The Sag Harbor Tree Fund turns 20 this summer and will observe its anniversary with a celebratory party, taking place in the Book House garden of Tom and Lucille Matthews on Sunday afternoon, August 3.

Recently, while keeping up with the Putins, I read a NY Times article that quoted a Russian sociologist named Olga Kryshtanovskaya who commented about the couple’s impending split. I don’t remember what she said about Vladimer and Lyudmila’s divorce (they never looked so happy), what struck me was the sociologist’s name. I feel sorry for Olga. She’s probably gone through life spelling her name, even to order take-out from Blini Hut. No doubt in Russia they’re accustomed to names like that and wait patiently while Olga recites the alphabet. I must point out Olga’s plight to my son who as a first grader complained that his given names, “Christopher James,” joined to our medium-length surname, kept him scribbling at his desk while his classmates were frolicking on the monkey bars.

By Richard Gambino As I was walking along Long Beach recently, I picked up a shell from a long-gone conch. It is largely covered, outside and inside, with several kinds of other shell-coated creatures that attached themselves to it. Scientists can tell us about the “survival advantages” gained in such actions. E.g., the creatures attached [...]

1963 was a watershed year in the history of Civil Rights in the United States. On August 28, 50 years ago, the March on Washington gathered some 250,000 people on the Mall and culminated in Martin Luther King Jr’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” That year was also the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves in our country, yet some 10-million blacks, mostly in southern states, were still prevented from voting. We visited a few of our African-American neighbors in the Sag Harbor community and asked about those eventful days and the long struggle for equality.

Color me giddy, but this past summer’s air was heavy with the jejune scent of hyacinth, dumpsters brimming with recently discarded, roasted Italian espresso grinds, and the rarified, pungent clippings from 4-5 acres of well maintained Zoysia sod.

Interesting side note: When propagated from plugs, Zoysia will require two growing seasons for establishment.

Just like Lou Grant’s…

Hair plugs. And incremental improvements in ensemble TV performance.

Now that the dust is settling on Summer 2013 and we’re all getting back to some semblance of village life, headlines in the local papers begin to sound reassuringly ordinary as planning board proposals and library budgets now pepper the news pages and boys soccer and girls field hockey fill the sports sections. For the [...]

After spending a week in New York City over Labor Day (in order to get out of Labor Day in The Hamptons), I found myself thinking about the way we behave in different places. In the city people held doors for me as I came and went. “Thank you” I said to everyone who treated [...]

I had a dream recently in which a deer talked to me — he even showed me a picture of his two kids. You can’t make this stuff up! He said he’d been chosen by his kind to deliver a message to us humans on the East End. Here’s what he told me — make of it what you will.

Most of us shy away from cemeteries, perhaps not wanting to be reminded of our mortality. But a walk through Oakland Cemetery on Jermain Avenue is surprisingly pleasant, especially in the informed company of Ernest Schade, a long-time Harborite who treasures everything about the village. Oakland’s mossy acres are beautiful, even though the graves show their age, some stones covered with lichen, a few broken or fallen over. But the mood beneath towering oak trees is peaceful and soft. Poet Margaret Brehman wrote, “I have stood alone and quiet in the filtered sunlight beneath the old trees, listening to the sighing wind and the chattering of birds…”

By Christine Bellini  The New Yorker cover illustrated by Bruce McCall, titled Operation Neptune, was brought to my attention by a fellow journalist who, by way of catching up was rattling off all the articles and books we concur are must reads along with all the movies any respectably informed citizen of the planet must [...]