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Sarah Jessica Parker. Paul McCartney. Joan Rivers. Donald Trump.

In the last several weeks, I got to write about all these celebrities, along with a few other boldface names from various industries and professions, in the Big Ticket column, which appears weekly in The New York Times real estate section.

As the column name suggests, Big Ticket looks at the most expensive closed sale or sales in any given week in New York City – based on deeds and other transactions filed with the city – and, of course, the people with enough money and/or connections to buy and sell these properties.

The vast majority of Big Ticket players shield their identities via a limited liability company or trust. (And who can blame them, really.) A few will have their names listed – in some cases because the co-ops they’re buying into make them. I’ve managed to “out” some of the buyers and sellers with a little bit of detective work.

Paul McCartney was among the first of the superstars to appear in my column since I took it over last December. Around Memorial Day he and his new-ish wife, Nancy Shevell, paid $15.5 million for a 10-room duplex penthouse in a quirky bronze-glass prewar co-op building on Fifth Avenue, with views of Central Park. A photo slideshow gave readers a look inside. The former Beatle paid the full asking price, which is untouchable for most of us mere mortals, yet minuscule in comparison with the astronomical closing prices being recorded in Manhattan these days – as in the record $100.4 million duplex penthouse sale at the vitreous skyscraper One57, a.k.a. Billionaires’ Row.

But $15.5 million constituted a record for Brooklyn. Less than a month after Sir Paul purchased his co-op unit, the renowned American photographer Jay Maisel paid $15.5 million for an enormous brick townhouse in Cobble Hill. Meisel, it seems, was flush with cash, having just sold his previous home and studio — the gritty six-story, 38,000-square-foot former Germania Bank building at 190 Bowery in Manhattan — to Aby J. Rosen’s RFR Holding for $55 million.

The biggest Big Ticket hoopla came with the $18.25 million sale of Sarah Jessica Parker‘s 25-foot-wide Greek Revival-style townhouse in Greenwich Village. In fact, this sale, which included a slideshow that even provided a peek at the “Sex and the City” star’s walk-in closet, was the most viewed story in July in the real estate section of The Times.

The second most viewed real estate story over all in July was the $28 million sale of Joan Rivers‘s palatial triplex on the Upper East Side. She had lived in the apartment off Fifth Avenue, which included an adjoining unit for her daughter, Melissa Rivers and her grandson, Edgar Cooper Endicott, for more than a quarter of a century until her death in 2014. The slideshow photos showed the lavishly decorated home, which Ms. Rivers once jokingly described as “Louis XIV meets Fred and Ginger.” The buyer was Middle Eastern royalty.

Meanwhile, Ms. Rivers’s close friend Donald J. Trump, the real estate developer and presidential hopeful, sold one of the two penthouses he owned at the Trump Park Avenue to the founder of the Fresh Market supermarket chain in August for $21.38 million. Trump never lived there — just held it as an investment.

Other sales of note in this season of celebrities: The architect César Pelli, whose vast portfolio of designs includes some of the world’s tallest buildings, bought a lower-floor co-op apartment at the San Remo for $17.5 million. Jeff T. Blau, the chief executive of the Related Companies, one of the city’s largest private developers, sold the co-op he owned in an exclusive Rosario Candela-designed apartment house on Fifth Avenue for $30 million. And Chris Hughes, one of the five founders of Facebook and a roommate of Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, bought a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse with a separate studio in the rear  for $22.3 million.

After a busy spring and summer, I wonder what the rest of the year will bring.

 “Blue moon” illuminates Long Branch, N.J.

A Vietnam veteran that I know often bristles (rather audibly) whenever anyone says “Happy Memorial Day!”

“Don’t say that,” he appeals to anyone within listening range, “because it’s not a happy day.”

Sure, Memorial Day has evolved into the unofficial start of summer — a time for parades, barbeques, pool parties (and for the fashion-minded, permission to wear white again).

It’s easy to lose sight of what this day really means. With roots dating back to post-Civil War time, Memorial Day used to be called “Decoration Day” and was meant as a time for decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers. Eventually it’s scope expanded to include all members of the military.

I would like to take this opportunity to commemorate all the courageous men and women who served in the armed forces, especially my father (pictured at left) and his father. My dad was drafted into the Army toward the end of World War II almost minutes after he turned 18, and a few years later served in the Korean conflict. My grandfather served in World War I and received a purple heart for bravery. He was injured with shrapnel while fighting in France.

I’d also like to remember my late, great Uncle Bud, one of the last few WWII vets (He died only a few months ago). He served in the Navy and narrowly missed being shipped out on the ill-fated USS Arizona.

And, of course, I’d like to add my friend, the Vietnam vet, who is now in a battle against cancer — the result of exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic mixture of chemicals used by American military to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam.

Another weekend, another college graduation.

