Seaside no more

Saturday, September 14, 2013

The cold air comes in thought the back of my open bedroom window on the back of a batch of thunderstorms.

A day later than I expected, but it is still here.

Autumn always arrives this way for me, a waking in the morning, a sudden awareness of change, and hints of what may come later – omens of larger changes that the end of year sometimes brings.

This late in life everything is an anniversary of some earlier event, if only a year old or 40, the memory becomes fresher and distinct, as if lived yesterday, or still being lived.

Some flashes come from my fractured youth, and make me wonder where my old friend from Paterson is, Dave and his brother, with whom I got in some much trouble and then somehow got out of.

My recent visit to the old work place in Fairfield keeps Hank in the forefront of my mind, and I miss him – especially with the destruction of the boardwalk in Seaside – both from the fire and from Sandy – which steals from me a lasting memory of his most silly ambition, a talented singer who spent too much time gambling at the magical wheels in pursuit of a record collection he could have afforded easily if he had taken more time to hone his craft.

There was some magic connection between him and winning, and he found some great satisfaction in predicting on what number the wheel would stop.

I went back to that neck of the woods twice in 2012, before Sandy, to glimpse again, not just the past I had with Hank, but with my family.

I have an old photograph from the late 1970s or earlier 1980s of two of my uncles walking down the boardwalk with my grandmother there, and photos of my mother standing on the boardwalk looking out at the sea.

Things change, of course, as the whole shore has. Even during my last few visits to the place, I still struggled to remember just where The Chatterbox was, the boardwalk music venue where we played, where most of the popular Jersey bands played. But what filled in that space after its passing, seem to fit in with the tone of the place so that while I missed the name, it left no gap in the sequence of buildings and I could walk along carrying its memory.
But this new disaster, this fire and wind, wipes out all the physical and leaves only the spiritual memory of what was, and the whole burden of remembering is carried on inside me with no outside stimulation to remind me of what once was.

With so much changed in the world, with roadside vegetable stands gone, with super highways crisscrossing the state instead of roads following old Indian trails, there was comfort in coming to Seaside to see that little had changed, and now it all has.

Although it is foolish to imagine that I could point to the boards upon which Hank stood when throwing down his coins or the space near the benches where my mother clung to the rail to look out at the waves, I liked to think that when I walked from the Southern portion in Seaside Park to the most northern portion where chairs were suspended in the air in Seaside Heights, I followed in the footsteps of my uncles and grandmother.

When very young, my rich neighbor and I always were in dispute over Seaside Park – which was a getaway for the better class (doctors and lawyers) while Seaside Heights was the vacation destination for working class people like me. But in reality, such distinctions are dishonest, because we often wandered from one to the other, all of them giving us a mountain of memories upon which to construct the rest of our lives, a mountain built on faulty wood which fire and wind could wipe out in a matter of hours, while we hunker down with our memories, struggling to keep them in tact after the reality is blown away.