On one of those cold late-March afternoons, we found ourselves at a mostly empty Salvadoran restaurant across the street from the African American Museum of Nassau County.  The green team and the red team were going at it in a thrilling game of barefoot beach-sand soccer on the two flat-screen televisions. Sitting above the liquor bottles on the bar were various figurines — a Buddha, an elephant, Shrek. There were a few male customers conversing in Spanish who seemed more interested in the two waitresses in form-fitting black outfits than the soccer on Fox Deportes.  It felt like a thoroughly agreeable place to decamp and hang around for a while, but there’s never enough time. So there was shrimp and rice stew for lunch, much shouting from the announcer on Fox Deportes, and then it was time to move on.  Salvadoran Buddha aside, it felt like a fairly representative scene on Long Island today. It’s not as if suburbia began on Long Island. Kenneth T. Jackson’s classic “Crabgrass Frontier” traces it back to the king of Persia in 539 B.C. But if the modern, automobile-centric, mass-produced suburb was defined by Levittown, the largest development built by a single builder, Long Island still looms large in the landscape that now defines America.  Of course, once you think you know that landscape, it’s gone or changed. In the 1870s, these general environs were the site of the most ambitiously planned suburb of the 19th century, designed for a population “desirable in every respect as neighbors, taxpayers and citizens.” It ended up as one of the great real estate failures of its time.  The notion of some perfectible suburban-exurban idyll persists, but whatever simplistic, monochromatic image lingers from the 19th or 20th century becomes ever less relevant. In 2000, minorities made up almost a quarter of Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Just 10 years later, they represented almost a third of the population of 2.8 million. Hispanics were 15.5 percent. Long Island’s vitality is inseparable from its immigrants.  In some ways, there is not much new under the sun. As early as the 1940s, existing communities were bracing against invasions of uncouth suburban hordes certain to undermine their way of life. Much is made of the suddenly tenuous economics of once-comfortable suburbs, but John Cheever, the bard of the most genteel suburban good life, described his fictional suburban village of Shady Hill in 1954 as hanging “morally and economically from a thread.” If you’re looking for really desperate housewives (and house husbands), try looking there.  But images die hard, and in our corner of the world, New York City sucks up so much of the light that what is outside can fade almost to black — the burbs, upstate, Jersey, as if that tells us much. Sometimes — Indian Point, possible gas drilling anywhere near the New York City watershed, Chris Christie’s surly star power — it all feels as if it’s one story. Usually, it’s the city here, everyone else there.  For almost seven years, doing this column twice weekly has been both a blissful and a hectic mad dash from the Jersey Shore to the Litchfield Hills, from Trenton to Hartford, from Bound Brook, N.J., to Point Lookout, N.Y., trying to reflect the places and people at the near and distant edges of the city’s orbit, who increasingly fall off the screen in the winner-take-all news lottery. Charlie Sheen, sure. Flooded Catskill villages, probably not.  It has felt like a thoroughly agreeable place to decamp and hang around, but there’s never enough time, so this is my last column. In our dwindling journalistic universe, it’s been a chance to try to make sense of the last great fisherman of the Hamptons, the most noble pit bull in Hoboken, graduation night at Sing Sing, kosher gasoline in Teaneck and the struggles of New York’s farmers.  So a fond shout-out to the critters of our realm: moose! wild parakeets! Champ, the sea serpent of Lake Champlain! Heartfelt thanks to humble purveyors of chili, burgers and dogs: Hubba’s in Port Chester! the Red Rooster in Brewster! Rutt’s Hut in Clifton! Best wishes to the rebbe of Woodstock, to the Tims and Rocky the Horse in Montclair, Lydia Alcock’s $23 quadrillion Visa bill, the Greenwich Wiffle Ball War and Nina Sankovitch of Westport, Conn., who read a whole book every day from Oct. 28, 2008, to Oct. 28, 2009, and now, of course, has written one about it.  I’m going to keep covering similar turf at a less frenzied pace and often at greater length, so if you have ideas, please continue to send them on. And remember: Whatever happens, we’ll always have Xanadu.
A Salvadoran restaurant in Nassau County seemed pretty representative for Long Island, where, as so many places, the idea of life outside the big city is fluid.