my bike through the streets and it’s all the norm — loud pink taxis swooping up fares, red buses chugging up Sukhumvit Road, growling mobs of motorbikes mustering under traffic lights. I do not see a single soldier, gun, or tank. Everyone seems intent on business as usual.

Wasn’t there a coup d’état here last night? Aren’t we under martial law?

Looking a little closer, however, the evidence is there: The traffic sprawls much farther than usual, and is even more chaotic.

As we honor the 70th anniversary of D-Day this week, it is worth noting that the number of surviving veterans of World War II is tiny. Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, only about 16,000 were still alive in 2012, one in 1,000.

At the recent rate of loss, the number of living U.S. veterans from World War II will be down to 8,000 by the end of 2014 — i.e., one survivor for every 2,000 people who served.

As a general practitioner on eastern Long Island for 25 years, I have become habituated to tick-borne illnesses. I have had Lyme disease four times. Last summer from Memorial Day to Labor Day, while my office in Wainscott saw 100 cases a week, a tick the size of a poppy seed almost killed me.

By Hy Abady

     "There are eight million stories in the Naked City." So closed a black-and-white series on TV when TV was limited to fewer channels than fingers on two hands. And the Internet might have been a brand of hair spray with a penetrating quality.

     There must be many, many more stories now. But the story I want to tell is one of what must be the stories of hundreds of thousands of single women in the city. From 45 to death. Divorced, widowed, alone, and at various stages of unhappiness.

    After I dropped off my daughter, Elizabeth, at L.I.U. Post Monday morning, my right turn south on Route 107 was brutally interrupted by a weaving asphalt truck, eerily similar to one that cut me off in front of the now-defunct Highway Diner, so to avoid an almost certain obituary and bumper-to-bumper traffic past Ikea, Sears, and Theresa (“Long Island Medium”) Caputo’s house, I split-second decided to take the road less traveled and stayed the course east along Northern Boulevard for a lazy ride back to Springs along Route 25A, a road I haven’t traveled in 25 years.

    Finding the perfect gift for someone can be difficult. It requires knowledge of the recipient, creativity, budget considerations, and expectations of how the gift will be received. This year I got a gift chosen with love.

    Ron Fleming lived on Meeting House Lane, Amagansett. His 73rd birthday would have been April 21 of this year, 2014.

    Ron lived in a house built not long after the turn of the last century, its architecture and style from that time, similar to beach houses along Bluff Road, large, gracious, and welcoming. “The house with the red shutters,” when giving directions.

    The pictures created the questions, and perseverance revealed the story. A family photograph much like one in possession of the East Hampton Village office shows Jud Banister, who would go on to become village mayor, in military uniform, captain’s bars on his epaulets plainly visible in the village’s photo. The family also has Jud’s framed commission certificate, signed by Gov. Charles S. Whitman and Adjutant General Charles H. Sherrill, from when he became captain of one of the two New York Guard units in East Hampton formed in late 1917.

    When I was 8, my artistic parents divorced and my mother married an intelligent lawyer who took us from a small house to a much bigger house. The basement in our new house is where I learned to box.

    For me, Loehmann’s in White Plains wasn’t simply a discount department store. It was a rite of passage. My first serious pilgrimage occurred the summer before I left for Emory University. I was 17.

    I recently visited the genome exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A genome is an organism’s total DNA, which includes the genes that provide instructions for the organism’s development and maintenance.

    Twenty-five years ago, the task of finding the total DNA sequences for any organism seemed overwhelming. But large teams of scientists have uncovered nearly complete sequences in many species, including ours. Genome research is indeed impressive, and the Smithsonian exhibit provides a clear and lively introduction to it.

    My father, Edwin Courtland Mulford, was born in East Hampton on March 16, 1896. He first saw the light of day in Congress Hall, the Mulford family homestead overlooking the village green, directly across from Home, Sweet Home and what became known later as the Mulford Farm. The land on which Congress Hall stands had been granted to William Mulford in 1650, and had never been out of the family. His parents were David Green Mulford and Elizabeth Osborne Mulford, and he was descended from virtually all of East Hampton’s founding families.

    As I make up a lot of beds today, as I smooth the sheets into neat hospital corners, fluff up the down pillows, and erase any suggestion of a crease in the white matelassé bedspreads, I think about my Irish forebears who emigrated to the States and were maids. They made beds just like me. They were Irish just like me. They were all called Brigid, because their employers couldn’t be bothered to remember their real names — Fionnuala, Maeve, Siobhan, and Orla.

    I was a spitfire tomboy and only 13 when I made my first exciting escape, sneaking out at 3 o’clock in the morning, shimmying down the side of the house from my second-floor bedroom window. I was a little shaky at such a height, but I had so much adrenaline before my feet touched the ground that I thought I could fly.