Opinion

Howard Lebwith, who died recently, embodies the Christmas spirit for me inasmuch as he genuinely cared for and celebrated others, acted on their behalf, and always marveled at the beauty of life.

The foot and automobile traffic was considerable when we set out for a ramble at Barcelona Neck just before sunset on Boxing Day.

There has really never been any question about the right thing to do where the Montauk downtown ocean beach is concerned.

They say that in ancient times conjunctions such as Saturn and Jupiter’s were considered ill omens — the gods, people thought, were conspiring.

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a run on puppies this December, and a shortage, as there has been a run on and shortage of Christmas trees here on Long Island.

In a year of unrelenting bad news, the region got an end-of-December gift in the form of language in a federal appropriations bill that would stop the looming sale of Plum Island to the highest bidder.

When East Hampton resident Philip Whitley Churchill-Down, age 63, died last month in a freak clam-shucking accident, America lost its foremost oenological bibliophile and I lost a dear friend.

We could learn something about how to handle a pandemic from 17th-century England.

Living-room spread does not quite match what could be 2020’s phrase of the year, “superspreader event,” but in defeating the Covid-19 pandemic, we are now told that our smaller social gatherings are the source of more infections.

The drive-through Smith Point Light Show in Shirley is holiday entertainment, corona-style.

How the Republican Party rebuilds after the president is out of office — or even if it can — has been the subject of a great deal of discussion as his term ends.

Even James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was in favor of a popular vote, and here we are more than 200 years later with the albatross still about our necks.

In the spirit of New Year’s accounting, and things we want to remember, I present you here with 10 flashbacks from lockdown — a collage of moving images, in impressionistic order.

There have been more deaths in Suffolk than there have in 20 states, more than in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Nebraska, to name a few. Fourteen people died from the virus in Suffolk on Monday, the highest single-day number since May.

One of the ways that a human being can be traumatized is to have their reality doubted, and now more than 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden are being told at least once a day that what they’ve seen and done is a fiction.

The bad-luck schooner Alice May Davenport spent the two weeks following Thanksgiving up on the sand near Smith Point.

It is terribly disappointing, but not at all surprising, that Representative Lee Zeldin would join 125 other members of the House of Representatives in opposing the orderly transfer of the presidency from one administration to another.

I never quite got over hearing how Silicon Valley developers and programmers who worked ingeniously to hook kids on social media would turn around and send their own kids to no-tech Waldorf schools.

We have to admit that we were more than a little puzzled at news last week that large oysters are considered too big to market. This seems like a missed opportunity for shellfish growers and restaurants alike.

Presumably I have returned to work now, and am thus to some extent re-engaged in East Hampton’s life, and am feeling once again at least somewhat useful.

A revealing trip through an old Dominy weather diary.

A brief snowfall triggers memories of Vermont and an uncle’s life there as a potter.

No one wants their loved ones to die of Covid-19 in a hospital hallway. But many places in the United States are at that point right now, or near to it, as virus cases soar.

Offer me coffee and I feel special. A chance to shine, to be heard. Inevitably, all eyes turn to me when I announce, “No thanks, never had a cup in my life.”

We, the Rattray family, have a tendency to get lost in time, to misplace ourselves in its flow.

The creation of a geographic entity — a village in this case — out of opposition to offshore wind power would seem the stuff of some far fringe of society. Only it isn’t.

Leafing back through five months’ worth of “Shipwreck Roses,” I chuckle at myself as I realize exactly how much of my brain space is filled by thoughts of handsome movie actors.

So of all people, Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday made the obvious concession that there was no evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the November election.

After Edmund Spenser

After eight months of social distance, I think isolation is getting to me.