My spirits soared as the Labor Day weekend approached. Beaches crammed with humans, a vast sea of exposed flesh awaited me. While some may ogle other body parts, my fetish is shins and backs of knees. In my book, there is nothing quite so beautiful and alluring as a shin, and the backs of knees are a close second. Oh occasionally I’m drawn to a thigh and every once in a great while, a lower back. Arms? Almost never (and I really can’t explain why the random attraction). Torsos never. Necks never. Heads totally never. I’m just a shin guy and proud of it. Hey, I’m a sand fly and I’m here to bite shins as often as I can.

This is what I do. You got a problem with that? So swat me.

I was born this way. I don’t remember being trained or directed toward shins. (Frankly, I’m shaky on the whole remembrance thing.) I simply became and then I started going after shins. There was no transition or evolving. No mom or dad coaching or outside tutoring. No nothing as far as I can remember and, as I think about it, mom and dad seemed to be preoccupied in parenting zillions of other sibling sand flies and had no time to shepherd me into shins. But I have noticed that most of my kin are shin-oriented, much like certain ethnic humans are led, almost against their will, to be sand dogs, digging subway tunnels, or steelworkers, working at the top of skyscrapers and mastering the art of not looking down.

As the summer season winds down, and, man, do I rue the end of summer and the diminishment of exposed flesh, there are a couple of things to bring up.

First of all, so-called repellents. People, have you noticed that they don’t work? I’m no expert as to the chemical makeup of these sprays, but they are not a problem for me. They are like the speed bumps in Dering Harbor, a pain in the neck but hardly a deterrent to rolling apace beside the harbor-side mansions.

I say I haven’t evolved. But you be the judge: When I spot a glossy patch of Off! on a shin? That will make my day. That is where you earn your stripes as a sand fly. The easy targets are everywhere. When you have to penetrate some Off!, that gives the bite distinction. You have broken through an attempted barricade to feast on what for millions of years has been our happy hunting ground: humans, who can only slap and curse at us in utter hopelessness.

Bites, in and of themselves, are the primary raison d’etre. I don’t consider myself reflective, but they are pretty much all I think about. You might assume that flying — hurtling around at amazing speed on tiny wings — would be a big deal. But that talent is so deeply embedded that it seems simply a way to get from bite to bite. Although in heavy winds I sometimes catch myself thinking, why the heck am I not being blown to the Azores? So clearly the flying prowess is prodigious.

Let’s review: biting is king and repellents are worthless. But for me the greatest joy and most significant achievement is what I call Movement. Last Saturday, for instance, there was an attractive family of four stationed about 20 yards right of the lifeguard tower at Wades. I began waging a marauding/biting campaign that soon had the adults sputtering. (I am not aware of having any ethics but I dimly perceive that I mostly consider children in the single-digit ages to be off-limits.) It took roughly a half-hour, but lo and behold, they packed up the umbrellas, the chairs, the coolers and the towels and headed down toward Dickerson Creek in search of respite. Bingo: Movement.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling amped up, I follow the transplants and drive them mad, but in this case, a family of six took over the vacated patch of beach and I began harassing them, hoping to notch another Movement tally. Sometimes, things don’t go as planned. These new would-be victims were tough. They had a preternatural ability to detect when I had alit and swat me away before I could bore in. Usually just buzzing around is enough to unnerve a human. But these guys were unfazed and I give them a tip of the cap. No matter, like 10 feet away, an older couple, their skin the color of saddle leather, reclined in their ancient beach chairs, defenseless. I gave them the business but they never even reacted. World-weariness? That’s no fun and I moved on.

It’s one thing to get humans to Move on a given beach. It’s an entirely different and higher thing to get them to Move to another beach. I usually work Wades and Crescent but a while back I checked out Menhaden Lane, just for a change of scenery. Only five parties were encamped, mostly families. For reasons that escape me, I chose to hector a lone human under a blue umbrella that seemed somehow familiar. He was pretty good at defense but after I got up the back of his shirt and nailed his lower back a couple of times, he packed up, rather huffily I thought, and went to Crescent, or that’s what I’m assuming because, in a never-before move, I was going to follow him to ruin his beach day entirely. I got as far as Goat Hill and had to take a breather. Once restored, I looked around. There, beneath some obscene plaid shorts was a very fine shin specimen. I guess you can figure out what happened next.

This is the story of my “aided case,” although this was not to ELIH via the Shelter Island Emergency Medical Service. This was to Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on the arm of my wife, Jane.

It started the night before, after a dinner of scallops Provençale on a bed of pasta. Pretty good stuff, I might say, for amateurs. Later we retired and, as is my habit, I got up around 1 a.m. to hydrate with some OJ, although I don’t remember getting up to hydrate. The only thing I remember is Jane tending to me. Upon heading back to bed, I had fainted, falling like a sequoia, skull-first into the hallway baseboard, where Jane, having been roused by the thumping sound, found me unconscious and bleeding at a good clip. In these digital days, of course, she took a photo. It looked like a murder scene. After several minutes I came to, we staunched the bleeding, I lay down and she began the ungodly cleanup.

I resisted going to the hospital in the middle of the night and I can’t say exactly why. But by 7:30, we were on our way to Lenox Hill, an easy two-and-a-half block amble to the ER on an exquisite morning. It was quiet there. The greeter, or whatever this person is called, gave us the obligatory pink piece of paper for the basic information. As Jane was filling out the bottom part of the form, the greeter says you don’t have to do that part, and the intake nurse was already coming around from her glass partition to hear our story. I simply wanted someone to look at the gash to see if stitches were needed but I told her about the fainting. She made notations and led us to a bed on the main floor of the ER. She pulled the curtain to shield us from the adjoining bed and returned to her post.

Soon a doctor, the size and mien of a 16-year-old, appeared and quizzed us in more detail about the previous night’s bloody adventure. I was swaddled in detectors to ascertain the condition of my vitals and he called for a head scan, just to be sure. Instead of sutures, he “glued” the wound shut and I was wheeled up to the CT scan people for a look-see.

After I was wheeled back down to the ER, Jane informed me that I had suffered a subdural hematoma, a pooling of blood on the brain, which does not like that in the least. I was going to be admitted for at least two days in the ICU, for if things go awry with these things you can die. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

Jane and I ask, nearly in unison: Two days? What about post-discharge recovery? We had a highly vaunted 25th anniversary Mediterranean cruise coming up in a week. Francis (his and other Lenox names have been changed), the neurological assistant who had taken over the interrogation, shook his head and said probably no way. A kind of helpless despair descended. Jane had to go to work. I was wheeled to my fine room in the ICU where the great nurse Gwenda sticks in the IV tube, applies the chest sensors and slips on the inflatable tubes for my lower legs to prevent blood clots. All will be my constant companions, making sleep impossible.

Of course, even if I found sleep, the hourly checks for blood samples, “finger pricks” for blood sugar readings and flashlight scans of my pupils would have made it short-lived. Because I was a “fall risk,” I was confined to my bed; because of my hematoma, I was not allowed food or drink. This went on for two days. On the third day, I was allowed to eat. I was ravenous but two hard-boiled eggs and pancakes that had no known connection to edible food norms? Pitifully, I scarfed.

Each day entailed a new brain scan. They wanted to see stability in the size of the hematoma. If it grew, it would be a drill-and-drain event. I had three good scans and got out of there on a mid-day Friday. But the cloud hanging over the cruise remained dark and churning. My being able to travel was in serious doubt. We had travel insurance so I begged Jane to go without me to ameliorate my guilt for having screwed up this exceedingly important marital trip. She said no way but occasionally would call out the temperatures in Istanbul and Mykonos.

On Sunday, I went back to Lenox Hill and fortunately was able to find Francis. It was his boss, whom I had never seen or spoken to, who was against travel. Delmore, a doctor who had visited me at 6 a.m. one morning in the ICU, had been open to it, given it was a 25th anniversary trip and all, though it was not without risk, he said.

I asked Francis: what if I got a fourth “good” out-patient brain scan on Monday? If you were me, would you go? Yes, he said. Two-to-one for travel!

Monday was frantic, baffling and a touch Kafkaesque, but I got the scan (it was good) and I even got a CD of all four scans so that other neurologists could weigh in, if I was so inclined down the road to get other opinions. Sometimes it works, even in a complicated organism such as a New York hospital. We left for Venice that Wednesday evening.

I am living in my golden years of residential fireplaces and wood-burning.

The bookcase-flanked, brick fireplace in our house in the Center reliably heats up the living room and reaches around the corner to the thermostat to calm, at least for a while, the thirsty oil-burning boiler in the basement. The fireplace is a vintage Heatilator, a double-walled steel firebox with four lateral vents poking through the brick. The two lower vents draw in cool air, which is warmed in the space between the steel walls and exits into the room through the two upper vents. It works like a charm.

In our Upper East Side apartment in the city, we live in a building built in the late 1920’s (in New York lingo this means a “pre-war” building). It too has a brick fireplace, a relative rarity in the city. While the times we use it during the winter usually number in the mid-single digits, it is a game-changer when the temperatures fall into the teens. Except for the bathroom, we keep the old-fashioned radiators off in the living room and bedroom. The valves are hard to reach and there is no middle ground with these ancient iron soldiers: turn them on and your sinuses are fried in a couple of days; keep them off and it can get a little cool in February. As for wood, most of the grocery chains carry bundles of wood in plastic-wrapped carriers. It works out to be over a buck for each stick of wood, although you can drop twice that at the high-end markets that offer better packaged gourmet wood from upstate.

On the Island, given my age, I would say we have a lifetime supply of wood, mostly locust, that roundly despised but fine-burning species. We took out a bunch of them that threatened the house, and of course we are gifted with downed branches after every serious storm. I split much of it myself but have brought in outside help for the past couple of years. I swear that, every once in a while, as I reload the firewood ring by the front door, I recognize a gnarly, hard-to-split stick from years ago. How satisfying it is to throw those into the flames.

Golden years notwithstanding, I’ve lived with fireplaces since first grade. Here are some of them, in chronological order. Consider this bonus holiday coverage you didn’t see coming. You’re welcome.

