Opinion

Every American should have the experience of complete, untethered freedom, if only for a while.

In recent years, while I migrated to South America, a multinational Latin American community has established roots here, and as I drive around town, I find myself becoming reacquainted with a new East Hampton.

With mounting evidence about a Russian plot to pay bounties to fighters in Afghanistan to target United States and coalition troops, one might have thought an Army veteran like Lee Zeldin would sympathize with the American military personnel who may have come under attack, but that would be wrong.

My mom’s ability to reach out, give you the spotlight, kill at cocktail hour, and, by God, hold up a conversation, is a source of endless luxury for my dad, sister, and me.

As summer began, Covid-19 prevention on the East End looked dangerously inadequate.

You have to wonder how friendships will survive the pandemic.

My own favorite moment of 2020 was circling deck seven aboard the Queen Mary II in high seas, tilting into the high winds, as we crossed the North Atlantic back in January.

There is a sense on South Fork streets and on the beaches that we may somehow have defeated the virus. There is no evidence this is true.

Let's pause a moment to reflect on the passing of Joe Sinnott, artist and inker instrumental in shaping the look of the Marvel Comics universe in its 1960s heyday.

It’s a rough job. The entire time driving the pumpout boat the operator is thinking, Once I get done pumping out this boat, I am going to tie this stinkpot up and offer my resignation.

On this, the first day of summer, I thought it would be fit to fetch the snow shovel from its place beside the front door and take it to the shed out back. “I guess we won’t be needing this for a while,” I said to Mary, before recalling that given the winter that wasn’t, we hadn’t needed it at all.

The question is if — not when — schools will welcome back students. And the question also is how teachers and administrators are preparing.

There have been a lot of strange nights around the Fourth of July at our place. This year might turn out to be one of the strangest.

Reactions have been negative to a $60,000, six-month contract between the Town of East Hampton and a New York City-based communications firm hired to help get the word out about Covid-19 issues and to redesign the town website.

A self-imposed race against the clock to give blood as the pandemic drags on.

Fifty years ago, on June 28, 1970, my husband, Rick, and I took our vows at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons on Woods Lane. Ours was the first wedding held at the Jewish Center, which 17 Jewish families, including mine, founded in 1959.

For a nation that venerates the throwing off of tyranny the way the United States does at the Fourth of July, the end of a far greater repression of human life and dignity goes largely uncelebrated.

When Mary said we were already in heaven, our backyard providing ample evidence that it exists, I said Emily Dickinson had said something similar in some of her poems.

What Obama designates Trump takes away, and in the case of a recent decision to open the almost 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument, what may be taken away if the move is allowed to stand cannot be replaced.

Exactly six years, eight months, and one day have elapsed since the last time I played the cello.

Dinnertime for black-backed gulls more or less coincides with people dinner around here, or so it seems to me. 

New Yorkers have already been voting in 2020 primaries for a range of local and statewide races. Early in-person polling places, which opened on Saturday, will remain open until Sunday afternoon and then reopen on Tuesday, the actual day of the primary.

The Bridgehampton racetrack was brought back to life Saturday for a simulated racing competition watchable on YouTube.

In the three months since we started home schooling our children, the global pandemic has made me feel like a 1950s housewife, sequestered at home with her colicky newborn, while also being a failing schoolteacher and homesteader.

“It gets easier,” someone said recently in referring to long marriages and looking my way for confirmation.

How can I ever thank you? You have been there from the beginning, in the soaring chorus of “Good Day Sunshine” through the car’s tinny radio so many summers ago, and even now you are here, the infectious — in the best way — “Home Tonight.”

No sooner were New York restaurants granted a reprieve from the Covid-19 lockdown did patrons come back in swarms for outdoor dining. But for many on the East End who had become used to hunkering down and ordering takeout, if at all, the return of crowds was an unsettling shock.

As such things go, early on during the pandemic I passed on a piece of good advice I had heard — about learning a new skill during the lockdown — then did not really heed that thought myself.

There are times when voters are faced with a critical choice. This is one of those times.

I pulled the plug on cable television at precisely the wrong time — as two national crises descended upon us.