Opinion

To help Dell Cullum and his Wildlife Rescue of East Hampton nonprofit, a comedy night fund-raiser was in order. This is what I do.

I am among that elite group of people who can afford not to work, or, as in my case, were tossed out of it, and who easily lose track of days — all days, in fact, are rather the same.

On the East End, fusing commercial endeavors with deep-rooted values and social good has been an ideal for years. There are many examples flourishing in our midst.

Norman Jaffe’s landmark design for Harold Becker’s house in a Wainscott pasture taught me that rule-bending buildings can change your mental space, your emotional compass, your perception of the relationship between nature and human nature.

My life as a full-time patient.

Long Island real estate is suffering as sales decrease and homes lose value, and one reason is chronic flooding fueled by climate change.

Writing a memoir was not something that came naturally. It was more like building my first treehouse and my second marriage. I had to struggle to learn how to “measure twice, cut once.”

When I was a young (ish) bride (1982) and new to the South Fork, one of the things my new husband and I did on weekends was just drive around and look at stuff. He called it shoelacing; I called it zigzagging — we would wend up one road and down the next.

Somewhere in the Midwest, where if you’re anti-Trump you must speak in lowered tones, I had my hair cut — well, so to speak, inasmuch as there isn’t much left — and was at one point during my monologue — for I can’t hear without my hearing aids, and thus feel I must hold forth when in the chair — asked if I read.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ah,” the barber said, “my polling’s holding up! You didn’t vote for Trump, then?”

“For public enemy number-one. . ??”

I have a friend who knows the names of the stars. A few of them, anyway, she says. I do not know what the stars are called; a few constellations, maybe, yes, but individual stars, no.

The Hamptons International Film Festival got me thinking about the starring role the Rattray family’s Amagansett house played in “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen’s 1977 movie starring Diane Keaton. I haven’t seen “Annie Hall” in a long time, but much of it has stayed with me.

A survey by the Pew Research Center observed that 63 percent of Jews say they’re either “fairly certain they believe in God” or are in some place of nonbelief or questioning. Unless we have an honest an conversation about spirituality, this “God gap” will continue to widen.

For some time, we have observed that the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals operates in what seems to be a universe unto itself.

North Main Street was blocked this week as a crew hired by the Long Island Rail Road worked on raising two trestles about three feet above their current grade. The project had been a long time coming. For years, trucks too tall to make it through the underpass there and at Accabonac Road have done damage to the trestle. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the L.I.R.R., had had enough.

As a legal standoff between East Hampton Town and the Springs Fire District over a disputed radio and cellphone tower drags on toward a fourth year, emergency communications — as well as mobile phone service — in the populous hamlet remains poor to nonexistent.

I’m getting near the end of the Old Testament now, and it surely has been a test.

Ketchup was a kitchen staple when I was growing up in the 1940s, as it still is in most American households. You know the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”? I think we might better be able to chart the zeitgeist of the United States by keeping an eye not on auto production but on our national condiment.

It has often been said that if you weren’t for impeachment already, you were not paying attention, but nothing has been quite enough.

I had the opportunity recently to appear on the actor and Amagansett resident Alec Baldwin’s “Here’s the Thing” podcast. Ostensibly, I had been invited to reflect on the nearly 20 years I have been the editor of The Star and how the South Fork has changed over the years.

Was it so long ago that I wrote about the articulate students, survivors of the Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, who had come to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., to speak eloquently of their suffering?

The presidential game is not over, many Americans being frightfully capable of being fooled twice. That the economy is rolling along is nice, though you do wonder how much people are making and how many jobs they are working.

Hook Pond is jammed with carp. The other evening one of the kids and I pulled over near the Dunemere Lane bridge to watch groups of the nearly leg-long fish breaking the surface of the water. 

The logo of the Eastville Community Historical Society, a longtime nonprofit based in Sag Harbor, has three profiles, one black, one white, and one red.  When the society sponsored musical and dramatic performances at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Sunday, however, 99 percent of the people in the audience were people of color. 

I’ve been looking a little longingly lately at accounts in Newsday of playoff games, in baseball, boys and girls lacrosse, and softball, wondering if the day will come when East Hampton teams will be in them again. Baseball used to be, boys lacrosse used to be, girls lacrosse too, and softball, of course, used to be.

By Hamptons standards, it is a good deal. Bookings opened this week for new luxury tent accommodations at Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton, starting at $300 a night, and, from where we sit, there is every reason to think the venture will be successful.

Last year at this time we were preparing to host Thanksgiving for 37. It was our first Thanksgiving at the Mashomack Preserve and we wanted to make it a holiday to remember. Family, friends, food, and fire, all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark Thanksgiving.