Kirkwood, Missouri: My parents bought a new ranch house in suburban St. Louis and it had fireplaces in the living room and basement. The upstairs fireplace was rarely used because we didn’t hang out there; we hung out in the cozier den. The fireplace in the basement was used by my father, who had purchased a stubby charcoal grill designed to fit into a fireplace. Voila, winter barbecuing.

In the early 1960’s, they remodeled the screened-in porch into a family room, with a third fireplace. This became the nexus of family living. We watched James Garner in “Maverick” on TV tables on Sundays and listened attentively during the Cuban missile crisis. In winter, my mother, a Nebraska farm girl, would have a fire going when we came home from school.

First Philadelphia: My first multi-floor rental dwelling, a small townhouse owned by the Quakers, had a non-working fireplace. But someone should have told me before my first attempt at a fire. Thank goodness it was a modest, exploratory effort.

Belmont Shore, California: Our first domicile was a stucco beach house two blocks from the water. It was built as a summer place in the 1920’s and had no central heat. But it had a beautiful fieldstone fireplace. This being California, we burned eucalyptus (it was the cheapest), and it burned as though drenched in gasoline.

Alexandria, Virginia: The only chimney fire I’ve had, knock wood, so to speak, was in a rented townhouse here. I had no clue. Occupants of a passing car spotted the flames and detoured to find our front door and alert me. I consider this to have been an extraordinary act of civic responsibility. Not sure I would have done it. But I might have.

Second Philadelphia: For almost six years, I worked in Philly and Jane worked in Manhattan, thus ushering in what we call the “The Amtrak Era.” The Philadelphia townhouse was an interesting place. It had a dumb waiter, a tiny sauna and a bidet. It also had a cheesy metal fireplace I almost never used. On one particularly chilly night I opened the flue in anticipation of laying a fire. A terrified, very sooty bird burst from the chimney, nearly giving me a heart attack. I watched helplessly as the bird banged into walls and ceilings — sooty splotches marking every collision — as it made its way three stories up the stairway where its journey ended in a bedroom. I closed the door, got a towel, captured the creature and released it into the night air.

You tell me: If it figured out how to get into the chimney, why the heck didn’t it get out the same way? Why hide out at the bottom of the chimney when his escape route was at the top? Why maliciously choose to scare me half to death? It’s a mystery.

One of the greater glories of living in Manhattan is having Central Park as your neighbor. We live four blocks away to the east, and every time I enter it I feel something akin to low-grade exhilaration. Befitting a long rectangular 843-acre park bestride the spine of Manhattan, it offers just about everything a city dweller — or visitors from the world over — could possibly hope for.

You can run around it, bike around it, walk all over its miles of trails, be they in the woodlands, lakeside, stream-side or in meadows and promenades. You can ride a horse and take a horse-drawn carriage ride. You can rent a rowboat for a tour of The Lake. You can attend world-class Shakespeare in an open-air theater. You can visit a castle with a claustrophobic stairway to its turret. Ball fields, check; ice rinks, check; swimming pools, check; tennis courts; check. Attention boaters: you can sail there, albeit with remote-controlled scale models in the spacious pool at The Conservatory.

It has a fine zoo, with its melancholy, slightly yellowish polar bears plodding around their pit and all manner of other fauna. It is an urban birders’ paradise, particularly in The Ramble, a knot of trails and boulders north of The Lake, that in the very bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s was a den of great danger and decrepitude (as was most of the park).
Vendors dot the landscape, offering hot dogs, pretzels, ice cream sandwiches and drinks. During the 2003 blackout, we headed confidently to the 79th Street hot dog stand for nourishment when much of our neighborhood had little or no hot food to offer. There was a long line.

The park also can be a spontaneous memory-maker. As luck would have it, during the one sled-friendly snow day last winter, we had custody of the grandson. We staked out our own private slope by the massive south wall of the Metropolitan Museum, and for a few hours it was his “most awesome day,” until supplanted by, well, I don’t need to know.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher and historian of ideas, famously postulated that writers and thinkers could be divided into two categories: “Foxes” (Aristotle, Shakespeare and Montaigne, for instance), who know many things, and “hedgehogs” (Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, for instance), who know the one big thing. That dictum is over-cited (but not stopping me), and Berlin said it wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously. But, for the moment, let’s be reckless and apply it to parkland. Central Park is a fox.

Its country cousin on Shelter Island, the grand expanse of Mashomack, is a hedgehog. No frills, no adornment, it reclines on the southeast third of the Island serenely confident in its power to attract and amaze. It simply makes itself available for deep appreciation in ways as numerous and varied as its visitors can conjure. It doesn’t need to try to be anything else.

On weekends, we favor the longer Green and Blue trails. The water vistas, the creeks and ponds, the Manor House, the Great Swamp never lose anything upon repeated visits. The golden “bluebird meadow” (as we call it) is notable for its simple beauty and, on the return trip, serves as a sobering reminder that my throbbing hammer toe has a ways to go before the patches of asphalt on the trail signal that the Visitor Center is over the next hill.

Whereas Central Park tends to promote conversation, Mashomack, for me, stills conversation. The quietude stirs up inner thoughts and dialogues, particularly when you hit a stretch of trail when every step kicks up a hypnotic rhythm of leaf crunch. The lack of social intercourse may have something to do with my habit of walking at an interval just out of conservational range. Accidentally, of course.

This is not to overlook the vibrancy of the preserve, with its activities, programs and guided hikes. And the volunteers at the Visitor Center are invariably welcoming, often chatty and, when called for, vigilant.

Case in point: Last fall, after returning from a Blue or Green trek, we glanced, as we always do, at the “sightings” on the white board, which invariably has several interesting entries. My wife, not known worldwide for her puckishness, added “crow” to the list. I don’t recall if we even saw a crow (probably we heard a crow), but that’s not the point. Okay, “crow” might stand out from the other listed sightings in its utter ordinariness. But after all these years, it seemed long overdue for us to put something on the board. We’re not naturalists. You were expecting a herniated dusky woodpecker? Sure enough, maybe 10 minutes later, after loitering inside the Visitor Center observing the riot at the bird feeder, we headed to the parking lot and noticed the “crow” had been erased. You must respect an organization that holds its “sightings” list to such high standards. It’s not like we put “poison ivy” on the board.

But we get the point. It won’t happen again.

It took a while, but my wife and I have come to complete and irrevocable agreement on one Manhattan issue (I forget the other two): If we came into unfathomable money, we would opt for a modern high-rise over a more gracious brownstone walkup. (Note to self: play the occasional damn Powerball! You never know.)

For years we held the opposite view, largely driven by our neighborhood walks westward toward Central Park. The four-block trip took us past impossibly beautiful brownstone and limestone structures that got better with each step. In the East ‘70s where we live, the closer you get to Fifth Avenue, the Park’s eastern boundary, the grander the real estate. Our block, between Third and Second avenues is not as nice as the block to its west but better than the block to its east. And the gradual degradation continues until you hit FDR Drive and the always boiling East River. There is the occasional stinker but the three- to five-story homes we pass by on our walks seem the embodiment of elegant New York living, and for years it was the residence style of choice, assuming an influx of unfathomable money, that is.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

But there is this obsession Manhattan has with height. We live on the 16th floor and even from our relatively modest altitude we are afforded a nighttime tableau of hundreds of lit apartment windows with all kinds of unknown human activity lurking behind. Other than the routinely  breathtaking views from the city’s classic observatories — the Empire State Building, the Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center and the martyred Twin Towers — I have never witnessed the city from way up high, in a residence. And that’s exactly where my Powerball money would go. (And to a hill farm in Vermont and a villa in Positano, Italy.)

Obviously I am not shopping around for a lavish sky-high residence, but if you put a gun to my head and made me choose, it’s no contest. It would be the so-called “One57 building,” fittingly enough on West 57th just south of Central Park. This is the building from which a large section of a construction crane was dislodged by Hurricane Sandy and dangled perilously overhead for days. It is 90 stories tall, although some quibblers say 75, but, oh man, what a location. Down the block from Carnegie Hall, roughly in the middle of the island, if you lived high enough here you would have the entire glittering borough of Manhattan beneath you with Queens and Brooklyn and (sigh) New Jersey thrown in. It is from such a perch that I would blithely entertain friends, slice garlic thinly or just read a book, looking up every once in a while to drink in the great urban hive all around me. I’m sorry, brownstone walkup, but this is where my head is at these days.

Getting back to reality, there is one obvious drawback to vertical living. During the blackout of 2003, the trek in a darkened stairway from lobby to floor 16 was amusing only once. I’m assuming that residents of One57 would not face that predicament, what with modern backup generators and all. In our building, erected in late 1920’s, when you lose power, you lose it authoritatively.

Because it is highly doubtful that I will be in discussions anytime soon with New York State lottery officials on my preferred payout scheme, I must satisfy myself with the here and now of our 16th floor abode. That is not difficult. It’s a small apartment, nice enough, and I am always glad to return to it from Shelter Island weekends. Anyway, I strongly prefer our neighborhood to the one surrounding the One57 building of my dreams. I once saw Jason Giambi in the Citarella market down the block, with highly gelled hair and the eyes of a hunted animal. Johnny Damon was rumored to be living across the street, but there were no sightings of him during his Yankee years.

Our 16th floor view is east, with the occasional fiery sunrise. We used to have a sliver of a view north, up Third Avenue, until they tore down five old classic Manhattan storefronts, including a ridiculously pricey butcher and a favorite neighborhood bar/restaurant, and built a 20-story luxury apartment building. It’s an old New York story: No view is safe here; well, I guess upper floor One57 owners needn’t worry about that.

Standing at our bedroom window, you can see across the East River into Queens, where my grandson lives in Astoria. The other day I found myself deep in idle thought about him. What if his parents took him outside and securely attached him to a large weather balloon and let him go? I’m pretty sure that our Manhattan/Queens alignment is such that from our bedroom window I could see his speck of a body rising slowly as he took in his magnificent view of the city. This batch of idle thought obviously has some major flaws. For starters, he’s not the Icarus type and would probably throw a major league conniption getting strapped in to the harness, and there is the problem of returning him safely to the planet’s surface.