This time it was my youngest daughter’s turn to don a cap and gown (along with honors cord and study abroad sash) as she received her Bachelor of Architecture diploma from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

She appears on the far -right-hand side of this “action” photo, face hidden from view and arm extended skyward as she flung her cap in the air.

The actor Alan Alda was the commencement speaker. His grandson, Scott, was graduating from the school’s drama department. When I excitedly told both of my daughters that he would be speaking, they looked at me like I had two heads.

Alan who?

You know, the actor who starred in “Mash.”

Silence.

Boy do I feel old.

I had a long list of reasons for not wanting to “walk” on graduation day this past weekend.

For one thing, I had already received my diploma – it was mailed to me in March, three months after completing my graduate program (in Interactive Media) in the fall semester.

And besides, it wasn’t as if I had to be on campus one last time for a final farewell. The program was entirely online, so I never set foot in a building, cheered at a hockey game, or met my professors and fellow students (unless you count Skyeping or Google Hangouts).  But also, I thought I would look rather silly in academic regalia – a grown woman who received an undergraduate degree long before many of her classmates were even born!

And yet, there’s something very special about the ritual of a graduation ceremony – the Pomp and Circumstance march, the commencement speeches, the convocation and the awards and honors. Speaking of which, I was chosen to receive the Faculty Award for Academic Excellence, in part for having a perfect 4.0 grade point average. (Imagine that!)

Graduation is a punctuation in life, really. The end of one story – in my case, three long years of classes, projects and work into the wee hours – and the start of another.

And so I put aside my reasons for not attending, donned my cap, gown, robe and tassel and made that walk into a crowded auditorium and onto the dais, with eldest daughter, hubster and favorite professors looking on. I’m so glad I did.

My latest contribution to Midcentury/Modern Magazine on Medium. (Say that three times fast!) If you like it, share and/or recommend.

Lessons for Millennial Journalists

I haven’t had too many opportunities – free time, really – to visit my college alma mater, Rider University, since graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism over 30 years ago. (Work, kids, house, divorce, single motherhood, and later, grad school … You get the picture.) I returned only once in 1992 to receive a Distinguished Alumna Award from the communications department, and another time a couple of years later as a guest lecturer for a journalism class.

I made a long-overdue, third appearance last week – about two decades after the previous visit, yikes! – this time to receive another award from the communications department: the Lambda Pi Eta Alumni Achievement Award. And I had the honor of addressing the students being inducted into the Lambda Pi Eta national honor society for communications studies, along with their proud parents, professors and university administration. The event was especially important because it marked the 150th anniversary of the university’s founding, and it included a special tribute to the man who founded the school’s communications and journalism department, Dr. Howard Schwartz, who died last summer.

It was Dr. Schwartz, actually, who helped me start a career in journalism. I came to Rider as a transfer student, and he spent a great deal of time choreographing my schedule, ensuring that I took the right courses and graduated on time. He encouraged me to get involved in activities outside the classroom. And so I wrote for the Rider News; I became the faculty editor for the yearbook; and I joined Sigma Delta Chi, the society of professional journalists. (Lambda Pi Eta wasn’t around back then.) I also took his advice about getting internships – I found them to be not only good résumé builders, but also a way to test whether I even wanted to continue in my career path as a journalist. Obviously I did.

I enrolled at Rider long before all of the current students I was addressing were even born, and when the news industry was in the midst of a major transition – computers. Gone were the noisy old typewriters, a staple in the once-smoky newsrooms, and in were these boxy electronic behemoths that took up an entire desk. The Internet was invented back then, though not widely available. So reporters had to get their information the old-fashion way: by calling people up on the phone or wading through reams of files themselves.

Competition for jobs was beyond fierce when I started college – thanks to a little scandal in Washington known as Watergate. It seemed everyone wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, including me. I still remember being warned by my professors that even if everyone, all at once, had left their newspaper, magazine and broadcast jobs, there still wouldn’t be enough openings for the current crop of journalism students.

Today’s students (along with the rest of us in the business) must also deal with an industry in great transition. And probably one that is just as fiercely competitive, only in different ways. In this digital world, there are so many more platforms for communicating a story. In fact, there are probably ways that have yet to be invented. The main advice I could give these youngsters (I can call them that, because they’re basically as old as my daughters) was to do everything they can to stay current and to never, ever, ever stop learning. Already they have a leg up on the old-timers in the business. They are being offered crucial classes in digital marketing, web design, video editing and coding – I had to go to grad school to learn those skills!

But perhaps the most crucial advice I could impart to this next generation of journalists, broadcasters, film producers and marketers was to remind them to never lose sight of what’s always remained constant and most important in the communications business, and that is, telling the story in the most engaging, honest – and accurate way.

I can still hear the annoying mantra one of my journalism professors never tired of saying years ago: “Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!” he would shout during class and pound his fist down on the desk for special effect.

Some things will never change.