I guess it’s back to the idle thought drawing board.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

I don’t remember making a conscious decision about this, but I strive to split my liquor expenditures evenly between Dandy’s in the Center and Wines & Spirits in the Heights.

Given the size and year-round population of the Island — its gestalt, if you will — ­it seems the right thing to do. We should support as many of our local merchants and purveyors as our limited funds allow. In the case of liquor, we are roughly equidistant from both stores, although when urgent needs arise, Dandy’s gets the nod because of the two or three minutes I would save making the run. As I think about it, another benefit of splitting visits is that one store’s sales personnel has no idea that you’re actually purchasing twice as much their receipts seem to suggest. But enough about that.

I extend this splitting activity to the Island’s fish markets, Bob’s and Commander Cody’s, two establishments that seem impossible to imagine being located anywhere else but here. No offense intended toward the liquor store sales people, but the fish market splitting is almost entirely driven by the personalities of their respective owners. With Bob the purchase is friendly, enjoyable and serious. With James (for some reason way back I started calling him that out of some faux formality) you get the same treatment, with a smidgen of impishness. And of course the occasional smoked scallops. These places and men seem essential to Island life as we know it. Of course that is why we live and visit here: Characters such as these, a humane pace of living, natural beauty, beaches, water, Mashomack, equidistant liquor stores.

There is no reason to split your spending dollars in Manhattan. You pretty much find out where you have to go to get something you need and you stick with it. In fact if someone were to overhear you talking about splitting your liquor purchases out of some goofy fairness principle, you might well be bundled up and forcibly admitted to Bellevue.

In our Upper East Side neighborhood, almost anything you need is within a several block radius. But you won’t be encountering any Bob’s or Commanders. I am one of those who utterly reject the notion that most New Yorkers are rude and dismissive. (Although up the block there is a specialty market whose owner’s berating of customers is legendary. I must submit myself sometime.) Yes, there can be shortness, curtness, some impatience can be afoot, but also great warmth and humor (along with deep veins of ability and expertise).

There’s a Citarella market down Third Avenue and a sushi place along the way. I have ordered the same thing for years: spicy tuna with avocado. Typically, I pop into the sushi place en route to Citarella. I walk in, either one of the two hostesses smiles and punches in my order working only on a silent nod from me. We laugh about it and I go to Citarella. On my homeward leg, in decent weather, she sees me coming, goes to the store’s outdoor railing and hands me my order. I don’t even break stride and we laugh again.

What I’m usually carrying back from Citarella is fish or seafood, along with the usual fruits and veggies and the occasional raw material for a meatloaf. The guys that work the 30-foot-long iced display area know me but we don’t banter, except for a rare Red Sox/Yankee exchange (I’m Sox). Despite the vast array of choices, we stick mostly to tuna, salmon, tilapia, red snapper, the occasional monkfish and flounder, although we know we shouldn’t and are cutting back. Scallops, of course, bay and sea, and the occasional twelve-pack of oysters, shucked for a buck or so. Citarella, by the way, is responsible for a sea change (ha!) in my oyster-buying. For years, I have been a strict Wellfleet oyster loyalist. I like them briny and, with family on the Cape, have been to the pretty village many times. (There’s a used bookstore by the bay where you could easily spend several days in intense browsing mode.)

One fateful day, the Citarella fishmongers had no Wellfleets. Jose, the only monger who wears a name tag, suggested oysters from Fishers Island, that Southold outpost that seems like it should be part of Connecticut (long story). A briny revelation! They are now my first choice, although I gladly and somewhat sheepishly return to Wellfleets when the Fishers have been snapped up.

As you face the arrayed fish and seafood, the complexity of the lifeforms increases as you gaze left to right. The bivalves are at the far left, the whole fish, with their unwavering accusatory stares, are at the far right. In between are all manner of things: the lobster tanks, filets and steaks of many fish species, octopi, soft shell crabs (in season), salmon cakes, fish sausage and Cajun-marinated catfish, among many other delectables from the sea.

Nestled among the whole fish is a small gathering of sea urchins, off-putting spiny globes. What, may I ask, do we make of these? A monger answers that it’s what’s inside that counts. According to a widely visited online information resource in some Mediterranean cuisines they are eaten raw, with lemon, and, on Italian menus, used in pasta sauces. Elsewhere on the planet, the gonads of both male and female sea urchins are considered delicacies.

Something tells me that neither Bob nor the Commander is going to be adding this item to the chalkboard anytime soon.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

I lived the ‘70s decade in Vermont, back when you could count on a week or so of sub-zero temperatures 24 hours a day. Improbably, my battered Volkswagen Beetle never failed to start, although a running board rusted off. In the morning, its pre-radial tires would freeze flat where they met the parking lot so for the first mile of so it felt like you were riding on squares instead of circles. Friends say it rarely stays that cold anymore.

One Vermontism I picked up on after a while was that the Green Mountain State had six, not four seasons: unlocking, spring, summer, fall, locking and winter. Somewhat obviously, the locking and unlocking seasons refer to the fierce seizure and rather timid release of the implacable cold. The timing of locking was November-ish, but unlocking always seemed to come in March. There would be a couple of warm days in early March, 50’s sometimes 60’s, when you realized that winter’s dominion was cracking. Frozen like concrete, the ground slowly thawed turning dirt roads into muddy, foot-thick rivers — mud season.

Because of the severe temperatures, strict six-season territory is northern New England, but I would submit that much of the Northeast, including Shelter Island, has a psychological form of the six seasons. Without resorting to research, I seem to remember a couple of warm days in early March that had me saying, it’s over, it’s unlocking. Real spring is the forsythia spring. It can’t get any more official than that. Our ferns, in their stubby missile silos, seem eager to launch and the tulips are not too far away.

A few weeks ago, we readied the garden, turning it over, putting down some black plastic weed guard and laying out the soaker hoses. Some lettuce is poking up. After years of my lobbying, we’re going to put in some wildflowers and cut back on the zukes and cukes, which if you let them go, as we are wont to do, look like they were grown in the amped-up soil of Chernobyl. It’s a good season, spring.

My feelings for summer have evolved. Early on, it seemed to take forever to get to summer, beach summer. Of course — and I think this is a universal for Islanders and renters — once it arrives it blows right past you. You’re lucky if you see July 4th coming because if you’re not careful the Fourth will be fast receding in round the corner. Finito. This used to bother me but no more. The August swelters have become a bit too oppressive (no central air) and we’ve let the beach routine become almost formulaic. And there’s the beloved visitors. (Wonderful folks all. Leaving it right there.) But mostly it’s about getting to September.

I’ve always been an autumn guy for all the usual reasons. Crisp temperatures, the slanted golden October light, great sleeping, the advent of wood fires, breaking out a favorite jacket and heading to Mashomack. The beaches are never prettier than in the fall. In Vermont, there was that one day when the foliage was at its peak and it didn’t seem possible to be that spectacular.

The telltale sign of the Island locking season is the more frequent rumbling of the boiler. I swear I can actually see little winged dollar bills slowly making their way up the chimney. It’s a bit depressing knowing what’s coming: the darkness, the bleakness, the winged currency becoming five spots. But somehow, when winter puts its foot down, I accept, adapt, have a drink and trudge on, knowing those warm days in March will eventually come.

Manhattan has the four conventional seasons. I think to have locking and unlocking you need more land and less concrete. Winter doesn’t affect the pace of life, and it really boils down to appropriate footgear and dressing warmly. There’s lots of stuff to do. Indeed, winter’s still a pain in the neck but it rolls right along until the pear trees, the city’s equivalent of the Island’s heralding forsythia, explode in blossoms overnight.

There is another immutable marker of spring in the city: The day when all, and I mean all, young Manhattan women start to wear those flip-flop-like sandals, with their office shoes in a tote. I have often wondered how they — and we’re talking millions of young women here — coordinate this footgear turning point. Is there a vast phone tree? An Internet-based flip-flop early warning alert? An applet? Perhaps scientists down the road will discover that this simultaneous flip-flop behavior is caused by a recessive gene activated when young New York women reach a certain number of shoe store visits per year (200? 500?).

I’m betting app.

James Bornemeier

Over the past decade we have assembled a group of men and women who construct, repair, maintain, paint, power wash and perform all the other crafts, like plumbing and electrical, that most Shelter Islander homeowners find the need to call on over the years.

And then there are the tree and lawn guys. My wife and I are deeply divided over the amount of attention the lawn needs. My standard line is that she is reaching for an Augusta National Golf Club level of verdancy, while I would be content with a presentable if a little, scruffy Island lawn. I never win this battle but I get to use the Augusta National line on a yearly basis. Our team of craftsmen is a great bunch of people and it’s always a pleasure to see them show up to chat about whatever comes up — world affairs, local affairs, Island gossip (I’m useless there), home prices (usually a very short conversation). And they do all the work for free! Threw that in there to see if you were paying attention. In fact this entire paragraph could be interpreted by a coldly cynical person as a brazen ploy to encourage quick call-backs from team members by publicly praising them. That level of cynicism has no place on this Island. But come to think of it, if that’s how the relationship works, so be it.

Our carpenter helped me win a major victory when we remodeled the kitchen years ago. I was adamant about keeping the existing stained cabinets with those old timey hinges and repainting them a lighter hue to make the black hinges pop. I also was pretty much locked in to installing a wood countertop. The carpenter joined with me and we carried the day. It turned out great, maybe not the ideal countertop for families with small children but for seniors, it works well. We managed to gouge it on its second day of service when a heavy glass took a suicide leap from an open cabinet door, but it’s held up well since then.

He also helped solve what I feared was the unsolvable: the leak that dripped into the kitchen sink during blustery rain. There were several possible culprits, prime among them some dodgy flashing around a vent pipe poking up from the attic roof. I trained the hose on the flashing while the brave carpenter stood watch in the attic underneath the vent. We had a gusher. With a new vent and proper installation, no leak — knock wood — so far.

In Manhattan, we have a similar group of fixers and maintainers, but not as folksy as the Island crew. There is the friendly dishwasher who was summoned three times in the past 15 years to replace some mangled part. On the third visit, last year, he delivered the grim news: not fixable. So, with the new one operating perfectly, presumably, I’ll not be seeing this guy anytime soon.

We have a Sub-Zero refrigerator, sort of a hoity-toity brand for us. But the kitchen remodel designer called for it because Sub-Zeros locate their working parts underneath the freezer cabinets, making for shallower depth. When you are dealing with a 7-foot galley kitchen space, every inch counts. I bring this up because we twice needed a repairman and it was the same guy and because he seems to be the only Sub-Zero repairman in Manhattan. He also gave me a very high compliment. With Sub-Zeros you’re supposed to vacuum the mossy crud that accumulates on the compressor’s front side twice a year. It’s not that big a deal to do: You have to remove the bottom freezer compartment, drop to the floor, unscrew the plate in front of the compressor, vacuum the crud and then backtrack. Takes about 10 to 15 minutes. The compliment was this: To his knowledge, I was one of just a few Sub-Zero owners in all of New York City who performed this maintenance. I’ll take ‘em when I can get ‘em.

These Manhattan kitchen remodels are something of a rite of passage in the city. They are nerve-wracking, disrupting, dirty and behind schedule. During ours, I was working during the week in Philadelphia so I would return to find a wife who had been driven wild by the demo and construction. (There is a scene in Jane Eyre that comes to mind.) But the project turned out splendidly. Until the lovely floor tiles began cracking into hundreds of fissures. What I tell you next is an urban miracle. The good news is that I hounded the contractor to put in new tile, free of charge; the very bad news is that a crabby young Eastern European man arrived with a jack hammer and busted up the entire kitchen floor. I wanted to flee but felt I had a duty to stay and witness this incomprehensible and savage attack. The crabby young man instantaneously diagnosed the problem. Wrong material for the sub-flooring. That too needed to be jack-hammered out. Here is the essence of the miracle: The free jack-hammering and reinstallation of our lovely tiles took him about six hours. The experience probably shortened my life, but the tiles remain lovely to this day

James Bornemeier

A Tragedy in Three Act

Dramatis Personae

MINERVA, Town senator
OBSTREPERO, Town senator
HUEY, Town senator
DEWEY, Town senator
LOUIE, Town senator
CHORUS, The plain people of Shelter Island

Act I (Stars Café)

O: Have you heard this latest madness! She’s doing it again! Not satisfied with the Saving Dark Skies Act, now she’s pushing the Citronella Candle Suppression Act! No citronella candles can be lighted from Memorial Day to Labor Day! This is a triple outrage! Stealing our individual and community rights! Subverting and defiling of our American way of life! One person forcing her will upon a helpless community! Theft! Treason! Tyranny! This cannot stand! Would the heroes of Lexington and Concord have allowed this besmirchment of individual liberty! The answer is counted in drawn muskets!

C: He speaks only in exclamation points. It is tiresome.

O: And where is (Senate Leader) Imperion! I can’t find him anywhere!

H: He is in the city, at the Stadium, taking in the Red Sox series. He left Minerva in charge.

O: Oh this vilest conspiracy!

H: I concede, it does have the faint aroma of conspiracy but I would quibble with “vilest.” That would suggest that no future conspiracy could be viler. And I’m not willing to make that assumption.

O: Don’t you see! This darkness agenda is not only evil but it flies in the face of one of man’s ultimate quests over the millennia! Since we crawled out of caves, we sought ways to subdue the fierce power of the darkness! Darkness brought fear! It brought danger! It brought the unknown! Do you think Edison perfected incandescent light on a whim! No, it was to push back the night! Having the ability to illumine the blackness is one of man’s supreme triumphs! What does she think, that we are all celestial navigators!

C: It would be good to know how many cups of coffee he has had.

H: How long you been here, ‘Strepo? You seem a little jumpy.

O: You think this is jumpy! I’m just getting started!

Act II (9 p.m., Quaker Cemetery)

M: Thanks for coming, guys. I know this is an imposition.

H: I had to cut out early from my reading group.

D: There were some NASCAR reruns I wanted to see.

L: Thanks for asking. Glad to have somewhere to go.

M: Let me speak plainly. I intend to bring business before the Senate next week and I seek your support, and I am not at all confident that I will have it. That is why we are meeting in the middle of nowhere, basically. It would not do to have prying eyes seeing this little gathering. I need to deliver your votes to my cause, which I know has stirred up some ripples of opposition. To ensure that delivery, I too must deliver. Let’s lay out the facts. Huey, you have a 1,337-foot setback waiver before the ZBA. Dewey, you are seeking approval for a sixth floor on your place in the Center. Louie, you are having trouble renewing your nonconforming use permit for your nerve gas storage and disposal business. I believe I could be of assistance in these matters. As we say, one hand washes the other. I am reasonably certain that by applying a bit of pressure, I can persuade a sufficient number of board members to look favorably on your issues.

H: How can you be so sure?

M: A grainy black-and-white video has come into my possession. It shows quite clearly four ZBA members flagrantly breaking the law. Without naming names, these individuals are seen in the water at Menhaden Lane. The camera pans to the “Not a Bathing Beach” sign and then back to ZBA group. Lo and behold, the camera documents the crime: they are using soap and washcloths to bathe! I’m not suggesting that this is a grave crime, but it does lay plain a collective failure to heed the laws of the Island.

H: I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my Harelegger days. Is it possible that the video was doctored?

M: Careful, I wouldn’t cross that line if I were you.

H: Can we have a minute to discuss among ourselves?

M: Be my guest.

H: I am somewhat surprised by Minerva’s blatant horse-trading maneuver. It reminds me of that scene in Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” I wouldn’t have thought Abe and his cohorts would stoop to that sort of thing.

D: I didn’t see “Lincoln.”

L: Never heard of it.

C: Yes, of course there is such a trolling-for-votes scene.

H: I feel a bit soiled even having this discussion with her. But the marriage is on the line if I don’t reel in this set-back waiver.

D: If I get the sixth floor, I could list it as “water view,” although the water would be two miles away.

L: No nerve gas, no income. Simple as that.

H, D and L: See you next week, Minerva.

Act III (outside the Senate after the Citronella Suppression Act passes with one highly caffeinated dissenter)

O: Et tu, Huey! Et tu, Dewey! Et tu, Louie!

H: She’s right. Last night I couldn’t find the Big Dipper.

D: I’ve always hated the smell of Citronella.

L: Et tu? Et tu? Am I supposed to know what “et tu” means?

JAMES BORNEMEIER

The Crew, as I call them, came out recently. It comprises my wife’s son and daughter, their spouses, two kids (son) and two dogs (daughter). Excellent humans and animals all, but there is, for me, a disorder dynamic that accompanies their arrival, which I have been working on to handle, not that anyone would recognize this effort.

This time, they came out on Friday and we came out on Saturday morning and spent a perfect day at Wades. The son’s wife had purchased one of those tent-like beach enclosures, large enough for all of us to recline in our chairs without fighting for our small circles of individual umbrella shade. It felt like the Ritz.

On Sunday morning, as is his wont, grandson Max arose early and crossed the second floor landing to tentatively open our bedroom door, which reliably creaks to announce his arrival. I say, “Hi, Fuzzball,” a reference to a time not long ago when we shared amusement at a Harrison Ford moment in a Star Wars movie when he upbraided his Wookie sidekick. This remark no longer has any effect and I will retire it. He climbs between us, into The Cave, where in the past we have imagined wild animals benignly threatening him from outside. From deep brain recesses, I resurrected my guttural tiger snarl, which like the failed Fuzzball gambit, no longer sends him burrowing to the back of The Cave for safety. It’s mostly iPad games now.

My wife asks him what he wants to do. A couple ideas are thrown out. He says, “I want to play baseball with Grandpa.”

We go to the garage to select a bat. There are two slender yellow Wiffle Ball bats and a fat red one that seems appropriate for Sammy Sosa in his juicing days. We go with one of the Wiffles and a styrene ball from the recreational spheroid collection.

We head to the diamond, which is in fact the turnaround of the cul-de-sac we live on. My pitching is terrible, too often inside or low. But he whacks away, spraying balls to the first and third base side, to which I say, “Good hit, but I think you nailed a fan.” He pays no heed to my chatter. He does have an innate sense to make me fetch a ball in the tall grass, somehow grasping the notion of bugs and ticks.

My wife comes out and we go into a pitcher/catcher mode that speeds up the action big time. She quickly takes over the hurling duties and puts me to shame, laying in gopher ball after gopher ball. Then Dad and then Mom show up and we have some actual fielding going on. I make several sensational plays but no one seems to notice. The one-on-one grandpa/grandkid spell has long been broken, but you take what you can get.

Next up is the Coecles Harbor Marina pool, where a dear friend allows us entry. Mom and Dad are with the one-year-old girl so we still have custody of Max. The idea is to go swimming, but Dear Friend offers to take us out in her Whaler. This is a no-brainer, but I wonder how Max will react. His sister, if magically endowed with speech and sufficient cognition, would eagerly assent to sky diving. Max has a more deliberative world view.

We inch out of the marina and the time comes to put on some speed. Dear Friend has been in this situation dozens of times. She tells Max it’s all about his comfort zone and gives the throttle a little push. He’s cool with that and then she adds a bit more and then we’re flying. On the phone we record a big smile, absent two front teeth. We bounce through our first wake. The smile endures, bigger maybe.

As we head to Reel Point, Dear Friend asks him to step up to the wheel and he grabs on. He understands this is serious stuff and affects an ancient mariner pose. Then Dear Friend starts a lazy right-hand turn and he’s totally into it as we head back to the marina.

Next up is the Whale’s Tale. He is no young Tiger Woods. His game is all mulligans and herding the ball into the cup. Then, mid-way through, we encounter a hole with no gimmicks, obstacles or undulating carpet. He puts his orange ball into the dimple. From the instant he starts his tiny back swing I know he made unconscious calculations for force and speed and the ball takes off accordingly. He drains it, a no-doubter.

Jubilation? Nope. He wants a do-over.

We’ll take a do-over of the entire day.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

As a mostly weekend Island guy, for years I have sat on the Jitney as it collects passengers down Lexington Avenue, motors east and deposits us at Greenport and the ferry. But I’ve often wondered, just how familiar with Shelter Island are the Manhattanites we leave behind? I decided to conduct a poll.

Here was the plan: I would put on my pharmacy Island T-shirt with the words “Shelter Island New York” clearly displayed on the front. (I prefer my 12-year-old Bliss T-shirt with the black splat of Island on the front, but I have found a remarkable number of people mistake the splat for a bucking bronco, particularly in the car magnet version.) In polling, I reckoned, clarity would probably yield better results.

I came up with a set of questions that would try to measure Shelter Island’s grip on the city: Excuse me, have you heard of Shelter Island? If so, what do you know about it? Do you know where it is? Have you ever been to Shelter Island? If you have, did you like it? If so, why did you like it? Are you planning to revisit? Are you a frequent visitor? Would you consider a summer rental? Are you planning to buy? Is the ferry access a pain in the neck or is it a major part of the Island’s allure? If you don’t like it, please tell me why.

Not exactly a professional Chamber of Commerce questionnaire, but a decent stab at gauging the Island’s identity in the city. Or at least in one small part of it.

Right around the corner from us is a subway station at 77th Street and Lexington Avenue. My plan was to station myself, bright-faced, tablet in hand, on 77th and Third Avenue, a block east of Lex, in the midst of the thousands of westward-bound commuters walking surprisingly briskly and with no apparent symptoms of job dread. Setting up my polling operation at the mouth of the subway station would be a mistake as, trust me, you get pulled together like a column of ants and, shoulder to shoulder, solemnly march down the stairs to the platform. At this critical moment of the daily commute, a would-be pollster would be totally ignored, if not elbowed out of the way.

Every so often, a politician takes a position near the stairs. You have to pity these people. Not only do they not know that they stand zero chance of talking to anyone, but they are inevitably challengers to venerable incumbents and have zero chance of unseating them. They are, however, always nicely dressed.

This got me thinking. In 15 years, I’ve never stopped for a street pollster or petition-wielder. If I can discern from a ways off that the (usually) young man or woman is polling or gathering signatures on an issue I agree with, I make eye contact and cheerily say, “I’m with you all the way!” and never break stride. Or “I couldn’t agree more!” Or “I think what they’re doing is an outrage!” This is a cruel tactic because the pollster/petition-wielder sees a sure-fire signature or supportive data point walking away from them into the throng. If I can discern that the polling or petition issue is a violation of everything I hold dear, the standard city practice (and mine) is to act as though the person asking for small bit your time is invisible.

Although I have never personally observed it, I’m sure that many times a day there are tense conversations between pollster and pollee that devolve into shouting matches over hot button issues. What I have observed are rude remarks made by people who feel the need to disparage the pollster and his or her issue as they pass by. These may not be exact quotes, but I seem to recall sentiments such as: “Good luck with that!” “You’re joking, right?” “Not if you put a gun to my head!” I’ve heard other earthier comments that are unsuitable to be published in this newspaper.

I cannot imagine that my Island “issue” could possibly inspire rudeness. But as I pondered my imminent polling operation, I easily could imagine that it would inspire a great number of you-got-to-be kidding looks without breaking stride. From the outset I figured I would be lucky if I got a dozen or 15 people to stop and answer my questions. That would mean thousands giving me the invisible treatment or offering looks of pity. Even the ones that stopped would probably know about Shelter Island and almost certainly like it. What’s not to like? So rather than the polling results delivering some surprise or shades of meaning, they would simply confirm what we already know.

Say I found someone who doesn’t like Shelter Island. Would anyone pay his opinion any mind?

I’m shutting down the polling operation before it starts. I’m going to finish the Sunday crossword. Let the Chamber of Commerce do it.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

The tree was hardly a big selling point when we bought our place out here over a decade ago. But it stood out prominently in the front yard and was a presence in the first photos we snapped (the verb used back then with film cameras) after we closed the deal and wanted to send around some house pictures to friends.

It was a large Norway spruce about 25 feet from the small front room we shamelessly came to call the library. It worked well with its nearby neighbors, the red maples and cherry trees. There was a certain woodsy elegance about it, classically conical-shaped with its boughs dripping with downward-hanging fronds of pine needles. I read somewhere that those drooping fronds are an evolutionary adaptation so the spruce can more easily divest itself of ice and snow. Nice trick. If only power lines and driveways could learn something like that. You want cones? We got cones.

Early on we made facetious remarks that it could be in the running for Rockefeller Center, all dolled up in lights during the holidays. But if you’ve seen those trees, you know they are true giants and probably no tree on the Island could begin to compete. I, by the way, have probably seen my last Rockefeller tree. I’m put off by the crowds and, I’m sorry, by the time they get done trimming and shaping the tree it doesn’t look like a real tree at all. Well strung with a million lights? Yes, I’ll give you that. I’ll give you “tree-like object,” and that’s it.

Our spruce had a heart-warming start. The previous owner purchased it as the family’s first Christmas tree over 30 years ago and stuck it in the ground as a growing memento. And grown it has. To my eyes, it runs 50 feet tall and 30 feet wide. Its trunk approaches three feet across. Its nearest bough is now 10 feet from the house and is obviously aching to have a close encounter with cedar shingles. It has surely invaded the septic tank and leech field. It could fall on the house. It lords over the front yard like a bully. It has become a scraggly, heavily bearded granddaddy of a tree. It belongs in some frigid forest far away. It has outgrown its residential welcome. It’s time for it to go.

I’ve been advocating for its removal for some time, to no spousal avail. So I never miss the opportunity to elicit opinions from friends and acquaintances who drop by about its aesthetic suitability in the front yard. I’ve never once registered a positive reply. Over the past couple of years, I’ve asked would-be and actual arborists about the spruce and they, too, side with me, removal-wise. As for requested estimates for doing the deed, they’re not exactly rolling in, although it would clearly cost a bundle.

After years of digging in her heels, my wife is beginning to relent. She actually uttered the word “scraggly” recently, and we talked about its replacement tree or trees, maybe a sugar maple or some more fruit trees. We imagine the great opening up of the front yard to sunshine and space and watching the new trees catch and thrive.

But hold on.

Like most of us, I have a deep-seated aversion to taking out a tree, unless it’s a locust, which is cause for feasting and celebration. I admit there are times when I look at the spruce and marvel at its density and complexity, its long-term success, its clear supremacy in the yard, its tenacity during countless storms and tempests. Many times I have carefully freed the lower boughs when they were encased in icy snowdrifts, and they seemed to react as though they would have happily extricated themselves, thank you, at a time of their own choosing. So, yes, there is an attachment to the spruce.

I’m not saying I’m backtracking on getting rid of it, but on this glorious October day it seems to belong here much more than in August, when it looms like a lost North Woods denizen in the sizzling hazy days of summer. It was invited here, after all, planted by human hand. If I dared to observe, I would have a difficult time watching it destroyed and hauled away in fragrant pieces. In its absence, there would be a large patch of needles to convert back to lawn, and it does, at some angles, provide some privacy from the rare curious eyes that ascend the small hill to our cul-de-sac. Not that I care about them, but rabbits like to hang out on the spruce’s shady, piney under-blanket and it’s amusing to flush them into their strangely slow loping escapes. And there was the time, after hiking from the ferry, when I came upon a napping fawn half in and half out of the spruce’s lower canopy.

Okay. If and when it goes, I will miss it.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

I started working for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1980, the same year the Phillies won their first championship, 77 years after the modern World Series began in 1903. They won again in 2008 and are considered a solid National League franchise. In contrast, the Inquirer in the ‘80s was one of the top three or four daily newspapers in the country; it is now a laughingstock, the news side decimated and the business side picked over by a string of soulless carrion-feeding ownership groups. While new to the paper back then, during the Phils’ run to their first Series victory, I played an infinitesimal role in their success, sitting in my battered metal chair at the Inquirer news desk, a nightly nerve center where decisions were made on what stories were important, where they went and how they were displayed.

Back then, we used a layout pad and carbon paper to map out the various sections so there was always a steady supply of false starts to be wadded up and tossed away. An industrial size wastebasket was 6 or 8 feet distant, and I had to arc the wads between the photo editor and the irascible Armenian-American senior news editor in order to drop them in the target. This is analogous to landing at the St. Thomas airport in the U.S. Virgins: little margin for error. My consecutive strings of made shots began to be noticed and tallied, and I recklessly began to link my prospective successful buckets with upcoming positive Phillies outcomes, be it an opponent’s swinging third strike, a well executed Phillies bunt, a timely sac fly or any other of the countless tactical minutiae that constitute a baseball game.

But once the Phils made the playoffs that year, my prognosticating paper wads took on a life of their own. I lost control of calling the desired outcome and was solely responsible for making the shot, regardless of the degree of difficulty my nearby colleagues put me at the line for. I don’t remember missing a shot during the defeat of the National League foes, the Houston Astros, or the ultimate humbling of the American League champion Kansas City Royals to win the Series.

But let’s be clear, my sinking of the paper wad put the onus on the Phillies: I only momentarily agitated the competitive vapors from afar; the team had to execute on the field. After the late Tug McGraw struck out Willie Wilson for the final Series out, a couple of guys came up with serious faces and thanked me for my paper wad-based postseason karmic assistance.

My personal efforts in willing my teams to victory had mixed success with Larry Bird and the Celtics during their epic ‘80s NBA battles with Magic Johnson and the Lakers. At home I set up a much smaller wastebasket to aim at during those bitter contests, and the Celtics pretty much ignored the inspiration I laid at their feet with some startling long-range buckets from across the room. Of course Bird routinely played with such other-worldly brilliance and guile that asking him to do the impossible after a sunk paper wad was superfluous.

As for home baseball-rooting techniques, paper wad launching was quickly replaced by paraphernalia. As a Red Sox fan for decades, I have compiled the usual inventory of caps, jerseys, glasses, coffee mugs and the like. I have a bottle opener that played an ecstatic home run call but the replacement battery failed to revive the announcer’s voice. I have a dress all-wool blue Bosox cap from the ‘70s that looks great but cuts off all blood flow to my brain with no major effect other than modest drooling during extra-inning comebacks. I have a vintage sweat-stained red cap that I wore playing softball. I have two badly frayed caps that date from 2004 (the immortal Yankees’ choke-a-thon) when the Sox went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals and finally win a World Series after 86 years. I have two recent replacements for the battered ’04 caps. I have a pint glass with the Series-winning ’07 roster on its side. I have two insulated Sox glasses that I use year-round. I have a couple of jerseys, one a gray travel jersey with “Boston” on the front and the number nine on the back. For those of you scoring at home, that’s Ted Williams’ retired number. The Inquirer guys gave it to me when I left in recognition of my long-ball days at the softball diamond hard by the Amtrak rail bed when getting it over the fence actually meant something.

During the season when Sox games land on the New York cable systems, I usually wear one of the ’04 caps or their replacements. Not to bog down in trivia, but one pair has the standard Sox “B” logo on the front and the other sports the so-called “hanging sox” logo. Only during regular season Sox-Yankees games or, if Boston makes it, postseason contests do I indulge in karmic manipulation, which simply consists in switching cap logo styles when the listless Sox need a jolt or late-inning heroics are demanded. Trust me, it works more often than is remotely plausible.

Last Wednesday, the Sox coasted to their third Series trophy in a decade and I was so confident beforehand that I would have bet your life that they were going to get that game six win. No need to fool around with different caps this night. Even on the tube, the air of inevitability at Fenway was tangible, visible. But, for the first time ever, I brought my Williams’ jersey downstairs and hung it on a dining room chair across the room. We didn’t come close to needing it, but you never know when you might have to go to the good karma bullpen.

JAMES BORNEMEIER

The following is a transcript of emails, illegally recorded by federal eavesdroppers, between XJ3516, a member of Taystee Turkey Farm in Salisbury, Maryland, and Tom, a member of Wattles Unlimited, a Shelter Island-based turkey social group.

Tom: Just checking in, XJ. Trusting that you made it through Thanksgiving down there.

XJ: Tom! Great to hear from you. Still here, still upright, although that can be a struggle with my bulging girth. Wow, what a madhouse the last few weeks were. If I didn’t know better, it seemed like a life-or-death struggle to get ready for the holiday. All our human assistants were really hustling to keep us relaxed and fed and they even got into the holiday spirit, decorating the conveyor belts with green pine boughs and wearing historically accurate Pilgrim costumes as they tended to our creature comforts.

Tom: I was concerned about you because modern “farm life” these days bears little resemblance to the agricultural lore our elders handed down: Spacious outdoor pens, languid snacking on grain and goofy guys in overalls who considered raising us a hobby. From what we hear, it’s all business now and personal relationships are given short shrift.

XJ: I hear you, brother. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a whole other agenda at the farm and it’s not all about our longevity. Since spring, we were treated like royalty, given seconds and thirds during our three liquid meals a day and asked to do virtually nothing in return. In fact, we barely moved since August as our living space shrunk as we put on a surprising amount of weight, particularly in our pectorals, which grew to Schwarzeneggerian proportions.

My conversations became limited to fellow turkeys to my right and left with whom I could still make eye contact. The turkey in front of me was nothing but a blizzard of white feathers stuffed in my face. But, as I said, the food, though amazingly bland, was always plentiful even if we were jammed to our gullets from the meal before. By autumn, most of us found the feeding protocols to be excessive. Did we totally buy into the farm’s party line that such gluttony was in our best interest? Not really. But what are we going to do? Go on a hunger strike? You can run but cannot hide from the feeding tubes.

Tom: As a relatively bony wild turkey, I will be candid and say that sort of life sounds dreadful.

XJ: The worst part is the overwhelming sense of shared purpose has simply evaporated in the post-Thanksgiving era, to say nothing of the thousands of missing turkeys, presumably relocated to other farm quarters. While I’m treated with the utmost respect here, I catch myself wondering what it would be like to hang out in the more rough ‘n’ tumble world that you Wattles endure.
Tom: Careful what you wish for, XJ. Your indolent lifestyle and predator-free environment look pretty good in the dark days of Island winter when our daily routine boils down to dodging cars, pecking at the frozen earth and worrying about foxes. On the other hand, XJ, we can still fly, an ancient genetic bequest that may not be of much practical value these days but instills in us great pride as winged fowl. Clumsy and inelegant aviators we may be, but what a flush of freedom to take to the air, even if just for the heck of it!

XJ: I know it is not your intention, Tom, but your paean to flying is deeply depressing. When I talk of not being able to move, suggesting that I even want to, I am being disingenuous. My knees are a wreck (a very common complaint here at the farm). If the feeding tube were two feet away, I would cut down to two infusions rather than painfully shuffling to my three squares a day. It seems my legs are utterly useless for my bulked-up frame!

Tom: I should be more sensitive to your situation, XJ. I know you have made agonizing (no pun intended) tradeoffs to be fox-free for life. But, I must say, dealing with tender knees so you can chow down to your heart’s content seems a far cry from constantly looking over your shoulder for salivating Vulpes vulpes, whose raison d’être is turkeycide.

XJ: Tom, I do appreciate the state of continuous embattlement you face in the Island wild. In my pathetic physical shape, I would be easy pickin’s for a fox. Hey, a mole could give me a run (no pun intended) for my money! But the word here on the farm is that the fox threat on the East Coast has dwindled to DEFCON 5, similar to the odds of being attacked by a hyperactive human third grader. So why the paranoia?

Tom: Rotundo old pal, there are evil stirrings in Mashomack here. Call it crazy coincidence, but ever since that Clooney/Streep movie, the maliciously titled “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” cleaned up at the box office a couple of years ago, these mange-ravaged turkey killers are making a comeback.

XJ: Tom! Hello! It’s an animated feature! It’s a diverting fantasy! It’s a kids’ movie for grownups! You are so over-reacting.
Tom: Listen, Fatso, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this, but I don’t like your tone. That post-Thanksgiving lull on the farm you refer to? It’s not a lull, it’s the savage result of the annual Turkey Day Armageddon! Your missing cage buddies — and that’s what it is, XJ, a cage, not “living space” — became meals! You lucked out because you probably have a physical imperfection and are not suitable for retail! Don’t you see that?

XJ: On that note, I’m signing off, Tom. Take a walk on the wild side! Feast on roadkill! Face down a battalion of Ford F-150s! Fly into a live LIPA power line! Go nuts, man. My midday food service has arrived.

James Bornemeier

In a way we planned it. In a way we didn’t.

I suppose there are many people who find themselves living exactly where they want to be after weighing this factor and that factor, absorbing the surprises life dishes out and building on thoughtful decisions. The fact that for the last decade we have divided our time between Manhattan and the Island can be partially explained by some of the classic determinants like jobs and family. But on this frigid day, watching the birds snack on suet and seed and hearing the wind howl as it does only at the front of the house and nowhere else, the wintry Island tableau outside the bay window contrasts so mightily with the mix of urban sights and sounds of two days ago that I could be living in a fantasy.

When an ornamental birdhouse awaits you under the Christmas tree in Queens or some falling ice hitting the Manhattan air conditioner 16 floors up sounds exactly like a window bird-strike in Island summer, you know your dual lives have blurred in ways you could never have predicted. Take Christmas tree-buying for instance. Two paths to ownership; neither superior to the other.

Around the block on Second Avenue awaited the woman from Quebec. She has sold us our last half-dozen trees and seems to remember us from year to year. We certainly remember her, with the French lilt, stocking cap, cheery country manner and sweater littered with evergreen parts. In the city, you tend to place undue importance on such human connections. How many people in Manhattan do you see annually for about 10 minutes over a six-year span whose reunion is inspired by the acquisition of a Douglas fir? It has become the official opening act of the city holiday season: exchanging friendly greetings with our Quebec amie; being shown a tree she had “for us”; and savoring the three-block trip to the apartment, tree hoisted on my shoulder, banking smiles and glances all along the way.

Breaking the spell, our favorite tree saleswoman didn’t show this year. But we managed to find a handsome New York apartment tree, hiding behind some pushy Frasier firs, all by ourselves. Despite this minor hitch in our routine, this recently concluded city-based holiday endurance contest was the most stress-free in memory. Mostly, because we paced it well.

I corralled the music event by getting tickets to the choral concert at St. Bart’s, an Episcopalian cathedral in the Byzantine style noted for its occasionally thunderous pipe organ and chorus larded with professional singers. The sounds rising from the throats of the girls’ and boys’ choirs would have melted the heart of Putin had he attended. Although the concert program was, for my taste, too heavy with Handel, the opening “O Come All Ye Faithful” snuck up on me and stole my voice as I redeployed resources to deal with tear duct-control issues.

My wife looks forward every year to taking in the Rockefeller Center tree and somehow prevails on her son and daughter and their spouses and kids to join her. This quest is preceded by a meal at the apartment, a very snug affair that makes considerable demands on my personality’s better half. Or third. Or fourth. Over the years I have brokered a deal: I bail out on the tree visit in return for cleaning up. Seeing as how I clean up all meals, all the time, under all circumstances, this is a meager bargain indeed.

The gift exchange was held Christmas Eve with this same crew at the step-son’s abode in Queens. Christmas Day was a rack of lamb and trimmings in the apartment. New Year’s Eve was crab cakes and the sound of renegade fireworks in our Upper East Side neighborhood. As usual I missed the ball-drop. A few days into the New Year we went with friends to Birdland, the venerable Midtown jazz club, to hear a very good big band. And that was our city Christmas.

Before the advent of grandchildren, who tend to pin us down in Manhattan, there was Island Christmas. I still like the AWOL Quebec woman, but nothing beats the North Fork Christmas tree-buying experience. You know the drill. Ferry to Greenport, take a right off Route 25 in Mattituck into (our favorite) Shamrock Christmas Tree Farm. Trooping through the designated field of trees dredges up distant memories from another life of searching for the perfect one in an unnamed forest in Vermont. With spousal accompaniment, selection can take a while; alone, my radar finds the right tree in minutes. One of the Shamrock guys fells it, trundles it to wrapping central, drills a hole for the stand, lashes it to your car and you’re off.

What is better than motoring along with a fir tree on top of your Subaru? That’s right, nothing. As for Island Christmas activities, I can list fire-building and … eating. Why complicate matters when your rustic aromatic 8-foot tree looks like it could have come from an unnamed forest in Vermont?  Byzantine-style cathedral? Jazz club? Who needs it? Throw another log on. It’s Island Christmas.

James Bornemeier

When extreme weather is in the forecast, I abandon the city to housesit on the Island.

The reason is simple. The one-bedroom Manhattan apartment on the 16th floor of our kindly dinosaur of a 1927 building can shrug off most of the stuff that gets dished out to other buildings in the region, even though the east-facing windows will leak a bit when a wild wind drives rain horizontal. They were retrofitted sometime in the past, but acquaintances who know about such things say new construction in the city holds all kinds of surprises in the categories of leaks, poor materials and general shoddiness of workmanship. We should be grateful, they say, for the sturdiness of our dowager fortress.

To be clear, our house in the Center is no sissy. It’s situated out of storm-surge territory and we have taken out most of the threatening trees. But it has staunchly weathered all the meteorological events of the last decade without whimpering or heaving or collapsing. Sitting tight in New York while nasty weather batters the Island seems a dereliction. My presence here will prevent nothing from happening, but I would rather hear and see the damage first hand than getting reports from neighbors or discovering it after the fact.

The exception to apartment invincibility in our 15 years there was Irene, when rain penetrated aged mortar and wetted areas of the living room, bedroom and bathroom. As per arcane co-op rules, the building scraped and re-plastered these spots. Owners are responsible for interior painting. (The building also considers the wood floors within its legal purview; more on that perhaps in a future column about the one true apartment catastrophe we have endured, which entailed moving out.)

The building has since had wide swaths of brick and mortar repointed and replaced. For months, the masons traveled up and down, their platforms hoisted and lowered inches from our windows, working in utter silence except for the clink of cloven brick. On at least one ascent, they whacked one of the window air conditioners pretty good, and I elaborately imagined its thunderous crash landing below.

Ironically, our Island place was unscathed by Irene, although fretting through those endless hours of howling wind may have shortened my life in some mysterious way that won’t show up on the annual physical. The usual locust debris littered the property but the only significant Plant Kingdom victim was an old lilac bush that looked like, instead of getting blown over, it just gave up, so gentle was its death pose. But one of these storms will wreak damage to the house. Of that I am utterly convinced. That is why I head into the teeth of would-be hurricanes and all too real nor’easters. I hope it doesn’t happen on our ownership watch, but I feel obligated to be a witness if it does. The house shouldn’t take it alone.

Speaking of hurricanes, I never gave them much thought until we bought our Island home. Domiciles in Southern California, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia and the aforementioned Manhattan apartment never felt at risk. But Long Island seems to be daring them to hit dead on. There is something about its elongated slender shape that leads to idle thoughts about a middle finger taunting those Carolina storms to come north for a visit. In the early years, I battened down the property securely, guaranteeing that the storm would wobble away harmlessly. In more recent times, I’ve become less persnickety about all the possible missiles in the yard. Rather than moving them inside the house, garage or shed, I tie some of the larger stuff down, herd the potted plants on the deck close to the house and take down the wind chimes and garden sign, as if these moves would have any effect during a direct hit. Of course all bets are off if a Cat 2 or 3 lumbers across our Island sheltered by islands. I wonder how far a kayak can fly.

In my Washington, D.C. journalism days, I was dispatched, along with another guy, to cover Bertha, a Cat 2 that whacked Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, in 1996. (If you are a student of U.S. hurricanes, you will know that Wrightsville Beach is one of the premier hurricane magnets on the East Coast. Bet on it. It’s eerie.) I, however, stationed myself in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the night before the National Weather Service said Bertha would make landfall. North Myrtle was evacuated but I found a cinder block motel on the beach that was still welcoming visitors (me). It wasn’t scary at all when Bertha hit because I didn’t own any of the roofs that I saw flying away across the street. A riderless bicycle went briefly airborne, shades of E.T. It wasn’t my stuff. It was only fodder for my colleague in Wrightsville Beach who was writing the story.

Let’s say one of Bertha’s progeny next summer/fall is messing around in the Carolinas and sees a middle finger and veers north to confront it, ignoring every NWS prediction on record. I’ll be here when it comes, flying kayaks and all.

It’s my solemn duty as a witness.

James Bornemeier

My thoughts focused sharply last week on my old chum Richard McDonnell.

I was listening to the great jazz alto player Cannonball Adderley on one of his more sedate and obscure recording sessions with his friend, the cerebral jazz pianist Bill Evans. Although Cannon got off some of his unmistakable saxophone licks, his performance bore little resemblance to the explosive, head-nodding sheets of hip funk he produced in the ‘50s, usually with his brother, Nat, on cornet.

In those days, Richard and I would spend hours listening to Adderley, marveling at how his rolling virtuosic technique could produce such earthy, timeless jazz pronouncements. That is why there will only be one Cannonball per this present version of Earth.

Richard was one of those rare guys who, even during childhood, you knew was special. A warm, big-hearted fellow in first grade, he never changed, never picked up any of the grit that attaches to so many of us along the way. I saw him at a 20th high school reunion in suburban St. Louis and he was the exact mature version of the jolly, earnest third-grade classmate who insisted, despite Miss Huckey’s clear demonstrations otherwise, that leaves were the engines of plant growth and not roots. Like Julia Roberts, he seemed to have extra teeth to populate his smile. I cannot think of him with closed lips.

Back when elementary schools offered “enrichment” along with the basics, Richard and I started on clarinet in the fourth grade. I used a school-owned metal clarinet, but Richard brought a real (wood) one from home. I soon found out why. He came from a big family and lived in a sprawling, unostentatious house off by itself on Dougherty Ferry Road, away from the old and new subdivisions where most of us lived. His many siblings had access to several musical instruments, either the Hammond organ in the spacious living room or the nearby grand piano, the accordion, or the cello (although I may be making that up). As far as I can recall, Richard was the only McDonnell who tackled the clarinet and saxophone.
We both became proficient and would wile away rainy afternoons in the McDonnell manse playing Bach fugues transcribed as woodwind duets. After particularly adroit readings, Mrs. McDonnell would come out from her kitchen, clapping in approval. Not surprisingly, in such an atmosphere we would play for hours, rewarding ourselves afterward with some Cannonball upstairs in Richard’s room.

Ours was a big suburban high school that had a notable music program, and Richard and I flung ourselves into the various opportunities. I hated marching band and the pungent red woolen uniforms, but Richard never seemed to mind. Eventually, by junior year we had risen through the audition ranks to be the top clarinetists. The only remaining contest was who would be the concert band’s first clarinet and who would get the slightly more prestigious chair in the orchestra. The school musical director and possibly two other aspiring clarinetists had some interest in the outcome. Richard and I could not have cared less, such was our inviolable bond as brothers in Bach duets. I went to the orchestra and Richard the band. To this day the years collapse when I hear the clarinet triplet figure at the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony: That was me in high school.

Richard and I were also founding members in a schoolmate’s crackerjack extracurricular dance band that played for proms, wedding receptions and whatever. Ten dollars a gig. Fittingly, Richard ably led the five-man sax section on alto. The “book” was big band hits from the ‘40s and ‘50s, an Ellington here, a Glenn Miller there, “The Party’s Over” at the end. We, in white tuxedo jackets, played for our senior prom, which a yearbook photo documents.

I went to a Big Ten music school with thoughts of a saxophone-borne livelihood. That came to a quick end as I segued into liberal arts and wound up, after defending the Caribbean from Communist invasion aboard a Navy destroyer, a newspaperman.

Richard became an investment banker. After three sons and 30 years of the business life, he then did a most remarkable thing: He formed a jazz record label. First, he recorded St. Louis-area musicians, but soon expanded his roster to top-tier national artists like pianist Mulgrew Miller, guitarist Russell Malone and a stable of wonderful jazz singers. He became a beneficent pillar of the St. Louis jazz scene, and performers across the country held him in high regard as a knowing but stay-out-of-the-way producer of their art. “Let the music tell the story” was his lodestar.

On February 7, a Friday, his habitual jazz night out, Richard was at a local club enjoying the estimable duo of pianist Bill Charlap and tenorman Houston Person. He had a stroke, never came to and died the next day, his sons and his music all around him. I cannot help but smile at the cunning timing of his death.

Sweet dreams, my friend.

James Bornemeier

Even the crustiest among us has a hard time suppressing thoughts of rebirth during spring.

But this year’s version of the season seems more like a rehabilitation after a near-death experience. A couple of weeks ago, a survey of the yard showed everything in shock, stunned by the relentless waves of a pitiless winter. As usual, the crazy, clueless peonies didn’t get the memo and were rocketing upward as though they were in Miami.

What hadn’t been rendered comatose had been ravaged by the deer, which preyed on never-before-touched bushes, requiring them to reach within inches of the front windows. Once I opened the door and was nearly flattened by a good size doe who, at 3 feet away, was as surprised as I was by the encounter. It levitated like a lamb and sprinted away, my curses following her across the street to the vacant lot that apparently serves as a staging area for attacks on our place.

But time and temperature will heal and we dutifully organized the garden amid the bleak landscape outside the enclosure. The ceremonial hanging of the Le Jardin sign is always a nice moment. Over the years we have come to rely on rolls of black plastic weed suppressor and pre-planting, the two rectangular mounds resemble oddly decorated shallow graves. This year we vow to go with more flowers and fewer cukes and zukes and do a better job of pinching off the shoots on the tomato plants, although no blood oaths were uttered over the better tomato maintenance part. There will be missed weekends, things will begin to get out of control and you start fighting a rear-guard battle for the rest of the summer.

For some reason, probably dumb luck, our first few gardening seasons were the most productive. I’d carry bags of cucumbers and tomatoes back to the office in those days; nowadays we are steeled against meager crop yields and rejoice at surprise successes. This is the essence of weekend gardening.

The garden is officially the province of my wife, and she has over the years yearned to cultivate the entire side yard and sell the bounty from a roadside card table or at a farmer’s market. I come from Nebraska farming stock and have enough deeply embedded agricultural genes that this idea flares with momentary resonance, only to be quickly snuffed out by the dense weight of reality. But, as I am prone to say, if we hit the lottery and our hard-won daily reality was pleasantly blown to smithereens, I would give serious consideration to such a scheme.

Right.

In Manhattan, spring triggers a far more subtle interaction with members of the plant kingdom: I add Miracle-Gro to the plant-watering bottle — that’s pretty much the entirety of the subtle interaction. The plants respond immediately, sending out new bunches of leaves and reaching toward the ceiling with an admirable gusto.

I am the keeper of the apartment plants because my wife has conclusively demonstrated a black thumb in this skill area. My internal plant-watering clock is a good one, and I’ve kept some of the plants alive for over a decade. I have found that the use of hydrometers actually skews proper watering technique because they give you too much information that leads to over-analysis and, usually, over-watering. It’s better, I’ve found, to go with your gut in these matters.

It must be said that these are not stately plants, not show plants. They flank the living room window tandem and are rather unkempt, having been repotted several times after brushes with death or unrestrained growth. But they do have back stories. One plant was deemed the “Susan plant,” after my wife’s late sister, because it came from her funeral service. This plant is now three plants, two of them 4 feet high. We nearly lost the original several times due to residential moves, remodeling episodes or dehydration during vacation absences. But now they are here for the long haul.

The other is the “cancer plant” that my step-daughter gave me after a surgical operation 10 years ago. It too has had many alarming health issues over the years. Once, maybe twice, we had to resort to sticking a cutting in water to keep it going. Given the provenance of the Susan plant, it will reside in the apartment permanently and probably travel to whatever location materializes after the apartment becomes history. As for the cancer plant, I have often joked that getting rid of it, or carelessly letting it die, might offend the cancer gods and they would be moved toward mischief and set certain things in motion. That of course is preposterous. At this point in its life, it more resembles weed than plant and has zero aesthetic interior decoration value.

You couldn’t give this plant away.

All things considered? I’m not planning to.

James Bornemeier

A suburban Minneapolis man who had a long-running dispute with two neighbors over feeding deer opened fire on the couple … hours after their son was arrested on suspicion of threatening to burn down their house …
— The New York Times, May 8, 2014

Background: The grossly over-large deer herd on the Island has been a problem for years. The ravaging of plants and shrubbery, the auto collisions and, of course, ticks and Lyme disease have all been debated and examined ad nauseam.

We at Deer Talk, a recently formed Island-based nonpartisan deer think tank, believe that ticks and Lyme disease are by far the most pressing local deer issue.

We also have sadly concluded that the tick-and-Lyme disease debate has become ossified, brought to a standstill by ever-more polarizing points of view. Progress on this issue seems further away than ever.

Furthermore, Deer Talk believes strongly that the tick-and-Lyme disease debate has obscured a larger and more fundamental deer issue: the possibility of rising civic unrest as neighbors become enemies for holding opposing deer attitudes. Hellos are being replaced by shouted epithets and coarse hand gestures. Bumping into one another, literally, at the IGA, can become fractious encounters with vicious verbal salvos flying.

We at Deer Talk do not want to get too far ahead on this issue. But we are tortured by the possibility that if we do not act now, we will have to live with the consequences when deep-seated opposing deer attitudes drive Island citizens to the breaking point.

Do we really want to keep our collective heads in the sand on this matter? Deer Talk knows the answer to that one. We cannot sit idly by and then be shocked by some disturbing act. As the Boy Scouts so presciently have reminded us for generations: Be Prepared.
Proposed Steps: Deer Talk sees the following as essential steps to ensuring that deer-attitude provocations are held in check.

•  Eight elite fire and police personnel be chosen to form a Deer violence control strategic Weapons and Assault Team (DWAT) unit. These individuals would undergo special training in deer-attitude interventions, hostage negotiation and special firearm handling and perform regular drills to prepare for civic unrest, be it one-on-one situations or medium- to large-scale groups squaring off in adrenalin-laced confrontations over differing views of 4-poster feeding stations or other hot button deer issues. $10,000 times 8 = $80,000.
•   Special camo uniforms and insignia be designed for the unit. $356 times 8 = $2,848.
•   Purchase of a DWATmobile. This is essentially an armored personnel carrier to be kept at the dump when confrontations escalate to dire levels and Kevlar vests are deemed insufficient protection. $250,000.
•   Annual refresher DWAT training to keep team members at the top of their game. $5,000 times 8 = $40,000.
Costs: Startup: $332,848; annual: $40,000. Yes, these are eye-popping numbers. But Deer Talk believes that opposing deer-attitude confrontations will only increase over time, both in frequency and level of violence. We need to take proactive steps now.

Payment Methods: These are listed in ascending order of probability, that is, the last one is deemed by Deer Talk as most probable.

•    Up-or-down referendum. This would be, in Deer Talk’s opinion, a major waste of time and money. Not going to pass.
•    Bond issue: A tantalizing possibility but would have to overcome lingering Town Board doubts over the appropriateness of this financing vehicle.
• Apply for grants from foundations and philanthropies. Another promising source of funds, but requires massive paperwork and there’s no guarantee of success.
• Island benefactor. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Deer Talk has approached several wealthy Islanders and found a surprising willingness to at least engage in conversation about funding the DWAT team. Oddly, most of these individuals live on Dinah Rock Road. Who knew?

Conclusion: Deer Talk anticipates snickering, backlash, opprobrium, hate mail and you name it to this serious, forward-thinking proposal. But we also believe it is the right thing to do at the right time: Before somebody gets hurt.

James Bornemeier

My earliest Island 10K tee shirt is from 1991, although I seem to recall running it before that as a spontaneous, unregistered insurgent during a visit.

As most first-timers would attest, one’s debut circumnavigation of the Island is an unforgettable jaunt. Of course that was many years ago when the act of running was almost effortless.

I started running in the mid-‘70s and put on thousands of miles in modest distances, a bunch of half-marathons and one New York Marathon. The only rival to the Island 10K in prettiness was a run I would take from our home in Alexandria, Virginia to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac.

The days of effortless running are completely and utterly over. Not too long ago I could get away with virtually no training and still plod through the Island 10K in a dispiriting walk/run format that made me feel unworthy of wearing the bib number. And last year, the unimaginable happened: I bailed out and walked the 5K (and sort of ran the last mile). In my shame, I vowed to make a comeback this year and eventually developed a training schedule that would empower me to run the 10K on June 21 with, I hoped, just a handful of stops along the route.

The plan was to stop drinking and start running (and stationary biking) on April 1. This was a radical idea at both ends. I like drinking and dislike running. (I still like biking.) But there was something alluring about the challenge because of its degree of difficulty.

Not surprisingly, as April 1 crept closer, my brain began working its diabolical mischief. Starting training April 1 for a June 21 run seemed needlessly ambitious and, at my age, possibly detrimental. I have only a finite number of miles left in my legs, so why carelessly waste them on training? Save them for the 10K! This argument exploded in my brain as though implanted by an exterior force. I was helpless against its persuasive brilliance.

April 1 blew by as I recalibrated my plan and settled on May 1 as the start of my training regimen. I was overjoyed at the extra month of drinking and non-running. Reason had won the day.

The eve of May 1 was on me in a heartbeat and I was panicking big time. I awaited more brain tricks and I was, thankfully, rewarded at the last second. The exterior force (I’m just the victim here!) decided that I should head to Central Park and do a test run to measure my body’s fitness to train.

Based on the test results, I would either commence training as planned or step back and reconsider my options. I approached the running lane that circles the park — one I had run countless times in the good old days — with something akin to doom. So akin to doom, let’s just call it doom. I began to run and it was as though I had never run before. I had to concentrate all my mental power on moving my legs in running-like motions. My left leg and knee had been barking at me occasionally over the last six months and they were not pleased with this test run. They let me know about it. I made it about 50 yards and then with an unexpected surge of euphoria I stopped. It felt so good not to be running.

On the way home, the exterior force (not me!) calculated that a hard and fast June 1 start date was probably the most prudent plan. It would be cutting it close but why risk foolish injury? My relief nearly brought me to tears. But having blown two deadlines and all too aware of the insidiousness of the exterior force, I decided to begin journal entries in order to keep me on track.

May 31: I should have thought this through. June 1 is a Sunday, a day of rest. My labors should more appropriately start on a Monday, the beginning of the work week, joining the millions of my brother and sister worker ants teeming on the streets below. We’re in this together.

June 2: This morning I got word that I needed to join a conference call at 2 p.m. on a project I’m working on. It would only take 20 minutes or so but I should probably stake out some time to prepare for the call. My traditional best time to exercise is mid-morning so the prep time and call pretty much wipe out that part of the day. Tough break, but it is what it is.

June 3: Showers are forecast and it certainly looks like rain. There was a time that running in the rain was almost amusing.

Those days are a couple of decades ago. For a man my age, running in the rain would seem so goofy. Look at that geezer in the too-short running shorts, they would say. Please don’t let me become like him, they would say. We’re staying dry and inside today.

June 4: The Monday conference call might produce some work to do today.  Might as well stay near the computer to jump on it if it arrives.

June 5: Rain in the forecast.

June 6: Took a good look at my running shoes. Pathetic. Dirty, heels run down, no neon color anywhere. They could be 10 years old. The aches in my left leg could be attributable to these crummy shoes. Time to get new ones. Regrettably, shoe-buying time coincides with “best-time-to-exercise” period.

June 7: Rain is not in the forecast but who trusts forecasts these days?

June 8: Bright sun. Out of sun block. I will buy some tomorrow.

June 9: Drug store is out of my preferred sun block brand.

June 10: I’m no doctor, but this leg pain could be the first sign of something far more dire, possibly life-threatening. Why play around with that? There’s always next year.

It’s all about prudence.